Rachel Ruysch was a Dutch still-life painter who specialized in flowers, creating her own style and earning international fame in her lifetime. With a long and successful career that spanned more than 60 years, she became the most well-documented woman painter of the Dutch Golden Age.
Virginie Bovie was a Belgian painter and arts patron, well-known in her time but later largely forgotten. Current whereabouts are only known for seven of her more than 200 works.
Dr Yvonne Sylvain was the first female doctor from Haiti and the first woman accepted into the University of Haiti Medical School, earning her medical degree in 1940. She played a vital role in providing improved medical access and tools for Haitian citizens and was a leading advocate for the physical, economical, social and political equality of Haitian women.
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was a French-American artist, best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art. Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker, and explored themes such as domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious, as well as fear, vulnerability, and loss of control. She considered art therepeutic, and used her work to process difficult events from her childhood. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not officially affiliated with a particular artistic movement.
With the rise of feminism in the United States, her work found a wider audience. Although she rejected the idea that her art was feminist, Bourgeois’s subject was usually the feminine. Works such as Femme Maison (1946-1947), Torso self-portrait (1963-1964), and Arch of Hysteria (1993), all depict the female body. In the late 1960s, her imagery became more explicitly sexual, in works such as Janus Fleuri (1968), as she explored the relationship between men and women and the emotional impact of her troubled childhood. “My work deals with problems that are pre-gender,” she wrote. “For example, jealousy is not male or female.” Despite this assertion, Femme Maison was featured on the cover of Lucy Lippard’s 1976 book From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art and the sculpture became an icon of the feminist art movement
Ximena Cuevas is a Mexican video performance artist, whose work often explores the social and gender issues that lesbians face in Mexico. She is one of Mexico’s first video artists to be recognised by major American cultural institutions. Her videos and films have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and the touring film series, Mexperimental Cinema, as well as New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Contemporary Art Museum of San Diego, and the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo de la Ciudad de México. In 2001, MoMA acquired nine of Cuevas’ videos for the museum’s permanent collection, which was the first time a Mexican video artist’s work had been included in MoMA’s collection; 24 of her videos are in now in the collection.
Cuevas has been recognized by the Mexican government as a significant contributor to videography. Many of her films offer social commentary on corruption and its impact on culture, society and politics, and explore from a feminist perspective the place of women in society, particularly lesbians.
After becoming disillusioned with traditional films being made in Mexico and internationally, Cuevas purchased a camera and began producing her own films in 1990. Her work is known for its subtle irony of evaluating contemporary society and exposing the disconnect between social customs and beliefs versus the reality of living using a combination of truth and fiction. She deconstructs myths of the “typical middle-class Mexican family”, heteronormative relationships and concepts of beauty, by parodying the ridiculousness of their traditional portrayal in popular culture. In her own words, her films reveal the “half lies” of the collective Mexican imagination. Among her noted works is the 1993 video clip entitled “Corazon Sangrante”.
Lili Elbe was a Danish painter – successful under her birth name Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener – and transgender woman who was an early recipient of sex reassignment surgery.
Elbe met Gerda Gottlieb while they were studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and they married in 1904. They worked as illustrators, Elbe specialising in landscape paintings while Gottlieb illustrated books and fashion magazines. The couple travelled through Italy and France before settling in 1912 in Paris, where Elbe could live more openly as a woman and posed as Gottlieb’s sister-in-law. Elbe received the Neuhausens prize in 1907 and exhibited at the Vejle Art Museum in Denmark, where she remains represented, and in the Saloon and Salon d’Automne in Paris. Elbe stopped painting after her transition.
Elbe started dressing in women’s clothes after she found she enjoyed the stockings and heels she wore to fill in for Gottlieb’s model who was late for a sitting. By the 1920s, Elbe regularly presented as Lili, attending various parties and entertaining guests in her house. Gottlieb became famous for her paintings of beautiful women with haunting, almond-shaped eyes, dressed in chic apparel, petites femmes fatales with Elbe as model.
Elbe went to Germany in 1930 for sex reassignment surgery, which was highly experimental at the time. She underwent four operations over two years and her case became a sensation in Danish and German newspapers. A Danish court annulled the Elbe and Gottelieb’s marriage in October 1930 and Elbe was able to have her sex and name legally changed, including receiving a passport as Lili Ilse Elvenes. She returned to Dresden and adopted the surname Elbe in honor of the Elbe River. In 1931, she had her fourth surgery, to transplant a uterus and construct a vaginal canal, which made her the second transgender woman to undergo a vaginoplasty surgery, a few weeks after Dr. Erwin Gohrbandt performed the experimental procedure on Dora Richter.
Elbe’s immune system rejected the transplanted uterus, and the operation and a subsequent surgical revision caused infection, leading to her death from cardiac arrest on 13 September 1931, three months after the surgery.The US and UK English versions of her semi-autobiographical narrative were published posthumously in 1933 under the title Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex. In 2000, The Danish Girl, a fictionalised account of Elbe’s life, became an international bestseller and was translated into a dozen languages. In 2015, it was made into a film of the same title – although critically acclaimed, the film was criticised for casting an English cisgender man (Eddie Redmayne) to play a Danish transgender woman.
Although she was involved with art throughout her life, painter Luchita Hurtado only received recognition near the end of her life. Named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2019, she landed her first solo show in a public gallery at age 98. Hurtado worked in different styles that drew elements from 20th-century avantgarde and modernist art movements including Surrealism, abstraction, and Magical Realism. Among her best-known works is the 1960s ‘I Am’ series: self-portraits that Hurtado painted by looking down at her own body, often in closets as it was this only place she could work in between raising her sons and managing the home. Later works demonstrate her environmental concerns, with recurring motifs that include humans merging with trees and texts such as ‘Water Air Earth’ and ‘We Are Just a Species’.
Although Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron is best remembered today as a painter, she was actually a true Renaissance woman, acclaimed during her lifetime as a talented poet, musician, artist, and academicienne. In her childhood, she was trained by her father in the arts of enamelling and miniature painting. Under the sponsorship of the prominent artist Charles Le Brun, she was admitted to the Académie Royale of Paris as a portrait painter in 1672. She exhibited regularly at the Salon in Paris, while also producing poetry and translations; she was fluent in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Chéron’s literary talent was recognized in 1694 when she was named a member of Italy’s Accademia dei Ricovrati in Padua, and given the academician name of Erato, after the muse of lyric and love poetry.
Perhaps best known as the the long-time lesbian partner of Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness, sculptor and translator Una Troubridge was an educated woman with achievements in her own right. She was a successful translator and the first to translate the works of French writer Colette for English readers. Her talent as a sculptor led the renowned ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky to sit for her several times. She and Radclyffe Hall were also known for being interested in spiritualism, and hosting seances.
In her younger days, Norwegian feminist Aasta Hansteen earned her living as a portrait painter in Kristiania (modern-day Oslo)’ she was in demand as the city’s only portrait artist. Her most famous painting is possibly her portrait of her father, which is on permanent exhibit at the National Gallery of Norway. Associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting, she exhibited her work at the 1855 World’s Fair in Paris. Well known in the Oslo’s intellectual circles, Hansteen inspired characters in dramas by Ibsen and Gunnar Heiberg. Her writings advocating for the rights of women, her opposition to religious authority, and her provocative behavior—she often appeared fpr public speaking engagements wearing men’s boots and brandishing a whip in a symbolic performance of the oppressor—led to such harassment that in 1880 she emigrated to the United States. Together with her foster daughter Theodora Nielsen, she sailed from Christiania on April 9, 1880. In Boston, she met leading feminists of the day, including Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe and Mary Livermore, and was deeply affected by the relative freedom of women in America. By 1889, when she returned to Norway, the feminist movement there was firmly established, and Hansteen was embraced as one of its pioneers. In 1889, she returned to Norway, joined the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights (Norsk Kvinnesaksforening) and became an active contributor in the press on women’s rights
She also studied linguistics, with an interest in Norwegian dialects. In 1862 she published anonymously a small book written in Nynorsk, becoming the first woman to publish in the language.