Women Artists You Should Know: Essential Painters & Makers
Women Artists You Should Know:
Essential Painters & Makers
From Hilma af Klint's visionary abstractions predating Kandinsky to Louise Bourgeois's fearless sculptures at ninety — fifteen women whose work shaped modern and contemporary art on their own uncompromising terms.
Fifteen Artists Who Changed What Art Could Be
The history of women artists is not a history of exclusion overcome, though exclusion was constant; it is a history of formal intelligence finding its way through whatever structural obstacles the institutions placed in its path. Hilma af Klint was making abstract paintings in Stockholm in 1906 when Kandinsky and Mondrian were still painting landscapes. Georgia O'Keeffe was remaking American modernism from the New Mexico desert while the New York art world largely ignored the implications of what she was doing. Agnes Martin was producing some of the most profound meditative paintings of the twentieth century in a studio without electricity. Louise Bourgeois was making sculpture of terrifying psychological depth into her late nineties. Helen Frankenthaler invented a technique — staining diluted paint directly into unprimed canvas on the floor — that changed the course of American abstract painting, though the generation of male painters who built careers on the technique she pioneered received more institutional attention than she did for decades.
The fifteen artists gathered here represent the full range of media, movements, and historical moments through which women artists have shaped the art of the past two centuries: painting, printmaking, textiles, sculpture, abstraction, figuration, calligraphy, and pattern. Their works are available as framed prints through Zephyeer, making their formal intelligence accessible for domestic display. What they share is a commitment to their own vision that no amount of institutional indifference or structural disadvantage succeeded in deflecting — a quality that, in retrospect, defines not only these individual careers but the history of women's contribution to art at its most lasting and significant.
Forwards / Parcifal Series, Group 2, 1916
Hilma af Klint began making purely abstract paintings in Stockholm in 1906 — at least three years before Kandinsky's First Abstract Watercolour of 1910 and years before Mondrian, Malevich, or any of the men typically credited with inventing abstraction. Her large-scale series The Paintings for the Temple, comprising 193 works produced between 1906 and 1915, represents the most comprehensive body of early abstract painting by any artist of the period — yet she stipulated in her will that the works should not be exhibited until at least twenty years after her death, believing the world was not yet ready for them. She died in 1944. The works were largely unknown until a 1986 exhibition and not comprehensively shown until the Guggenheim's landmark retrospective in 2018.
The Forwards / Parcifal Series (1916) demonstrates the visual language af Klint developed through automatic drawing sessions with a group of female artists she called the Five — a method of bypassing the conscious, trained artistic intelligence in favour of what she understood as spiritual dictation. The resulting works are startlingly modern in their use of biomorphic forms, saturated colour, and spiral motifs that recur across the series with the consistency of a personal symbolic vocabulary. Whether understood as spiritual communication or as the product of an extraordinary formal intelligence working outside the accepted channels of the Western art tradition, these paintings are among the most significant and least adequately recognised bodies of work in the history of modern art.
Hilma af Klint may have invented abstract painting before Kandinsky — and stipulated her work be withheld from the public until the world was ready. The retrospective that finally came in 2018 confirmed she was right to wait: nothing prepared viewers for the scale and ambition of what she had been doing alone in Stockholm.
Calla Lily Turned Away
Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings — the series for which she is most widely known — have been persistently misread as autobiographical or psychosexual statements, an interpretation O'Keeffe consistently and emphatically rejected throughout her long life. She painted flowers large because she wanted viewers to slow down and actually look at them — to give a flower the sustained attention they gave a skyscraper, which commanded attention simply by virtue of its scale. Calla Lily Turned Away demonstrates the formal intelligence behind this ambition: the lily's white form curves and recedes in a composition of extraordinary spatial complexity achieved through the simplest possible means — a single flower, close up, filling the canvas with its form and its light.
O'Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949, following the death of Alfred Stieglitz, and the landscape of the high desert became her primary subject for the remaining four decades of her life. The abstract desert paintings — the black place series, the sky above clouds compositions, the patio door abstractions — represent a deepening of the formal concerns visible in the flower paintings, the same attention to form and light applied to the vast, empty landscape of Ghost Ranch. She worked until her eyesight failed in her eighties and continued, with assistance, into her late nineties. The Smithsonian's Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, opened in 1997, holds the most comprehensive collection of her work.
O'Keeffe remade the relationship between scale and subject in American painting — insisting that the smallest natural object, given the largest possible pictorial attention, could carry as much formal weight as any grand historical or landscape composition.
Jacob's Ladder, 1957
Helen Frankenthaler invented the soak-stain technique in 1952 — thinning oil paint with turpentine and pouring it directly onto unprimed canvas laid on the floor, allowing the colour to soak into the fabric rather than sitting on its surface — and the resulting work, Mountains and Sea, was seen by Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland the following year. Both painters developed careers from the formal possibilities Frankenthaler's technique opened, producing works that received considerable institutional attention as the Washington Color School; Frankenthaler's own contribution to the technique's invention was often treated as a starting point rather than a continuing achievement. Jacob's Ladder (1957) demonstrates her mature command of the method at the moment of its fullest development: the stained colour moves across the canvas with the freedom of a natural process — water spreading across paper — while the composition holds a spatial complexity that purely gestural painting rarely achieves.
Frankenthaler continued developing her practice across six decades, moving from oil to acrylic in the mid-1960s and producing increasingly complex large-format works that tested the full range of what the stain technique could produce. Her late works — the Arctic Thaw series, the Sesame and Plexus compositions — are among the most formally sophisticated paintings produced by any American artist of her generation, and they are only now receiving the sustained critical attention they have always deserved. The Frankenthaler Foundation, established in 2013, has worked systematically to address the historical imbalance in how her contribution to postwar American painting has been assessed.
Frankenthaler invented a painting technique that two generations of male painters built careers on — and continued developing that technique with a formal intelligence that consistently exceeded what her male contemporaries achieved with it.
Happy Holiday, 1999
Agnes Martin's life and work are inseparable from each other in a way that few artists' are. Born in Saskatchewan in 1912, she spent years of profound difficulty — including extended hospitalisations for schizophrenia and long periods of withdrawal from the art world — before settling in New Mexico in 1968 and producing, in the final three and a half decades of her working life, some of the most quietly powerful paintings of the twentieth century. Happy Holiday (1999) is from her very late period, when her grid paintings had achieved a quality of luminous simplicity that she described not as minimalism — a label she rejected — but as an expression of happiness, of innocence, of the undisturbed mind that she understood as painting's highest possible subject.
The pencil-drawn horizontal lines on pale acrylic are executed at a scale — six feet square — that creates an immersive field when viewed from the distance the painting requires. The title is not ironic: Martin meant happiness, and the painting delivers it, though the happiness in question is of a specific kind — not excitement or pleasure but the quiet contentment that arises from undistracted attention. Martin's writings, collected in Writings (1992), are among the most illuminating accounts any artist has given of their own intentions, and they make clear that her grid paintings are not exercises in formal reduction but precisely calibrated instruments for inducing a specific quality of meditative experience.
Martin produced some of the most formally radical and emotionally profound paintings of the twentieth century in a studio without electricity in the New Mexico desert — on her own terms, in her own time, without concession to the market or the institution.
Defiance, 1991
Louise Bourgeois worked for thirty years in relative obscurity — producing sculpture, drawing, and printmaking throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s while the art world's attention was directed elsewhere — before her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York established her as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. She was seventy years old. The following three decades were among the most productive of her career, during which she produced the giant spider sculptures Maman and the Cells installation series, along with an extensive body of works on paper and printmaking that explored the same themes of memory, sexuality, family trauma, and the body that had occupied her entire career. Defiance (1991) is a drypoint etching from this late period, the title itself a precise description of the quality that defined her practice: an absolute refusal to compromise what the work needed to be.
Bourgeois grew up in France, the daughter of a father who kept his English tutor as his mistress while using the young Louise as his translator — a situation of childhood psychological complexity that she processed in her art across seven decades without ever exhausting its implications. Her late interviews, collected by Donald Kuspit and others, are among the most frank and searching accounts any artist has given of the relationship between biography and formal practice. She continued working — producing fabric works, drawings, and prints with the assistance of studio helpers — until the week before her death in 2010 at the age of ninety-eight.
Bourgeois spent thirty years producing work of the highest formal ambition while the art world looked elsewhere — and then, at seventy, received a retrospective that established her as irreplaceable. The work had not changed; the world had finally caught up.
Nets 70
Yayoi Kusama arrived in New York in 1958 with a letter of introduction from Georgia O'Keeffe — who had advised her, practically if not warmly, that New York rather than Seattle was where she needed to be — and spent the following decade producing the Infinity Nets paintings, happenings, and soft sculpture installations that placed her at the centre of the New York avant-garde. Her influence on artists including Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol was substantial; her position within the canonical accounts of Pop Art and conceptual art remained marginal for decades. She returned to Japan in 1973 and voluntarily entered the psychiatric institution near her studio in Tokyo where she has lived since 1977, continuing to work there every day.
Nets 70 is from the Infinity Nets series that has occupied Kusama across her entire career — paintings in which obsessively repeated loop marks cover the entire canvas surface in a pattern that implies infinite extension. The series began as a response to the visual hallucinations Kusama has experienced since childhood and has developed, across six decades, into one of the most formally consistent and philosophically coherent bodies of work in contemporary art. Her global cultural visibility — the queues outside her Infinity Room installations at museums worldwide — is a phenomenon of the twenty-first century, but the formal intelligence behind the work predates that visibility by half a century.
Kusama developed one of contemporary art's most formally radical and culturally resonant bodies of work from inside a psychiatric institution — the compulsive repetition that the work requires being simultaneously its subject and its therapy.
Blaze 1, 1962
Bridget Riley's early black-and-white paintings — produced between 1960 and 1966 — are among the most formally rigorous works of the Op Art movement and among the most immediately powerful visual experiences available in postwar British painting. Blaze 1 (1962) presents a spiral of alternating black-and-white chevrons that generates involuntary sensations of rotation, depth, and movement in any viewer regardless of their art-historical knowledge: the perceptual effect is not an illusion or a trick but a consequence of the nervous system's response to specific pattern configurations that Riley identified through systematic formal investigation. The painting is one of the founding works of the Op Art movement that would be named and institutionally recognised two years later.
Riley studied at the Royal College of Art and spent years in intensive formal study — working through the colour theory of Seurat and the gestalt psychology of perception — before arriving at the black-and-white optical paintings in 1960. Her subsequent move to colour in 1967 opened a further dimension of her practice, the colour interactions between adjacent stripes generating optical effects as surprising and as systematically investigated as the black-and-white spiral work. She received the International Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale in 1968 — the first British painter and the first woman to do so — and has continued producing work of formal rigour and visual authority into her ninth decade.
Riley developed a systematic approach to perceptual painting that is as intellectually rigorous as any scientific investigation — the visual effects are not intuited but calculated, and the calculation produces effects that no amount of intuition alone could have achieved.
Rhythm Colour 1
Sonia Delaunay developed the visual language of Simultanism — a theory of colour relationships based on the simultaneous contrast of complementary colours generating visual energy and rhythm — alongside her husband Robert Delaunay from 1912 onward. The theoretical credit has historically been shared between them, with Robert's paintings receiving more sustained art-historical attention; Sonia's contribution — extending the theory across painting, textile design, fashion, book covers, theatrical costume, and commercial illustration — was in many respects more practically consequential, demonstrating that the formal principles of avant-garde abstraction could generate a coherent visual language across every scale and medium of application. Rhythm Colour 1 (1966) is a late painting in which the Simultaneist principles are applied to large circular forms in a palette of extraordinary richness — the colour interactions between adjacent discs generating the visual vibration that had been the theory's central proposition for more than fifty years.
Delaunay was born in Ukraine in 1885 and died in Paris in 1979 at the age of ninety-four, having worked continuously across seven decades. In 1964 she became the first living woman artist to be given a retrospective at the Louvre, an event that secured the institutional recognition that her formal contribution had long deserved. Her textiles and fashion designs of the 1920s — which brought the visual principles of Orphism to dress, fabric, and public space — were as influential in the development of modern design as her paintings were in the development of abstract art.
Delaunay extended the formal principles of avant-garde abstraction across painting, textile, fashion, and commercial design — demonstrating that the most rigorous formal ideas are not diminished by application to the everyday but are confirmed and enlarged by it.
Second Movement V, 1968
Anni Albers entered the Bauhaus in 1922 intending to study painting, but women were barred from the painting workshop and directed toward the weaving workshop instead — a restriction that Albers subsequently transformed into the most consequential body of textile art of the twentieth century. Working within the constraints imposed on her by institutional gender discrimination, she developed a practice that challenged the boundary between art and craft, between the fine arts and the applied arts, with a rigour of formal thought that exceeded what many of her male contemporaries at the Bauhaus were achieving in the media they had freely chosen. Second Movement V (1968) is a screenprint that translates the visual logic of her woven textiles into the print medium, the geometric structure of the woven thread becoming a composition of horizontal and vertical marks in a carefully calibrated colour palette.
Albers and her husband Josef Albers emigrated to the United States in 1933 following the Nazi closure of the Bauhaus, and she became the first textile artist to receive a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1949. Her book On Weaving (1965) remains the most rigorous theoretical account of textile structure as a formal language, and her book On Designing (1959) extended her thinking about the relationship between material constraint and formal creativity to the broader design culture. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation has worked to ensure that her contribution to modern art is understood on its own terms rather than as an adjunct to her husband's better-known career.
Albers transformed the restriction imposed on her — women directed to weaving, not painting — into the most rigorous and formally ambitious textile practice of the twentieth century, permanently expanding what art could be made from.
Series VII, No. 7d, 1920
Af Klint's Series VII works of 1920 represent a later phase of her abstract practice — smaller, more delicate watercolours in which the large-scale symbolism of The Paintings for the Temple gives way to a more intimate formal investigation of the biomorphic forms and colour relationships that had characterised her earlier work. No. 7d presents organic shapes in a palette of warm ochres, dusty pinks, and grey-greens that creates an atmosphere of extraordinary delicacy — the forms floating in a tonal field that has no ground in the conventional sense, the shapes existing in a space that is neither above nor behind but coextensive with the picture surface.
By 1920 af Klint had largely withdrawn from the automatic drawing sessions with the Five that had generated the large series of her middle period, working more independently and at smaller scale. Her continued productivity through the 1920s and into the 1930s demonstrates that the abstract vocabulary she had developed was not dependent on the spiritual practices that had originally generated it — it had become a formal language in its own right, capable of generating new works through its own internal logic. The Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm holds the most comprehensive collection of her work and has been central to the reassessment of her historical position that gathered pace following the 2018 Guggenheim retrospective.
Af Klint's later watercolours demonstrate that her abstract vocabulary had become genuinely independent of its spiritual origins — a formal language capable of sustaining an entire career's development on its own formal terms.
Still Life on Corner of a Mantelpiece, 1914
Vanessa Bell was the most formally adventurous painter of the Bloomsbury Group and the artist most responsible for introducing Post-Impressionist colour and formal thinking into British domestic painting in the decade before the First World War. Still Life on Corner of a Mantelpiece (1914) demonstrates the absorption of Cézanne and Matisse's lessons — simplified forms, flattened colour planes, the domestic object given the same formal weight as any heroic subject — in a composition of characteristic Bell restraint: the mantelpiece corner with its jug and ceramics rendered with an informality that feels genuinely observed rather than staged. The painting belongs to a moment when British modernism was making its most concentrated formal effort, and Bell was among its most committed practitioners.
Bell's position within the Bloomsbury Group — the sister of Virginia Woolf, the partner of the critic Roger Fry and later of the painter Duncan Grant, the co-director of the Omega Workshops — has sometimes obscured the independence and quality of her own practice. She painted consistently across five decades, maintaining the formal intelligence of her Post-Impressionist work while developing a body of portraits, landscapes, and domestic interiors that constitutes one of the most substantial and least adequately recognised contributions to British figurative painting of the twentieth century. Charleston, the Sussex farmhouse she decorated with Grant from 1916 until her death in 1961, is maintained as a museum of the domestic artistic environment she created.
Bell was the most formally committed modernist in the Bloomsbury Group — absorbing the lessons of Cézanne and Matisse with greater rigour and consistency than any of her male contemporaries in the British Post-Impressionist tradition.
Work (Abstract Expressionism)
Toko Shinoda trained as a classical calligrapher before departing from the tradition's representational purposes to apply the calligraphic brush and sumi ink to purely abstract compositions — a formal transition of considerable cultural complexity in a Japanese artistic context where calligraphy occupied a different institutional position from painting. Her arrival in New York in the late 1950s placed her in dialogue with the Abstract Expressionist painters at precisely the moment when the movement's gestural concerns and her own calligraphic practice were most productively in alignment: Kline's black-on-white gestures and her own ink marks shared a formal ambition — to make the single mark carry the maximum expressive weight — while arriving at it from entirely different cultural starting points.
Shinoda's recognition came slowly in both Japan and the West, her work occupying a position between two traditions without being fully claimed by either. The Order of the Rising Sun awarded by the Japanese government in 2001 represented the most formal institutional acknowledgement of her contribution to Japanese cultural life, but her reputation in the international contemporary art market remains less secure than the formal quality of her work warrants. Born in Manchuria in 1913 and active into her late nineties, she is one of the longest-lived and most productively sustained artists of the twentieth century, her practice demonstrating across nine decades what a single formal commitment — to the calligraphic mark and the relationship between black ink and white ground — can yield when pursued with absolute seriousness.
Shinoda created a body of work that belongs fully to two traditions — Japanese calligraphy and Western abstract painting — while being entirely reduced to neither, demonstrating that the most productive formal territory is often found at the intersection of apparently incompatible cultural logics.
Robe-Poème: Oublions les Oiseaux, 1922
Delaunay's fashion illustrations and textile designs of the early 1920s represent the most consequential application of avant-garde formal principles to everyday life achieved by any artist of the period. The Robe-Poème (poem-dress) series — in which she inscribed lines of contemporary poetry on her fabric designs, integrating visual and verbal language in a single wearable object — was exhibited at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1925 and became one of the defining design achievements of the Art Deco period. Oublions les Oiseaux (Let Us Forget the Birds), with its Simultaneist colour blocks and integrated text, demonstrates how fully the formal principles of abstract painting could be carried into the applied arts without any loss of formal rigour or chromatic intelligence.
The poem-dresses reflect a fundamental conviction in Delaunay's practice: that the boundary between fine art and applied art was a cultural construction rather than a formal necessity, and that the most advanced formal thinking of the avant-garde was available for deployment in any medium or context that required it. This conviction — which she demonstrated not only theoretically but through decades of practice across painting, textile, fashion, theatrical design, and commercial illustration — was more radical than any of her contemporaries' more narrowly defined formal propositions, and its legacy in twentieth-century design thinking is deeper and more pervasive than is generally acknowledged.
Delaunay's poem-dresses dissolved the boundary between painting and poetry, fine art and applied design — demonstrating that the highest formal ambitions of the avant-garde were fully compatible with the everyday demands of clothing, fabric, and commercial life.
Black Place I, 1944
O'Keeffe's Black Place series — paintings of a specific stretch of grey and black badlands in the Bisti wilderness of northwestern New Mexico, which she visited repeatedly on painting trips from Ghost Ranch throughout the 1940s — represents the most sustained engagement with a single landscape subject in her mature practice and the most completely abstract body of work in her career. Black Place I presents the hills' undulating forms in a palette of greys, blacks, and near-whites that is simultaneously topographically specific — anyone who has seen the Black Place will recognise it — and formally independent of any representational necessity. The forms have shed everything that is not essential to their formal relationship with each other and with the picture surface.
The Black Place series demonstrates the full extent of O'Keeffe's formal ambition — the ambition that her most persistent critics, fixed on the flower paintings and their biographical readings, consistently underestimated. The hills here are not symbols or metaphors; they are forms, and the painting's achievement is the quality of sustained, non-interpretive attention she brings to rendering those forms with the minimum of means necessary to make their formal relationships fully present. Alfred Stieglitz, who had championed O'Keeffe's early work, died in 1946, and her subsequent reputation has been disentangled only gradually from the narrative of his discovery of her — a narrative that consistently positioned her achievement as secondary to his promotion of it.
The Black Place series represents O'Keeffe's most uncompromising formal statement — landscape painting reduced to its essential forms with an austerity that has no interest in beauty for its own sake and achieves it for that very reason.
Pink Days and Blue Days, 1997
Bourgeois's late works on paper and in fabric — produced in the two decades between her 1982 MoMA retrospective and her death in 2010 — represent the most formally adventurous and emotionally direct body of work in her career. Pink Days and Blue Days (1997) is a textile work in which fabric is assembled, cut, and marked to create a composition that hovers between collage and painting, the fabric's material character — its softness, its vulnerability to cutting, its capacity to absorb colour — contributing to the meaning as fully as the visual composition. The work's title announces the emotional register directly: the alternation of moods, the instability of psychological states, the visibility of emotional experience as the primary subject of the work.
Bourgeois began working in fabric in the 1990s, incorporating old clothing and household linens from her personal archive — her own garments, her children's clothes, her husband's shirts — into compositions that draw on the domestic and personal without sentiment or nostalgia. The fabric works are among her most formally innovative and emotionally transparent, the material itself carrying a biographical charge that bronze or marble could not. At ninety-eight, in the final years of her life, she continued producing works of extraordinary formal intelligence and psychological honesty — a reminder that the career of an essential woman artist, like that of any essential artist, cannot be adequately summarised by any single decade or medium or moment of institutional recognition.
Bourgeois's late fabric works demonstrate that the most radical formal choices are often the most personal — the domestic material transformed by intelligence and intention into art of uncompromising psychological depth.
The Unfinished Project
The fifteen artists gathered here represent the full range of what women's contribution to the history of modern and contemporary art encompasses — from Hilma af Klint's visionary proto-abstraction to Louise Bourgeois's fabric works at ninety-five, from Sonia Delaunay's applied Simultanism to Agnes Martin's meditative grids, from Bridget Riley's systematic perceptual investigation to Toko Shinoda's synthesis of calligraphic and gestural traditions. What they share is not a style or a movement or a historical moment but a quality of formal commitment that no amount of institutional neglect or biographical misreading has succeeded in obscuring — a commitment visible in the work itself to anyone willing to look at it on its own terms.
The institutional reassessment of women artists' contributions to art history has accelerated dramatically in the past two decades, driven partly by the market's recognition that works by Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, and Georgia O'Keeffe are among the most valuable produced by any American artist of the twentieth century, and partly by the sustained scholarly attention that has clarified how thoroughly the standard accounts of modern art's development had misattributed, subordinated, or simply omitted women's contributions. Framed prints of all fifteen artists discussed here are available through Zephyeer, making their formal achievements accessible for domestic display — the most direct way of ensuring that daily looking, rather than institutional narrative, determines whose work continues to matter.