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.
“Her paintings show an ability to enter a personal dream world and transform the visions she experienced there into bold, unselfconscious, emotionally charged landscapes which more often than not strike into the very depths of one’s mind. Using a limited palette and painting thickly, she was able to bring together seemingly unrelated objects which she used to fill desolate landscapes, giving the paintings a narrative quality of her own making”. Along with the other female Surrealists, she gave the following generation of female artists the gift of role models and in turn, access to the notion that women are active art producers, not simply models tasked to provide inspiration for their male counter-parts.
Joan Mitchell created a large and impressive body of Abstract Expressionist work. Recognized by the age of 30, her paintings steadily matured and became ever more striking and profound. The Joan Mitchell Foundation, established in 1993, continues to celebrate her legacy by providing grants and other support for painters and sculptors working today.
While largely undervalued and overlooked by art world critics during her time, Grandma Moses was a widely popular artist in the eyes of the American public. Her art, created in a time when the country was rebuilding itself from the horrors of World War II, helped to remind viewers of a simpler time; a time of innocence, hard work, and family values.
Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s talent and importance was largely dismissed in the decades following the artist’s death, a common fate of many significant women artists. Despite her vast oeuvre, including commissions by the most powerful ruling families throughout Europe, her legacy was largely ignored until the late-20th century.
As the first internationally famous Iranian woman artist, Monir opened the way for others to follow, although it is difficult to gauge her precise influence on any individual artist. She was the first Iranian woman to have a museum in Tehran dedicated exclusively to her work, and the first Iranian artist of any kind to have a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum (in 2015).
Taeuber-Arp is not as well-known as other artists in her circle, despite her deep involvement with the burgeoning European avant-garde and the presence of her works in museum collections across the world. However, this reputation is changing, as evidenced by the 1981 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that subsequently traveled to Chicago, Houston, and Montreal. Her work is now generally accepted as part of the story of modernism and Dada, and has drawn increasing attention from scholars and academics. Her work was influential to the growth of Feminist Art of the 1960’s, who viewed her as a trailblazer.
Dorothea Lange’s greatest achievements lie in the photographs she took during the Depression. They made an enormous impact on how millions of ordinary Americans understood the plight of the poor in their country, and they have inspired generations of campaigning photographers ever since.
Hartigan is admired for having, as one critic noted, “resolved the problem that doomed many artists of the New York School: where to go from art in the 1950s.” Since she was able to reconcile abstraction with her usage of realism and iconography, she influenced many future artists. She made the Maryland Institute College of Art a nationally prominent program and mentored hundreds of students during her tenure there.
As with other Impressionist artist who produced extensive drawings that stood on their own as finished works rather than as studies, Gonzalès’s pastels may well be her most successful works.