Ten women whose painting, sculpture, and photography did not join the canon so much as rebuild it.

For most of its history the story of modern art was told as a line of men handing genius to one another, from Impressionism to Cubism to the New York School. That story was never true. Women were in the studios and the darkrooms all along, and a striking number of them did not merely keep pace but arrived first: the earliest purely abstract paintings, the hole cut clean through a sculpture, the self-portrait understood as social criticism. The 20th century did not so much admit women to art as slowly, grudgingly notice that they had been redrawing its map from the start.

This list gathers ten of them, across painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, and across Sweden, Germany, Mexico, Britain, Japan, and the United States. We chose influence over fame: each changed what her medium could do, not merely how well she did it. A few names here are household ones, and a few should be genuine discoveries, which is rather the point, since some of the most important were kept out of view for decades. They appear in no particular order.

1. Hilma af Klint

1862-1944

The history books long credited Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich with inventing abstract painting around 1912. This Swedish painter got there first. Beginning in 1906 she made large, radiant canvases of spirals, coils, and floating geometry, a body of work she called The Paintings for the Temple, years before any of the men are said to have crossed into pure abstraction. Convinced the world was not ready, she stipulated that the work stay unseen until decades after her death, so it stayed rolled away until the late 20th century. Start with The Ten Largest of 1907, a suite of vast, joyous panels tracing a human life from childhood to old age.

2. Käthe Kollwitz

1867-1945

Kollwitz proved that a print could carry the moral weight of a history painting. Working in etching, lithography, and woodcut, she trained her eye on the poor, the grieving, and the exploited, giving early modern Germany its social conscience in black and white. Her Weavers cycle of the 1890s won such acclaim that a jury proposed her for a gold medal, only for Kaiser Wilhelm II to veto the honor for a woman with such subjects; in 1919 she became the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts. Having lost a son in the First World War, she spent years carving the shattering memorial known as The Grieving Parents. Start with the Weavers prints, where compassion and rage are held in perfect balance.

3. Georgia O’Keeffe

Mother of American modernism

O’Keeffe taught American art to look closely and think big at the same time. She magnified a single flower until it filled the canvas, pared the New York skyline down to clean geometry, and then found her true country in the bleached bones and red hills of New Mexico. Across seventy working years she built an unmistakably American modernism that owed nothing to European fashion, and in 1946 the Museum of Modern Art gave her the first retrospective it had ever devoted to a woman. Start with the enormous 1930s flower paintings, such as Jimson Weed, then follow her out to the desert.

4. Barbara Hepworth

1903-1975

Hepworth was among the first sculptors to do something radical: in 1931 she cut a hole clean through the solid mass of a carving, letting light and landscape pass through the form itself. That pierced shape became one of the defining gestures of modern sculpture, taken up soon after by her friend Henry Moore. Carving directly into stone and wood rather than modeling in clay, she made abstraction feel as natural as a pebble worn by the sea, and from wartime St Ives she helped lead British art into the modern age. Start with Pelagos of 1946, a spiral of pale wood strung with taut cord, and end with Single Form, her memorial at the United Nations in New York.

5. Frida Kahlo

1907-1954

Kahlo turned her own body and history into a subject as large as any myth. A childhood bout of polio and a devastating bus accident at eighteen left her in lifelong pain, and she painted that reality without flinching, borrowing the intimate scale and votive language of Mexican folk retablos rather than the grand murals of her husband Diego Rivera. Long dismissed as a curiosity beside him, she is now seen as the greater innovator, the artist who made national identity and female experience central to modern painting. In 1939 the Louvre bought her work The Frame, the first painting by a Mexican artist to enter its collection. Start with The Two Fridas of that same year, a double self-portrait of two hearts joined by a single vein.

6. Louise Bourgeois

1911-2010

For most of her long life the French-born Bourgeois was an artist other artists admired and the public did not know. That changed in 1982, when the Museum of Modern Art gave her a full retrospective at the age of seventy and the art world realized it had overlooked one of its own. Mining childhood memory, fear, and the body, she made sculpture that was frankly psychological decades before that was fashionable, from her caged, room-sized installations called Cells to the towering steel spiders she named after her mother. Start with Maman, the nine-meter spider that has stood guard outside museums from London to Bilbao, tender and terrifying at once.

7. Dorothea Lange

1895-1965

Lange proved that a photograph could change public feeling and public policy at once. Working for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, she made images of displaced families so direct and so humane that they became the face of the era. Her 1936 portrait of a drawn, weary pea-picker, known as Migrant Mother, is among the most reproduced photographs ever made, and it helped bring federal aid to a starving California camp within days. In 1941 she became the first woman awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography, then gave it up to document, with evident anger, the forced internment of Japanese Americans. Start with Migrant Mother and notice how much of a life she holds in a single face.

8. Yayoi Kusama

Born 1929

Kusama has spent seventy years turning private hallucination into shared wonder. Arriving in New York from Japan around 1958, she covered enormous canvases with obsessive webs of dots she called Infinity Nets, made soft sculptures that anticipated Pop and Minimalism, and staged polka-dot happenings at the height of the counterculture. Her mirror-lined Infinity Rooms, which dissolve the visitor into apparently endless space, have since made her one of the most visited and best-selling living artists on earth. Start by stepping inside any one of the Infinity Mirror Rooms, then look back at the early Infinity Nets to see where the vision began.

9. Eva Hesse

1936-1970

Hesse loosened sculpture’s grip on the hard and the permanent. Born in Hamburg and sent away from Nazi Germany as a small child, she reached New York and, in the 1960s, began working in latex, fiberglass, rope, and rubber, materials that sag, droop, and visibly age. Against the cool rigidity of Minimalism she offered something bodily and vulnerable, an approach later named Post-Minimalism that reshaped how a generation thought about materials and touch. She died of a brain tumor at just thirty-four, yet her influence runs through much of the sculpture that followed. Start with Hang Up of 1966, a wrapped frame trailing a single absurd loop of steel into the room.

10. Cindy Sherman

Born 1954

Sherman turned the self-portrait into a tool for taking the whole image-machine apart. Between 1977 and 1980 she photographed herself as some seventy different women, the starlet, the housewife, the runaway, each frame looking like a still from a film that never existed. The pictures argued that the feminine roles we take for natural are costumes handed to us by movies and magazines, and they made appropriation and constructed identity central concerns of late-century art. In December 1995 the Museum of Modern Art acquired the complete set, the Untitled Film Stills, as a landmark of its period. Start there, and try to remember that every character is the same person behind the camera.

Final thoughts

What links these ten is not a shared style, since a spiritualist’s abstraction and a documentary photograph could hardly be further apart, but a shared willingness to work outside the permission of their moment. Several of them invented what later became orthodoxy, and were credited only afterward, if at all. Taken together they make a plain case that the modern canon was never a line of men with a few women tolerated at the edges; it was always this wider, stranger, more international field, and we are only now learning to see it whole.

As ever, a list of ten leaves the door crowded with others who belong. Helen Frankenthaler, whose soak-stain technique poured thinned paint straight into raw canvas and opened the way to color-field painting, came very close to a place here, as did Marina Abramović, who made the artist’s own endurance the material of her work and turned performance into a museum art. Read these ten as an invitation rather than a verdict, and if a name is new to you, follow it. You can explore how many voices and traditions have shaped the arts in our diversity pillar across CreARTivity.

Corrected on 2 October 2026. An earlier version of this article said that the Museum of Modern Art acquired Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills in 1996 and that Barbara Hepworth did something no sculptor had done before. The correct information is that the museum acquired the series in December 1995, and that Hepworth was among the first sculptors to pierce a carving.

Sources consulted

The Museum of Modern Art, Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills
Wikipedia, Untitled Film Stills
The Museum of Modern Art, Georgia O’Keeffe (1946 exhibition)
Wikipedia, Barbara Hepworth