Cecily Brown’s emergence as a female artist capable of challenging the gendered status quo not only of the art world but of what many regard as the hyper-masculinity of the Abstract Expressionist movement is perhaps her most lasting contribution.
Emin’s work as part of the Young British Artists movement placed her firmly within a key legacy that was to affect the development of art in Britain for years to come.
Saville can be credited with updating figurative painting for contemporary art and her unidealized paintings of predominately women’s bodies can also be related to Feminist art and Performance art by innovators such as Mary Kelly, Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, and Carolee Schneemann.
Elaine de Kooning’s legacy has received increased attention in recent years. Her large, colorful, gestural works of the 1960s show her to be an adept Abstract Expressionist, and her sensitive and dynamic portraits of friends, athletes, and strangers widen the understanding of what Abstract Expressionism can be. But beyond her painting, de Kooning’s astute and rigorous analyses of painting in the 1940s and 1950s, helped to shape what we know of Abstract Expressionism as a whole.
Pat Steir is a strongly process-driven painter. She says “I think of painting as a research. I’m not a product-maker. I’m a researcher.” Her signature drip-style painting emerged from a desire to demonstrate that painting, too, can be conceptual.
Sherrie Levine, along with Richard Prince, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman and a small cadre of other artists came to define “The Pictures Generation.” Their collective efforts wrestled with age-old questions surrounding authorship, citation, and originality in art. Her acts of artistic appropriation drastically renegotiated what was permissible both creatively and legally in an unprecedented way.
RRosler became a leading figure in the Feminist art movement because much of her work revealed the divide between how women were portrayed as individuals whose only place was within the confines of home, marriage, kitchen, and motherhood and the way they actually felt by being pigeonholed into said domestic roles. She also used brave new technologies such as video to differentiate herself from the male art stars and their traditional mediums that had come before.
In pursuit of realism, Freilicher, by remaining true to herself, inspired other painters of her era such as Grace Hartigan, Fairfield Porter, Milton Avery, and Hedda Sterne in their engagements with representation. She was also profoundly important to the poets with whom she surrounded herself.
Though it does her aesthetic reach a considerable disservice, Flack is best known for her contribution to the Photorealist movement of the 1970s.
Matter’s life’s work incorporates elements of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Hofmann’s principles of spatial composition with pure color, automatist compositions of the early New York School, and the innovations of her Abstract Expressionists peers.