Meet: Sonia Delaunay (Ukraine,1885- France,1979)
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Ukrainian-born French painter, textile designer, fashion and costume designer. She was one of the primary propagators of Orphism, a theory of wedding color to achieve visual intensity. Sonia took this theory beyond painting, creating an entire career in textile design.

Meet: Leonor Fini

Argentinian surrealist painter, designer, illustrator and author, known for her depictions of powerful women. Born in Buenos Aires but raised in Italy, at age 17 moved to Paris where she met many famous artists. She had no formal artistic training yet she was familiar with the traditional renaissance and mannerist styles due to her upbringing in Italy. Fini was considered part of a pre-war generation of Parisian artists and outlived most of her artist peers. She painted portraits of wealthy visitors and celebrities, designed the falcon for a top selling perfume and decorations for the theater, ballet and opera. She also designed costumes for two films, wrote three novels, and illustrated many works by great authors and poets. Fini is considered a great contributor to the feminist movement.

Meet: Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) 

Known simply as Tarsila,is considered one of the leading Latin American #modernistartists, described as “the Brazilian painter who best achieved Brazilian aspirations for nationalistic expression in a modern style”. She was a member of the “Grupo dos Cinco”, a group of five Brazilian artists who are considered the biggest influence in the modern art movement in Brazil. Tarsila was also instrumental in the formation of the#antropofagia movement. Her legacy: besides the 230 paintings, hundreds of drawings, illustrations, prints, murals and sculptures, her legacy is her effect on the direction of Latin American art. She moved modernism forward in Latin America and developed a style unique to Brazil.

Meet: Sylvette David/Lydia Corbett (1934)

French painter & ceramicist and former artist’s model known for being “the girl with the ponytail “ in Picasso’s Sylvette series of paintings. She started drawing to pass the time while she sat for Picasso. She changed her name to avoid being recognized only as Picasso’s muse. She began painting seriously in her 40’s and her work has been exhibited in Japan and England. Her work possess a dreamlike quality born of naivety. She likes to celebrate a childlike freedom of form.

Meet: Élisabeth Chaplin (17 October 1890, Fontainebleau, France – 28 January 1982, Fiesole, Italy) 

She was a French/Tuscan painter in the Nabis style. She is known for her portraiture and Tuscan landscapes, most of which reside in the Pitti Palace’s Gallery of Modern Art collection in Florence. She has two self-portraits in the Vasari Corridor collection.

Chaplin’s visits to the Uffizi Museum were decisive. She learned from copying the classics. From 1905-1908, she painted her first large canvases and in 1910 her "Ritratto di Famiglia" (Family Portrait) won a gold medal from the Florence Society of Fine Arts (displayed in the Gallery of Modern Art, Florence).[1] In 1916 she moved with her family to Rome, where she would live until 1922. There she met Paul-Albert Besnard (1849-1934), a French painter and printmaker, who in 1913, was appointed to be the director of Villa Medici in Rome. He became one of Chaplin’s mentors. (Wikipedia)

Meet: Jane Graverol (1905-1984)

She was born in Ixelles in Belgium. Jane studied at the Academie des Beaux-Arts of Brussels and followed the lessons of Constant Montald and Jean Delville. She grew up in a family of artists with the painter Alexandre Graverol as her father.

Graverol is part of the Belgian surrealism movement. She was strongly influenced by Magritte, whom she met in 1949. Close to several surrealist personalities She painted in 1964 La Goutte d’Eau, an enlarged drop of water that illustrates a “family portrait” of the great names of Belgian Surrealist artists at the time.

In 1953, with André Blavier, she created the magazine Temps mêlés in Verviers. In the same year, she met Marcel Mariën, with whom she not only shared her life for a decade, but also animated the magazine Lèvres Nues and actively participated in his various works. In 1959, the couple Graverol-Mariën realized an erotic and anticlerical film entitled L’imitation du Cinéma. Forbidden as soon as it was released, this feature tells the story of a young man so impressed by imitation of Jesus Christ that he decides to be crucified himself by imitation.

Although she is known for her surrealist art, Jane Graverol is already active between 1920 and 1930 when her art presenting subjects of still lifes in a symbolist style.

Following her surrealist period, politically engaged in the 1960s and 1970s, she turned to social collages, especially against violence and war. At the same time, she was interested in the world of the infinitely small and paints multiple paintings of animals or plants in a strange and dreamlike atmosphere.
(http://www.galerie-retelet.com/en/biography-jane-graverol/ )

Meet: Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) 

She was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings were amongst the first abstract art. A considerable body of her abstract work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky.She belonged to a group called "The Five", a circle of women who shared her belief in the importance of trying to make contact with the so-called "High Masters" – often by way of séances. Her paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams, were a visual representation of complex spiritual ideas.

From her family, Hilma inherited a great interest for mathematics and botany. She showed an early ability in visual art, and after the family moved to Stockholm, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Stockholm, where she learned portraiture and landscape painting. This choice was quite controversial at this time, as very few women had access to higher studies in the beginning of the 20th century. She was admitted at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at the age of twenty. During the years 1882–1887 she studied mainly drawing, and portrait- and landscape painting.
Her interest in abstraction and symbolism came from Hilma af Klint's involvement in spiritism, very much in vogue at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.

In her will, Hilma af Klint left all her abstract paintings to her nephew, vice-admiral in the Swedish Royal Navy. She specified that her work should be kept secret for at least 20 years after her death. When the boxes were opened at the end of the 1960s, very few persons had knowledge of what would be revealed.

In 1970 her paintings were offered as a gift to Moderna Museet in Stockholm, which declined the donation. Thanks to the art historian Åke Fant, her art was introduced to an international audience in the 1980s, when he presented her at a Nordik conference in Helsinki in 1984. Erik af Klint then donated thousands of drawings and paintings to a foundation bearing the artist’s name in the 1970s.

The collection of paintings of Hilma af Klint counts more than 1200 pieces. It is owned and managed by the Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden. (Wikipedia)