Modern · Sweden
Hilma af Klint
1862–1944 · Abstraction, years before the men who claimed it
AbstractionSpiritualismDiagrammatic
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Name a painter you already know. We'll hand you the women who worked the same problem, and tell you exactly why the match holds.
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Picasso, Monet, Rothko, Caravaggio. The canon is the doorway, not the destination.
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The canonJackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock
1912–1956 · Abstract Expressionism
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Lee Krasner
1908–1984 · Abstract Expressionism
Featured swap
Instead of Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner
Krasner worked all-over gesture from the early 1940s onward, in tightly built rhythms she kept revising across five decades.
Abstract ExpressionismGesture
Artist of the week
Paula Modersohn-Becker
1876–1907 · Early Expressionism · Germany
In seven working years Modersohn-Becker moved from Worpswede naturalism to a raw, sculptural modernism, painting nude self-portraits of startling frankness.
ExpressionismSelf-portraitsThe bodyPrimitivist form
Curated routes
Walk the collection sideways
Four rooms · 4 artists
Instead of Picasso, start here
Some of Cubism's most rigorous conclusions were drawn in Moscow and Paris by women who are rarely hung beside him. This route moves from fractured plane to pure colour, and ends with the geometry that walked off the canvas and into a factory.
Early abstraction · 5 artists
Abstraction's other beginnings
This list opens in a Stockholm studio in 1906, and follows the line through Munich, Moscow and postwar New York. Five painters who built non-objective painting and were filed under 'also present'.
Looking back · 4 artists
The nude, painted from the other side
What changes when the person who was looked at picks up the brush? Four painters who worked as models, mothers or patients before they worked as authors of the body, and painted it without flattery.
Newly catalogued
Four to know this month
Modern · Germany
Paula Modersohn-Becker
1876–1907 · Painter of the pregnant self-portrait
ExpressionismSelf-portraitsThe body
19th century · France
Rosa Bonheur
1822–1899 · Monumental realist of animals and labour
RealismAnimalsMonumental scale
Modern · India / Hungary
Amrita Sher-Gil
1913–1941 · Post-Impressionist form turned toward Indian village life
ModernismPost-ImpressionismVillage life
Why this exists
The canon isn't a list of the best painters. It's a list of the painters who were collected, written about, and hung, a record of access as much as of talent.
We're not asking anyone to give up Caravaggio. We're pointing out that Artemisia Gentileschi worked the same light, and that you were never offered the choice.
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