Frieze Masters 7 September 2018

To commemorate the centenary of women’s suffrage in the UK, the seventh edition of Frieze Masters Magazine is themed around the achievements of women artists throughout history. Griselda Pollock proposes that Impressionism was the first gender-equal art movement in Western art history and discusses the work of the great painter Mary Cassatt; Sheryl Reiss explores the contributions of women art patrons; Claudia Calirman looks at trailblazing female Brazilian modernists; Margo Neale discusses the work of Emily Kame Kngwarreye and the centrality of women’s creativity to Australian Indigenous cultures; and Charmaine Nelson highlights the extraordinary life of the 19th-century artist Mary Edmonia Lewis, who was the first sculptor of both African American and Indigenous heritage to achieve international acclaim.  

In the columns, Alice Twemlow considers the legacy of women who studied at the Bauhaus, Jessica Lack examines the women artists who helped shape the suffragettes’ identity, Jennifer Kabat visits the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington and Amy Sherlock celebrates the life and work of Minette de Silva – the first female Asian architect to be certified by RIBA – on the centenary of her birth. Plus: in a newly launched section, museum directors from around the world highlight an important work in their collection by a woman artist. Respondents include: Jean-Luc Martinez of the Louvre; James Rondeau of the Art Institute of Chicago; Sabine Haag of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum; Ann Demeester of the Frans Hals Museum; and Deborah Swallow of the Courtauld Institute of Art. For the seventh year in a row, we have invited a cross-section of international artists to nominate a work of art from the past that has inspired them.

The renowned art historian Barbara Novak is our questionnaire respondent.

Frieze Masters Magazine is edited by Jennifer Higgie, Editorial Director of frieze, and art directed by David Lane.