Women Emerging From the Shadows

Lee Krasner. Photo credit: Ernst Haas / Getty Images

It's a rare occasion when I can look at work by Picasso, Jackson Pollock, or Diego Rivera - to name a few - without thinking of the talented women that were diminished by these indulgent men. Yet as of late, more attention has been given to these incredibly skilled artists who deserve the praise they are finally receiving.

In 2019, the Brooklyn Museum of Art presented Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving exhibition. The exhibition is the largest U.S exhibition of the artist's work in ten years. The vast installation includes her clothing and other personal items, discovered in 2004 after being placed in storage after Kahlo's death in 1954. In her lifetime, Kahlo was overshadowed by her husband, Diego Rivera, yet posthumously has become an iconic figure in the art and pop-culture world.

Other women who stood beside and behind their painting partners have been less recognized than Kahlo, yet that is changing. In June of 2019, Artsy headlined an article, "Lee Krasner Is Finally Appreciated for Being More Than 'Mrs. Pollock,'" noting that Krasner's work is complex and difficult to classify. Shadowed by her husband, Krasner's genius opened up and soared after Pollock's death in 1954. Hans Hoffman is quoted as saying about Krasner's work, "this is so good you wouldn't know it was done by a woman." Critics had claimed that Krasner created her best work in the 1960s when she was no longer compared and stifled by Pollock's presence.

Francoise Gilot is the woman that comes to mind whenever I stand before a framed cubist puzzle created by the famously womanizing Picasso. In 1943, the twenty-one-year-old painter would meet and begin a ten-year-long love affair with Picasso, forty years her senior. It has been reported that Gilot influenced Picasso far more than the reverse. Yet, it would take decades for Gilot's work to receive the attention it so rightly deserved. In 2010, Gilot was made an Officer of the Legion d'Honneur, the French government's highest honor for the arts.

These are but a few examples of incredibly talented women who stood outside the spotlight placed on their partners. The book Ninth Street Women, which highlights Lee Krasner, chronicles five women "who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting - not as muses but as artists." Things are improving, yet males still dominate the percentages in museums and galleries worldwide. Despite the discouraging statistics, women continue to persevere. Through ingenuity, creativity, and sheer badassness, women artists are eroding the sexism that exists in the art world while legitimizing the female perspective.

Women artists, like all women in male-dominated industries, are shifting the numbers and changing the narrative. One day our daughters will question how our world was anything less than perfectly equal.

"Why are there no great women artists?' sounds as ignorant of human geography as the query 'Why are there no Eskimo tennis teams?" -Francine du Plessix Gray

-trw