Crisp clean lines, explosions of primary color, and dancing curves: the women artists at Crystal Bridges found inspiration despite their circumstances. Historically and still today, women artists face gender discrimination, rejection from art spaces, and a lack of access to education, time, or materials.
Crystal Bridges is committed to collecting and displaying work by women in art, in addition to creating spaces for reflection on their countless contributions to the art world and social justice. In celebration of women’s history month, read more about our women artists in their own words.
Carmen Herrera (1915 – 2022) was a Cuban-born American abstract painter. Before leaving Cuba, she trained as an architect, and her minimalist style centered on the beauty of the simple lines and pure colors she admired. She painted briefly in Havana, Cuba, before moving to New York City and later Paris in the 1940s. Despite being an American artist, galleries in New York City excluded her art based on her gender and Cuban identity. It was not until the 2000s that she received acclaim at 93 years of age. Now, her works are collected by the largest museums in New York City and around the world.
In Cerulean, Herrera’s background in architecture shines through. She defined her clean lines with tape, peeling it away after she layered on the paint.
“I believe that I will always be in awe of the straight line. Its beauty is what keeps me painting.”
Despite facing rejection in the art world, Herrera lived frugally to continue painting until she was 101. Take a closer look at Cerulean – at the first glance, this painting looks perfectly balanced but is actually purposefully asymmetrical.
Alice Neel (1900 – 1984) worked as a figurative artist in the Spanish Harlem neighborhood of New York City, painting portraits across social classes. Neel believed all people were worthy of being painted in a portrait and invited her subjects into her home to paint them. Neel frequently painted women in emotional and authentic poses, fighting the historical objectification of nude women in portraiture.
Alice Neel painted portraits directly onto her canvases, relying on her instinct and her subject’s personality rather than a careful preliminary sketch.
“It was more than a profession. It was even a therapy, for I told it as it was.”
In her portrait, Hugh Hurd, the actor and civil rights activist sits rendered in bold lines and bolder color. Like all her portraits, Hugh Hurd shows us not only a person, but glimpses of their individual story and hardships.
Helen Frankenthaler (1928 – 2011) was a prolific Jewish American painter working in New York City alongside other abstract expressionists, most of them men. Like Jackson Pollock, she spilled paint onto her canvas, but her “soak-stain” method widened the possibilities of abstract art, creating the Color Field movement. This technique of pouring paint, which the artist had thinned with turpentine (pine-tree resin), over canvas resulted in a watercolor-like appearance, with each paint field seeping gently into its neighboring colors.
In Untitled, Helen Frankenthaler depicts the natural forms which inspired her. She wanted Untitled to appear spontaneous to a viewer, as if it was painted all at once. It took much longer to create this effect.
“It takes ten over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.”
Harriet Whitney Frishmuth (1880 – 1980) modeled sculptures at the turn of the 20th century. Born in Philadelphia, she traveled and studied sculpture under Auguste Rodin. Frishmuth’s close relationships with her female models, many of them ballet dancers, inspired the elegance and movement of her bronze sculptures. Created during the women’s rights movement, many of her works are interpreted as championing social and political freedom.
Frishmuth began planning The Bubble while watching the ballet dancer Desha Delteil perform holding a ball or balloon. As dance choreography of the time became more expressive and fluid, Frishmuth captured this movement in The Bubble.
“We started I don’t know how many times to make a quiet, still pose, and both of us got so bored that we couldn’t go on with it. So then we’d pull it down and start with something where she was standing on one leg.”
Frishmuth was a nonconformist artist who consistently portrayed women as strong and free, standing on their own.
Niki de Saint Phalle (1930 – 2003) was a self-taught French American artist whose work explored sensuality, violence, and joy. Deeply committed to social justice, De Saint Phalle’s work spans AIDS awareness, gun violence, and women’s rights. Her Nanas, French slang for girls, are a series of large sculptures that appear to be in motion through abstraction. They pirouette or somersault, their colorful bodies taking up physical and visual space. In the 1980s, De Saint Phalle turned her art to the AIDS crisis, illustrating an educational picture book for schoolchildren.
In Gwendolyn, she celebrates the female form without objectification. For De Saint Phalle, this sculpture and her other Nanas are provocative because they exhibit a woman’s body in joyful movement.
“I realized there was nothing more shocking than joy.”
Gwendolyn is a stylized woman whose protruding stomach is decorated with a sun motif. Despite the cheerful colors, the sun also resembles the rings of a bullseye target, perhaps hinting at the violence inflicted upon women’s bodies.
As March ends, continue celebrating women artists year-round by visiting Crystal Bridges! Come and see these women artists and many more starting in April, when a new exhibition will highlight women in the arts.
Interested in learning more? Discover Clementine Hunter’s memory paintings, explore how Joan Mitchell saw color, or get inspired with Mickalene Thomas’s multimedia collages.