Jo Applin

Between​ 1978 and 1983, Charles Jencks worked with the architect Terry Farrell to turn his family’s Victorian end-terrace home in Holland Park into Cosmic House. Jencks died in 2019, two years before the house opened to visitors and nearly fifty years after he defined ‘postmodern’ architecture as an ironic, pluralist style signalling ‘the death of modernist...

‘Altarpiece’ (1915)

In​ 1932, aged seventy, Hilma af Klint rewrote her will. She stipulated that her paintings, notebooks, drawings and writings be kept from public view for at least twenty years after her death: by then, she hoped, audiences might be ready for her work. In the event, it took more than four decades for it to be seen in public. In 1986, a selection of...

Since​ 1977 Barbara Kruger has explored the relationship between politics and power in text and image-based works that surprise, exhort, instruct, plead, insist, cajole and otherwise boss us about. In addition to her familiar wall-mounted billboards and projections on show at the current Serpentine retrospective (until 17 March), sound installations dotted about the gallery repeat stock...

Judy Chicago photographed in 1970 by Jerry McMillan. Courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, California.

In​ 1970, the artist formerly known as Judy Gerowitz renounced ‘all names imposed on her through male social dominance’ and became Judy Chicago, doing away with both her paternal and marital surnames. She pinned the announcement to the wall of her exhibition of...

‘Feminist art history is there to make trouble,’ Linda Nochlin once wrote. The hagiographic preservation of a debate about ‘greatness’ now fifty years old seems an odd way of doing justice to those troublemaking tendencies. Perhaps the real question is whether we still need to hold onto Nochlin’s question at all.