When her mother died early in 1848, Caroline’s life began to alter course dramatically. Her considerable artistic talent flourished, and she was able to turn her strong sense of duty and social commitment to better account, especially in the nursing and care of the poor.
Schneemann’s groundbreaking works on film have been an inspiration for later artists, like Peggy Ahwesh and Abigail Child, and provided them with a historic precedent for feminist filmmaking. Her performance and photographic works also set a precedent for artists like Ana Mendieta and Hannah Wilke to explore ideas ranging from goddess imagery, the generative and subjective female form, and ideals of beauty. Even Annie Sprinkle’s Public Cervix Announcement (1990) would not be possible without Schneemann’s exploration of intimacy in her artwork. Many exhibitions throughout the 1990s and 2000s have been dedicated to feminist artists of these later generations in direct communication with works from Schneemann’s oeuvre. As new generations of artists and women discover her works, the dialogue Schneemann initiated in the early 1960s about women, their bodies, the sensual and the intimate continues to engage viewers, artists, and critics.
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.
Even though only a quarter of her 800 photographs have at this point been made public (with the rest remaining private in the artist’s estate maintained by her parents), she is generally considered a prolific young prodigy whose work expresses great emotive depth and continues to challenge perceptions of identity and the medium of photography even to this day. Art critic Michèle Kieffer claims “Woodman has become an icon, a ‘rock star’ of contemporary photography”.
Since her early family portraits, Anguissola’s works were permeated with elements of storytelling that elevated regular, everyday scenes into witty visual plays. Her ability to represent a believable likeness imbued with the personality of the sitter later became one of the hallmarks of Baroque portraiture.
Though Münter sold just a few paintings in her lifetime, in the words of scholar Annegret Hoberg, Gabriele Münter was the “best-known female exponent of German Expressionist painting.” Indeed, Münter helped develop and instigate the Expressionist and Blaue Reiter aesthetic, and, ultimately, through her preservation of Blaue Reiter art from Nazi persecution, became one of the Expressionist movement’s most important unofficial historians.
Höch’s deliberate attempt to obscure herself during the Second World War, and the fact that she continued to live in her modest home on the outskirts of Berlin until the end of her life, may account for her relative obscurity. The art historian Dawn Ades notes that “she wasn’t interested in becoming a celebrity,” which perhaps speaks to her early embarrassment at the exhibitionism of the Dada group.
Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique gave rise to the Color Field movement, having a decisive impact on the work of the other artists associated with this style, such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski. In addition its striking departure from first-generation Abstract Expressionism, Color Field art is often seen as an important precursor of 1960s Minimalism, with its spare, meditative quality.
From an early age she developed an interest in natural history. At 15 she discovered a new species of a noctuid moth on Mt Egmont, which was described in 1921 by the entomologist G. V. Hudson as Melanchra averilla in her honour. In 1923 Lysaght commenced studies at Victoria University College, Wellington. She graduated BSc in 1928 and MSc in 1929 with second-class honours in zoology; her thesis in entomology was on the biology of Eucolaspis.
For a long time, Mendieta’s highly publicized death eclipsed any attention being paid to her intensely important body of work. A recent surge of interest in her jolting performances, however, has turned a focus onto her work as being an important member of the displaced and abused women canon. Mendieta has inspired a book about her death written by Robert Katz, a feminist protest outside of the Dia Art Foundation’s retrospective of Carl Andre replete with chicken blood and guts, and many of her own postmortem retrospectives. She has also influenced numerous modern artists, such as Ana Teresa Fernández, Kate Gilmore, Simone Leigh, Gina Osterloh, Antonia Wright, Nancy Spero and Tania Bruguera.