Power and influence of women’s art
HISTORICALLY, women artists have not been given the recognition and standing of their male counterparts.
During the Renaissance period, a number of female artists began to be recognised, but not without resistance. Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614) is sometimes regarded as the first female career artist, with her family relying on her commissions for income, and her husband both serving as her agent, and raising her 11 children.
During the 19th century women artists began to specialise in portraiture, and during the later period, Impressionism.
In the early 20th century women came to be extremely prominent in the Newlyn Art School, a colony of artists based in the Newlyn and St Ives areas of Cornwall.
These artists were drawn by the fantastic light of the peninsula, and the subjects of fishermen, harbourside, village and seascapes of Cornwall.
Of the later period, artist Joan Gilchrist, whose work Sancreed recently sold for £450, garnered a tremendous following for her naïve depictions of seascapes and rural scenes, being sometimes regarded as the Cornish LS Lowry.
Over the course of the 20th century, women began to infiltrate and shape many expanding fields including abstract art, Realism, Surrealism and Modernism.
Female photographers also rose to greater prominence, dealing with subjects from race and culture, fashion and rock and roll to feminism.
Among contemporary female artists, diverse genres, including women’s environmental art, continue to challenge both the production of art, and the way we engage with it.
In 1992, sculptor Rachel Whitehead became the first woman to win the Turner Prize; her works include House, a concrete cast of the entire inside of a Victorian house, and the Judenplatz Holocaust memorial in Vienna, resembling the shelves of a library with the pages turned outwards.
Groundbreaking contemporary artist Bridget Riley is one of the pioneers of Op Art, a style using geometric patterns that produce a disorienting effect on the eye, and investigate our interactions with light and movement.
Her compelling abstract works explore the nature of perception, and she is renowned as one of the most distinguished artists working today.
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