Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (in That Order)

by Bridget Quinn

Sisters with sister messages, in complementary mediums. Ding.

Bell’s portrait of Woolf reveals the explosive impact on her art of Britain’s first Post-Impressionist exhibition, organized two years before by her lover, Roger Fry, with the help of her husband, Clive Bell (hold on to your hat, that brain-twister and more to come).

She depicts her sister, a person as close to her as anyone in the world, without a face. Instead, Bell captures something essential in her, a pose or way of being in the world as distinctive as her facial features. Virginia Woolf was noted among friends and family for the rapid mobility of her facial expressions—impossible to capture in paint or by camera—and also her violent dislike of posing for portraits of any kind. Bell understood her, body and soul. She ignored mere features, capturing her sister’s essence instead.

Bell was stolid, self-contained, an almost totemic figure of self-possession, who, while socially unconventional, was, according to biographer Frances Spalding, “voraciously maternal.” Virginia, on the other hand, was brilliant but brittle, childless, and emotionally fragile. One lived a long life, the other cut hers short. One is little known, the other revered.

A multiplicity of love was helped along by husband Clive Bell, who insisted on an open marriage. To his credit, this openness was not for himself alone and extended to his wife, who soon took up with England’s preeminent art historian, Roger Fry. Unlike Clive, her lover was devastated when after a few years she fell for painter Duncan Grant, then lived with him in marriagelike coupledom for some forty years. Together they had a child, Angelica, who was raised as a Bell. Vanessa and Clive never divorced and remained congenial friends. Meanwhile, Vanessa quietly shared her love of Grant with a series of his gay lovers (including writer Bunny Garnett, who many years later—yikes—married Angelica).

IN THE WINTER OF 1931, a thirty-year-old painter named Alice Neel was strapped with restraints to a thin mattress in Philadelphia’s orthopedic hospital. Institutionalized by her parents, Neel was raving, incontinent, and suicidal. She would become, arguably, the greatest American portraitist of the twentieth century, but was now forbidden by doctors to draw or make art of any kind.

Art, the medical establishment believed, was too unsettling for a lovely young blonde like Alice Neel. She was instructed to sew instead.

While her father complained about the coming gas bill, Neel was bundled back to the suicide ward.

That Krasner was not conventionally attractive is often remarked on. Her biographer, Levin, who knew Krasner, writes, “I never considered Lee ugly, as several of her contemporaries and some writers have emphasized since her death.” But Levin does go on at length about Krasner’s great figure, even quoting a fellow female student at the Academy describing “the extremely ugly, elegantly stylized Lee Krasner. She had a huge nose, pendulous lips, bleached hair in a long, slick bob, and a dazzlingly beautiful, luminously white body.” Ever notice how no one ever talks about how Picasso wasn’t good-looking? He wasn’t. And he was short (5 ft 4 in/162 cm). Why does this never enter into accounts of his life and work? Because it doesn’t matter. Right? And never, that I can recall, has anyone begun a discussion of Jackson Pollock’s work with a phrase such as, “The bald but still virile painter . . .”

Ab Ex canvases were gestural and sprawling—slashes or spills of paint all over the canvas—and tended to the large (read: heroic). For the Abstract Expressionist, the canvas was a rectangle of cultivated battle, no less than the boxing ring or wrestling mat. It tended to attract men. Or actually, no. It tended to recognize men, those brawling, “heroic” action figures.

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”

The memory of it simply ends with its acquisition.

Bourgeois knew many Surrealist artists, but refused the roles they proffered, which was as either model or mistress.

Bourgeois, grinning and pleased with herself, has Fillette tucked casually under one arm, her right hand cupped beneath the glans penis as if it were the muzzle of a small dog—a wiener dog?—tucked under the arm of her fur coat.

Bourgeois easily explained Maman’s appeal: “The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. . . . Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.” Spiders are like mothers, at least Bourgeois’s mother. They are also like artists, weaving, creating, repairing. In that way, Bourgeois is a kind of Maman, too, a benevolent mother for us all.

At Santa Anita, the remainder of Asawa’s family inhabited the racetrack’s former horse stalls. “We were given two stalls,” Asawa said. “My brothers lived in one and we lived in the other. They gave us an army blanket, a pillow, and a cot. We made our own mattresses out of straw.”

Except us!

the famed Art Institute of Chicago was too expensive.

(Decades later, the school tried giving her an honorary doctorate, but Asawa insisted on the BA she’d earned instead.)

“I am a very successful artist and she wasn’t. Maybe that got to her, and in that case, maybe I did kill her.”

A celebrated pioneer of Minimalist sculpture, Andre and his brilliant career were affected not at all.

Where is Ana Mendieta? ¿Dónde estás Ana Mendieta?

I had to go looking for her.

Operation Pedro Pan saw fourteen thousand children airlifted from Cuba to the United States under the aegis of the Catholic Church.

The isolation and abuse they experienced as teenagers made a rebel of Mendieta, one fiercely proud of her identity as a Cuban woman.

Earth Art tended toward the massive and the masculine, requiring big machines and accompanying egos. Works such as Michael Heizer’s Double Negative and Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field epitomize the muscular size and scope of the style. If there were an ancient prototype for the new art, it would be Stonehenge way back in the Neolithic, impressive and lasting, at least in part because it’s just so damned big. The Neolithic inspiration for Mendieta runs more to the plastered skulls of Jericho and myriad Great Goddess images found all over the world.

Often I’ll be surprised at even what I could think, self-righteous goody-two-shoes that I am. —KARA WALKER Mommy makes mean art. —HER DAUGHTER

Commissioned by Creative Time, an organization dedicated to ambitious public art projects, A Subtlety was anything but. Except, actually, it was. It turns out “subtleties” were once elaborate edible sugar sculptures made to adorn the tables of the über-rich. Who knew?

In this piece and many others, Walker is the opposite of the Internet scold. She’s saying—in effect—this life, our history, our lust and livelihoods and loves, are deeply complicated. Also, they are fucked up.

A reconception of van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters hung on one of Rosenblum’s walls.

Walker’s art isn’t like that. It’s far more complicated, implicating, scary, and confusing. And it’s brave as hell. When the attacks on her work began, Walker was pregnant and, soon after, the mother of a newborn daughter. It was undoubtedly a psychic and spiritual one-two punch, but nothing has stopped Walker from continuing to make hella difficult art.

“I don’t think that my work is actually effectively dealing with history,” she’s said. “I think of my work as subsumed by history or consumed by history.” Or, to quote the epic title from one of her large drawings (that itself quotes, and alters, Martin Luther King), The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos.