Are you able to name three painters beyond Frida Kahlo? (Part II)

After a first part in which we talk about Anguissola, Morisot and Krasner, we return to the fray with three other artists whose names you will have to learn forever.

Imagine that you are walking down the street and suddenly they stop you from a TV contest and they tell you that you win one hundred euros for each painter's name that you know how to say. Or a thousand euros, much better. And they say: “Time!”. And of course, apart from Frida Kahlo, Sofonisba Anguissola, Berthe Morisot and Lee Krasner, who we talked about last time and who you should know by now, you can't say any more. It would be horrible. You would lose a lot of money. And you'd be ridiculous, you don't know what's worse anymore.

This is not at all based on a recurring fantasy of the person who subscribes to this, but if it did happen (although there are few possibilities, at least there are), we wouldn't forgive ourselves if you didn't know the history of more female painters. So we continue this cycle with another three new artist names that you better remember (in case you get stopped on the street and it helps you earn money).

Clara Peeters

Very little is known for sure about the life of one of the greatest painters in the history of the Netherlands. Precursor of still lifes, there are doubts about where she was born and when, but it is suspected that it was between 1580 and 1595 and, her death, after 1621 -some scholars point to around 1659-. Because Peeters' biography is the biography of his paintings (there are only 39 works in the world with his signature or with sufficient evidence to attribute them to him).

UX quarterly sales are at an all-time low productize, nor price point not the long pole in my tent Of Flemish origin, it is almost certain that, if he was not born, at least he did live in Antwerp, since six of the supports were from there that he used for his paintings, the brand of the knives that he immortalized in his paintings (at that time, each diner brought their own knives, which it is understood that they then washed in turns) and thus appears in a 1635 document that talks about one of his works of 1608.

It is highly probable that he commonly dealt with art dealers as his works appeared in Spain, France, Germany, or England in later centuries. Having been denied the study of anatomy, she became a still life teacher, mixing ceramics and cutlery with fish, birds, vegetables and flowers.

She was a pioneer of the hidden self-portrait, immortalizing herself in miniature in the paintings she painted in the reflection of glasses and pots. In 2016, she was the first woman to whom the Prado Museum dedicated an exhibition, with her being the protagonist.

Eva Gonzales

She had a short life (1849 – 1883), but in her 34 years of life, this Parisian descendant of Spanish entered Impressionism through the front door. The daughter of a bourgeois family (her father, a novelist; her mother, a composer), she received an exquisite education surrounded by the crème de la crème of the bohemian jet set.

She had a short life (1849 – 1883), but in her 34 years of life, this Parisian descendant of Spanish entered Impressionism through the front door. The daughter of a bourgeois family (her father, a novelist; her mother, a composer), she received an exquisite education surrounded by the crème de la crème of the bohemian jet set.

She was, as can be seen, greatly influenced by Edgar Degas, but she moved away from the official salons as did her teacher Manet, who died just five days before her. Gonzalès had married the engraver Henri Guérard in 1879 and with him she had a daughter, Julie, although the delivery was terribly complicated and she died of an embolism caused by giving birth.

She was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery, and there she remains, waiting for history to put her where she deserves.

Elaine Dekooning

Let's go with Elaine Marie Fried, born in New York's Brooklyn on March 12, 1918. A radical portrait painter with thick and aggressive graffiti (“When I paint a portrait I don't think of anything but colors and shapes. I paint emotionally and the image is always born of that emotion”, he settled), Elaine learned drawing at the age of five and at school she was already selling the prints she made of her classmates.

He went through several schools, where he was forging a style of serious and firm postulates. He said: “For me, a painting is above all a verb, not a noun. An event first and, only secondarily, an image”. Or: “When I paint a portrait, I paint the person. I never paint people smiling because smiles are a response to others. A portrait must be a response to the sitter's own loneliness”. She met her husband, the well-known Willem de Kooning, in a Manhattan cafeteria when she was 20 and he was 34. Their relationship was unequal, with Willem, a star of expressionism, criticizing and sometimes destroying his wife's works. They get married in 1943, share a workshop and attic, but alcoholism is too much. The solution: an open relationship. And it was so open that they stopped living together in 1957 but they love each other so much that they never divorced. She would take care of him starting in 1976, when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, although she would die earlier in 1989, a victim of lung cancer for so many years as a smoker.

Although de facto she was, she was never outshone by her husband. “I don't paint in Willem's shadow, I paint under his light,” he argued, and yet he changed his signature to his initials (E d K) to be recognizable. He painted based on brushstrokes, after a hard stage in which he had made his best portraits, he stopped working because he was finalizing several works on JFK when he was assassinated. A famous university professor and writer, being the first North American artist to assume the role of art critic, in 1983 she was able to visit the caves of the Pyrenees, obsessed as she was with Altamira and Lascaux (France).

For her, rock art was the origin of abstract expressionism. She took out a series of paintings, the Cave Walls, based on the silhouettes of bison, bulls, horses... Her reputation came late, but now her last name is not automatically associated with her husband.