There's no surprise for anyone: History of Art is characterized by an intense majority of men. Integration of women creators into the artistic microcosm was the result of a slow, tedious and above all unjustified process: many women ventured, already at a very early age, into the domain of artistic exaltation, without being invited to do so by any man. Having only the quality of their achievements as a means of promotion, these women have often had to be obstinate to obtain the recognition they deserved.
4. Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) : An intrepid Royalist
Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Self-portrait in a Straw Hat, circa 1782.
In the 18th century, women had to redouble their efforts to be accepted in academic institutions and museums. Despite these insurmountable difficulties, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun was considered one of the greatest portrait painters of her time, even surpassing most of her male peers. This prowess was possible thanks to an incomparable technique and style, combined with a skillful sense of human relationships.
Already at a very young age, she showed a definite talent for drawing. Her father, a little-known pastellist, supported his daughter's creative ambitions, and prophesied very quickly that she would become an important artist. Unfortunately, he died when Elisabeth was only 12 years old: he died of septicemia after accidentally swallowing a fish bone (welcome to the joys of 18th century medicine).
Following these events, the artist prodigy followed the teachings of various drawing professors, until she joined Gabriel Briard's studio at the Palais du Louvre. Although the legitimacy of women in academic art wasn't yet unanimous at the time, Elisabeth found herself surprisingly well surrounded, and met many inspiring and motivating male personalities in the corridors of the queen institution of the capital.
Grail among all grails, she wishes at all costs to join the Royal Academy of Painting. Unfortunately, this one, very conservative, mechanically refuses women. Thanks to an astonishing combination of circumstances, she was finally admitted, notably thanks to the support of powerful personalities of the Royal Court, including Marie Antoinette, the Queen, who made Elisabeth her appointed portrait painter.
Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Peace Bringing Back Abundance, 1780.
Although she received an unofficial guarantee of her admission to the academy, she still decided to paint a reception painting, a kind of entrance exam usually required to enter the institution. She knows it: only very conservative male viewers, traditionalists who had previously refused her admission, would comment her artwork. Logic would therefore dictate that she should opt for a standardized composition, a pretty portrait, coupled with her impeccable technique, which would thus have every chance of convincing a recalcitrant jury. Despite common sense, and with a certain mischievousness, she decides to realize a painting of History (Peace Bringing Abundance), and allows herself to include an uncovered breast, whereas the academic nudes were expressly reserved for men. A way for her to upset the conventions with great blows of implacable technique and high-placed relations.
Throughout her life, she painted a lot, mostly portraits, and a few self-portraits. She marked the history of art again in 1786, when she made an exotic self-portrait with her daughter, Julie. In this artwork, we can see the first real smile (with visible teeth) of Western art. By showing her teeth in this way, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun attracted many critics, who accused her of outrageous seduction: it didn't take much to shock the reactionaries of the time.
Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Self-Portrait with Her Daughter, Julie, 1786.
Despite her successes and controversies, a slightly conflictual period will undermine the fulguracy of her career: it' s the Revolution in France, and Elisabeth, her habits and bourgeois company are not really well regarded by the insurgents. She had to go into exile: first to Italy, then to Austria and finally to Russia. During each of her travels, she forged ties with bourgeois imperial families, her reputation and talent serving as her European passport.
She spent her life doing what she liked: painting, taking advantage of the excesses of worldliness, and breaking the dusty conventions established by time and male ego. This is a particularly inspiring life trajectory, isn't it?
3. Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002): Refusing Traditional Schemes
Niki de Saint Phalle in her studio, 1961.
She is the most contemporary artist of this classification, essentially known for her monumental Nanas: coated, voluptuous, and dancing female sculptures. However, reducing his artistic contribution to these only sculptures would be a mistake. She has left behind her a multiform and subversive universe, composed of feminist artworks, performance paintings, and psychoanalytical films.
She was born in 1930 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, during the Great Depression. Her parents, who suffered greatly from the stock market crash of 1929, sailed between France and United States. Until she was 4 years old, she lived with her grandparents in the French countryside, then left to join her parents in New York.
When she was just 11 years old, she was raped by her father. Deeply traumatized by this event, she confessed it only in 1994, at the age of 64, in an autobiographical book entitled "My Secret". She then explained that this incestuous incident forged her desire to become an artist, considering art as a kind of reconstructive therapy: "Painting calmed the chaos that agitated my soul and provided an organic structure to my life [...]. ".
Niki de Saint Phalle, Black Standing Nana, 1995.
In 1953, after a deep depression followed by an artistic convalescence, she decided to devote herself fully to painting for exorcise her demons. Three years later, she met Jean Tinguely, a plastic artist specializing in automata and moving sculptures, who would become in turn her friend, lover, husband, mentor, colleague, and muse. Through him, she encounters and joins the Nouveaux Réalistes, an artistic movement founded in the 60s, composed of artists who are still very famous today, such as Yves Klein and Arman.
At the time, the success was not yet there. It was in 1961, when she made her first series of Shots, that she began to be internationally recognized, thanks to the scandals linked to this new way of creating, very contemporary, even too contemporary for some. This series consists of "performance painting": she first prepares large plaster panels sculpted and decorated with all kinds of objects (dolls, crucifixes, antique busts, carnival masks, small furniture...), then adds aerosol cans and balloons filled with paint. Finally, when this installation is finished, she fires a rifle at the panels, exploding the paint balloons and spray cans, which then spread the color arbitrarily over the entire initially immaculate surface.
More than just an original technique, she stages her shootings by various artifices, notably by involving her celebrity friends (including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, or Jean Tinguely), and by shooting in front of television cameras, which popularized these performances by stirring up controversy.
For Niki, this is not just an artistic experience, it's still a way for her to exorcise her demons. She then claims to shoot "society and its injustices", even going so far as to invoke those responsible for her violent resentment before pulling the trigger: "Dad, all men, children, adults, my brother, society, the church, the convent, the school, my family, my mother, myself (...). ".
By using her art as a catalyst for her deepest feelings, she then manages to transcend herself. She became involved in politics and quickly became an icon of female independence, abolition of the dictates of beauty and submission to the patriarchal model. She died in 2002 at the age of 71, having accomplished the feat of remaining honest, faithful to her ideals, while inspiring a whole generation of women in the struggle for their emancipation.
She summed up her struggle this way: "We do have Black Power, so why not Nana Power? Communism and capitalism have failed. I think the time has come for a new matriarchal society. ”
2. Frida Kahlo (1907-1954): Unclassifiable and Impassive
Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939.
Obviously, it was impossible to establish a ranking of the most audacious female artists without mentioning the illustrious Frida Kahlo. Here, we will not go back over her tragic life trajectory, but if the subject interests you, we recommend reading our Article on Tortured Artists.
After going through a painful illness, a violent accident, severe depression and surviving a toxic and inspiring relationship with artist Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo's life was not a long, quiet river. Yet, the Mexican artist managed to overcome this accumulation of misfortune to become the icon of freedom and female emancipation that we now know.
To illustrate his sharp temperament and his freedom from social and artistic conventions, we wanted to return here to his special relationship with the French and European Surrealists in general. This period of her life is one of the least known, but nevertheless very interesting.
In the 1930s, the Surrealists, and in particular the founder of the movement, André Breton, became interested in Frida's work, which they falsely considered to be a partisan of the movement. In 1938, André Breton went to Mexico to give a series of lectures on European painting. He and his wife were welcomed by the couple Kahlo-Rivera. Very quickly, Frida cooled Breton's enthusiastic fervor, not recognizing herself in the surrealist current as it was presented to her: "People took me for a surrealist. It's not fair. I've never painted dreams. What I portrayed was my reality. ".
This difference in artistic conception was the first stone in an edifice of hatred gradually built by the Mexican artist towards the egocentrism of the European surrealists.
In 1939, Frida travelled to Paris for an exhibition honoring Mexican art. She lodged in the house of André Breton and met many influential artists such as Picasso or Kandinsky. This trip didn't suit her at all: she found the capital grey, soulless and very dirty. Above all, she learns little by little to hate her surrealist contemporaries, and considers that the exhibition, for which she crossed the Atlantic, is "invaded by this band of lunatic sons of bitches that are the surrealists". Parisian worldliness is clearly not her cup of tea.
In a correspondence with one of her friends, she will even go so far as to say these words: "I'd rather sit on the floor of the market in Toluca selling tortillas than have anything to do with those artistic assholes in Paris... I've never seen either Diego or you waste their time in these stupid chats and intellectual discussions. That's why you are real men and not pathetic artists - God damn it! It was worth coming all the way here just to understand why Europe is rotting, why all these incapable people are the cause of all Hitlers and Mussolini.".
An acidic temperament for a woman who obviously had nothing to do with superficiality and very European intellectual conventions. A strong character that deserves to be highlighted.
1. Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652): Revenge in the Paintbrush
Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 1638-1639.
If there is one artist in this ranking who has particularly suffered from an environment composed of many toxic masculinities, it's Artemisia Gentileschi.
The story started off well for this young Italian woman. Aspiring to become an artist from an early age, she was encouraged by her father, Orazio Gentileschi, himself a painter and drinking buddy of the famous and no less controversial Caravaggio. Despite a very conservative and anxious academic climate for women's artistic creation, Orazio struggled to ensure that his daughter, who already demonstrated great compositional ability, could practice and gain access to institutions previously reserved to men.
Despite common sense, he recruits a dubious but very recognized landscape painter at the time, Agostino Tassi, to share his technical knowledge with his daughter. The latter is however suspected of theft, incest and even murder. This man, as charismatic as toxic, a narcissistic pervert of the Renaissance, will gradually consume the young prodigy by promising her a marriage (at that time, only a married woman could establish herself as an artist) and then by raping her. This masquerade came to an end in 1612, when Artemisia's father decided to take the case to court. His persecutor was condemned, but the young painter's reputation was forever tarnished by his allegations: for several centuries, people talked about a lecherous woman with "corrupt morals". As Simone de Beauvoir skillfully summarizes it: "No one is more arrogant towards women, more aggressive and scornful, than a man worried about his virility.".
Rid of this noxious personality, Artemisia takes advantage of it to exteriorize her hatred through the brushes. In 1615, she realized two allegories of Judith slaying Holofernes. This biblical scene had already been the subject of several scandalous representations, including one by her spiritual master, Caravaggio. Here, apart from a flawless technical realization and a breathtaking mastery of chiaroscuro, we can find a secret message, an illustrated bitterness: under the features of Holofernes' beheaded face, we recognize his former persecutor, Agostino Tassi. The luminous Artemisia therefore decides to take revenge on the man who caused her so much pain, marking forever in the history of Art the repugnant face of this despicable criminal. Apart from this displayed resentment, the artwork denotes and makes one gnash one's teeth: it depicts a seductive, dangerous, and armed woman. At the time, the church was still very rigorous: carrying a weapon was a privilege reserved for men, nobles, and heroic knights. Here a willful, venomous and powerful woman is exhibited, which had the ability to frighten men, conservatives of all kinds, including painters and contemporaries of Artemisia. She was quickly compared to Judith: both the painter and the biblical heroine became marginalized, because they broke the female stereotype in an eminently patriarchal society.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, circa 1612-1614.
After the trial, the injured artist finds a real husband, allowing her to continue doing what she loves: painting. This marriage wasn't a truly happy one, but it saved her father's honor. She becomes pregnant and raises her daughter alone for a few years, her husband being in exile, wanted by the police.
Her Caravaggesque style, still innovative at the time, ensures her an income and a modest but sufficient success to live decently. She then became the first woman to join the Academy of Drawing in Florence. The rest of her life is rather poorly documented, crucially lacking written sources, but it seems that she leads a much more peaceful life than in her early days. She was forgotten for almost 300 years, until she was rediscovered in the 20th century. She is now legitimately established as a pioneer of feminism, and her entire artwork is praised worldwide.
Obviously, this ranking is far from being exhaustive. We could also mention the impressionist Mary Cassatt, who dedicated her entire life to her art, never allowing herself to be seduced by a single man to maintain her independence in all circumstances, considering it essential in maintaining the quality of her creative process. We could also mention Catharina van Hemessen, who in 1548, not without difficulties, created the first female self-portrait in the History of Art. Or even the contemporary artist Louise Bourgeois, who exorcised her father's light-hearted morals that affected her childhood through monumental sculptures as dark as they are breathtaking. In any case, all these remarkably motivated women remind us that self-confidence is the queen in lands of social conventions and traditionalist fatalities.
Today, fortunately, these obstacles to women's artistic evolution are disappearing more and more rapidly, despite persistent under-representation in museum institutions. In contemporary creation, for example, there are almost as many men as women.
For example, at Artmajeur, we are proud to represent the work of 55% women, among the 180,000 artists present on the website. In this way, we recommend that you discover our Collection that highlighted Talented Women Artists of our platform.
There is no predestination strong enough to not be annihilated: be yourself, do as you please, and never listen to those who doubt your abilities when your intuition leads you on paths far from the conformism of your time. Lines are made to be moved, boundaries to be transgressed.
Bastien Alleaume
Content Manager - Artmajeur Online Art Gallery
Bastien Alleaume (Crapsule Project)