More important than the impact her diverse work has on the art market is its influence on other artists and movements, which spans generations. To this day, she represents herself as a lone wolf most comfortable with being known as independently avant-garde.
As an individualist who was disengaged from any official artistic movement, Kahlo’s artwork has been associated with Primitivism, Indigenism, Magic Realism, and Surrealism. Posthumously, Kahlo’s artwork has grown profoundly influential for feminist studies and postcolonial debates, while Kahlo has become an international cultural icon.
Izquierdo’s work opened up new possibilities for using symbols tied to Mexican traditions in a way other than to serve the nationalist discourse in art at the time. Izquierdo believed in art for art’s sake and wanted to go beyond the bounds of political art then. While the concept of art for art’s sake traced back to nineteenth-century European avant-gardes, in her context of post-revolutionary Mexico, this direction in art especially bucked the trend of using art as a propagandistic tool. Instead, art’s meaning, for Izquierdo, could be personal and variegated, not following the lines set by the politically powerful art establishment then.
The style of Romaine Brooks’ art in many ways defies classification and does not easily fit into one stylistic category. However, she has been most frequently linked to the movements of Aestheticism and Symbolism because of her leaning towards the non-narrative and the romantic and lyrical qualities of her portraits. While Brooks did not embrace the vivid colors of many of her fellow modernists, she nevertheless made the same bold and somewhat simplified expressive gestural lines as her contemporary Fauves and Cubists. Her portraits are unapologetically honest and real in the same way that the likes of much later twentieth century portraitists, including Alice Neel and Lucian Freud took on board.
Today, Spero is widely recognized as one of the most influential women artists of her generation. Working directly onto the wall, Spero’s technique recalls ancient fresco painting, but simultaneously her cut and paste approach of placing individual figures in the urban landscape interestingly brings to mind the work of contemporary street artists, such as Banksy. The process and result of creating an immersive gallery environment rather than simply a framed artwork is a way of making work that is now much more wide spread than it was when Spero developed the notion during the 1980s. More broadly speaking in popular culture, using collage cut and pasted directly on to the wall has become an important statement in the world of design, with both public and private spaces preferring this way to decorate rather than a picture in a frame.
Goncharova’s Rayonist and Futurist work influenced many of her Russian contemporaries, including Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. In turn, two major new art movements were coined in Russia, Suprematism and Constructivism. Figurative scenes that had been fragmented into shards by Goncharova and Larinov became more and more abstract with only geometrical spaces recognizable as particular forms in the work of Malevich. This lead to a wave of abstract work being produced in Russia and Europe more widely.
In the artist’s later years, while her work as a painter received little attention, she was well known for her stage and costume designs, which were influenced by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the most innovative of ballet companies which had a long-lasting impact on dance, theatre, and opera productions. In the 21st century her work has again risen to the forefront, and she is today considered a leading Russian painter.
Paula Modersohn-Becker was the first woman artist to paint herself nude and furthermore, the first artist to paint herself nude while pregnant. Her repeated themes of moving self-portraits and portraits of women and children are well integrated within the foundations for the Feminist Art movement. She has had great influence on the work of contemporary female artists dedicated to similar subject matter, including most notably Frida Kahlo, Tracey Emin, and Cindy Sherman.
Delaunay’s textile designs extended the range of her influence into fashion, home decor and the theater. Her ability to introduce art into regular life by creating and wearing clothing, and living in spaces that were of her own design, can be seen as an early form of performance art, inspiring contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovic.
Due to the combined quality of her artwork and groundbreaking treatment and representation of the female nude Suzanne Valadon is considered one of the greatest early female artists. As muse to many of the most famous Impressionists, as well as an artist often making self-portraits she is one of the most well-documented and “seen” French artists. Thus she has become an important role model for following generations of female artists.
For more than 200 years after her death, Leyster’s work was either attributed to her husband Molenaer or Frans Hals. This seems partly due to their similarity in style, but there also seems to have been deliberate forgery: in 1893, Leyster’s signature was discovered underneath a forged signature of Hals on the 1630 painting called The Carousing Couple or The Jolly Companions.
Because Leyster’s legacy was overlooked for centuries of art-making and history, it is difficult to say precisely who has been influenced by Leyster’s work. It would seem that many of the artists who studied or cited Frans Hals or Molenaer as an influence may well be citing Leyster without realizing it. The realist paintings of Netherlandish painters such as Jacoobus van Looy and Isaac Iraels owe much to the style of Dutch Golden Age painting, where she was a leader among her contemporaries. Similarly, many key figures in both Impressionism and Realism studied the works of Dutch Golden Age painting as a means of considering the interaction between interior spaces and human life. Her impact is most likely larger than modern art historians can document.