By Sarah Johnson
The history of art, as it has been taught in western academies for over a century, is a curated fiction. It is a narrative built on the myth of the solitary male genius, an uninterrupted lineage stretching from Michelangelo to Picasso. Yet, the archives of museums and the basements of private collectors hold a different truth. For centuries, female artists were systematically erased from this timeline—their works misattributed, their innovations credited to male contemporaries, or their legacies simply left to gather dust. Today, an overdue reckoning is underway. A wave of major international exhibitions in 2026 is forcing the art world to confront its blind spots, proving that restoring these women to the canon is not an act of revisionism, but of correction.
The mechanism of this historical erasure varied wildly across centuries. For some women, it was deliberate misattribution, a financially motivated deception by dealers who knew a male signature fetched a higher price. For others, it was the structural barriers of their era, which barred women from formal life-drawing classes and relegated them to specific genres like portraiture or botanical still life. And for a few, the erasure was entirely self-imposed, an act of preservation by artists who knew the patriarchal establishment was ill-equipped to comprehend their vision. By examining the lives of four distinct pioneers—Judith Leyster, Artemisia Gentileschi, Hilma af Klint, and Edmonia Lewis—we can begin to unpick the complex tapestry of how masterpieces are lost, and more importantly, how they are found again.
The Misattributed Master: Judith Leyster
In the bustling artistic climate of the Dutch Golden Age, Judith Leyster (1609–1660) was a formidable and highly respected talent. She was one of the first women admitted to the prestigious Haarlem Guild of St. Luke, ran her own commercial workshop, and successfully took on male apprentices. Her genre paintings—characterised by their loose, expressive brushwork, psychological depth, and exuberant depictions of musicians and revellers—were heavily sought after by contemporary collectors. Yet, within mere decades of her death, her name vanished from the historical record.
For over 250 years, Leyster’s vibrant corpus was almost entirely attributed to her male contemporary, Frans Hals. The stylistic similarities were undeniable; both artists favoured a dynamic, spontaneous application of paint that captured fleeting moments of human interaction. However, the misattribution was not an innocent scholarly error. It was a deliberate market deception. Because Hals was the established male master, his name commanded premium prices at auction. Unscrupulous art dealers systematically painted over Leyster’s distinctive monogram—a fluid “JL” intertwined with a five-pointed star (a play on her surname, which translates to “lodestar”)—replacing it with fraudulent Hals signatures.
The deception unravelled spectacularly in 1893. The Louvre had acquired a painting, The Carousing Couple, believing it to be a masterful Frans Hals. Upon close technical examination, the Dutch art historian Cornelis Hofstede de Groot discovered Leyster’s hidden star monogram beneath the forged signature. The revelation sent shockwaves through the European art market, leading to emergency reappraisals in galleries from London to Saint Petersburg. Slowly, Leyster’s oeuvre was pieced back together.
This year, Leyster’s rightful place is being cemented in the landmark exhibition Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600–1750 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent (running through May 2026). By displaying her work alongside peers like Rachel Ruysch and Michaelina Wautier, the exhibition dismantles the notion that Dutch women were anomalous footnotes. Leyster was a master of the human form, an artist whose technical brilliance rivalled—and occasionally surpassed—the men who subsequently stole her credit.
The Shadow of Biography: Artemisia Gentileschi
While Judith Leyster suffered the indignity of misattribution, the Italian Baroque master Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1656) faced a different kind of erasure: the subjugation of her art to her personal trauma. For centuries, Gentileschi was treated as a historical curiosity rather than a technical heavyweight. Her legacy was inextricably tied to her sexual assault by her painting tutor, Agostino Tassi, and the subsequent gruelling, public trial in 1612, during which she was subjected to torture by the Roman authorities using thumbscrews to verify her testimony.
In the centuries that followed, male art historians viewed Gentileschi’s visceral, bloody masterpieces—such as her iconic Judith Slaying Holofernes—solely through a psychoanalytic lens. Her work was reduced to an expression of female rage and post-traumatic revenge. While the anger in her canvases is palpable, focusing exclusively on her biography served to obscure her staggering artistic achievements. It blinded critics to her mastery of chiaroscuro, her radical compositional framing, and her status as the first woman accepted into the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence.
Gentileschi was a shrewd businesswoman who secured commissions from the Medici family, King Philip IV of Spain, and King Charles I of England. She negotiated her own contracts in an era when women were legally bound to their fathers or husbands. Today, scholars are actively working to divorce her artistic genius from the sensationalism of her trial. Her inclusion in recent major retrospectives proves that a woman’s technical mastery can, and must, be evaluated independently of the violence enacted upon her. The re-evaluation of Gentileschi forces the art world to ask a difficult question: how many other female artists have had their technical brilliance overshadowed by the dramatic details of their personal lives?
The Secret Pioneer of Abstraction: Hilma af Klint
If Leyster’s erasure was driven by commerce and Gentileschi’s by patriarchal sensationalism, Hilma af Klint’s was driven by a profound understanding of her era’s intellectual limitations. For generations, the invention of abstract art was securely credited to Wassily Kandinsky, who created his first non-objective watercolours around 1911. Art history textbooks enshrined Kandinsky, alongside Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, as the founding fathers of abstraction. But they were late to the party.
Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) began producing radical, large-scale abstract paintings as early as 1906. Her monumental series, The Paintings for the Temple, comprised 193 luminous canvases filled with biomorphic shapes, geometric forms, and a complex chromatic language. Predating Kandinsky by half a decade, these works were entirely divorced from physical reality.
Why, then, did af Klint remain unknown until the late 20th century? The answer lies in her spiritual practice and her acute self-awareness. Af Klint was a devout follower of Theosophy and Spiritualism. She operated as part of a clandestine collective of five female artists, known simply as “De Fem” (The Five), who conducted séances and received commissions from “High Masters” to map the spiritual realm. Af Klint understood that the conservative, male-dominated art establishment of early 20th-century Stockholm would dismiss her visionary abstractions as the hysterical scribblings of a female mystic.
Consequently, she rarely exhibited her abstract works during her lifetime. Upon her death in 1944, she left a strict stipulation in her will: her pioneering canvases were not to be shown to the public until at least twenty years had passed, believing that only a future society would possess the consciousness to understand them. She was right, though it took much longer than two decades. It wasn’t until a watershed exhibition in 1986 that the international art world began to grasp the magnitude of her achievement.
In 2026, her legacy reaches new heights with Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Temple (1906–1915) at the Grand Palais in Paris. This unprecedented retrospective forces a permanent rewrite of modernism’s origins. Af Klint did not merely participate in the birth of abstraction; she authored it. Her work demonstrates that the break from representational art was not purely an intellectual, formalist exercise by European men, but a profoundly spiritual investigation pioneered by a woman working in self-imposed exile.
The Neoclassical Trailblazer: Edmonia Lewis
The physical loss of artworks is another tragic mechanism of historical erasure. The story of Edmonia Lewis (c. 1844–1907) is one of the most astonishing narratives of triumph, obscurity, and eventual recovery in American art history. Born to a Haitian father and a Mississauga Ojibwe mother, Lewis overcame the violent prejudices of 19th-century America to become the first professional African American and Native American sculptor to achieve international acclaim.
Finding the United States too hostile a climate for a woman of colour to secure anatomical training or marble commissions, Lewis emigrated to Rome in 1865. There, she joined a thriving expatriate community of female sculptors. Lewis distinguished herself by refusing to employ Italian artisans to carve her marble, a common practice among male sculptors. She carved every piece herself, fearing that any assistance would be weaponised by critics to cast doubt on her authorship.
Her undisputed masterpiece, The Death of Cleopatra (1876), was a three-ton marble monolith depicting the Egyptian queen in the visceral, immediate aftermath of the asp’s bite. It was a radical departure from the dignified, sanitised Victorian portrayals of death. When exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, it drew massive crowds and widespread critical awe. Yet, the monumental size of the sculpture made it impossible for Lewis to ship it back to Rome. It was placed in storage and subsequently lost to history.
The sculpture’s journey over the next century reads like a surreal fiction. It was moved to a Chicago saloon, then used as a grave marker for a racehorse named Cleopatra, before eventually being abandoned on a suburban golf course where it was subjected to decades of weather damage and vandalism. It was not until the 1980s that a historical society recognised the battered marble. Following extensive restoration, The Death of Cleopatra now resides in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Lewis’s broader oeuvre is currently the subject of the landmark 2026 exhibition Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone at the Georgia Museum of Art. The exhibition is the first to gather the full range of her surviving works, contextualising her fierce independence and her masterful ability to infuse neoclassical forms with potent narratives of abolition and Indigenous rights. Lewis’s story is a stark reminder of how fragile a legacy can be when an artist operates outside the protective infrastructure of white, male institutional power.
Correcting the Canon
The rediscovery of these female masters is not merely an exercise in academic housekeeping. It represents a fundamental shift in how we understand cultural production. For every Judith Leyster, Artemisia Gentileschi, Hilma af Klint, or Edmonia Lewis whose work has been painstakingly recovered, countless other female artists remain hidden in the margins—their canvases deteriorating in storage, their names absent from the syllabus.
Institutions are finally beginning to do the necessary archival archaeology. The exhibitions sweeping Europe and the United States in 2026 signify a departure from the tokenistic inclusion of women in “special” showcases, moving toward a permanent integration into the main galleries. By investigating contemporary culture and examining past art exhibitions, we can trace how public appetite for these narratives is forcing museums to act.
The stories behind these masterpieces reveal the systemic mechanisms—market forgery, intellectual prejudice, patriarchal bias, and institutional neglect—that actively shaped the canon. To view a painting by Leyster, an abstraction by af Klint, or a marble carving by Lewis today is to engage with an act of historical defiance. These artworks survived against the odds, waiting out the centuries until the world was finally ready to look at them.
