Revolutionary women in art history: Gentileschi - de Lempicka - Kahlo.

Everywhere In art history, we can meet beautiful and famous women. Some of them were princess, queens and noble ladies. But most of them they were just models chosen by artists for their beauty and charisma. We can easily recognize their faces and their shapes, and a lot of artists became famous for their productions of women’s portraits. Maybe they were their lovers, maybe they were just simple people in town.

Maya desnuda - Francisco Goya - 1800

But what about female artists? What do we know about women in front of the canvas? 

We already know that women used to stay hidden from the public scene until the XX century, when they finally could work and have their own autonomy. Until that moment, cultural activities were forbidden to women, and they had to fight hardly to conquer their rights and also to show their skills in art field just like men. But even if behind the scenes, there were talented woman everywhere in history. Between them, the first example of talented woman who tried to break the rules of her age was Artemisia Gentileschi.

Artemisia Gentileschi - Selfportrait as a Maryr - 1615

 Artemisia Artemisia (July 8th, 1593 – 1656) was an Italian painter that lived between the XVI and the XVII centuries, daughter of the famous artist Orazio. She became very famous between Naples and Rome for creating a very original style and she was the very first woman accepted in the Academy of Drawing Art in Florence. She was an exponent of Italian baroque, and she used to mix her personal touch with many elements of Caravaggio’s style. She could be considered one of the first feminist in art history, also because of the subjects in her artworks. She used to paint about women, in an era when female artists were absolutely not accepted in the society. Her women were strong and suffering characters from the Bible and myth, and they probably were allegories of Artemisia herself, desperate women for being stuck in that role, looking for hope and happiness. 

Judith and Holofern - 1620

But the price to pay for this brave artist was really high. When she was still a girl, Artemisia was raped by an Orazio’s assistant who compromised her reputation in the society. For this reason she was obliged to get married in repair and to move around Italy to the rest of her life. So, Artemisia Gentileschi’s art was about denouncement, full of rebel feelings and revenge willing. 

Very different from this one, is the artistic attitude of another great women of art history, Tamara De Lempicka (May 16th 1898 – March 18th 1980). 

Tamara de Lempicka

Born in Poland in a healthy family, she took her surname from her first husband Tadeusz Łempicki and she spent her life travelling all around Europe first (France, Russia, Italy, Germany, Switzerland)and then to U.S. with her second husband. Tamara was an extremely fascinating woman, admired by many important personalities al that time, like Gabriele D’Annunzio, and she became an emblem of style and womanhood. In her artworks we can easily find many selfportraits, beautiful women and also some men portraits. She uses bright colours, one closed to the other creating sparkling chromatic contrasts that make her way of painting very modern and original. Tamara de Lempicka’s production belongs to Art Decò, which was a peculiar artistic taste developed between the ’20s and the ’30s all over Europe, and that was linked to many fields, from fashion to visual art, trough design and decoration. 

Selfportrait in green Bugatti - 1932

Tamara took inspiration from many themes of Art Decò, like technologic improvement, moving female shapes, scenic costumes, the use of bright and unreal colours, mixting them with her personal style. In the ‘60s, after she moved to New York City, her style moved to abstractism and new painting experiments with no success, and Tamara decided to recede and not to show her artworks anymore. 

Another revolutionary woman, and in this case not for her fight for her rights in society, is Frida Kahlo (July 6th, 1907 – July 13th, 1954). 

Frida Kahlo

Born in a healthy family in Mexico, she had to fight all life long against her health issues, that brought her to an early death. Frida suffered for spina bifida since she was born, and at the age of 15 she faces a terrible car crashing, whose after-effects changed her life forever. She was a politic militant, a convinced socialist, and she got married to the most famous painter at that moment in Mexico, Diego Rivera. Her health conditions brought her to spend a lot of her life stuck in her bed, and in this situation, young Frida could start painting her selfportraits, helped by a mirror. In her selfportraits she used to paint herself linked to her terrible pain and suffering, emotionally and physically. She used to draw herself cut in two during the car crashing, she used to draw herself torn by sores, and her paintings were cruel as much as full of poetry, like explicit allegories of her sad condition. She was definitely out of social patterns, and she really liked to scandalize. She loved to dressed up in man suits, but she also liked dressing up in perfect Mexican style, with very colored clothes, twisted hairstyles and many jewels. All of these elements, and the pain for Diego Rivera’s cheating are so into her paintings, and they make them so peculiar. 

The broken column - 1944

So, these three women have been somehow emblems of modernity and avant-garde. They were breakable women, but they have been able to show their disappointment against male society using all of those creative ways of communication they had. In this male society, the art history’s one, there were many curious women who tried to tell about their stories using art instruments, becoming leading ladies and symbols of a clockwork femininity. Thank also to them and to their work, today we are free to express ourselves and many women work hard in art field in the last years. 

To them, to all of you, and to us too, best wishes for International Woman’s Day.