From Hildegard to Delaunay: 7 painters you should know

For several decades, activists have drawn attention to gender inequality in the art world, highlighting the fact that women artists represent only a fraction of all artists represented in museum and gallery collections.

Museum curators responded by mounting exhibitions focused on the contributions of women artists throughout history.

The last show titled “Maestras. Women Masters 1500-1900”, a collaboration between the Arp Museum in Germany and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, offers an overview of important women artists from the Middle Ages to modernity. The exhibition opens on Sunday and runs until June 16.

Some of these artists are still known today, while others have fallen into obscurity and been rediscovered.

Hildegard of Bingen (ca. 1098-1179)

Born into a noble German family, Hildegard of Bingen became a Benedictine abbess. She was a polymath known as a writer, healer, musical composer, theologian, mystic and visionary – and an artist who illustrated her own manuscripts. Photos of her expressed her religious views, including a self-portrait of her own spiritual awakening. She also created symbolic images of the universe and illustrated cosmic or invisible concepts.

Hildegard of Bingen used all her powers of expression to communicate her ideas at a time when women were generally not allowed to speak. Her art continues to inspire people, from those interested in Christian mysticism to feminist artists like Judy Chicago, who paid homage to the medieval abbess in her installation “The Dinner Party,” featuring place settings for famous women.

Faith of Galicia (1578-1630)

Better known simply as Galizia, the Italian artist began painting as a teenager, encouraged by her father, who painted miniatures. She became best known for her fruit still lifes, then a new genre.

But she also painted religious motifs and portraits. One of her most notable works is the depiction of Judith with the head of Holofernes, a popular biblical motif. Art historians believe that Galizia painted herself as Judith.

Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670)

Italian Baroque painter Giovanna Garzoni’s name may not be widely known now, but in her day her work was so popular that an 18th-century biographer wrote that she could get “any price she asked” for them.

One of the first women artists to practice the art of still life painting, Garzoni pursued her career with “intensity,” according to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. One of her earliest works, a calligraphy book from 1625, includes illuminated capital letters with fruits, flowers, birds, and insects. These motifs would become her specialty, painted meticulously in tempera and watercolor. Several members of the Medici family commissioned botanical and zoological works from Garzoni, and she also painted religious, mythological, and allegorical motifs.

Garzoni also painted portraits and is responsible for creating the first known European miniature portrait of a black person, the Ethiopian prince Zaga Christ, who may have commissioned the work himself.

Madalena Corvina (1607-1664)

One of Garzoni’Her contemporary was Maddalena Corvina, also an Italian portrait and still life painter whose patrons included the Medici family. She specialized in miniature portrait paintings and also made prints.

Corvina was apprenticed to her uncle, Francesco da Castello. This mid-17th century painting of hers has been identified as either a self-portrait or a portrait of her fellow contemporary painter Artemisia Gentileschi, dressed as Saint Catherine of Alexandria.

Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun (1755-1842)

Also known as Madame Le Brun, Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun was the favorite portrait artist of the French queen Marie Antoniette. She created some of the most famous portraits of the French aristocracy. This association meant that the painter had to flee the French Revolution.

During his exile, Le Brun spent time in Italy, Russia, Germany and England. He continued to work as a portraitist, receiving commissions from members of the European nobility, focusing especially on portraits of women and children.

His violation of genre norms – for example, by making welcoming gestures or slightly open mouths to his subjects – was scandalous at the time, but quickly became an established style of his own.

Maria Cassatt (1844-1926)

The only American among the Impressionists, Mary Cassatt was also one of the few women. Despite this professional honor, she was unable to enter some of the same spaces as her male colleagues, so she turned her attention to the world of women and children.

Cassatt’The unrestricted access there allowed him to portray domestic life with an intimacy and authenticity that his male colleagues did not demonstrate, without any trivialization.

He worked with painting, pastel and engraving and always wanted to try new techniques. From the late 1890s she was inspired by Japanese printmaking and it was increasingly incorporated into her work.

Sónia Delaunay (1885-1979)

Sonia Delaunay’Anna’s colorful abstract compositions were directly inspired by the traditional quilts she saw during her childhood in what is now Ukraine.

Delaunay spent most of his working life in Paris, expanding his repertoire to include textiles, fashion and set design and establishing a successful business.

Although she was often overshadowed by the work of her husband, fellow modernist painter Robert Delaunay, in 1964 she became the first living woman to have a solo retrospective at the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Edited by: Davis VanOpdorp