20th Century
Notable women artists from this period include:
Hannelore Baron, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, Romaine Brooks, Leonora Carrington, Mary Cassatt, Elizabeth Catlett, Camille Claudel, Sonia Delaunay, Dulah Marie Evans, Audrey Flack, Mary Frank, Helen Frankenthaler, Elisabeth Frink, Françoise Gilot, Natalia Goncharova, Nancy Graves, Grace Hartigan, Barbara Hepworth, Eva Hesse, Sigrid Hjertén, Malvina Hoffman, Margaret Ponce Israel, Gwen John, Käthe Kollwitz, Lee Krasner, Frida Kahlo, Laura Knight, Barbara Kruger, Marie Laurencin, Tamara de Lempicka, Séraphine Louis, Dora Maar, Margaret MacDonald, Maruja Mallo, Agnes Martin, Ana Mendieta, Joan Mitchell, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Münter, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Georgia O'Keeffe, Orovida Camille Pissarro, Irene Rice Pereira, Bridget Riley, Verónica Ruiz de Velasco, Anne Ryan, Charlotte Salomon, Augusta Savage, Zinaida Serebriakova, Henrietta Shore, Sr. Maria Stanisia, Marjorie Strider, Suzanne Valadon, Remedios Varo, Nellie Walker, Marianne von Werefkin, and Ogura Yuki.
Margaret MacDonald (1865–1933), was a Scottish artist whose works helped define the "Glasgow Style" of the 1890s and early 20th century. She often collaborated with her husband, the architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, in works that had influence in Europe. She exhibited with Mackintosh at the 1900 Vienna Secession, where her work is thought to have had an influence on the Secessionists such as Gustav Klimt.
Aleksandra Ekster and Lyubov Popova were Constructivist, Cubo-Futurist, and Suprematist artists well known and respected in Kiev, Moscow and Paris in the early 20th century. Among the other women artists prominent in the Russian avant-garde were Natalia Goncharova, Varvara Stepanova and Nadezhda Udaltsova.
Sonia Delaunay and her husband were the founders of Orphism.
In the Art Deco era, Hildreth Meiere made large-scale mosaics and was the first woman honored with the Fine Arts Medal of the American Institute of Architects. Tamara de Lempicka, also of this era, was an Art Deco painter from Poland. Sr. Maria Stanisia became a notable portraitist, mainly of clergy.
Georgia O'Keeffe was born in the late 19th century. She became known for her paintings, featuring flowers, bones, and landscapes of New Mexico. In 1927, Dod Proctor's painting Morning was voted Picture of the Year in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and bought by the Daily Mail for the Tate gallery. Its popularity resulted in its showing in New York and a two year tour of Britain.
Surrealism, an important artistic style in the 1920s and 1930s, had a number of prominent women artists, including Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo.
Lee Miller rediscovered solarization and became a high fashion photographer. Dorothea Lange documented the Depression. Margaret Bourke-White created the industrial photographs that were featured on the cover and in the lead article of the first Life Magazine. Diane Arbus based her photography on outsiders to mainstream society. Graciela Iturbide's works dealt with Mexican life and feminism, while Tina Modotti produced "revolutionary icons" from Mexico in the 1920s. Annie Leibovitz's photographic work was of rock and roll and other celebrity figures.
Mary Carroll Nelson founded the Society of Layerists in Multi-Media (SLMM), whose artist members follow in the tradition of Emil Bisttram and the Transcendental Painting Group, as well as Morris Graves of the Pacific Northwest Visionary Art School. In the 1970s, Judy Chicago created The Dinner Party, one of the most important works of feminist art.
Helen Frankenthaler was an Abstract Expressionist painter and she was influenced by Jackson Pollock. Lee Krasner was also an Abstract Expressionist artist and married to Pollock and a student of Hans Hofmann. Elaine de Kooning was a student and later the wife of Willem de Kooning, she was an abstract figurative painter. Anne Ryan was a collagist. Jane Frank, also a student of Hans Hofmann, worked with mixed media on canvas. In Canada, Marcelle Ferron was an exponent of automatism.
From the 1960s on feminism led to a great increase in interest in women artists and their academic study. Notable contributions have been made by the art historians Germaine Greer, Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock and others. Figures like Artemesia Gentileschi and Frida Kahlo emerged from relative obscurity to become feminist icons.
In 1996, Catherine de Zegher curated an exhibition of 37 great women artists from the twentieth century. The exhibition, Inside the Visible, that travelled from the ICA in Boston to the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, the Whitechapel in London and the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, included artists' works from the 1930s through the 1990s featuring Claude Cahun, Louise Bourgeois, Bracha Ettinger, Agnes Martin, Carrie Mae Weems, Charlotte Salomon, Eva Hesse, Nancy Spero, Francesca Woodman, Lygia Clark and Mona Hatoum among others.
Read more about this topic: Women Artists