Pérrine Moncrieff
In 1925 Pérrine wrote New Zealand birds and how to identify them. Although she intended her book for the untrained bird-lover, it influenced scientists as well as lay people and ran to five editions.
Category Archives: Writer
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Olga Rozanova
Although Rozanova was an important figure in the Russian avant-garde – one of the “Amazons” of early-twentieth-century Russian art – her work has received little sustained critical attention except in Russian-language publications.
Dorothea Tanning
Tanning’s entire oeuvre – from painting to poetry – has had a profound influence on subsequent generations of artists. Her continued exploration of the female form has led to her association with the Feminist movement.
Itell Colquhoun
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.
Katherine Dreier
While Katherine Dreier never achieved the recognition of her contemporaries as an artist, she was and is still considered today to be one of America’s greatest collectors and educators of art in the 20th century.
Edith Rimmington
Rimmington’s prolific practice in drawing, painting, writing, poetry, and photography gave significant substance to the British Surrealist movement, helping to secure its reputation both locally and overseas.
Leonor Fini
Leonor Fini was befriended by the whole Parisian artistic community and was one of the most photographed people of the 20th century, resulting in the legacy of “queen of the Paris art world” (expression coined by art critic Sarah Kent). Her popularity in artistic social circles made her the subject of many poems, artworks, and photographs by various artists and writers of her time.
Emmy Bridgwater
“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.
Helen Levitt
In both her photographs as well as her films, Levitt created objects of fascination drawn from the seemingly mundane reality of everyday life. Transforming scenes and subjects into performances that flirted with the surreal, the intimate moments captured in her work spoke to the wonders of the human condition.
Marie Laurencin
Laurencin’s influence can be seen across the work of a number of artists who have employed visual languages of femininity in order to explore the place of women and gender expectations in modern life. Louise Bourgeois, Laurencin’s most celebrated student, similarly used clothing and other symbols of womanhood in order to explore female relationships, using psychoanalytic ideas to consider familial relationships, the human body and emotional states.