Women Artists Paintings & Artwork

Featured Women Artists

Mary Cassatt was born in 1844 in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, and died in 1926. Against the wishes of her family, she studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1861-65 and then moved to Paris, France, in 1866 to study the old masters, and where she was to live most of her adult life. In 1872, Cassatt studied with Camille Pissarro and had her first painting exhibited in the Paris Salon. In 1874, she met Edgar Degas and began exhibiting with the Impressionists. [More...]

Georgia O'Keeffe was born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and died in 1986. She studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago for two years starting in 1905, and then studied under William Merritt Chase at the Art Student Leagues in 1907-8. She later studied at the Univerity of Virginia Summer School in 1912 and Columbia University in 1914. She taught art and other subjects in Texas until 1918, after which she moved to New York at the invitation of the photographer, Alfred Stieglitz. She and Stieglitz later married, in 1924. In New York, O'Keeffe got to know a number of artists who were in Stieglitz' circle, including Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, and the photographer Edward Steichen. In the 1920s, O'Keeffe began to paint the large scale oil paintings for which she is perhaps best known. Between 1929 and 1949, she lived in New Mexico for part of each year and in New York the rest. [More...]

Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 in the outskirts of Mexico City, Mexico, and died in 1954. Her father was of German ancestry and her mother was Mexican. She grew up during the period of the Mexican Revolution (1910 - 1917), which greatly influenced her outlook. She had polio in 1914 at age six, which left her with one leg much thinner than the other, which she disguised later in life with the aid of long skirts. In 1925 at the age 18, she was seriously injured in a trolley accident, breaking her back and many other bones, and piercing her abdomen and uturus, leaving her unable to carry children fully to term, and requiring as many as 35 surgeries over the remaining years of her life, causing her much suffering. Following the accident, she switched from studying medicine to painting. Through her art, she later met the Mexican painter and muralist Diego Rivera, who she married in 1929. Their marriage was a turbulent one, partly due to Rivera's many affairs, including one with Frida's younger sister, Cristina. She, in turn, also had affairs, both with women, which Rivera tolerated, and with men, which infuriated him. She alledgedly had affairs with Josephine Baker and Leon Trotsky, while he was living in exile in Mexico. She and Rivera were divorced in 1940, but remarried shortly after. Many of her paintings are self-portraits. [More...]