The works of American photographer, performance and video artist, and sculptor Hannah Wilke, born Arlene Hannah Butler in New York, are known for explorations of sexuality, gender, and feminism through forms that are either suggestive of the female body or that explicitly depict it. Considered the first feminist artist to use vaginal imagery in her work, Wilke began in the 1970s to use her own body in performances documented by photographs and video that she dubbed “performalist self-portraits.” IntraVenus, a group of photographs documenting her experience with cancer, was exhibited posthumously at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in 1994.
Postcards, such as this image of the actress as Cleopatra, advertised Sarah Bernhardt’s celebrated performances for global audiences. Born Henriette-Rosine Bernard to a Jewish courtesan of Dutch…
One of Friedrich Friedländer’s best-known paintings, The Death of Tasso, depicts the death of the Italian poet Torquato Tasso (1544–1595). Tasso was famous for his epic poem, La Gerusalemme liberate (…
The influence of Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771-1833) on German culture owed much to the salon society of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hostess of a noted salon in Berlin, she was…