Dating back to the Renaissance, male artists have often taken the spotlight over their female contemporaries.

According to theartwolf.com, the fifty most influential artists in history are all men, except for number 49!

Yet, many lesser-known women artists deserve more attention than they’ve received.

As an under-appreciated artist of the 17th century, female artist Lavinia Fontana’s classical style rivals that of the great Caravaggio, Michelangelo, and Donatello.

Holy Family with Saints Margaret and Francis by Lavinia Fontana

Unfortunately, Fontana’s gender led to insurmountably biased reactions within the fine art world that both stunted her acclaim and limited her painted subject matter.

Like Fontana, American painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt, one of the first more well-known female artists, painted what she, as a woman of the 19th century, knew best — domestic affairs.

Women with their children recurred throughout much of Cassatt’s artwork, depicting impressionistic maternal portraits.

A Kiss for Baby Anne (no. 3) by Mary Cassatt

Following Cassatt, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and American artist Georgia O’Keeffe also explored the truths of womanhood in the early 1900′s, exploiting hardship and femininity.

Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird by Frida Kahlo and Light Iris by Georgia O’Keeffe

But it wasn’t until the late 1960′s and 1970′s that women artists and art historians took full charge of their art influence and founded a feminist art movement, examining the role of women in history and culture.

Through performance art and photography, esteemed female American artists like Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, Judy Chicago, and Cindy Sherman exposed the real experiences of women and the female body.

Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party is a monumental installation, comprised of a triangular table, each side 48 feet long, on which 39 women in history are represented by place settings. Inscribed in the Heritage Floor where the table rests are the names of 999 other historic women.

The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago

Throughout Cindy Sherman’s prolific body of work, she addresses the stereotypes of women in society with self-portrait photographs, representing themes like naivete, self-obsession, and sexuality.

Untitled #360 by Cindy Sherman

Yet, the feminist art movement did not reign the art world for long.

With the 1960′s pop art movement and post-modernism beginning in 1970, male artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Gerhard Richter, and Anselm Keifer became kings of the court.

And so female artists continued to fall into the shadow of their male peers.

Hopefully the young and talented African American artist Kara Walker, British painter Jenny Saville, and American photographer Zoe Strauss will pave the way for women of the art world to easily shine.

Camptown Ladies by Kara Walker

Hypen by Jenny Saville and Daddy Tattoo by Zoe Strauss

- Ava Cotlowitz

The coverage of the closing of Knoedler and Co., the legendary art gallery that claimed to be the oldest in America, has been as extensive as it has been shocking. The Bare Square’s November article on art fraud and forgery proved eerily prescient, with the November 30 announcement of the closing of Knoedler coming on the heels of allegations of forgery and questionable provenance of artwork sold though the venerable gallery.

Last home of Knoedler and Company: 19 East 70th Street, sold in February 2011 for $31 million. (Photo credit: The Real Deal)

Knoedler’s nurtured artists long before the founding of  the Museum of Modern Art (1929), the Frick Collection (1913), and even the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1870). By way of perspective, Knoedler’s was as old as the Smithsonian Institution (founded in 1846), and older the State of California (officially annexed in 1848). At Knoedler’s founding, New York City’s entire population was around 300,000.

Knoedler’s founder, Michael Knoedler, began working for French lithographers and art dealers, Goupil & Cie, in 1844 in Paris. Goupil opened its New York City branch in 1846 (some report the year as 1848), and asked Knoedler to take over the New York branch in 1852, which he did. By 1857, Knoedler bought Goupil’s New York location and continued to operate under the Goupil name. Michael Knoedler died of tuberculosis in 1878, (Goupil retired in 1884), but the gallery that carried Knoedler’s name made art history.

Though the relationship between Goupil and Knoedler’s flourished for quite a while, court records (coincidentally reported by “Wallace, J.”!) show that Goupil opened a rival location in New York City in 1887, a move that sparked litigation. Though Knoedler’s lost the case, the name became ingrained in New York art annals.

Knoedler’s held a special 150-year retrospective in 1996, including signature works like John Singleton Copley’s ”Watson and the Shark,” Thomas Eakins’s ”Music” and Edouard Manet’s moody portrait called ‘The Plum”. The exhibit earned kudos from the New York Times as “perhaps the first time in history [that] a commercial establishment has persuaded 15 institutions, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery, to lend artworks for a show on its premises.”

"The Plum" (1878), first sold by Knoedler Gallery, now at National Gallery of Art.

The list of living artists Knoedler’s represented before the artists’ deaths reads like an art history book:  Frederick Church, Helen Frankenthaler, Mary Cassatt, George Inness, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, William de Kooning, Salvador Dali, Barnett Newman, and many others–a list is too long and impressive to comprehend.

Some mark the decline of the gallery as beginning in 1971 with the sale of the gallery to business tycoon Armand Hammer. Some point to 1976 as the pivotal year, marking the departure of the last member of the Knoedler family from management (Roland Balay, Michael Knoedler’s grandson).

We may never know when the seeds of Knoedler’s demise took root, but the fruit may leave a sour taste.

So reflect on the closing of this important landmark, then find the recipe to cleanse your palette at The Bare Square Store.

Help start the next 150 years of New York art now. Support this generation of emerging artists, and start your collection today.

- James Wallace