Woman Pioneers of Abstraction

Woman Pioneers of Abstraction highlights woman artists in the Sainsbury Centre’s collection who were at the vanguard of developments in abstraction between the First and Second World Wars.

Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979), Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889–1943) and Natalie Goncharova (1881–1962) were all key innovators of abstraction. They forged a multi-disciplinary practice that ignored the established hierarchies that had traditionally separated craft from art. Their work encompassed a range of media including painting, printmaking, fashion, textiles and drawing. Woman artists were frequently encouraged into craft disciplines rather than fine art, which often served to advance experimentation in their practice. Often overshadowed in their lifetime by more famous male partners, their contribution to key innovations in Twentieth Century Art is now being fully recognised.