Female Artists

In Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes, she used tenebrism to convey a “dark,” or heavy subject matter. She choose a narrative involving a heroic female, which is a favorite motif of hers seen in many of her pieces. The story is from the Old Testament of Judith, telling how Judith killed the Assyrian general Holofernes. Gentileschi often depicted women defeating men, and this may be due to a traumatic experienced she had involving ****** abuse. (Gardner's Art Through The Ages)

In Leyster's self-portrait, she communicates a lot about herself. She has depicted herself as an artist, seated in front of a painting resting on an easel.The palette in her left hand and brush in her hand indicate this is her painting, and almost asks the viewed to evaluate her skills. Her confidence is reflected in her smile and her relaxed pose as she stops painting to meet the viewers gaze. (Gardner's Art Through The Ages)

Although Leyster produced a wide range of paintings, including still lifes and floral pieces, she excelled in genre painting, as seen here. We see Hals's influence here, with the painting being detailed, precise, and accurate but imbued with spontaneity as seen in Hals's works. (Gardner's Art Through the Ages)

Clara Peeters, a Flemish Baroque painter, explored still life painting. She was renown for her her usual depictions of food and flowers together, and her still lifes that included bread and fruit. These still lifes because known as breakfast pieces. Peeters is also famous for painting her still lifes against a dark background. In Still Life with Crab, Shrimps, and Lobster, she depicts a typical early 17th century meal, while revealing her undeniable talent. (Gardner's Art Through The Ages)

Artemisia Gentileschi was highly influenced by Carvaggio’s naturalism and drama, and was encouraged to pursue her artistic career by her father. Her career pursued in Florence, Venice, Naples, and Rome helped disseminate Caravaggio’s style throughout her peninsula. (Gardner's Art Through the Ages )

Ruysch's father was a professor of botany and anatomy, which may account for her interest in plants and insects. She had acquired an international reputation for her lush paintings, such as this one. Ruysch carefully arranged this piece, and this is demonstrated with the positioned flowers to create a diagonal that runs from the top of the painting to the bottom. Ruysch is , and was, extremely famous for her floral paintings and still lives, and from 1708 to 1716 she served as the court painter to the elector Palatine. (Gardner's Art Through the Ages)

Vigee-Lebrun’s self portrait reflects on the variation of the naturalistic impulse in the 18th-century French art. In this innovative mode of portraiture, Vigee-Lebrun looks directly at the viewer. The youthful portrait displays Vigee-Lebrun at twenty-six, after many years of painting Marie Antoinette. Rather than depicting herself as an artist, she shows herself as a charming and an attractive woman of society. (https://www.kimbellart.org/collection/search/view/1250?text=Le%20Brun%2C%20Elisabeth%20Louise%20Vigée)

Largely self-taught, Vigée Le Brun was recommended by the queen for membership in the Royal Academy in 1783 and short ly after became quite famous and renowned. Vigee portrayed Marie Antoinette and her children in a close-up, intimate view. This is the last painting she did of the Queen and her children: Marie Therese Charlotte de France, Madame Royale, and her brother, Louis-Joseph, Le Da**hin. The youngest child sits on Antoinette’s lap is Louis XVII. This portrait shows Marie Antoinette in a similar dress to the one in her “Red Dress” portrait, however, the bodies in the two art pieces are very different. (http://www.gogmsite.net/grand-ladies-of-the-reign-o/subalbum-marie-antoinette-n/1787-marie-antoinette-and-c.html)

The most celebrated woman artist of the 19th century was Marie Bonheur. She was the winner of the gold medal at the Salon of 1848, and became the first woman officer in the French Legion of Honor in 1894. Bonheur received artistic training from her father, and as a result she launched her career believing that as a woman and an artist, she had a special role to play in creating a new and perfect society. In the painting, Ploughing through the Nevers, Bonheur shows the first ploughing which was done in early autumn to break the surface of the soil and aerate it during the winter. (http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/painting/commentaire_id/ploughing-in-nevers-2040.html?tx_commentaire_pi1%5BpidLi%5D=509&tx_commentaire_pi1%5Bfrom%5D=841&cHash=60f905d6af)

Among the most famous portrait photographers in the 19th century in England was Julia Margaret Cameron, who did not seriously take up photography until she was 48. Although she produced images of many well-known men of the period, she photographed more women than men, like most women photographers. Ophelia, Study No.2, really demonstrates her style. Cameron often depicted her female subjects as characters from literary or biblical narratives; this is shown here because Ophelia is an allusion to Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet. The slightly blurred focus was also a distinctive feature of hers - which added to the ethereal, dreamlike tone to her photographs. Her photograph of Ophelia has a mysterious quality to it.(Gardner's Art Through The Ages)

Berthe Morisot, Edouard Monet’s sister-in-law, regularly exhibited with the Impressionists. Most of her paintings were focused on domestic subjects, the one realm of Parisian life where society allowed an upper-class woman such as Morisot free access, but she also produced many outside scenes. In The Craddle, shows one of Berthe’s sisters, Edma, watching over her sleeping daughter, Blanche. It is the first image of motherhood to appear in Morisot’s work, and would eventually be her favorite subject to depict. (http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/painting/commentaire_id/the-cradle-8953.html?cHash=80def6b7dc)

Girl Arranging her hair was greatly admired at the last impressionist exhibit, and no one awed over it more than Degas. However, the theme is one that even Degas did not dare to portray: a woman’s toilette. Cassatt purposely choose an adolescent as her subject so the painting would not be valued for the beauty of the model. Clad in loose chemise and seated before a washstand and mirror, she performs the routine task of coiling her hair. The girl’s pose is awkward but natural, and the S-curve formed by her arms and twist of her hair creates a fluid surface pattern. (http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/ggcassattptg/ggcassattptg-46572.html)

In the Salon of 1874, Degas admired Mary Cassatt so much, he befriended and influenced her. Cassatt had trained as a painter before moving to Europe to study masterworks in France and Italy. As a woman, she could not easily frequent the cafes with her male friends, and had the role of being a caretaker for her aging parents, who had moved to Paris to join her. Cassatt’s subjects, like Morisot’s, were primarily of women and children. In her painting, The Bath, show the tender relationship between mother and child. The visual solidity of the mother and child contrasts with the flat wallpaper and rug. Cassatt’s signature style in this work is influenced by Degas and of Japanese prints, but the painting’s design and subject matter has an originality all its own. (Gardner’s Art Through The Ages)

The Boating Party is a representative of Cassatt’s finest period. It demonstrated a high horizon, off-center placement of figures, elimination of unnecessary details, and the preoccupation with surface patterns and contours reveal this awareness of Japanese art. The composition of this piece is unconventional and arresting. In conception, execution, and sheer size, this is Cassatt’s boldest work. (http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/ggcassattptg/ggcassattptg-46569.html)

On the forefront of American Pictorialism, a movement that tried to emulate photography’s status by emulating painting, Kasebier believed photography to be the medium of self-expression. Her shadowy portrait of a mother and child set against a stall shows her sense of design and reverence of maternity. With a transparent veil and classical drapery, Kasebier transformed an ordinary woman into look like Madonna of a religious painting. The photograph showcases Kasebier’s ability to inject a sense of the spiritual and divine into scenes of everyday life. (http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=68667)

This is Frida Kahlo’s first self-portrait. It was painted for her boyfriend, Alejandro Gomez Arias, shortly after he left her. She it gave it to him to show him her love and affection towards him, and in hopes to get back together, which worked. Frida’s aristocractic pose shows her interest in Italian Renaissance art ; this self-portrait is Frida’s interpretation of Botticelli’s Venus which Alejandro admired. (http://www.fridakahlofans.com/c0020.html)

Black Cross, New Mexico, is one of a series that Georgia O’Keeffe painted in the Southwest during the summer of 1929. She was fascinated with these crosses, and even stated, “I saw the crosses so often...like a thin dark veil of the Catholic Church spread over the New Mexico landscape...For me, painting the crosses was a way of painting the country.” She contrasted the man-made cross with a flat against a picture plan with nature’s sunset. (http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/46327?search_no=3&index=17)

Georgia O’Keeffe’s style changed stylistically throughout her career. In 1930, she witnessed a drought in the Southwest that caused the starvation and dehydration of many animals, whose bodies and skeletons ended ** littering the land. O’Keeffe was so fascinated by those bones, she shipped a number to New York so she could paint. She added a macabre note by decorating the skull with artificial flowers, because they looked like the flowers that adorn the graves in New Mexico. (http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/61428?search_no=1&index=0)

The RA hired American photographer, Dorothea Lange, in 1936 and dispatched her to photograph the rural poor attempting to survive the awful conditions brought on by the Great Depression. At the end of one assignment to document the lives of migratory pea pickers in California, Lange stopped at a camp in Nipomo and found the migrant workers there were starving because their crops had frozen over in the fields. On this occasion, Lange took a picture of Migrant Mother, Nipomo Valley in which she captured the mixture of strength and worry in the raised hand and careworn face of a young mother, her holds her baby on her lap. Within days of Lange’s photograph being in the San Francisco newspaper, people rushed food to Nipomo to feed the hungry workers. (Gardner's Art Through the Ages)

From mid-1947 until 1949, Hepworth made a series of drawings based on her observations of surgical procedures. Because her daughter needed surgery, Hepworth became friends with a doctor, Norman Capener, who suggested that because she was interested in sculpture, that Hepworth might want to watch an operation. Blue and Green shows an operation of a dysfunctional joint. In this piece, Hepworth hoped to communicate the way in which the medical staff engaged in their task resulting in their physical disposition in space. ( http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/objectdetails.aspx?oid=35963)

Barbara Hepworth was a practitioner of direct carving. Rhythmic Form is various rhythms: those of the artist at work, of the work in the space, and of the context of the production. For Hepworth, sculpture was the “plastic production of thought” - a way of translating ideas that can only be expressed through direct and spontaneous acts of engagement with material in order to arrive organically at something whole and complete. Once the work is completed, it can stand on its own. Hepworth wrote in 1937, its power is that it “puts no pressure on anything.” (http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org/collection/artist/5/17651/object/46314)

Joan Mitchell was a member of the first generation of Abstract Expressionist, and was famous for painting big, light-filled abstractions, animated by loosely applied skeins of bright color. In City Landscape, colors are very vivid. We see a tangle of pale pink, scarlet, mustard, and black hues. The title suggests that the pigments evoke nerves, similar to a city. The sense of spontaneity is a key characteristic of Mitchell’s work, and seen here. Interestingly, Mitchell painted slowly, unlike many of her contemporary action painters. (http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/86385)

Joan Mitchell was a member of the first generation of Abstract Expressionist, and was famous for painting big, light-filled abstractions, animated by loosely applied skeins of bright color. In City Landscape, colors are very vivid. We see a tangle of pale pink, scarlet, mustard, and black hues. The title suggests that the pigments evoke nerves, similar to a city. The sense of spontaneity is a key characteristic of Mitchell’s work, and seen here. Interestingly, Mitchell painted slowly, unlike many of her contemporary action painters. (http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/86385)

Yayoi Kusama was an avant-garde Japanese artist who was an influential figure in the postwar New York art scene. She staged evoking happenings and exhibited works like “Infinity Nets.” Kusama was also friends with many famous artists as well, such as, Eva Hesse and Andy Warhol, who may have influenced her. Although Kusama returned back to Japan in the 1970s, Kusama’s work still appeals to the imagination and senses. (http://artsy.net/artist/yayoi-kusama)

Bridget Riley viewed nature as, “dynasim of visual forces - an event rather than an appearance.” Her goal was to show these “events” in her artwork through abstract rhythm patterns, tempos, and contrasts and reversals that parallel the human emotional structure. The moving, rippling, vertical lines in Arrest 2 change from black to cool gray, creating vibrant spatial illusions that satisfy and frustrate the eye. Art critics of the 1960s declared Riley as an Op artist. Her paintings have inspired a new generation of abstractionism. (http://www.nelson-atkins.org/art/Exhibitions/Sparks/CollectionDatabase.cfm?id=32298&theme=M_C)

It was common for Cindy Sherman to take pictures of herself to build a catalog of self-portraits that engage an array of women stereotypes. In this black-and-white portrait, Sherman is pretending to be Madonna. Her white veil obviously parallels one of a classical religious figure, however, Sherman’s elongated eyelashes, accentuated lips and curled hair peaking out of her veil differs from a historic traditional depiction of Madonna. This could be a reflection of the time, the 1920s, as women became more sexually active and less like chastised like the Virgin Mary. However, since it was reprinted in the 1990s it may also be a reference to the pop singer, Madonna, as well. (http://www.scadmoa.org/art/collections/madonna-self-portrait)

Untitled Film Still #16 is part of a series in which Sherman sought to show stereotypes associated with women. Sherman photographed herself to portray these messages, and presented herself in different manners, from the tearful innocent and famous scarlet, to show how stereotypes affect all women. (http://www.scadmoa.org/art/collections/madonna-self-portrait)

Kruger has appropriated a famous scene from Michelango’s Sistine Chapel fresco where God is creating Adam, or life, through the touch of his finger. Combining a black-and-white image of this painting with text, she draws a parallel between the Biblical creation story and that of lauded masterpiece of Western painting. Kruger’s background in graphic design is evident here in the way she overlays the clipped image with the aggressive text. Kruger purposefully uses the word ‘’you’’ to implicate it is us in continuing patriarchal narratives of religion and art history. ( http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79334)

Since the early 1980s, Lawler has photographed in galleries, private collections, and museums. This is done because she wants to remind her viewers that a work of art is an object, that is bought, sold, and owned, and that the owner and how it is displayed is part of its meaning. (http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3ADE%3AI%3A4%7CG%3AHO%3AE%3A1&page_number=26&template_id=1&sort_order=1)

Faith Ringgold is famous for her colorful figurative works that address issues of gender and racial equality. Ringgold’s book, Tar Beach, which tells the magical tale of a small girl in Harlem who discovers through her imagination she is free to fly anywhere in the world. The partially autobiographical and universal story was based off this quilt in which the artist silkscreened a detailed scene from which the plot is told. (http://www.scadmoa.org/art/collections/tar-beach-2)

In 1990, Louise Bourgeois published an illustrated book called the puritan, pairing a text she had written in 1947 with a series of eight prints, which all had a hand painted gouache additions. The text of the puritan is a parable of a love lost in New York City. Bourgeois described the ordered geometry of the images as a tool of an object understanding. (http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=69979)

In 1990, Louise Bourgeois published an illustrated book called the puritan, pairing a text she had written in 1947 with a series of eight prints, which all had a hand painted gouache additions. The text of the puritan is a parable of a love lost in New York City. Bourgeois described the ordered geometry of the images as a tool of an object understanding. (http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=69979)

In 1990, Louise Bourgeois published an illustrated book called the puritan, pairing a text she had written in 1947 with a series of eight prints, which all had a hand painted gouache additions. The text of the puritan is a parable of a love lost in New York City. Bourgeois described the ordered geometry of the images as a tool of an object understanding. (http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=69979)

In 1990, Louise Bourgeois published an illustrated book called the puritan, pairing a text she had written in 1947 with a series of eight prints, which all had a hand painted gouache additions. The text of the puritan is a parable of a love lost in New York City. Bourgeois described the ordered geometry of the images as a tool of an object understanding. (http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=69979)

Each of the 15 prints in Kara Walker’s portfolio of works created at the Neiman Center began with an enlargement, using offset lithography, of a woodcut plate from Ed. Alfred H. Guernsey and Henry M.Aldren’s Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, which was published in Chicago in 1886. Each image in Walker’s series had silhouetted figures with solid black silkscreen. Walker uses a variety of strategies to break in, cover over, or intervene within the narrative of the woodcuts. Walker’s silhouettes interrupt Union maneuvers as often as Confederates ones, as if no matter which side wins, there will be suffering on/for both parties. (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arts/neiman/Walker/)