20 Women Artists Who Turned Their Trauma Into Art Masterpieces

Frida Kahlo was just 18 and studying to become a doctor in Mexico City when a bus accident in 1925 sent an iron handrail through her pelvis and broke her spine, ribs, and collarbone. Lying in a plaster corset, she took up painting, setting up a mirror over her bed so she could paint herself. She went on to have more than 30 operations throughout her life. She turned her suffering into art, seen in “Henry Ford Hospital” and “The Broken Column.” She denied being a Surrealist, saying she only painted her own reality, not her dreams.

In 1611, Artemisia Gentileschi was a 17-year-old painter in Rome who was molested by Agostino Tassi, a tutor her father had hired to train her. During the ensuing 1612 trial, officials wrapped tight cords around her fingers and asked if she would retract her testimony under torture. She did not, and Tassi was found guilty. She later painted “Judith Slaying Holofernes,” and in 1616 she became the first female member of Florence’s painting academy.

Camille Claudel was the student, collaborator, and lover of the sculptor Auguste Rodin for more than ten years, living with him in Paris. In 1898, after Rodin would not leave his longtime companion, Rose Beuret, she broke off their relationship and produced “The Age of Maturity,” which depicts a woman on her knees relinquishing a young man to an older man. Following her father’s death in 1913, her mother and brother Paul, the poet, had Camille sent to an asylum. She remained there until her death in 1943, some 30 years later.

When Lee Krasner’s husband, the painter Jackson Pollock, died in a drunk-driving accident in August 1956 near their home on Long Island, she had already been an abstract expressionist painter for years. Returning from Europe, Krasner took over Pollock’s studio and, tormented by insomnia, painted through the night under dim light. Out of this came her “Earth Green” and “Umbra” series, as well as a painting called “Prophecy,” completed immediately following Pollock’s death, all featuring agitated, chaotic strokes.

Georgia O’Keeffe was one of the leading American modernists. In 1933, exhaustion from a mural commission and distress over her husband Alfred Stieglitz’s public affair sent her into a severe nervous breakdown that required hospitalization, and the following year she started retreating each summer to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. She painted animal skulls bleached by the sun in a barren landscape. Pictures such as “Pelvis with the Moon” transformed images of decay into something like renewal.

German printmaker and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz’s 18-year-old son, Peter, died in battle in Belgium in October 1914, early in the First World War. Over the course of the next 18 years, she crafted “The Grieving Parents,” a monumental sculpture that shows her and her husband kneeling, with each figure carved into a separate stone block. In 1932, it was placed in a military cemetery in Belgium, where it still stands as a memorial to her son and to the grief of war.

The British Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington fled to Spain after her lover, the artist Max Ernst, was arrested in France in 1939, and her own mental breakdown followed soon after. This led to her being incarcerated in an asylum against her will, where doctors administered a convulsant drug. She escaped to Mexico in 1942. There, she pieced her mind back together on canvas, eventually writing a memoir of the experience and producing art such as “Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse).”

As the French Revolution escalated in October 1789, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun was the leading portraitist of the French court, most famous for her depictions of the queen, Marie Antoinette. She escaped from Paris, abandoning her house, husband, and wealth. Over 12 years, she wandered through Italy, Austria, and Russia, bringing up her daughter by herself. All the while, she painted self-portraits and royal portraits and was elected to a number of major European academies. At last, in 1802, she returned to Paris.

When Charlotte Salomon, a German Jewish artist who had fled to southern France to escape the Nazis, learned that her mother, grandmother, and aunt had all died by suicide, she set out to create a visual “opus” over the following two years. The result, now known as “Life? or Theatre?,” consisted of more than 760 paintings, accompanied by texts and music. Before she was arrested in 1943, she handed them off to a local physician, telling him, “Take good care of it. It is my life.” She was killed at Auschwitz that October at age 26.

In January 1929, the photographer Tina Modotti’s lover, Julio Antonio Mella, a Cuban political exile, was shot to death next to her in the street. Modotti was questioned by the police and accused by the press but exonerated. She was later deported in 1930 and continued taking political photographs like “Woman with Flag” and “Bandolier, Corn and Sickle,” which were among the most critically acclaimed examples of documentary photography of the time.

The French Surrealist writer and photographer Claude Cahun moved to Jersey with her stepsister and partner, Marcel Moore. After Germany invaded the island, the pair embarked on an anti-fascist campaign of resistance. The Gestapo captured Cahun in 1944 and condemned her to die, but kept her in prison for almost a year, until her release when the island was liberated. She took several defiant portraits of herself after that, including one in which she bites down on a Nazi insignia, before dying some years later due to the toll of the war.

As a teenage circus acrobat working in Montmartre, Paris, Suzanne Valadon performed on the trapeze until an accident in about 1883 left her with a permanent injury and ended her career as a performer. She turned to working as an artist’s model, then taught herself how to paint. She overcame poverty, a violent husband, and alcohol addiction. Her paintings of the female form were unidealized and radically new, as seen in her work “The Blue Room.” In 1894, she became the first woman accepted to the French national fine arts association.

In 1862, Mary Edmonia Lewis, a Native American (Ojibwe) and African-American sculptor studying at Oberlin College, was accused of trying to poison her two white roommates. A white mob took her out into a field and beat her up before her trial. After being defended by lawyer John Mercer Langston, she was completely acquitted in 1862 and eventually moved to Rome, where she created several sculptures in marble commemorating black emancipation, such as “Forever Free.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker, a German painter who had married fellow painter Otto Modersohn and struggled against the isolation of her small artists’ community, began visiting Paris intermittently to paint. By 1906, she had completed a nude self-portrait showing a belly that signified pregnancy, though she was not pregnant when she painted it. It was the first known nude self-portrait by a woman artist. She died the following year at age 31 following childbirth-related complications.

German Surrealist Unica Zürn lived with her partner, artist Hans Bellmer, in Paris. From 1957 onward, she started experiencing severe schizophrenic crises, with accompanying hallucinations and subsequent repeated hospitalization. During these hospitalizations, a friend of hers, the poet Henri Michaux, would bring her drawing pads. Using a fine pen and ink, Zürn created dense, labyrinthine drawings teeming with eyes and ghostly figures, visualizing her experiences of a distorted mind. She committed suicide in 1970.

As a kid, the painter Romaine Brooks was subjected to years of abuse at the hands of her mother, who preferred her mentally ill brother and left her at the age of seven with a poor family. When Brooks came into her fortune as an adult, she chose to use almost exclusively shades of gray, white, and black. The restrained, austere look in paintings such as “The Weeping Venus” or her 1923 self-portrait was a way for Brooks to deal with the abusive childhood she chronicled in an unpublished memoir.

The painter Alice Neel’s first child, a daughter, died of diphtheria in 1927, and three years later her husband, the Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez, deserted her for Cuba with their second daughter. Devastated, Neel tried to commit suicide and was institutionalized for a year. Once she recovered, she began producing some of her most visceral paintings concerning motherhood, loss, and grief. These include “Well Baby Clinic” and “Futility of Effort,” raw and unguarded pictures that were not like anything she’d done before.

Kay Sage was an American surrealist painter who married painter Yves Tanguy. He died suddenly of a stroke in January 1955. She went into isolation at their Connecticut home, her depression deepened by the rapid destruction of her vision due to cataracts. She produced eerie works such as “Tomorrow Is Never,” featuring skeletal towers in fog. She committed suicide in 1963, writing in her note, “Now he’s waiting for me again,” referring to Tanguy.

The German artist Gabriele Münter, together with her lover, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, helped form the pioneering Munich-based art collective Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). When World War I erupted, Kandinsky returned to Russia and abandoned her. Münter retreated to the German village of Murnau and coped with her emotional devastation through such haunting works as “Meditation.” Years later, during World War II, she also stored more than 80 modern artworks in her cellar to prevent the Nazis from destroying them.

In February 1953, Barbara Hepworth, a British abstract sculptor at work in her studio in St. Ives, Cornwall, received news that her 24-year-old son, Royal Air Force pilot Paul Skeaping, had died in a plane crash in Thailand. To seek solace, she carved a “Madonna and Child” for the local parish church as a monument to him. She continued to carve in wood and stone, with the smooth, hollowed-out apertures she’d developed many years before, now imbued with sorrow and protection.

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