For centuries, art history has been dominated by male names such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Rembrandt. However, throughout history, there have also been talented and visionary women artists who have created stunning works of art and made significant contributions to the art world.
From painting and sculpture to photography and video art, women artists have challenged cultural expectations and questioned gender roles through their works. In this article, we will explore the life and work of some of the most prominent women artists in history.
10 Women Artists You Can’t Miss
Of course, the history of art is full of women artists and it would be impossible to name them all in this article, so we have selected some of the most outstanding artists.
1-Sofonisba Anguissola
Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532 – November 16, 1625), also known as Sophonisba Angussola or Sophonisba Anguisciola,was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Cremona to a relatively poor noble family.
She received a thorough education that included the fine arts, and her apprenticeship with local painters set a precedent for women to be accepted as art students.
As a young woman, Anguissola traveled to Rome, where she was introduced to Michelangelo, who immediately recognized her talent, and to Milan, where she painted the Duke of Alba. The Queen of Spain, Isabella of Valois, was a great fan of painting and in 1559 Anguissola was recruited to go to Madrid as her tutor, with the rank of lady-in-waiting.
She later became official court painter to King Philip II and adapted her style to the more formal requirements of official portraits for the Spanish court. After the queen’s death, Philip helped her arrange an aristocratic marriage. He moved to Sicily, and later to Pisa and Genoa, where he continued to work as a leading portraitist.
Her most characteristic and attractive paintings are her portraits of herself and her family, which she painted before moving to the Spanish court. In particular, her depictions of children are fresh and very careful. At the Spanish court she painted formal state portraits in the prevailing official style, as one of the first and most successful of the relatively few female court painters. Later she also painted religious subjects, although many of her religious paintings have been lost. She died at the age of 93, in 1625, in Palermo.
Anguissola’s example, like her work, exerted a lasting influence on later generations of artists, and her great success opened the way for more women to take up painting seriously.
Her paintings can be seen in galleries in Boston (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), Milwaukee (Milwaukee Art Museum), Bergamo, Brescia, Budapest, Madrid (Museo del Prado), Naples and Siena, as well as the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
Her contemporary Giorgio Vasari wrote that Anguissola “has shown greater application and better grace than any other woman of our time in her efforts at drawing; thus, she has not only succeeded in drawing, coloring and painting from life, and copying excellently from others, but has herself created rare and very beautiful paintings.”
2-Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun
Élisabeth Louise Louise Vigée Le Brun (April 16, 1755 – March 30, 1842), also known as Madame Le Brun, was a French portrait painter, especially of women, of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Her artistic style is generally considered part of the Rococo aftermath with elements of an adopted Neoclassical style. His subject matter and color palette can be classified as Rococo, but his style aligns with the emergence of Neoclassicism. Vigée Le Brun made a name for himself in the society of the Ancien Régime as a portraitist of Marie Antoinette.
She enjoyed the patronage of European aristocrats, actors and writers, and was elected to the art academies of ten cities. Some famous contemporary artists, such as Joshua Reynolds, considered her one of the best portraitists of her time, comparing her to the old Dutch masters.
Vigée Le Brun produced 660 portraits and 200 landscapes. In addition to numerous works in private collections, her paintings belong to important museums, such as the Louvre in Paris, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and many other collections in Europe and the United States. His personal habitus was characterized by a great sensitivity to sound, sight and smell.
Between 1835 and 1837, when Vigée Le Brun was over 80 years old, he published his memoirs in three volumes (Souvenirs), which also contained numerous pen portraits and advice for young portraitists.
3-Rosa Bonheur
Rosa Bonheur (born Marie-Rosalie Bonheur; March 16, 1822 – May 25, 1899) was a French artist known primarily as an animal painter (animalière).
She also produced sculptures in the realist style. Her works include Ploughing in the Nivernais, first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848 and preserved in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and The Horse Fair (French: Le marché aux chevaux),exhibited at the Salon of 1853 (completed in 1855) and preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Bonheur was considered the most famous painter of the 19th century.
It has been claimed that Bonheur was openly lesbian, as she lived with her partner Nathalie Micas for over 40 years, until Micas’ death, after which she lived with American painter Anna Elizabeth Klumpke . However, others point out that nothing supports this claim.
4-Hilma Af Klint
Hilma af Klint (October 26, 1862 – October 21, 1944) was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings are considered among the earliest known abstract works in the history of Western art. A considerable part of her work predates the early purely abstract compositions of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian.
She belonged to a group called “The Five”, formed by a circle of women inspired by theosophy, who shared a belief in the importance of attempting to contact the so-called “High Masters”, often through séances.
Their paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams, were a visual representation of complex spiritual ideas.
5-Frida Kahlo
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954) was a Mexican painter known for her numerous portraits, self-portraits and works inspired by the nature and objects of Mexico. Inspired by the country’s popular culture, she employed a naive folkloric style to explore issues of identity, post-colonialism, gender, class and race in Mexican society.
Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist. She is known for painting about her experience of chronic pain.
Born to a German father and a mixed-race mother, Kahlo spent most of her childhood and adult life at La Casa Azul, her family home in Coyoacán, now accessible to the public as the Frida Kahlo Museum.
Although polio disabled her as a child, Kahlo was a promising student who was to study medicine until, at age 18, she was involved in a bus accident that caused her lifelong pain and medical problems. During her recovery, she resumed her childhood interest in art with the idea of becoming an artist.
Her interest in politics and art led her to join the Mexican Communist Party in 1927, through which she met fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera. The couple married in 1929 and spent the late 1920s and early 1930s together traveling throughout Mexico and the United States. During this time, she developed her artistic style, inspired mainly by Mexican popular culture, and painted mostly small self-portraits that mixed elements of pre-Columbian and Catholic beliefs.
Her paintings aroused the interest of surrealist artist André Breton, who organized Kahlo’s first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938; the exhibition was a success and was followed by another in Paris in 1939. Although the French exhibition was less successful, the Louvre acquired a painting by Kahlo, The Frame, making her the first Mexican artist to be included in its collection. Throughout the 1940s, Kahlo participated in exhibitions in Mexico and the United States and worked as an art teacher. She taught at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado (“La Esmeralda”) and was a founding member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana. Kahlo’s health, always fragile, began to decline in the same decade.
Her first solo exhibition in Mexico took place in 1953, shortly before her death in 1954 at the age of 47.
Kahlo’s work as an artist remained relatively unknown until the late 1970s, when it was rediscovered by art historians and political activists. By the early 1990s, she had not only become a recognized figure in art history, but was also considered an icon for Chicanos, the feminist movement and the LGBTQ+ community. Kahlo’s work has been celebrated internationally as iconic.
6-Mary Cassatt
Mary Stevenson Cassatt (May 22, 1844 – June 14, 1926) was an American painter and printmaker. She was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of the northern Pittsburgh area), but lived much of her adult life in France, where she befriended Edgar Degas and exhibited with the Impressionists.
Cassatt often created images of women’s social and private lives, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.
Gustave Geffroy described her as one of “les trois grandes dames” (the three great ladies) of Impressionism, along with Marie Bracquemond and Berthe Morisot in 1879, Diego Martelli compared her to Degas, as both sought to depict movement, light and design in the most modern sense.
7-Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia Totto O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American modernist artist. She was known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O’Keeffe has been called the “Mother of American Modernism.”
In 1905, O’Keeffe began her art training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later at the Art Students League of New York. In 1908, unable to continue studying, she worked for two years as a commercial illustrator and, between 1911 and 1918, taught in Virginia, Texas and South Carolina.
She studied art in the summers between 1912 and 1914 and was introduced to the principles and philosophy of Arthur Wesley Dow, who created works of art based on personal style, design and interpretation of subjects, rather than attempting to copy or represent them. This brought about a great change in her way of feeling and approaching art, as seen in the early stages of her watercolors from her studies at the University of Virginia and, most dramatically, in the charcoal drawings she made in 1915 that led her to total abstraction. Alfred Stieglitz, art dealer and photographer, organized an exhibition of her work in 1917 and for the next two years she taught and continued her studies at Teachers College, Columbia University.
In 1918 he moved to New York at Stieglitz’s request and began working in earnest as an artist. The two formed a professional and personal relationship that led to their marriage in 1924. O’Keeffe created many forms of abstract art, including close-ups of flowers, such as the Red Canna paintings, which many considered to depict vulvas, although O’Keeffe consistently denied that intention. The imputation of the depiction of female sexuality was also fueled by the explicit and sensual photographs of O’Keeffe that Stieglitz had taken and exhibited.
O’Keeffe and Stieglitz lived together in New York until 1929, when O’Keeffe began spending part of the year in the Southwest, which served as inspiration for her New Mexico landscape paintings and images of animal skulls, such as Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue and Ram’s Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills. After Stieglitz’s death, he lived in New Mexico at Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiú until the last years of his life, when he lived in Santa Fe.
In 2014, O’Keeffe’s 1932 painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for $44,405,000, more than triple the previous world record at auction for any female artist after her death, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum was established in Santa Fe.
8-HelenFrankethaler
Helen Frankenthaler (December 12, 1928 – December 27, 2011) was an American abstract expressionist painter. She contributed decisively to the history of postwar American painting.
She exhibited her work for more than six decades (from the early 1950s until 2011), spanning several generations of abstract painters while producing new, vital and ever-changing works.Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s.
She was included in the Post-Painting Expressionist exhibition of 1964. In 1964 she was included in the Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg, which introduced a new generation of abstract painting known as color field.
Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by the paintings of Greenberg, Hans Hofmann and Jackson Pollock.
Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and has been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001 he received the National Medal of Arts.
Frankenthaler had a home and studio in Darien, Connecticut.
9-Leonora Carrington
Mary Leonora Carrington (April 6, 1917 – May 25, 2011) was a British-born artist, surrealist painter and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants of the Surrealist movement of the 1930s.
Carrington was also a founding member of the women’s liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s.
10-Louis Bourgeois
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (December 25, 1911 – May 31, 2010) was a French-American artist. Although best known for her large-scale sculptures and installations, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker.
Throughout her long career she explored a variety of themes, including domesticity and family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious, related to events from her childhood, which she considered a therapeutic process.
Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with any particular art movement.
