As Mies Van der Rohe was elevated to the pantheon of Modernist masters, Lilly Reich died in poverty and anonymity, an all too familiar event for women artists and designers of the 20th century.

Hannah Hoch was a pioneer of photo montage during the Dada movement in the Weimar period. Hoch’s work embraced the concept of the ‘new woman’. Oftentimes and historically overlooked in favour of Schwitters and Mondrian, she embarked on a stormy affair with Raoul Hausmann. His hypocritical stance on women’s emancipation spurred Hoch to write a caustic short story entitled ‘The Painter’ in 1920, the subject of which is ‘an artist who is thrown into an intense spiritual crisis when his wife asks him to do the dishes’. Hats off to Hannah for that.

Natalia Goncharova was a Russian avantgarde artist, writer and designer. A founding member of the Jack of Diamonds (Moscow’s first radical independent art exhibiting group 1909-1911) and ‘The Donkey’s Tail’ (1912-13). Her work was confiscated because there were taboos for women to paint icons. Later she would cross over between Moscow avantgarde  and Western European Modernism, citing as being inspired by Picasso and Braque. It’s worth noting her first cubist painting appeared a year before her ‘influences’. Although recognised during her life-time, studying the movements she was fundamental to, her name is one that requires searching for.

Emmy Hennings too was a German poet and performing artist, founder of the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, 1915. By this time she was already a published poet and writer. Admired by the expressionists as the incarnation of the cabaret artist of her time, her role has never been adequately acknowledged.

Pauline Boty, the only acknowledged female founding member of the British Pop Art movement, mixed a self assured sexuality with the critical observation of the ‘man’s world’ of post war Britain.

Tragically passing, aged 28 in 1966, Boty’s paintings were stored in a barn at her brothers farm for nearly 30 years. By 2019 in the New York Times of profile Boty in their ‘Overlooked No More’ series. Arguably, as good, if better than her contemporaries Blake and Hockney, although her work and influence has now gained long overdue exposure, she remains like others in my ‘What Do You See’ collection, a sub note in the accepted art history and visual theories of the 20th century’s many publications.