Schlagwort-Archive: Literature

TIPP! Literature

‘Her time has come’: did Mondrian owe his success to a cross-dressing lesbian artist who lived in a Cornish cove?

The article “‘Her time has come’: did Mondrian owe his success to a cross-dressing lesbian artist who lived in a Cornish cove?” published by Joanna Moorhead on January, 12th in The Guardian highlights the British artist Marlow Moss and her long-overlooked contributions to abstract modernism. Once overshadowed by contemporaries such as Piet Mondrian, Moss is now recognized as a pioneering figure whose work influenced Mondrian’s use of parallel lines in the 1930s.

Born Marjorie Jewel Moss in London in 1889, she studied art before moving to Lamorna Cove in Cornwall, where she adopted a short hairstyle and a gender-neutral name. Despite repeated attempts to engage with prominent artists like Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, Moss’s work was largely ignored during her lifetime.

According to Moorhead, recent exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag and planned displays at the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin, along with record auction prices for her work, signal a growing recognition of her importance. Biographer Florette Dijkstra attributes this revival to the contemporary art world’s increased focus on inclusivity and diversity, allowing previously marginalized women and queer artists to receive overdue attention.

Read Joanna Moorhead’s full article in The Guardian for a detailed account of Marlow Moss’s remarkable life and legacy.

TIPP! Literature

Demand for Women Photographers Is Rising. Are Prices?

Demand for women photographers is rising, as collectors and institutions increasingly seek historically overlooked talent. At the 28th edition of Paris Photo, held from November 13–16, women’s representation nearly doubled—from 20 % in 2018 to 39 % in 2025—thanks in part to initiatives like the Elles program, which highlights marginalized women artists.

In her article published on November 18th on Artnet, journalist Jo Lawson-Tancred examines this growing recognition, noting strong institutional interest and renewed market attention for women photographers, while emphasizing that their works still command significantly lower prices than those of their male counterparts despite this momentum.

While efforts like Elles have made meaningful strides in correcting historical neglect, they cannot fully compensate for decades of unequal institutional support, leaving the price gap between historical men and women photographers difficult to close. However, the outlook appears more promising for younger generations: in the contemporary market, gender is increasingly less of a determining factor, with collectors focused more on the work itself.

For a deeper look at these shifting dynamics and the artists driving them, read Jo Lawson-Tancred’s full article on Artnet.

TIPP! Literature

At the Getty Research Institute, the Guerrilla Girls Mark 40 Years of Calling Out the Art World

The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles is presenting its largest retrospective to date on the Guerrilla Girls, the anonymous collective known for addressing sexism and bias in the art world. The exhibition, “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl,” on view from November 18, 2025 to April 26, 2026, offers an overview of the group’s four decades of activity. As reported by Jordan Riefe in the Observer on December 2nd, 2025, the show draws extensively from the collective’s archives.

Posters, handwritten tallies, planning documents, and research files demonstrate how the Guerrilla Girls combined humor, advertising strategies, and detailed data collection to highlight persistent inequalities. Co-curator Kristin Juarez notes their evidence-based approach: statistics and spreadsheets became tools for publicly holding institutions accountable.

Formed in 1984 after a MoMA exhibition included only a small number of women artists, the collective adopted gorilla masks and aliases to protect their identities. Their posters, open letters, and satirical works—such as “Advantages of Being a Woman Artist”—played a central role in raising awareness and challenging established power structures in the art world.

For a deeper look at the exhibition and the Guerrilla Girls’ ongoing impact, click here to read Riefe’s full piece for free.

TIPP! Literature

Mary Boone Reveals the Part of the 1980s Art World She Misses the Most

A recent interview conducted by Sophia Cohen and published on November 13, 2025 in Cultured Mag, documents the re-entry of gallerist Mary Boone into the New York art world through her collaboration on the exhibition “Uptown/Downtown” at the Lévy Gorvy Dayan art gallery. The conversation offers an assessment of changes in the art market since Boone’s emergence in the early 1980s, with particular attention to the position of women within the sector.

In the interview, Boone describes the 1980s as a period in which professional mobility was comparatively accessible. She notes that despite lacking inherited networks or financial resources, it was possible for her to establish a commercial gallery and maintain it over four decades. According to Boone, this period was characterized by a level of openness that facilitated the advancement of women who entered the market independently.

Boone also comments on persistent structural expectations placed on women working in the art economy. She identifies an ongoing bias in which women are implicitly encouraged to adopt behavioral models associated with male leadership in order to be considered successful. This, she argues, remains a significant factor shaping professional outcomes.

In discussing contemporary conditions, Boone points to accelerated market dynamics, increased competition, and a stronger emphasis on rapid visibility for emerging artists. She suggests that these conditions can be particularly challenging for younger practitioners, including women, who may not be afforded sufficient developmental time before entering market circulation. Additionally, she remarks on shifts in collector behavior, noting a tendency toward short-term speculation rather than sustained patronage.

The interview presents Boone’s observations as a contribution to ongoing analyses of gender, access, and professional structures in the contemporary art market, while positioning “Uptown/Downtown” as a case study for examining historical precedents and current developments.

For further details on Boone’s observations and the full context of her return, read Sophia Cohen’s complete interview here for free.

TIPP! Literature

Overlooked female modernist artist Marthe Donas dazzles in Belgium

A new exhibition at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp brings attention to Belgian modernist Marthe Donas, an artist whose contributions to early 20th-century abstraction were long overshadowed by her male contemporaries. Titled “Donas, Archipenko & La Section d’Or: Enchanting Modernism“, the exhibition runs from October 4th 2025 to January 11th 2026 and presents 55 works that trace Donas’s artistic evolution and situate her within the wider European avant-garde.

Working under the gender-neutral pseudonym “Tour Donas” Marthe Donas achieved early recognition in the years following the First World War. Critics at the time praised the “charm” and “kind of gentle timidity that seems to reveal a feminine sensitivity” of her paintings, unaware that the artist was a woman navigating the male-dominated circles of Cubism and abstraction.

Donas’s biography reveals both persistence and disruption. After early studies cut short by family disapproval, she resumed her artistic training following a serious accident and the upheavals of World War I. Her encounters with Archipenko in Nice in 1917 marked a turning point; their professional and personal relationship led to a period of intense creativity and mutual influence. Curator Adriaan Gonnissen and art Co-Curator Peter Pauwels emphasize Donas’s independent contributions during this period, arguing that “she wasn’t ‘a young pupil’ when she met Archipenko, but a 32-year-old artist in her own right”.

Despite early acclaim, Donas withdrew from public artistic life by the late 1920s after becoming a mother unexpectedly at the age of 45. Only recently has her work been reexamined within the broader narrative of modernism. The exhibition forms part of a wider curatorial effort to recover the histories of overlooked women artists.

Learn more about Marthe Donas’s remarkable life in Jennifer Rankin’s full article for The Guardian here.