Women artists through history – from Anguissola to Kusama

Women artists have existed in every period, but few received the same training and recognition as men. Among the best known are Sofonisba Anguissola and Artemisia Gentileschi in the Renaissance and Baroque, Judith Leyster and Rachel Ruysch in the Netherlands, Angelica Kauffman and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun in the 18th century, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt among the Impressionists, and Hilma af Klint, Käthe Kollwitz, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama in the 20th century.

Facts

Why so few names?

In 1971 the art historian Linda Nochlin asked why there had been no great women artists, and answered that the question was wrongly framed. The cause lay not with women but with how the art world was organised. For a long time women were not allowed to attend the academies, and when they finally were, they were forbidden to draw from nude models – the foundation of the most highly regarded painting, history painting. The Academy of Arts in Stockholm admitted women students from 1864, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris only in 1897. Read more in the aesthetics chapter on the post-war era.

That is why most women who became artists worked in a family workshop, with a father or husband who also painted, and in the genres considered suitable: portraits, still lifes and flowers. Many of their works were later attributed to men. The list below follows the course of time and shows how conditions changed.

The Renaissance and Baroque

Sofonisba Anguissola of Cremona became the first woman painter known across Europe. She was summoned to the Spanish court in 1559 and painted family portraits and several self-portraits, and she lived to over ninety. Artemisia Gentileschi learned to paint with her father, a follower of Caravaggio, and in 1616 became the first woman admitted to the art academy in Florence. Her pictures of Judith beheading Holofernes are among the most violent of the Baroque, and they have often been read against the background of the rape trial she went through as a young woman.

In Haarlem Judith Leyster had her own workshop and her own pupils. After her death her paintings were attributed to Frans Hals, and she was rediscovered only in the late 19th century, when her monogram was found on a painting that had been sold as a work by Hals. Rachel Ruysch painted flower still lifes for over sixty years and was one of the best-paid painters of her day.

The 18th century: academies and courts

Angelica Kauffman was a founding member of the Royal Academy in London in 1768, and she painted history paintings, the genre otherwise closed to women. It was not until the 20th century that another woman became a full member there. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was Marie-Antoinette's portrait painter, fled the Revolution and became sought after at courts across Europe.

In Sweden Ulrica Pasch became a member of the Academy of Arts in 1773. She supported her family as a portrait painter, in the Rococo style. That women could become members but not students says a great deal about the conditions: they were let in as an exception, not as a rule.

The 19th century: out into the city and the home

Rosa Bonheur studied animals in slaughterhouses and markets and obtained police permission to wear trousers so that she could move about there. Her The Horse Fair became a worldwide sensation. Among the Impressionists there were two women from the start. Berthe Morisot exhibited at almost all of the group's exhibitions, and The Cradle of 1872 shows her sister watching over her sleeping daughter. The American Mary Cassatt was invited by Degas and painted women's lives: reading, taking tea, with children.

Morisot and Cassatt could not, like the men, sit alone in cafés and bars, so they painted what they had access to: the home, the garden and the theatre. Today that is seen as precisely their strength. Read more in the guide to Impressionism.

Modernism

Around 1900 more schools opened, and women helped to shape Modernism. In 1906 Paula Modersohn-Becker painted a self-portrait often called the first nude self-portrait by a woman artist. Käthe Kollwitz depicted poverty, war and grief in her prints and in 1919 became the first woman in the Prussian Academy of Arts. Helene Schjerfbeck in Finland painted self-portraits for over sixty years.

Hilma af Klint painted abstractly from 1906, several years before Kandinsky, in series such as The Ten Largest. She hardly ever showed them and became world-famous only in the 21st century; see the guide to abstract art. Sigrid Hjertén was one of the Swedish Expressionists; her Studio Interior of 1916 hangs in Moderna Museet. Hannah Höch made photomontages within Dada, and the Surrealist Meret Oppenheim covered a cup in fur.

From Kahlo to Kusama

Frida Kahlo was badly injured in a bus accident when young and painted herself again and again. The Two Fridas of 1939 shows her doubled, joined by a blood vessel. She is often associated with Surrealism, but she herself said that she painted her own reality; see the guide to Surrealism. Georgia O’Keeffe painted enlarged flowers and the New Mexico desert, and Barbara Hepworth renewed abstract sculpture in England.

After 1945 women became leaders in new art forms. Louise Bourgeois made the giant spider Maman, Yayoi Kusama fills rooms with dots and mirrors, as in Pumpkin on the island of Naoshima, and Marina Abramović sat for 736 hours at MoMA in The Artist Is Present. Cindy Sherman photographs herself in hundreds of roles to show how images of women are made.

Keep looking

In recent decades museums have acquired and shown more works by women, and many names have returned. In 1989 the Guerrilla Girls asked on posters in New York whether women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan, since almost all the nudes in the collection were women but almost none of the artists. The question is still a good way of looking at a museum gallery.

Among the artists in the app there are some forty women with pages of their own. The Swedish ones are presented in the guide Famous Swedish artists.

What to look for in the museum

Exercise

Which artist became the first woman in the art academy in Florence?