Leonora Carrington, Artist (April 6, 1917-May 25, 2011)

Leonora Carrington OBE was an English-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City, and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. Leonora Carrington was also a founding member of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Mexico during the 1970s.

Financial Times 2017:  Carrington is as famous for her life as for her art.  The story of the nicely born English girl, child of a wealthy industrialist, who fled her respectable roots to hang out in New York and Paris with Surrealist writers and artists (her relationship with the older Max Ernst began when she was just 20), has a lingering glamour.  After she settled in Mexico in 1941, her art flowered in a baffling number of directions: playwriting to sculpture, poetry to tapestry and set design-although her painting remains the best know.  Filled with the familiar dreamlike imagery of Surrealism's vocabulary, her work responded to the vibrancy and folklore of her adopted Mexico why retaining storybook delicacy. 

Germaine Krull, Photographer (Nov. 29, 1987-July 31, 1985)

Germaine Luise Krull was a photographer, political activist, and hotel owner. Her nationality has been categorized as German, French, and Dutch, but she spent years in Brazil, Republic of the Congo, Thailand, and India. Described as "an especially outspoken example" of a group of early 20th-century female photographers who "could lead lives free from convention", she is best known for photographically-illustrated books such as her 1928 portfolio Métal.

Violet Oakley, Artist and Muralist (June 10, 1874-Feb. 25, 1961)

Violet Oakley was an American artist and the first American woman to receive a public mural commission. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, she was renowned as a path-breaker in mural decoration, a field that had been exclusively practiced by men. Oakley excelled at murals and stained glass designs that addressed themes from history and literature in Renaissance-revival styles.
Oakley's student and life partner, Edith Emerson,  was instrumental in conserving one of her mural cycles now in the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia.

Cynthia Shoshana Ozick, American short story writer, novelist, and essayist (b. April 17, 1928_

Cynthia Ozick was born in New York City, the second of two children. She moved to the Bronx with her Russian-born parents, Celia and William Ozick, proprietors of the Park View Pharmacy in the Pelham Bay neighborhood. As a girl, Ozick helped to deliver prescriptions. Growing up in the Bronx, she remembers stones thrown at her and being called a Christ-killer as she ran past the two churches in her neighborhood. In school she was publicly shamed for refusing to sing Christmas carols. She attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan. She earned her B.A. from New York University and went on to study at Ohio State University, where she completed an M.A. in English literature, focusing on the novels of Henry James.

Giles Harvey in the NEw York Times Sunday magazine, states that "she has written some of the strangest, most intellectually daring and morally intelligent fiction of recent times, including The Shawl (1989) and The Puttermesser Papers (1997).  She has also written essay after essay on subjects ranging from the Book of Job and Gershom Scholem to Helen Keller and Susan Sontag.  Her newest book is Critics, Monsters, Fanatic's, and Other Literary Essays.

Harvey further states that "Certainly it Is impossible to understand Ozick's pessimism, and its reliance to our current moment, without appreciating the essential Jewishness of her critique.  To be a Jew, her work insists, is to recognize the tenuousness of cultural transmission.  All the World Wants the Jews Dead is the searing title of her 1974 essay, and the Jews . . . have not made it this far by taking continuity for granted.  The extraordinary dynamism of Ozick's thinking and writing derives from the conviction tat thinking and writing, the study of certain sacred texts, are not merely ends in themselves , but matters of survival."

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1759-1797)
Mary Godwin Shelley (1797-1851)

This mother-daughter pair, who were together only 10 days after Mary Shelley's birth, were much alike.  Both overcame enormous pressure to live by their writings and to be the equal of men.  Charlotte Gordon, the author of Romantic Outlaws, a book about the pair, emphasizes the similarities between mother and daughter and the desire they shared "To be themselves.  The hurdles, the critics, the enemies, the insults, the ostracism, the betrayals, the neglect, even the heartbreaks - none of these had stopped them.  Nothing stopped them writing."  Before Gordon's book, the two had never been brought together in a dual biography.  "They have historically been taught as separate figures, but Mary Shelley was an expert on her mother.  She read every book her mother ever wrote countless times.  She was an expert on all things Wollstonecraft." 

Both were authors of world-changing books."  Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), and Godwin wrote Frankenstein (1818).  Godwin's novel is a case in point - when I first read it six decades ago, the author was her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley.   Later, it was grudgingly acknowledged that she may have contributed; later still, when evidence showed that it might have been written by Godwin, the brilliance of the book was attributed to the guidance and editing of her husband.  But in fact, she wrote it.  Herself.  So the bias and evil done against her and her mother, and the millions of women like  them, still perpetuate after three centuries.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

I was unable to reproduce a picture of Mary Godwin Shelley.

Licia Albanese, Soprano (July 22, 1909 - Aug. 15, 2017)

Licia Albanese was an Italian-born American operatic soprano. Noted especially for her portrayals of the lyric heroines of Verdi and Puccini, Albanese was a leading artist with the Metropolitan Opera from 1940 to 1966. She also made many recordings and was chairwoman of The Licia Albanese-Puccini Foundation, which is dedicated to assisting young artists and singers.

In April, 1966, when the Metropolitan Opera moved from its storied old home in 39th Street and Broadway to it new one at Lincoln Center, Albanese sang Cio-Cio-San's aria "un Bel Di" at the farewell gala at the old Met.  At the aria's end, she knelt, kissed her hand and touched it to the stage.  After the opera house was torn down, The Times reported in 1997, Albanese cold be seen on some fine days standing amid the rubble, dressed, as if in mourning weeds, in her Butterfly kimono.  Clips of her arias are available on YouTube.

 
Maria Lassnig, Artist (Sept. 8, 1919 - May 6, 2014)

Maria Lassnig was an Austrian artist known for her painted self-portraits and her theory of "body awareness". She was the first female artist to win the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1988 and was awarded the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art in 2005. Lassnig lived and taught in Vienna from 1980 until her death.
In one self-portrait, she stares at you with an expression of scalding horror, but it's not her eyes that draw your gaze.  What demands immediate attention is the black gun pointed straight at you. There is a gun in her other hand, directed at her own brain.  Painted in her eighties, the title of the painting is "You or Me."  Her body, with the small flap of belly, the wilting breasts, the dead-chicken skin of her thighs,
               radiates self-loathing. 
           
              Lassnig studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna during the Nazi
              years, when the instruction was strictly classical and the walls were brown,
              stripped of degenerate modernists' vivid hues.  She internalized the
              brown.  She moved to America, but no one liked her art.   She returned to
              Vienna where she became the first female professor of painting in a
              German speaking country. 

              Lassnig often described her art as emerging from "body-awareness," a
              disciplined hypersensitivity to the workings of her internal organs  she    paints pain, thought, blood and breath as if they were objects she cold hold and scrutinize. 
        

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, CBE, Artist (b. June 8, 1912)
 
Barns-Graham, known as Willie, was one of the foremost British abstract artists, a member of the influential Penwith Society of Arts.  As a child she showed very early signs of creative ability. Determining while at school that she wanted to be an artist, she set her sights on Edinburgh College of Art where, after some dispute with her father, she enrolled in 1931, and after periods of illness, from which she graduated with her diploma in 1937.  According to the Financial Times critic, she produced her best work in the decade before her death, aged 91, in 2004.  "Now I am at a stage of urgency," she said in 2001.  "My theme is celebration of life, joy, the importance of color, form, space ad texture.  Brushstrokes that can be happy, risky, thin, fat, fluid and textured.  Having a positive mind and constantly being aware and hopefully being allowed to live longer to increase this celebration."

Court Ladies in the Inner Palace
(detail) c. 1465-1509 by Du Jin

Although the picture is blurry, it shows Chinese ladies playing soccer in the 15th century.  One of them has a dainty foot extended and a big round ball in the air above it.  Soccer is an English invention, but if you thought that the English male was the first person to put foot to an inflated ball, you are hundreds of years out of date.  Chinese palace ladies were already practicing their passing inside the bamboo fence. 

Chinese ladies are also ahead of the men, playing golf in a level surface of a palace garden.  On the same garden scroll they are to be seen wielding a sort of proto-putting ball into the middle of their group.  This proto-golf was called chuiwan. 

Rebecca Solnit, Author (b. June 24, 1961)

 

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including a trilogy of atlases and the books The Mother of All Questions, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper’s.

After a party at which a man insisted on telling her about one of her own books, which he had not read, Solnit wrote:  "Yes, people of both genders pop up at events and hold forth . . . but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered.  Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they are talking about."  She adds a qualifier: "Some men.'  But this essay went viral because many women - many, many women - know exactly what Solnit is talking about.

Why are women such as Solnit being embraced after years of producing outstanding work?  Perhaps it's because no one listens to them the first time they speak.
 

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Jan Dalley, Arts Editor, Financial Times

Examining the issue of why women artists in their late life are suddenly garnering world-wide recognition, she first suggests that the early period of these women's live is accounted for by their looks.  'In a world slavishly devoted to youthfulness, are middle-aged women just intrinsically boring?  Do we only get interesting again in late age, when we no longer remind people uncomfortably of their mothers?"

Or perhaps we're looking at the particular life circumstances of women born in the first part of the 20th century.  Successful creators, like successful criminals, need means, motive and opportunity. Motive is hardly a problem.  Means and opportunity?  However self-denying one is, there's a basic requirement of money and time.  Just being able to sell a work was a huge hurdle from some of these women, early on; public galleries with their male curators were often uninterested.  And time is essential - not just the freedom from one's children but sometimes form other family members.  The artist Paula Rego, now highly successful at 79, looked after her older and then much better-known artist husband, Victor Willing.  Only after his death did Rego find her real subject matter" - rage.

But there's something else too, something interior.  It's about psychological permission: about allowing yourself to strive and be successful.  For women of these generations, perhaps only the post-maternal, post-sexualized self could grasp at the freedoms all creative people need.

Celia Paul, Artist (b. Nov. 11, 1959)

Celia Paul is an Indian-born British artist. She is a British Citizen. From 1976–81 she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she met Lucian Freud who was a visiting tutor. She had a relationship with Freud between 1978 and 1988 and has a son by him, Frank Paul, who is also an artist. Celia Paul appears in several paintings by Freud, including Girl in a Striped Nightshirt.

Paul paints her family and close fiends, her Spartan studio in London's Bloomsbury, and the vista from it.  With these limited subjects, she digs deep, moves slowly, refines nuance, and takes the viewer wonderfully into her own world.  Her portraits are loosely painted in delicate white-grey-brown tonalities, and turn crucially on light effects.  Sun streaming into the studio at varying hour s and seasons marks time and its passing, while an inner glow emanates from each figure. 

 

 

Dame Laura Knight, DBE RA RWS, Painter

Knight was an English artist who worked in oils, water colours, etching, engraving and dry point. Knight was a painter in the figurative, realist tradition and who embraced English Impressionism. In her long career, Knight was among the most successful and popular painters in Britain. Her success in the male-dominated British art establishment paved the way for greater status and recognition for women artists.

Her self-portrait (1913) showing her fully clothed profile with a nude model was decried as a vulgar "artistic exercise" that should have remained in her studio.  Men's right to represent the female body had never been questioned.  Knight, however, had been banned from life classes while at Nottingham School of Art.  By the time Knight painted it she was 36, and by her own admission, "able to sell everything I touched."  In 1946 she was sent to Nuremberg to paint the war trials.   In "The Nuremberg Trial" (1946) she makes a rare break with realism to dissolve the courtroom into a derelict cityscape that represents postwar Nuremberg.  Chiefly, however, this is a masterly chronicle of  what philosopher Hannah Arendt dubbed the banality of evil.  Sandwiched between barristers and soldiers, the Nazis - including Goering, Hess and Speer - are respectable white-haired gents whose relaxed demeanor, as they whisper and take notes, suggests they have registered neither the enormity of their rimes nor the depths of their fall. 

Helen Frankenthaler, Artist (Dec. 12, 1928-December 27, 2011)

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. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as Color Field. Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by Greenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock's paintings. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Rumiko Takahashi, Japanese manga artist (b.  October 10, 1957)

With a career of several commercially successful works, beginning with Urusei Yatsura in 1978, Takahashi is one of Japan's most affluent manga artists. Her works are popular worldwide, where they have been translated into a variety of languages, with over 200 million copies in circulation. She has twice won the Shogakukan Manga Award: once in 1980 for Urusei Yatsura, and again in 2001 for Inuyasha.

Judith Kerr, Author and Illustrator of children's books (b. June 14, 1923)

Ker has created both enduring picture books such as the Mog series and The Tiger Who Came to Tea and acclaimed novels for older children such as the semi-autobiographical When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which gave a child's-eye view of the Second World War. Born in Germany, of Jewish background, she came to Britain with her family in 1933 amid the rise of the Nazis.  Her 2013 autobiography, Judith Kerr's Creatures, recounted the story of her parents' exile.  While her parents' lives were destroyed, Kerr and her brother thrived in England and never looked back. 

Her father, Alfred Kerr, was a famed theatre critic and essayist who annoyed everyone, frequently mocking the Nazis.   They fled to England following Hitler's rise to power. 

Alice Elizabeth Kober, American Classicist and Archaeologist
Dec. 23, 1906-May 16, 1950

Alice Elizabeth Kober was an American classicist best known for extensive investigations that eventually led to the decipherment of Linear B. The daughter of Hungarian immigrants, Kober was born in Yorkville, a neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side. She attended Hunter College High School, and in the summer of 1924, she placed third in a New York City scholarship contest. The $100-a-year prize helped her to attend Hunter College, where she majored in Latin, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated magna cum laude. She earned a master's degree in classics at Columbia University in 1929 and a PhD in 1932.

One of the most tantalizing mysteries of the modern age centered on a long-lost script from Aegean antiquity known as Linear B.  Inscribed on clay tablets around 1450 B.C., Linear B was unearthed in 1900 on Crete, amid the ruins of a lavish Bronze Age palace.  No one knew what language it recorded, much less what it said.  The mystery endured for more than 50 years.  In 1952 Michael Ventris, a brilliant melancholic English architect who had been obsessed with Linear B since he was a boy.  But there is a quiet backstage figure behind the towering public one.  Like Rosalind Franklin, whose work, long unacknowledged, informed the mapping of the structure of DNA, The figure behind Ventris's achievement was Alice Elizebeth Kober. 

 

Each night after her classes were taught and her papers graded, she sat at the table in the house she shared with her widowed mother and, cigarette burning beside her, sifted the strange Cretan inscriptions.  She cataloged every word and every character of Liner B on homemade index cards, cut painstakingly by hand from whatever she could find.  On her cards she noted statistics on every character of the script.  Ventris and Kober met only once, but from through her few, rigorous published articles, which together form a ho-to manual for deciphering an unknown script, she handed Ventris the key to the locked room.  After her death, he attacked the mystery with renewed vigor and brought about its solution.  It is now clear that without Dr. Kober's work, Ventris cold never have deciphered Linear B when he did, if ever.  Her archives are at the University of Texas.

 

 

Mary Ruefle, Poet (b. 1952)  "Pause"

Hot flashes are the least of menopause, Ruefle tells the young woman she imagines might be reading.  You will want to drive a knife through your heart; you will want to leave your lover, no matter how much you have loved them.  You will feel as though your life is over, because it is.  You will realize for the first time that your whole life people have looked at you because you are a woman and people look at women - but now, suddenly you are invisible.  But then something magical happens:

"You are a woman, the ten years [of menopause] have passed, you love your children, you love your lover, but there are no longer any persons on earth who can stop you from being yourself . . . You would never want to be a girl again for any reason at all, you have discovered that being invisible is the biggest secret on earth, the most wondrous gift anyone could have given you. 

Ritha Devi, Classical Indian Dancer (d. Sept. 12, 2017 age 92)

Over her father's objections, Devi began studying classical dance after graduating from Bombay university.  Married in 1940, she learned that her husband disliked dance and told her "No dance.  Nothing.  You have to become a housewife."  Instead she divorced him and began performing to support herself and her son.  It was while she was on tour that a New York University faculty member in the audience approached Devi and asked her to teach.  She remained in New York for 35 years, teaching, continuing to perform and staring a dance academy.  Later in life, Devi attributed her stamina in dancing for hours at a time to the enduring struggle she faced as a young woman in perusing her love of dance against the wishes of the men in her life.

Elisabet, female jester
By Jan Sanders van Hemessen (c. 1504-1556)

Elisabet was employed as a court fool by Anne of Hungary, wife of Ferdinand I, Archduke of Austria and later Holy Roman Emperor.  Nothing is known about her but the amount of gold on her clothing and the letter in her hand indicate that she occupied a secure position in the court and possibly could read.  Her impish expression suggests that she had a wry wit.