20 Famous Women Artists who were Better Than Men

A photo of Frida Kahlo by Guillermo Kahlo – Wikimedia commons

20 Famous Black Women Artists who were Better Than Men

Painting is a medium of expression. It has undergone many changes and influences from time immemorial due to the ever-changing needs and aspirations of human life. Artists however are the main characters in this field.

What a man can do is a woman can also fulfil. This is why I think that today’s world has empowered a woman as much as a man is empowered. In painting, also women have showcased their capabilities since the start of the history of painting. In the article are the 20 famous women artists who were better than men.

1. Frida Kahlo

A photo of Frida Kahlo by Guillermo Kahlo – Wikimedia commons

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was a Mexican painter known for her many self-portraits and works inspired by the nature and artefacts of Mexico. She was always inspired by the country’s popular culture. Hence, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society.

Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist. She is known for painting about her experience with chronic pain.

2. Georgia O’Keeffe

A photo Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz – Wikimedia commons

Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was an American modernist artist. She was known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O’Keeffe has been called the “Mother of American modernism”.

3. Mary Cassatt

A photo of Mary Cassatt by an Unknown author – Wikimedia commons

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, but lived much of her adult life in France, where she befriended Edgar Degas and exhibited with the Impressionists.

Cassatt often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children. She was described by Gustave Geffroy as one of “Les Trois grandes dames” meaning the three great ladies of Impressionism alongside Marie Bracquemond and Berthe Morisot.

4. Marie Bracquemond

Marie Bracquemond was the wife of noted printmaker Félix Bracquemond, who helped popularize Japanese art in France. Marie was a French Impressionist artist. She was one of four notable women in the Impressionist movement, along with Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and Eva Gonzales.

She never underwent formal art training, but she received limited instruction from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and advice from Paul Gauguin which contributed to her stylistic approach.

5. Berthe Morisot

Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot was a French painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. In 1864, Morisot exhibited for the first time in the highly esteemed Salon de Paris.

Her work was selected for exhibition in six subsequent Salons until, in 1874 when she joined the “rejected” Impressionists in the first of their exhibitions, which included Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley.

She was described by art critic Gustave Geffroy in 1894 as one of “Les Trois grandes dames” which means the three great ladies of Impressionism alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt.

6. Eva Gonzalès

Eva Gonzalès was a French Impressionist painter. She was one of the four most notable female Impressionists in the nineteenth century, along with Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and Marie Bracquemond.

Gonzales’ style aligns very closely with that of Manet’s Spanish period. However, slight changes were made through the years as her forms of art consisted of discipline with a sober palette. Gonzalès’ work was celebrated by Salon reviewers for the inherent intuition with which she approached art, as well as her technical skill.

7. Yayoi Kusama

A photo of Yayoi Kusama by Garry Knight – Wikimedia commons

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation but is also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts.

Her work is based on conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan.

8. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, also known as Madame Le Brun, was a French portrait painter, especially of women, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Her artistic style is generally considered part of the aftermath of Rococo with elements of an adopted Neoclassical style.

9. Artemisia Gentileschi

Artemisia Lomi or Artemisia Gentileschi was an Italian Baroque painter. Gentileschi is considered among the most accomplished seventeenth-century artists, initially working in the style of Caravaggio. She was producing professional work by the age of 15.

10. Louise Bourgeois

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes throughout her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious.

Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.

11. Tamara de Lempicka

Tamara Łempicka better known as Tamara de Lempicka was a Polish painter who spent her working life in France and the United States. She is best known for her polished Art Deco portraits of aristocrats and the wealthy, and for her highly stylized paintings of nudes. She is the painter of the famous portrait Andromeda.

She was one of the best-known painters of the Art Deco style, a group which included Jean Dupas, Diego Rivera, Josep Maria Sert, Reginald Marsh, and Rockwell Kent, but unlike these artists, who often painted large murals with crowds of subjects, she focused almost exclusively on portraits.

12. Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades, she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work.

13. Rosa Bonheur

A picture of Rosa Bonheur by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri – Wikimedia commons

Rosa Bonheur was a French artist known best as a painter of animals. She also made sculptures in a realist style. Her paintings include Ploughing in the Nivernais first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848, and now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and The Horse Fair which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Bonheur was widely considered to be the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.

14. Sofonisba Anguissola

Sofonisba Anguissola was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Cremona to a relatively poor noble family. She received a well-rounded education that included the fine arts, and her apprenticeship with local painters set a precedent for women to be accepted as students of art.

As a young woman, Anguissola travelled to Rome where she was introduced to Michelangelo, who immediately recognized her talent, and to Milan, where she painted the Duke of Alba. The Spanish queen, Elizabeth of Valois, was a keen amateur painter and in 1559 Anguissola was recruited to go to Madrid as her tutor, with the rank of lady-in-waiting.

She later became an official court painter to the king, Philip II, and adapted her style to the more formal requirements of official portraits for the Spanish court. After the queen’s death, Philip helped arrange an aristocratic marriage for her. She moved to Sicily, and later Pisa and Genoa, where she continued to practice as a leading portrait painter.

15. Cindy Sherman

Cynthia Morris Sherman is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.

Her breakthrough work is often considered to be the collected Untitled Film Stills, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of herself evoking typical female roles in performance media. In the 1980s, she used colour film and large prints and focused more on costume, lighting and facial expression.

16. June Leaf

June Leaf is an American artist known for her abstract allegorical paintings and drawings. She also works in modernist kinetic sculpture. Her work is included in many permanent art collections including, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Minneapolis Institute of Art.

17. Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas’s collage work is inspired by popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada and the Harlem Renaissance.

18. Kara Walker

Kara Elizabeth Walker is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, printmaker, installation artist, filmmaker, and professor who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work.

She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1997, at the age of 28, becoming one of the youngest-ever recipients of the award. Walker is regarded as among the most prominent and acclaimed Black American artists working today.

19. Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold is an American painter, writer, mixed media sculptor, and performance artist, best known for her narrative quilts. Faith Ringgold’s artistic practice is extremely varied from painting to quilts, from sculptures and performance art to children’s books. In 1973, she quit teaching public school to devote herself to creating art full-time.

20. Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas is a South African artist and painter currently based in the Netherlands. Dumas’ work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Dordrechts Museum. Her work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.