7 Women Artists Who Became Works of Art

The concept of using one’s identity as part of a creative performance was the invention of modernity. Since then, we started to perceive both men and women artists as eccentric public figures with their identities inseparably linked to their art. Think of Salvador Dali with his mustache and pet ocelot, Picasso’s working-class flair, or Andy Warhol’s playful pseudo-anonymity behind a wig and glasses.

Although the most popular examples of reclaiming an artist’s ego as part of their creative practice relate to men, some women artists also adopted this method with varying degrees of intensity. Their performativity was not necessarily aimed at a wider public, sometimes it was their way of harmonizing their inner self with the world.

The legendary Art Deco portraitist Tamara de Lempicka came to Paris broke and traumatized, narrowly escaping the bloodshed of the Russian Revolution. As an amateur artist in training, Lempicka invented a PR strategy that would soon raise her to stardom. From an unknown Eastern European immigrant, she would turn into a glamorous, eccentric, and spoiled lady of high society. Her dresses had to be immaculate, and her manners good enough to be admitted to the elite circles and provocative enough to convey the sexual and emotional freedom of a truly modern woman. Her act as a wealthy careless socialite helped her career but irreparably damaged her relationship with her family. For years, she refused to publicly admit the existence of her daughter Kizette, afraid that the girl’s presence might cost her opportunities.

Contrary to Lempicka, Romaine Brooks could not care less about public promotion, at least on the surface. A traumatized and reclusive person, Brooks avoided social gatherings and was notoriously difficult in personal relationships. In real life, she looked as if she stepped out of her monochrome, sober, and strict paintings wearing a tailored men’s suit.

Brooks’ main strategy of perceiving the world relied on detached and seemingly disinterested observation. Attempting to achieve complete objectivity, she toned down her emotions and avoided attachments. Her creative strategy was the result of a childhood trauma and her abusive mother. To overcome the traumatic patterns, she developed a detached look at her life that aided her art yet did not bring the desired emotional comfort.

3. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

The Dada queen Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, unfairly dismissed in her lifetime and forgotten after her death, was perhaps the greatest force of artistic creativity of her time, responsible for many artistic trends, movements, and concepts. Despite being known as The Baroness, she did not have noble origins and she received her title through a brief and unhappy marriage. For most of her life, she lived in poverty, constructing her unbelievable outfits from trash and random found objects. She inspired Marcel Duchamp to work with readymades and explore the nature of sexuality and normativity in his works.

The public persona of Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven relied almost entirely on her sexuality and her insatiable physical needs. She was not human but a machine running non-stop, an android existing outside of beauty standards and norms. She shaved her head and covered it with green lacquer, wore tomato cans as a bra, and shower curtain rings as bracelets. Her crass humor, her open stance on matters of physicality, and her provocative sexual behavior blended the beautiful and the repulsive. Despite not many artworks by the Baroness have survived, her influence on her social circle was immeasurable.

Frida Kahlo’s physical body was the direct result of her encounters with pain, trauma, disability, and national identity. Her flower crowns, braids, and voluminous dresses worked to cement her reputation in the same manner as her art. Today, Kahlo’s face is one of the most frequently reproduced and referenced images of pop culture. Some experts believe that her dresses also served as a protective screen to hide Kahlo’s disability or turn her into a living monument, like a column from one of her famous paintings.

However, Indigenous Mexican activists criticize Kahlo for participating in homogenizing the variety of local cultures into a single brand of Mexican Indian. Such a compiled exoticized image led to the rise of Mexican culture’s popularity, but erased its complex undertones. Frida Kahlo’s famous Tehuana dresses were mostly a fashion choice rather than a personal statement: Kahlo stated that she had no connections to the region of Tehuantepec where those dresses originated, and never even visited it. Thus, Kahlo’s anticolonial stance, coming from a person of Spanish and German descent, still relied on the Westernized perspective of Mexican culture as something uniform and homogenous.

5. Remedios Varo

Spanish-born artist Remedios Varo was part of the Parisian Surrealist scene. With the beginning of World War II, she, like many other artists of her circle, had to flee Europe. Thanks to the intervention of Frida Kahlo, she and other artists settled in Mexico, where Surrealism was not just a fashionable movement but a way of everyday life. It was then that Remedios Varo started to reshape and rethink reality. Her art became a direct extension of herself, and her self was as equally surreal as her art.

Together with her friend Leonora Carrington, she learned about Indigenous magic from the locals, interpreted dreams, and performed various rituals. Quiet and mysterious, Varo was completely immersed in the world of the unconscious and regarded the world from a spiritual perspective. For her, magic was just another facet of reality, and myth was inseparable from reality. She made talismans for her friends and gathered seemingly random objects in her house, sure of their spiritual power. Although her identity had no direct intent at a public performance, it nonetheless was constructed by her as another artistic method and a prism through which she transformed her world.

The most radical example on our list, the French conceptual artist ORLAN went significantly further in using her body as an artistic instrument. The female body was the principal instrument and subject matter for ORLAN since the beginning of her career in the 1960s. Her body literally became her canvas, transformed and reshaped with the help of plastic surgeons.

She took her most radical step in the 1990s when she decided to undergo a series of plastic surgeries, all filmed and broadcasted, that would transform her face and body. Instead of appealing to pop culture beauty standards, ORLAN used iconic works of art as her reference points. The surgeons modeled her new chin after Botticelli’s Venus and her nose after Diana the Huntress. The project was at once an act of religious martyrdom, a commentary on beauty practices, and a celebration of modern medical advancements.

7. Marina Abramovic

The famous Serbian-born artist is a great example of how a performative artistic identity can be commercialized and developed into a personal brand. She became famous in the 1970s with a series of radical and controversial performances that tested the limits of the physical body and explored concepts of violence, endurance, and control. Her works of art essentially were complex shamanic rituals that often relied on disturbing and manipulating the audience.

Marina Abramovic stated that her key method for inventing and enduring her performance pieces was to enter a specific state of consciousness and connect to the present moment on a spiritual level. The Abramovic Method soon became her signature feature and a creative strategy, which she taught at art institutions. Over the years, the Abramovic Method turned from a creative instrument to an all-encompassing lifestyle that can be bought and experienced on demand. As it turned out, everything Abramovic said, done, and created was part of the method, including a set of inspirational instruction cards with the artist’s face on each of them and an anti-aging skincare line.