Who is O'Keeffe, Kusama, Gentileschi, Savage, Bourgeois and Cassatt?
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American artist. She was known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O'Keeffe has been recognized as the "Mother of American modernism".
O'Keeffe was a legend beginning in the 1920s, known as much for her independent spirit and female role model as for her dramatic and innovative works of art. Nancy and Jules Heller said, "The most remarkable thing about O'Keefe was the audacity and uniqueness of her early work." At that time, even in Europe, there were few artists exploring abstraction. Even though her works may show elements of different modernist movements, such as Surrealism and Precisionism, her work is uniquely her own style. She received unprecedented acceptance as a woman artist from the fine art world due to her powerful graphic images and within a decade of moving to New York City, she was the highest-paid American woman artist. She was known for a distinctive style in all aspects of her life. O'Keeffe was also known for her relationship with Stieglitz, in which she provided some insight in her autobiography. The Georgia O'Keeffe museum says that she was one of the first American artists to practice pure abstraction.
Yayoi KusamaYayoi Kusama (草間 彌生, Kusama Yayoi, born 22 March 1929) is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, but is also active in painting, performance, film, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan.
Kusama was raised in Matsumoto, and trained at the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts in a traditional Japanese painting style called nihonga. Kusama was inspired, however, by American Abstract impressionism. She moved to New York City in 1958 and was a part of the New York avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s, especially in the pop art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, she came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which naked participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots. Since the 1970s, Kusama has continued to create art, most notably installations in various museums around the world.Kusama has been open about her mental health. She says that art has become her way to express her mental disease.
Artemisia GentileschiArtemisia Lomi or Artemisia Gentileschi Italian: [July 8, 1593 – c. 1656) was an Italian Baroque painter, now considered one of the most accomplished seventeenth-century artists, initially working in the style of Caravaggio. In an era when women had few opportunities to pursue artistic training or work as professional artists, Artemisia was the first woman to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence and had an international clientele. Many of Artemisia's paintings feature women from myths, allegories, and the Bible, including victims, suicides, and warriors. Artemisia was known for being able to depict the female figure with great naturalism and for her skill in handling color to express dimension and drama.
The story of her rape by Agostino Tassi when she was a young woman, and her participation in the trial of her rapist long overshadowed her achievements as an artist. For many years, Artemisia was regarded as a curiosity, but her life and art have been reexamined by scholars in the 20th and 21st centuries, and she is now regarded as one of the most progressive and expressive painters of her generation.
Augusta Savage
Augusta Savage, original name Augusta Christine Fells, (born February 29, 1892, Green Cove Springs, Florida, U.S.—died March 26, 1962, New York), American sculptor and educator who battled racism to secure a place for African American women in the art world. Savage grew up in Green Cove Springs, a brick-making town in Florida. "It had all of this natural red clay, and so Savage would seek out those red clay pits as a child," explains Ikemoto. But before long, "she stopped making mud pies and started making things." Savage's father — a fundamentalist minister — disapproved. He viewed his daughter's little clay figures as graven images and punished her for them. Savage later recalled her father beating her several times a week; "He nearly whipped all the art out of me," she said. But a teacher spotted the girl's talent and encouraged her. Eventually, with $4.60 cents in her pocket, she moved to Harlem, cleaned houses to pay her rent, and studied at The Cooper Union School of Art. At 30, she got a scholarship to the Fontainebleau School of the Arts in Paris. But when the American selection committee found out she was black, they rescinded the offer, fearing objections from Southern white women. The reasoning was the white women "would feel uncomfortable sharing accommodations on the ship, sharing a studio, sharing living spaces," Ikemoto explains. "And the way that these committee members expressed that decision and the justification for it — they were concerned about Savage. It would be uncomfortable for her. "Savage got to Paris anyway. She spent three years there — studying, working, exhibiting, and winning awards.
Louise Bourgeois
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (French: 25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be 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 a particular artistic movement. In 2010, in the last year of her life, Bourgeois used her art to speak up for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) equality. She created the piece I Do, depicting two flowers growing from one stem, to benefit the nonprofit organization Freedom to Marry. Bourgeois has said "Everyone should have the right to marry. To make a commitment to love someone forever is a beautiful thing." Bourgeois had a history of activism on behalf of LGBT equality, having created artwork for the AIDS activist organization ACT UP in 1993.
Mary Stevenson Cassatt (May 22, 1844 – June 14, 1926) was an American painter and printmaker She was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh's North Side), but lived much of her adult life in France where she befriended Edgar Degas and exhibited with the Impressionists. Cassatt often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children. Though her family objected to her becoming a professional artist, Cassatt began studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia at the early age of 15. Part of her parents' concern may have been Cassatt's exposure to feminist ideas and the bohemian behavior of some of the male students. As such, Cassatt and her network of friends were lifelong advocates of equal rights for the sexes. Although about 20% of the students were female, most viewed art as a socially valuable skill; few of them were determined, as Cassatt was, to make art their career. She continued her studies from 1861 through 1865, the duration of the American Civil War. Impatient with the slow pace of instruction and the patronizing attitude of the male students and teachers, she decided to study the old masters on her own. She later said: "There was no teaching" at the Academy. Female students could not use live models, until somewhat later, and the principal training was primarily drawing from casts. Although Cassatt did not explicitly make political statements about women's rights in her work, her artistic portrayal of women was consistently done with dignity and the suggestion of a deeper, meaningful inner life. Cassatt objected to being stereotyped as a "woman artist", she supported women's suffrage, and in 1915 showed eighteen works in an exhibition supporting the movement organised by Louisine Havemeyer, a committed and active feminist.
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