Coco Chanel was born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel on August 19, 1883, in Saumur, France. Her early years were anything but glamorous. At age 12, after her mother died, Chanel was taken to an orphanage by her father, who worked as a street vendor. Chanel was raised by nuns who taught her to sew, a skill that would lead to her life's work. Her nickname comes from another occupation entirely. During her brief singing career, Chanel performed at clubs in Vichy and Moulins, where she was called "Coco." S...

Barbara Hepworth studied sculpture at the Royal College of Art along with Henry Moore. In 1928, Hepworth and Moore, along with her friend and fellow artist Richard Bedford, became the leaders of this new method of direct carving sculpture. In 1932, she and her then-husband Ben Nicholson mounted a sculpture exhibition declaring their move to abstraction and joined the group, Abstraction-Création, and became the driving force behind constructivism. When World War II hit London, Hepworth escaped t...

In 1925, The New York Times called Jane Peterson "one of the first ladies painters" in the city. She rose to conspicuousness during the American Impressionist time frame yet often acquired from the other craftsmanship developments preparing in the twentieth century. This early acknowledgment would slowly blur, eclipsed by Modernism. It took an age of women's activists during the 1960s and 70s to take Peterson back to the spotlight. Frequently depicted as "certain, free, and enormously capable,...