Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s talent and importance was largely dismissed in the decades following the artist’s death, a common fate of many significant women artists. Despite her vast oeuvre, including commissions by the most powerful ruling families throughout Europe, her legacy was largely ignored until the late-20th century.
Hartigan is admired for having, as one critic noted, “resolved the problem that doomed many artists of the New York School: where to go from art in the 1950s.” Since she was able to reconcile abstraction with her usage of realism and iconography, she influenced many future artists. She made the Maryland Institute College of Art a nationally prominent program and mentored hundreds of students during her tenure there.
Georgia O’Keeffe spent 70 years making art and contributing to the development of American modernism. She was a prominent member of the creative Stieglitz Circle, influencing early American modernists. She is notable for her role as a pioneering female artist, and although she disavowed their interpretation of her work, she was a strong influence on the artists of the Feminist art movement, including Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro, who saw feminine imagery in O’Keeffe’s flower paintings. A prolific artist, she produced more than 2000 works over the course of her career. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe is the first museum in the United States dedicated to a female artist, and its research center sponsors significant fellowships for scholars of modern American art.
As with other Impressionist artist who produced extensive drawings that stood on their own as finished works rather than as studies, Gonzalès’s pastels may well be her most successful works.
Although she has been forgotten in some corners, Morisot was an important figure in the founding of Impressionism as a movement; she participated in their first exhibition and was a key artistic and social figure within their circle. Morisot was also a strong encouraging influence on other female Impressionist painters living in Paris at the time, such as Mary Cassatt and Eva Gonzalès.
Salomon is neither a self-taught nor an outsider artist, for she received an artistic education and remains in the mainstream of art. Neither is she just a Holocaust artist. While her work testifies the experience of Nazi control and wartime, it also displays distinct artistic skills and a capacity for creative expression.
In both her life and her art, Tamara de Lempicka offered a new image of the modern woman: part jazz-age femme fatale, libertine and social climber, and part canny self-promoter, self-styled experimental artist and astute cultural and historical prognosticator. In many ways, Lempicka’s artistic output has been assessed as inseparable from her larger-than-life character and, more significantly, her gender.
Elizabeth Murray’s experiments with the shaped canvas were unparalleled, taking what other artists had begun to play with to its apotheosis. Her use of rich but oftentimes discordant color, the massive size and complexity of the canvas(es), and the interweaving of the cartoonish, the disturbing, and the playful influenced her peers and artists in the proceeding decades.
Although Martin abandoned the artistic hub of New York in favor of a solitary existence on the other side of the continent, she continued to refine her practice while traveling, writing, and experimenting with filmmaking. Perhaps ironically, her seclusion skyrocketed her fame; many devotees ventured to New Mexico in search of Martin, who reluctantly received her callers. The last few decades of her life were spent painting and writing, her practice becoming a metaphor for her search for tranquility. Her work is especially influential in India and China.
In a world where painted portraits were still primarily for the upper class, Neel’s insistence on representing a broad cross-section of the American public, from a range of racial, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds was firmly rooted in her political convictions, and recalls the staunch radicalism of Diego Rivera and American artists of the Harlem Renaissance.