Women in Art History

• Historically, art has not featured women artists as prominently as men, leading to the question of why there are no female equivalents to masters like Raphael or Picasso.

• Linda Nochlin suggested the issue relates to broader problems of equality, implying societal factors, not inherent talent, hindered women's artistic achievements.

• These social dynamics historically restricted women form gaining artistic training and hindered professional artistic pursuits.

• Women couldn't study anatomical drawing using nude models, unlike men.

• In 1772, Angelica Kauffmann, a Royal Academy vice president, was excluded from a portrait featuring academy artists with male nudes due to modesty.

• While women could pose nude, societal norms prevented them from copying nude figures in art.

• Societal norms confined women to domestic roles, which was justified intellectually, with the belief that women biologically lacked the capacity for genius

• Alfred Stieglitz defended Georgia O'Keeffe, asserting that women can create art, defying the notion that their creativity is limited to childbirth.

• Some women artists took on masculine personas, reflecting the belief that femininity conflicted with creativity.

• Claude Cahun, a photographer, embraced a masculine style, and Coco Chanel popularized masculine clothing for women.

Art periods

• Early avant-garde to the late 1960s.

• From the 1970s to 2000.

• Women entered art through marriage or relationships with male artists and were often relegated to "minor arts."

• Examples: Anni Albers (wife of Josef), Sophie Täuber (wife of Hans Arp), and Sonia Delaunay.

• Sonia Delaunay's fabric designs gained popularity, leading her husband Robert to lament her success; Sonia felt unfairly categorized in decorative arts instead of as a painter.

• Kay Sage gained recognition as an artist after becoming Yves Tanguy's widow

• Lee Krasner spent much of her life supporting Jackson Pollock and faced difficulty gaining recognition after his death.

• Despite recent critical success, Frida Kahlo didn't receive public commissions like her husband, Diego Rivera.

• Georgia O'Keeffe's success was greatly influenced by her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

• Stieglitz closed his gallery with an exhibition of his wife's work; the couple had a legendary relationship centered around love, eroticism, and intellectual connection.

• Stieglitz photographed O'Keeffe extensively.

• Georgia O'Keeffe became like Greta Garbo in the art world, choosing a reclusive life in New Mexico and becoming a symbol of female emancipation.

• Critics sexualized O'Keeffe's art, particularly flower paintings, but a retrospective in the 1970s recognized her as a Color Field and Photorealism pioneer.

• Russia briefly had gender parity in the arts before Stalin rose to power.

• Olga Rozanova, Alexandra Exter, Natalja Goncharova, Ljubov Popova, and Varvara Stepanova were all influential artists

• Gabriele Münter studied with and was Kandinsky's companion and was involved with the Blaue Reiter group, her painting "The Boat" includes Kandinsky as leader, portraying gender roles, and demonstrates Fauvist and Bavarian folk art influences.

• Paula Modersohn-Becker anticipated German Expressionism.

• Her reassessment began in 1976, influenced by feminism.

• Despite verbal support, avant-garde figures generally held conventional views on women.

• Futurists idealized masculinity and had few female members, the main Cubist artist was Marie Laurencin, known for her relationship with Guillaume Apollinaire more than her art.

• Hannah Höch significantly contributed to photomontage in the Dada circle.

• Surrealists, despite admiring femininity, did not include many women in their group.

• Léonor Fini sublimated homosexuality through surrealism.

• Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning achieved recognition as Max Ernst's wives, Meret Oppenheim succeeded after being Man Ray's model but faced marginalization from the group.

• The Bauhaus school had a secondary role for women.

• They worked in weaving, furniture, and costume design but didn't hold painting professorships dominated by Kandinsky, Klee, and Itten.

• Female creativity was considered secondary to home maintenance and deemed applied art.

• Women accepted this role, finding artistic credibility difficult in the early 20th century.

• Similar to the Expressionist movement, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler were notable artists; Frankenthaler's "Mountains and Sea" (1952) influenced Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis.

• Clement Greenberg supported her for her flat, abstract-style work.

Art in the 1970s

• Women artists formed feminist groups, publishing journals and organizing alternative exhibitions to challenge museum bias.

• The "Art and Technology" exhibition (1970) lacked female artists, leading the Los Angeles County Museum to later host the "Women Artists: 1550-1950" exhibition.

• Women pursued art without male support, Agnes Martin was a pioneer of analytic/minimal painting, while Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, Lucinda Childs, and Carolyn Carlson contributed dance performance.

• Lynda Benglis influenced antiform sculpture.

• Hanne Darboven focused on mathematical and sequential memory mechanisms in conceptual art.

• Mary Kelly's "Post Partum Document" (1973) used a Rosetta Stone-like diary exploring motherhood.

• Alyce Aycock, Mary Miss, Rebecca Horn, Carla Accardi, Marisa Merz, and Carol Rama were also notable artists.

• Ketty La Rocca, Yoko Ono, Valie Export, Annette Messager, Miriam Shapiro, and Nancy Spero blurred lines between public acts and private emotions.

• These artist's works often involved the female body as a sacrificial offering reflective of how society effects the body.

• Ana Mendieta simulated a rape-murder in her apartment to highlight violence against women.

• Lygia Clark rejected being an artist, shifting from kinetic art toys to group psychoanalysis sessions, a common theme was engaging herself and the audience in an action with the dualism of the victim and executioner being blurred.

• Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party" (1979) celebrated women's historical contributions, with a triangular table representing monumental proportions in design.

• Thirty-nine plates celebrated women and the marble floor had 999 names. The art world integrated women, prompting talk of a "female fashion" in the nineties.

Representing Oneself

• Female artistry in the 20th century, with representing oneself becoming a primary issue.

• Male artists had traditionally depicted women in stereotypical types, such as mothers, muses, or temptresses; this trend continued amongst avant-garde artists.

• The time was marked by an uptick in misogynistic representations corresponding with the unearthing of the unconscious and erotic imaginary.

• The increased occurrence of depictions portrayed women marked by misogyny, from the aggressive women of Picasso to the Poupée of Hans Bellmer.

• Performance art as a means for communication in women.

• Marina Abramović set up torture instruments in Naples (1971) and allowed the public to do whatever they wanted with her.

• Masochistic attitudes were common in Gina Pane's and Ana Mendieta's art and the stereotype of female representation.

• The focus on achieving conventional physical beauty has been a common form of artistic expression in modern female artistry, with anorexia and bulimia resulting in expressions of self-harm for American artist Janine Antoni.

• Elke Krystufek exhibits nude images in various states

• There are pieces that reference male pornography as Americana Sue Williams works and the struggle in maintaining these female artists.

• A reference to artistic influence, Louise Bourgeois is mentioned.

Female Sculpture

• The increased acceptance of female sculpture marked the entry of women into the field of art.

• Historians have only recently started taking female experiences seriously.

• Rosalind Krauss does not acknowledge female sculptors and does not mention it in the collected essays.

• Only from the nineties, and with specific emphasis, specific acknowledgment was reexamined.

• Camille Claudel was the first to rebel against preventing women from sculpting by being first the student, then the lover, of Auguste Rodin.

• Her work takes place from 1888 to 1913, before maturity

• Sakountala or l'Abbandono, an embrace representing Nirvana, with stylistic thefts from Rodin, perhaps as she assisted in creating them.

• Bodily autonomy is explored through small sculptures, with a wave acting as a uterus and dangerous portent to dancing female figures.

• There is also a commentary that mortality factors into much sculpture.

• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein involved giving life to a dead body.

• There's relation to wax anatomical models was created by Annamaria Manzolini.

• Mental health issues and repression influence female creation, and body imagery is linked to suppression with the image of the rigid female body and metaphor.

• Psychological issues stemming from female repression led to exploration of the human condition and hysterics.

• Performance and sculpture have been inspired Claudel's work is noted for specific themes: corporeality, habitational spaces, and memory.

• Louise Nevelson was inspired by collective history/scale themes and she learned the touch with themes linked to collective history scale from Diego Rivera

• She later composed from New York, and later became a decisive voice for the world of New York.

• It later became the decision to do strictly sculpture and she transitioned to work in sculpture solo and and perfected the vision for her painting alongside Hans Hofmann. She created wooden scales and archives and emotive experiences with her new found freedom from the constraints the prior artists were under. The composition was of a uniform pattern and a memory that was to cover full experience of the different points there. The experiences were of beauty, love, and unity of life. The French-American Niki de Saint Phalle was affiliated with the group of Nouveaux Réalistes; She gave human form again to her works of art.

• Germaine Richier a French sculptures, a sculpture used heavily animal form as well as plant-based material in to a work of art. Barbara Hepworth was keen and sculpture "to take away", through abstract art techniques, and close in visual likeness as artist Henry Moore.

• Barbara Hepworth wanted more recognition.

• The use of carved out locations.

• Katarzyna Kozro's art in the Russian period made and ran from Europe to Poland after graduating from the Russian Avante Garde.

• Second phase was with depictions of female woman bodies in different contorted expressions, along the utopian period.

• In Poland postwar female sculpture there were many protagonists from Niki de Saint Phalle, She was known from the maternal image.

• Eva Hesse had an organic style, she drew inspiration from the nature of the body to draw her conclusions from them, she incorporated elements around the human body.

• With artistic inspiration also, inspiration had been drawn, or in the manner the internal landscape created.

• Sculpting in new ways.

• It helps provide new direction.

• Manna Hatom in her art focused dangerous and harmful actions that may take place in women.

• Rachel Whiteread was an artist who would use her own art against her in very self.

• The artist Magdalena in Poland took the process of of obtaining form for women very seriously.

• Yayoi Kusama from childhood began struggling.

• Louise Bourgeois found popularity and originality in her work.

• Her exhibitions at the Tate Modern helped elevate here level of understanding of art and female sculptures.

• Louise drew from themes that covered the following traits: Sex, Sensuality, and how this plays into how a woman views her identity.