{"id":23195,"date":"2025-07-20T06:21:17","date_gmt":"2025-07-20T06:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/23195\/"},"modified":"2025-07-20T06:21:17","modified_gmt":"2025-07-20T06:21:17","slug":"cindy-sherman-barbara-kruger-and-more-the-women-artists-who-were-way-ahead-of-their-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/23195\/","title":{"rendered":"Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and more: The women artists who were way ahead of their time"},"content":{"rendered":"

CNN
\n \u00a0\u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n Visitors to European galleries with an interest in pioneering women artists will have plenty of choice this summer, with a series of new exhibitions featuring some of the biggest names in 20th century art.\n <\/p>\n

\n Fantastical sculptures and dreamlike drawings by the late French artist Louise Bourgeois, famed for her towering spiders, are on display<\/a> at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Elsewhere in Spain, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is hosting a solo exhibition<\/a> of American collagist and conceptual artist Barbara Kruger. And fellow American artist Cindy Sherman, known for her chameleonic self-portraiture, is the focus of a solo show<\/a> at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, on the picturesque Balearic Islands.\n <\/p>\n

\"Louise<\/p>\n

\n Each of these artists \u2014 whether through sculpture, photography, video, painting or language \u2014 has challenged conventional portrayals of women\u2019s bodies, emotions and experiences. And they\u2019ve managed to sustain a legacy of radical, often political art, over the course of decades. (Almost all of these current exhibitions include new or recent bodies of work.) That their art remains in focus is both a notable feat and a sign of the times.\n <\/p>\n

\n Asked what might be the reason behind such enduring interest, Gabriella Nugent, a London-based art historian and curator specializing in global modern and contemporary art, wrote over email: \u201cThe 1970s witnessed the emergence of second-wave feminism and a critique of the structures of patriarchy that determined women\u2019s public and private lives.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"Bourgeois<\/p>\n

\n During this transformative period, feminist art historians such as Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris helped to, as Nugent said, \u201crehabilitate the work of women artists and expose the terms of their exclusion\u201d through groundbreaking texts and exhibitions. She explained that the likes of Kruger and Sherman \u201ccame of age against this backdrop and engaged with the debates of the time in their artwork.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Bourgeois (who will also receive a major retrospective at PoMo in Trondheim, Norway, from February 2026) found a wider audience around the same time as this younger generation of artists, despite having practized art since the 1930s. \u201cIn the 1970s the women\u2019s art movement in New York took her (Bourgeois) up as a key precursor to feminist art,\u201d said Jo Applin, who helped curate both the drawing display<\/a> and sculptural show both taking place at the Courtauld Gallery this summer.\n <\/p>\n

\n The 1970s were a generative decade for pioneering art in other ways. It was a \u201cwatershed moment in terms of arts\u2019 relationship to mass media,\u201d explained Tanya Barson, curatorial senior director at Hauser & Wirth, who added that this transformation laid the foundation for artists like Sherman. \u201cShe became part of a group of artists called the \u2018Pictures Generation\u2019 who made work that examined this relationship. Her work is made for an audience who have grown up not just with film and advertising but with television as part of their reality. Looking back, it was the first generation for which this was the case,\u201d Barson told CNN.\n <\/p>\n

\"Fellow<\/p>\n

\n In many ways, Sherman was an artist ahead of her time. \u201cHer use of photography to record these identities is something that prefigures the use of social media today,\u201d Barson said of her performances and manipulation of personas. \u201cShe was really in advance of a transformation in society and our relationship to images, to media more widely, and our use of them,\u201d added Barson.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI think Sherman\u2019s work expresses something fundamental about how we live today and how we relate to images. In many ways, we live through images now. We also are absolutely involved in constructing our identities for an ever present but invisible and anonymous audience,\u201d Barson said. While Sherman constructed some of these personas 50 years ago, Barson believes they are perennially familiar. \u201cWe know these subjects, we have met them or seen them on TV, or on Instagram or Tik Tok,\u201d she said.\n <\/p>\n

\"While<\/p>\n

\"\u201cWe<\/p>\n

\n Kruger, another key figure of the Pictures Generation, began borrowing advertising and graphic design techniques to explore power in the context of consumerist and patriarchal structures. The artist continues to interrogate the interplay between image and text in culture today \u2013\u2013 illustrating the persistent dominance of advertising, as well as the peculiarities of newer phenomena, such as memes.\n <\/p>\n

\n The feminist movement that coincided with the emergence of these artists addressed issues around the emancipation of women, particularly reproductive rights and sexuality. Such issues have come back under the spotlight amid the rollback of legal rights regarding women\u2019s bodily autonomy in some Western nations.\n <\/p>\n

\"Kruger's<\/p>\n

\n \u201cMany of the debates that charged their work in the 1970s are still ongoing today, from abortion in the United States to child care in the United Kingdom,\u201d explained Nugent. The slogan \u201cYour body is a battleground\u201d<\/a>, used by Kruger in her famous poster for the 1989 Women\u2019s March in Washington, D.C., resurfaced last year in another of her pieces displayed on the side of a truck in Miami, FL<\/a>., as part of a travelling project calling for reproductive and healthcare access for all.\n <\/p>\n

\n Nugent said that, although \u201cwomen artists all over the world have long addressed the gender-defined differences that they had to navigate,\u201d the symbolic impact of US President Donald Trump\u2019s reelection<\/a> and rise of self-proclaimed misogynist<\/a> influencer Andrew Tate may partly explain why the work of these artists resonates today.\n <\/p>\n

\"\u201cWomen\u2019s<\/p>\n

\n Newer audiences may find comfort in engaging with artists who have lived and worked through earlier eras of political struggle. At the same time, the potency of their art has enshrined many of these figures as perennially relevant, even beyond immediate political lines. For instance, Bourgeois\u2019 deeply personal works \u201cspeak to universal themes of fear, anger, desire, anxiety that we can all identify with,\u201d said Applin. It could be why her work, like that of Sherman, Kruger, and countless other female artists who made their names in the 20th century, continues to be relevant.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CNN \u00a0\u2014\u00a0 Visitors to European galleries with an interest in pioneering women artists will have plenty of choice…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23196,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":["post-23195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}