Visual Art > Painting Archives - Page 22 of 26

Emmy Bridgwater

“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

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.

Grandma Moses

While largely undervalued and overlooked by art world critics during her time, Grandma Moses was a widely popular artist in the eyes of the American public. Her art, created in a time when the country was rebuilding itself from the horrors of World War II, helped to remind viewers of a simpler time; a time of innocence, hard work, and family values.

Elisabeth Vigeé-Le Brun

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.

Grace Hartigan

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

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.

Eva Gonzalès

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.

Berthe Morisot

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.

Charlotte Salomon

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.

Tamara de Lempicka

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.