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.
Category Archives: Visual Art > Painting
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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.
Elizabeth Murray
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.
Agnes Martin
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.
Alice Neel
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.
Anne Truitt
Anne Truitt is recognized as a leading figure of the Washington Color School along with a predominantly male-centred group of artists who made geometric art infused with resonant, vibrating color relationships.
Julie Mehretu
Whilst Mehretu’s art is inspired by events taking place in Africa and the Middle East, she resists interpretations of her work that fail to see past her ethnicity. According to the artist, her work is not all about “blackness” or “otherness.” She believes that there is a failure to “simply accept and understand that a woman of African descent is making large, abstract paintings” and that this is a restrictive view of what artists of color can achieve.
Marie Laurencin
Laurencin’s influence can be seen across the work of a number of artists who have employed visual languages of femininity in order to explore the place of women and gender expectations in modern life. Louise Bourgeois, Laurencin’s most celebrated student, similarly used clothing and other symbols of womanhood in order to explore female relationships, using psychoanalytic ideas to consider familial relationships, the human body and emotional states.