Eileen Agar helped to shape the development of Surrealism in Britain, a contribution made all the more impressive by the fact that she was one of only a few women associated with the movement. Her work continues to be exhibited in galleries all across the world, while the impact of her aesthetics can also be seen in the work of contemporary artists crafting their own versions of Surrealism.
Unlike her few other female contemporaries, such as Bridget Riley, Boty refused to to negate her feminine side and was not overly concerned with seeming serious, intellectual or dispassionate at the expense of her true self. Boty instead celebrated these supposedly “feminine” traits. Her work came unabashedly from a woman’s perspective and it was emotionally engaged and celebratory towards women’s sexual desires.
By breaking down the barriers between art and life, Clark challenged received ideas about what art could or should be. Accordingly, she is a major reference point for contemporary artists dealing with the limits of conventional forms of art.
Hedda Sterne lived to be one hundred years old, and within those years had a prolific and unceasingly experimental artistic career. She was an early Surrealist, her beguiling and disturbing collages reminiscent of Dora Maar, but she achieved most of her fame when she was grouped with the Abstract Expressionists in New York in the 1940s and 1950s.
Varo and her work quickly became legendary in Mexico. Following her death, the art critics of Novedades called her “one of the most individual and extraordinary painters of Mexican art.”
Leonor Fini was befriended by the whole Parisian artistic community and was one of the most photographed people of the 20th century, resulting in the legacy of “queen of the Paris art world” (expression coined by art critic Sarah Kent). Her popularity in artistic social circles made her the subject of many poems, artworks, and photographs by various artists and writers of her time.
Cassatt’s status in art history has been significant and influential in the later 20th and 21st centuries. She is considered one of the most important American expatriate artists of the late 1800s. She has also been the focus of influential scholarship on female artists, and her work has been discussed by key feminist art historians.
Overcoming adversity in her domestic situation, and despite only coming into her own as an artist in her early fifties, Dehner managed to put her seal on the timeline of mid-to-late twentieth century American modernism. She starred in no fewer than fifty solo exhibitions across the US between 1948 and her death in 1994 and yet for many her work remained stubbornly difficult to categorize.
“Her paintings show an ability to enter a personal dream world and transform the visions she experienced there into bold, unselfconscious, emotionally charged landscapes which more often than not strike into the very depths of one’s mind. Using a limited palette and painting thickly, she was able to bring together seemingly unrelated objects which she used to fill desolate landscapes, giving the paintings a narrative quality of her own making”. Along with the other female Surrealists, she gave the following generation of female artists the gift of role models and in turn, access to the notion that women are active art producers, not simply models tasked to provide inspiration for their male counter-parts.
Joan Mitchell created a large and impressive body of Abstract Expressionist work. Recognized by the age of 30, her paintings steadily matured and became ever more striking and profound. The Joan Mitchell Foundation, established in 1993, continues to celebrate her legacy by providing grants and other support for painters and sculptors working today.