Against Themselves? Women Artists in the Origins of Abstract Art

Abstract

This article is about women artists who created abstract art in the early decades of the twentieth century. Within the broad context of exclusion of women from the history of art, and particularly from modern art, its case has some specific features relating to the nature of the theory that underpinned the origins of abstraction, and the artistic practice that it supported. This theory was based on a dualistic thinking in which the feminine represented the 'other' to purify and remove, in association with the material, the sensual, the body and finally the decorative. The abstract artists met the contradiction of working in a language that was based on the rejection of the feminine, which culminated in great difficulties to do his work, often retreating to the field of applied arts. Feminist historiography of art, meanwhile, has not paid specific attention to these contributions.