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

by Bridget Quinn

In the words of feminist writer Germaine Greer in her pioneering study of women painters, The Obstacle Race, “At no time did anyone throw his cap in the air and rejoice that another painter, capable of equaling Hals at his best, had been discovered.”

Raised mostly in Montana, with some years in California beach towns, I’d had contact with fine art, but 99 percent of it was slides or printed reproductions. I told myself this was fine: reproductions were tidy, and slides tiny reliquaries, uncorrupted and jewel-like. In many ways, ideal. I was wrong. What I discovered as a grad student in New York was the necessary and exhausting emotion of confronting art itself. The messy, sexy, physically unnerving shock of the real. That paintings can seduce you, sicken you, haunt you.

If that sounds like nonsense, maybe Hofmann’s words are clearer: “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”