How Two Women Painted Themselves Out of the Corner

It's taken years to happen, but for the last decade or so women's art has slowly been getting some fraction of the attention that art by men has always gotten. But maybe what we've discovered most recently is that there's simply no such thing as "women's art." Objects produced by women may often reflect female experience -- as almost all art by men has always been touched by their maleness -- but those objects, and even that experience, are as varied as could be.

Right now in Philadelphia, there's a vanishingly rare chance to compare two major women artists who are entirely different. "Frida Kahlo," celebrating the superstar artist's centennial, is drawing crowds to the Museum of Art. "Cecilia Beaux: American Figure Painter," organized by the High Museum in Atlanta, is filling the new exhibition space at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Beaux studied in the 1880s and then became the first woman on the faculty. It is one of the very few places where Beaux's reputation, once substantial and global, lasted much beyond her death.

The pairing highlights the varied ways that being female could shape how women made their mark in art -- and how that mark has only lately been noted.