Carrington played a significant role in the internationalization of Surrealism in the years following World War II, and she was a conduit of Surrealist theory in her personal letters and writings throughout her life, extending this tradition into the 21st century.
The Nouveau Realisme movement, and Niki de Saint Phalle’s work in particular, had a significant effect on the development of conceptual art. Her works often combined performance and plastic art in new ways, blending and dismantling hierarchies between painting, sculpture, and performance in a way that would influence conceptual artists.
Arbus’s short and troubled life resulted in a body of work that was, and continues to be, both celebrated for its compassion and condemned for its objectification.
During her lifetime, and especially in the twenty years following her death, Kent’s work never quite worked its way into the mainstream. Being a female artist and a nun, she did not fit into the detached, jaded aesthetic narrative of Pop.
Until recently, Lynda Benglis’ work received relatively little critical notice and surprisingly few large solo exhibitions. In recent years, however, several notable institutions have exhibited her work. Her influence on a younger generation of artists is also becoming more evident and is now fairly well documented.
Susan Rothenberg’s legacy would have no doubt been secured with her Horse paintings of the late 1970s, but her successive decades of work only solidified her reputation as a painter of immense verve, depth of feeling, and simultaneously meticulous and spontaneous technique.
Helen Lundeberg had a dynamic impact on the direction of American art throughout the twentieth century. Alongside her husband and others, she was a key figure in the foundation of two new and influential art movements: Post-Surrealism and the Hard-edge Painting movement.
Krasner’s artwork and biography continue to inspire generations of painters and she has become revered especially amongst women artists. Throughout her career, she directly confronted the dominant stereotype that “women can’t paint” and struggled within the Abstract Expressionist movement, which prized masculinity and heroic figures. Krasner influenced other artists, including those from future generations, by her stylistic and artistic innovations, her example of persistence, and her ultimate triumph.
While the majority of the focus regarding Pop art has centered on American and British artists, the Spanish artist Isabel Oliver provides a good example of one of the many less recognized artists around the world who appropriated Pop art strategies and effects. Additionally, she demonstrates how artists moved beyond their critique of popular culture and sought a deeper understanding of the everyday through an archaeological examination of materials and their traces.
Part of Colquhoun’s legacy in the art world lies in her use of automatism. While she did not invent many of the styles (she did invent some), she became a leader in all of these using many different approaches.