The first woman to join the French Impressionist movement was the painter Berthe Morisot, (1841-1895). The prestigious art critic Gustave Geffroy in his “History of Impressionism” showed his admiration for her work and defined her as one of the “three ladies of Impressionism”, along with Mary Cassatt and Casa Bracquemond.
Berthe Morisot, belonging to an upper class family, was able to be educated in the art world which allowed her to meet at just 20 years old Camille Corot, a great landscape painter who had her as a disciple and introduced her in artistic circles.
Later she was model and friend of Manet, besides sister-in-law, when marrying with her brother Eugène Manet. He played a prominent role in the development of Impressionism and exhibited alongside them.
At a time when women were engaged in painting mainly in an amateur way, Morisot had the obstinacy to pursue a career as a painter and succeeded. In fact he exhibited alongside Renoir, Monet, Degas, Pissarro or Sysley.
In its subject the familiar scenes abound, the majority feminine personages in gardens, interiors or daily scenes. Hence, many critics called it “female painting.” Yet his work presents great audacity, a very expressive and striking brushstroke.
“Behind Breakfast” managed to break the records of London’s Christie’s but, while colleagues such as Monet, Renoir, Degas, were considered the great Impressionists, Morisot stayed out of history so far. narrated.
CAMILLE CLAUDEL, MUSA DE 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 her powerful work.
Camille Claudel was the sister of the poet Paul Claudel, and her decision to dedicate herself to sculpture, alongside her yearnings for freedom, led to a very conservative family. Camille entered the Academy run by the sculptor Alfred Boucher and, a year later, became independent. In 1883, at the age of 19, he met Rodin, twenty years his senior. Rodin was fascinated by her spectacular talent and beauty. The prey as a student, model, and soon as a lover.
From 1886 Rodin and Camille rent and share a workshop where they work on an equal footing, but outside there Camille was the lover of the sculptor and, although the reviews of his works were good, when he always exhibited they saw the “help” of the master.
Works such as “Sakountala, Clotho”, an allegory of old age and death or “El Vals” (1895), where a pair of dancer-lovers seem to come to life, justify their obstinacy to want to be recognized.
Rodin’s genius darkens her, she feels humiliated; they increase the jealousy loving (never it will leave his wife) and artistic and, in 1898, the definitive rupture arrives. This year ends the sculptural group “The Mature Age” in bronze, a striking allegory consisting of three figures. In 1905 he made his last great sculpture “The Abandonment”, a harbinger of his own life.
She abandons herself, lives precariously and alone, paranoia appears, she believes that Rodin is stealing her ideas, that he plans to kill her. All his anger is directed at him and he manages to hammer down many of his works.
In 1913 her father, her protector, died, and that same month her mother put her in a sanatorium. The following year she moved to a mental hospital, where she lived forgotten for the last 30 years of her life, completely isolated from her family, who not only deprived her of visits, but never heard the doctors advising that given her lucidity would bring her home.
“An unjust penance,” she wrote, which lasted until his death. Her biographers say that no one visited her except her brother, on six occasions, and that when she died no one came either, so she had to be buried in a mass grave like other ‘forgotten ones’. However his work is on display at the Rodin Museum in Paris.
POPOVA, GREAT 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 main defenders of abstract art in Russia and one of the most prominent figures of the avant-garde of the early twentieth century.
During a trip to Italy he met the “Futurism” movement and his work began to reflect his influence, in combination with certain aspects taken from Cubism.
In 1915 he took part 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 he was already a member. of the Institute of Artistic Culture (INJUK), by Kandinsky.
A year later, he signed a manifesto in favor of abandoning easel painting and declared that “the organization of the elements of artistic production must return to the shaping of the material elements of life, towards industry, what we call the production », and from 1922 he devoted himself to textile and graphic design and theatrical scenography. His untimely death at the age of 35 truncated his intense career.
LOUISE BOURGEOIS, “LA DONA ARANYA”
If there was any engine in the prolific career of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) it was the anguish, pain, fear and insecurity, emotions or traumas that dragged from his childhood and then overturned in his original creation.
Born in Paris and nationalized in the United States, 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,” nearly ten feet tall.
And it is that her spiders, in homage to her mother, who was a weaver, represent this duplicity represented by nature and motherhood – this mother, being a protector and a predator at the same time – ideas that forged her artistic identity. His works refer to the human figure, expressing issues such as betrayal, loneliness, traumas of his childhood, he explained, when he discovered his father’s disloyalty to his nanny.
Bourgeois spoke out in favor of equality for lesbians, gays, LGTBI, and created the piece “I do,” in support of same-sex marriage in 2010. He died that same year, in New York at age 98. His last pieces were finished just a few weeks before his death. In 2011, one of her works titled “Spider” sold for $ 10.7 million at an auction, setting a record for being the highest price paid for a woman’s work.
Georgia O’Keeffe I ABSTRACT NATURE
Through abstractions of nature, flowers and landscapes, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), a pioneer of American contemporary art, trained at the Chicago School of Art and in New York, where she met to what would be her husband, the gallery owner and photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
He lived between Hawaii and Mexico, until it was decided by the latter where he settled until his death at the age of 98. After a long life and a great work full of color and vibrant shapes, but not known to the general public, despite receiving living recognition as a member of the American Academy of Arts, the Presidential Medal of the Freedom or the National Medal of the Arts.
SONIA DELAUNAY, PIONEER WITH HER HUSBAND OF ABSTRACT ART
Born in Ukraine and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) had a cosmopolitan upbringing. In 1905 he expanded his training in Paris where he met the artistic avant-garde and the French painter Robert Delaunay, whom he married in 1910.
From then on, the artistic exchange of the Delaunay couple, pioneers of abstract art, was intense to the point of developing Orphism or simultaneity, an artistic current that uses light and bright colors as a means of creating space and forms.
In the 1920s he had a close relationship with the Surrealists and collaborated with them in the production of visual projects.