The first woman to join the French Impressionist movement was the painter Berthe Morisot, (1841-1895). Renowned art critic Gustave Geffroy of “History of Impressionism” showed admiration for her work and described her as one of the “three ladies of Impressionism,” along with Mary Cassatt and Marie Bracquemond.
Berthe Morisot, from a high-class family, managed to be educated in the art world, which allowed her to meet Camille Corot at the age of 20, a great landscape painter who had her as a disciple and introduced her. o in artistic circles.
She later became a model and friend of Manet, as well as a sister-in-law, when she married her brother Eugène Manet. He played a prominent role in the development of Impressionism and exhibited alongside them.
At a time when women were mainly engaged in amateur painting, Morisot was determined to make a career as a painter and succeeded. In fact, he has exhibited with Renoir, Monet, Degas, Pissarro or Sysley.
Family scenes abound in her theme, mainly female characters in gardens, indoors or in everyday scenes. Therefore, many critics considered it “feminine painting”. Even so, his work presents a great audacity, a very expressive and impressive brush.
“Behind Breakfast”, he managed to break Christie’s records in London, but while colleagues such as Monet, Renoir, Degas were considered the great Impressionists, Morisot was left out of the story so far.
CAMILLE CLAUDEL, MUSE RODIN AND GREAT SCULPTOR
Although her story was a mixture of love and passion for sculpture, Camille Claudel (1864-1943) is remembered more as a muse and lover of the great Auguste Rodin than for his powerful work.
Camille Claudel was the sister of the poet Paul Claudel, and her decision to dedicate herself to sculpture, together with her desire for freedom, turned her very conservative family upside down. Camille entered the Academy under the guidance of the sculptor Alfred Boucher and, a year later, became independent. In 1883, at the age of 19, he met Rodin, twenty-four years his senior. Rodin was fascinated by her talent and spectacular beauty. He takes her as a student, a model and, soon, as a girlfriend.
Since 1886, Rodin and Camille have rented and shared a workshop in which they work equally, but outside of Camille he was the sculptor’s lover and, despite the fact that the reviews of his works were good, when he exhibited they always saw the teacher’s “help”.
Works such as “Sakountala, Clotho”, the allegory of old age and death or “El Vals” (1895), where a pair of dancers-lovers seem to come to life, justify their decision to want to be recognized.
Rodin’s genius darkens her, she feels humiliated; Love and artistic jealousy increased (he would never leave his wife) and in 1898 came the final break. This year ends the sculptural group “Mature Age” in bronze, a shocking allegory of three figures. In 1905 he made his last great sculpture “El Abandono”, a harbinger of his own life.
She abandons herself, lives precariously and alone, paranoia appears, she thinks that Rodin is stealing her ideas, that he intends to assassinate her. All his anger is directed at him and he ends up destroying many of his works with hammer blows.
In 1913 her father, her protector, died and in the same month her mother hospitalized her in a sanatorium. The following year she went to an asylum, where she lived forgotten for the last 30 years of her life, completely isolated from her family, which not only deprived her of the reception of visitors, but never listened to the doctors who advised her. he should take her home.
“An unjust penance,” she wrote, “which lasted until her death. Her biographers say that no one visited her except her brother, six times, and that when she died, no one came, so she had to be buried in a common grave, as well. other “forgotten”. However, his work is on display in the Rodin Museum in Paris.
POPOVA, SEA OF RUSSIAN CONSTRUCTIVISM
Associated with the revolutionary avant-garde and Soviet constructivism, Liubov Popova (1889 – 1924) “the artist-builder”, as her contemporaries called her, was one of the leading defenders of abstract art in Russia and one of the most prominent figures in Russia. .the avant-garde of the early twentieth century.
During a trip to Italy he encountered the “futurism” movement and his work began to reflect its influence, in combination with certain aspects taken from Cubism.
In 1915 he participated in futuristic exhibitions and, under the influence of Malevich’s supremacism, in 1918 he joined the Left Federation of the Moscow Artists’ Union and in 1920 was already a member of the Kandinsky Institute of Artistic Culture (Injuk).
A year later, he signed a manifesto for the abandonment of easel painting and stated that “the organization of the elements of artistic production must return to the shaping of the material elements of life, to industry, what we call production,” and since 1922 his dedicated to textile and graphic design and theatrical scenography. His untimely death at the age of 35 interrupted his intense career.
LOUISE BOURGEOIS, “FEMEIA SPIDER”
If there was any driving force in Louise Bourgeois’s fertile career (1911-2010), it was the anguish, pain, fear and insecurity, emotions or traumas she drew from her childhood to later turn them into her original creation.
Born in Paris and a nationalized American, she was one of the most important artists in contemporary art. She went through surrealism and abstract expressionism … to be known for her large-format spider sculptures. The largest is “Maman”, almost ten meters high.
And it is that his spiders, in homage to his mother, who was a weaver, represent that duplicity that nature and motherhood represent – that mother, being at the same time a protector and a predator -, ideas that forged her artistic identity. . His works refer to the human figure, expressing themes such as betrayal, loneliness, the traumas of his childhood, as he said, when he discovered his father’s disloyalty to the nanny.
Bourgeois spoke out in favor of equality for lesbians, gays, LGTBI and created the song “Yes” in support of gay marriage in 2010. He died the same year in New York at the age of 98. His last plays were completed just a few weeks before his death. In 2011, one of her works entitled “Spider” sold for $ 10.7 million at auction, setting the record for the highest price paid for a woman’s work.
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE AND ABSTRACT NATURE
Through abstractions of nature, flowers and landscapes, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) expressed herself as a pioneer of contemporary American art, educated at the Chicago School of Art and New York, where she met her husband, gallery owner and photographer Alfred Stieglitz. .
He lived between Hawaii and Mexico, until it was decided on the latter, where he settled until his death at the age of 98. After a long life and a great work full of vibrant colors and shapes, she is not known to the general public, despite the fact that she has received awards as a member of the American Academy of Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom or the Medal. The arts.
SONIA DELAUNAY, PIONEER WITH HER ABSTRACT ARTS HUSBAND
Born in Ukraine and raised in St. Petersburg (Russia), Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) had a cosmopolitan education. In 1905 he expanded his training in Paris, where he met the artistic avant-garde and the French painter Robert Delaunay, with whom he married in 1910.
Since then, the artistic exchange of the Delaunay couple, pioneers of abstract art, was intense until they developed Orphism or simultaneity, an artistic trend that uses bright and bright colors as a means to create space and shapes.
In the 1920s he had a close relationship with the Surrealists and collaborated with them in the production of visual projects.