Important women artists part 1

Diane Arbus

Double Self-Portrait With Infant Daughter, Doon, 1945

Early life
Arbus was born in New York City into a wealthy Jewish family, in which she was overshadowed by her older brother, the poet, Howard Nemerov. Arbus fell in love with future-actor Allan Arbus at age 14, and married him soon after turning 18, despite her parents' objections. When Allan started training as a photographer for the US Army, he taught Diane his lessons. She also learned about photography through photographer, Lisette Model. The Arbuses ran a successful fashion photography studio for 20 years, before separating in 1959. The Arbuses had two daughters, photographer Amy Arbus and writer and art director Doon Arbus.
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Photography career
After separating from her husband, Arbus studied with Alexey Brodovitch and Richard Avedon. Beginning in 1960, Arbus worked extensively as a photojournalist, her photos appearing in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Bazaar and Sunday Times magazines, among others.
Arbus' early work was created using 35mm cameras, but by the 1960s Arbus adopted the Rolleiflex medium format twin-lens reflex. This format provided a square aspect ratio, higher image resolution, and a waist-level viewfinder that allow Arbus to connect with her subjects in ways that a standard eye-level viewfinder did not. Arbus also experimented with the use of flashes in daylight, allowing her to highlight and separate her subjects from the background.
In 1963, Arbus received a Guggenheim fellow grant, allowing her to focus on her art. Arbus received a second Guggenheim grant in 1966. The Museum of Modern Art, in 1967, staged Arbus' first museum show as the New Documents show which included the work of Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. Arbus also taught photography at the Parsons School of Design in New York and Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
In July 1971, Arbus ended her own life in Greenwich Village, at the age of 48 by ingesting a large quantity of barbiturates and then cutting open her wrists. Rumors held that she photographed her suicide, but no photos were discovered by the police.
Aperture magazine was crucial in reviving Arbus' artistic reputation. MoMA curator John Szarkowski prepared to stage a retrospective in 1972, but the accompanying Diane Arbus catalogue proposal was turned down by all major publishing houses. Aperture's Michael E. Hoffman accepted the challenge, producing one of the most influential photography books. The Aperture monograph has since been reprinted 12 times, selling more than 100,000 copies. The MoMA retrospective traveled throughout North America attracting more than 7 million viewers. Also in 1972, Arbus became the first American photographer to be represented at the Venice Biennale. Arbus' photograph, Identical Twins is sixth on the list of the list of most expensive photographs havings sold in 2004 for $478,400.
Arbus is remembered today for her photographs depicting outsiders, such as tranvestites, dwarves, giants, prostitutes, and ordinary citizens in poses and settings conveying a disturbing uncanniness. Some critics claim that Arbus' voyeuristic approach demeaned her subjects. In 2005 Germaine Greer made this claim on BBC Culture Show, based around a major London retrospective of Arbus's works. Admirers of Arbus's work (such as Todd Solondz) were also interviewed by the BBC and passionately defended her work.

Isabel Bishop

Laughing Head, 1938

Isabel Bishop (March 3, 1902 – March 19, 1988) was an American painter and graphic artist, who produced numerous works of mainly working women in an urban realist style. She was widely exhibited in her lifetime, and was recognised with a number of awards including one for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, presented to her by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
Bishop was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and brought up in Detroit, Michigan, before moving to New York City at the age of 16 to study illustration at the New York School of Applied Design for Women. After two years there, she shifted from illustration to painting, and attended the Art Students League for four years until 1924. During the early twenties she studied and painted in Woodstock. Much of her early work exhibits a range of study and styles. Although she never took off from landscape painting many of the early paintings exhibit landscape like examinations of lighting, trees, still-lifes, and street scenes often in a forced 1:3 landscape ratio. Early pieces are often on pressboard. Few early works survived her noted self-destruction of her own pieces from the early period left in her studio in the 1970s. She became a life member of Art Students League and taught there from 1936 to 1937.
Many of Bishop's mid to later works depict the inhabitants of the New York's Union Square area, where she maintained a studio between 1934 and 1984. Her subjects are nearly always women and, particularly in earlier works, some come from a blue-collar background, yet she was also known to produce beautiful panoramic studies of the country and social scenes such as golf tournaments. The portraits are portrayed often as an individual head – the emphasis securely on the subject's expression – or as a single nude. As well as these, many of Bishop's compositions contain two females engaged in various interactions. Her signature changed many times over her career from using various pseudynoms to initials signing some early pieces I.B, or I. Bishop in both block and scrpit