Five artists

Was it six months ago that I saw this challenge on Twitter?

Maybe so; I just clipped it and dumped it, because I was in the middle of the work day and couldn’t go fishing for examples. But it was very easy for me to come up with five women artists.

The first one that came to mind was Artemisia Gentileschi, 1593-1643. In an age where women painters were rarer than hens’ teeth, Gentileschi kicked ass. It didn’t come without cost—at age 19 she was raped by one of her father’s art students, and underwent a seven-month trial during which her rapist her not only accused of having been a slut before he had her, but also sniffed that she was without talent.

Take a look at the power of Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes” and see if you think she’s lacking in talent.

P.S. He was eventually convicted, but served less than a year. Some things are eternal.

My second thought was Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), one of the most powerful figures in 20^th Century American art. O’Keeffe’s journey from commercial illustrator to creator of modernist dreamscapes of New York City and New Mexico was an extraordinary transformation. Many of her paintings have elements of female sexuality—they have to make a lot of men as nervous as Gentileschi’s Judith.

Back in the last century I bought two posters of O’Keeffe studies—one a red poppy and the other this:

I took the poppy into work to hang in my office.

My third artist is Judy Chicago (1939- ), whose “The Dinner Party” was electrifying back in the day of the second wave of feminism. Chicago’s art—which encompasses painting, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, fireworks and more—continually explores her relationship to herself, to society and to the universe.

“The Dinner Party” is an installation of 39 (13 times three) dinner place settings at a triangular table, with each setting—linen, dish, glass, utensils—unique to the woman sitting there. The table stands over a floor inscribed with the names of 999 other women. The dinner guests include saints, goddesses, queens, warriors, writers and artists. O’Keeffe is there, along with Gentileschi, Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Saint Bridget and Christine de Pisan. Chicago enlisted many women to help in its creation—you might say, a coven of women. I saw it in Los Angeles; it’s permanently installed in the Brooklyn Museum

Chicago’s next effort was called “The Birth Project”, and it explored women’s journeys through motherhood. The one after that was “The Holocaust Project”.

Lee Miller (1907-1977) and Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) were artists of the camera, who turned their lenses on (among other things) the Second World War.

Bourke-White cut her teeth on architectural and industrial photography where she experimented with the available technologies to capture steel smelters at night. She was one of Henry Luce’s first pho-jos, joining Fortune in 1929.

While Bourke-White was exposing plates in steel mills, Miller was in France, exploring the world of surrealism (one of my favorite movements) with her lover, Man Ray. The architecture she recorded was fashion, as she worked for French Vogue and other publications.

During the war, both Miller and Bourke-White became accredited war correspondents. Bourke-White happened to be in Moscow during the first days of the Nazi invasion; forced to go to her hotel’s bomb shelter in the basement, she set up her cameras in her room to capture spectacular shots of the bombings. Miller spent most of the war in London.

With the Normandy landings, both Miller and Bourke-White moved back to the Continent. As it happens, they were both in Leipzig when it was discovered that the Bürgermeister, his wife and his daughter had committed suicide in emulation of their Führer. Their approaches to documenting the scene were quite different.

Miller got up close and level with the dead:

Bourke-White took a more clinical—architectural, if you will—view:

If you saw the 1982 biopic Gandhi, Bourke-White was played by Candice Bergen.)

I’ll end with Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), an artist of extraordinary fire, whose personal physical (her body was shattered in a traffic accident; she spent months in a body cast and lived in pain for the rest of her life) and mental (her pelvis was crushed in the accident, leaving her unable to carry a fetus) pain drove the passion in her paintings. Amongst other things, she—like Miller—was a surrealist.

She painted herself again and again, exploring her relationship with her womanhood. This is perhaps one of the most famous.

Those are my fivesix; I could easily come up with more. What are yours?