Remedios Varo
Varo and her work quickly became legendary in Mexico. Following her death, the art critics of Novedades called her “one of the most individual and extraordinary painters of Mexican art.”
Category Archives: Visual Art > Sculpture
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Camille Claudel
Following a long period of relative obscurity, with her work having been significantly overshadowed by her relationship with Rodin, it has now re-emerged and become rightfully recognized for its ingenuity in the portrayal of emotion and human nature.
Barbara Hepworth
Her obituary in The Guardian described her as “probably the most significant woman artist in the history of art to this day.”
Eva Hesse
Though Hesse’s career spanned little more than a decade, her work has remained popular and highly influential. On the one hand, the enduring fascination with Hesse derives from her remarkable “life of extremes.” But Hesse’s work, itself, was very much part of an equivocal and unique era in history, when artists were seeking new modes of expression in the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism.
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.
Yayoi Kusama
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.
Louise Nevelson
Nevelson’s work is fundamental to the history of Feminist art, as it challenged the dominant stereotype of the macho, male sculptor. In Linda Nochlin’s famous 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” she cited Nevelson as a major influence on the new generation of women struggling to redefine femininity in art.
Natalia Goncharova
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.
Kara Walker
Walker always insisted that her job was to jolt viewers out of their comfort zone, and even make them angry, once remarking “I make art for anyone who’s forgot what it feels like to put up a fight.” In 2007, TIME magazine featured Walker on its list of the 100 most influential Americans. In 2008 when the artist was still in her thirties, The Whitney held a retrospective of Walker’s work. Though Walker herself is still in mid-career, her illustrious example has emboldened a generation of slightly younger artists to investigate the persistence and complexity of racial stereotyping.
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
Though she is little known, Baroness Elsa Freytag-Loringhoven helped to shape the direction of New York Dada with her eccentric public displays and performances as well as with her desire to fuse her sexuality with her art. In the face of accusations that she was “crazy,” Freytag-Loringhoven would simply state, “Every artist is crazy with respect to ordinary life.” Her gender bending and blatant displays of her sexuality anticipated Feminist art and performance of the mid-20th century. She was an innovative artist whose works paved the way for later experimental Performance art of the late 1950s and 1960s. A renowned poet and a proto-feminist, Elsa and her work have only recently been rediscovered by art historians who have recognized the importance of her contribution to New York Dada. Her provocative poetry was published posthumously in 2011 in Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. At the very forefront of developing the readymade and performance art, the Baroness holds a legacy as the “Mama of Dada,” as the New York Times critic Holland Cotter dubbed her.