German artist Lesser Ury was one of the earliest painters to make modern Berlin itself a major subject, and this picture shows why. Rather than describing every detail, he paints the city as sensation with damp air, passing traffic, fleeting encounters, and elegance amid transience. A broad Berlin avenue opens in a haze of pale light and wet air. Bare dark trees rise along both sides of the street. Horse-drawn cabs move along the roadway, their forms softened by mist and quick brushwork. On the sidewalks, pedestrians appear only in flashes of clothing. Near the front, two young women stand out from the muted city around them. They are fashionably dressed, slim and walking side by side with silhouettes sharper than the rest. Ury pulls the eye toward them with small but deliberate accents of red—one woman’s dress, the other’s lips ... so that they are almost like sparks inside a gray-brown atmosphere. The architecture behind them feels stately but softened, less a mapped location than a remembered impression of the Charlottenburg district in motion. The women are not incidental. They are the compositional and emotional center, embodiments of urban visibility, fashion, and self-presentation. The older horse cabs and classical façades suggest a city suspended between eras, where tradition and modern life overlap on the same street. Born into a Jewish family in Prussia and based for most of his career in Berlin, Ury became known for atmospheric views of cafés, rain-slicked streets, and city light. Here, late in his life, he turns Berlin into both theater and weather as an urban stage where women moving through public space become signs of speed, modernity, and the fleeting glamour of the metropolis. Ury died in 1931 before the Nazi era and World War II. Unfortunately, much of his work was later lost or destroyed under the Third Reich.

“Berliner Straßenszene (Berlin Street Scene)" by Lesser Ury (German) - Oil on canvas / 1921 - Ben Uri Art Museum (London, England) #WomenInArt #LesserUry #Ury #BenUri #CityScene #ModernLife #art #artText #kunst #art #GermanArtist #Berlin #GermanModernism #WeimarArt #GermanArt #JewishArtist #1920sArt

Two chorus dancers appear in close profile against a nearly black background, cropped at the chest so the eye goes first to their faces rather than to performance or costume. The woman in front closes her eyes, her expression tired, inward, almost private. Both wear translucent pink hats and matching pink stage dresses; their short bobbed hair, pale skin, sharply drawn noses, and vivid red lipstick stand out with theatrical clarity. Their shoulders angle in the same direction, but they do not read as identical showgirls. Instead, each face feels distinct, alert to a different emotional register. The picture is intimate rather than expansive because there is no stage set, no audience, and no spectacle of legs or motion. What remains is the pause between performances, when glamour slips and personhood returns. That shift is the painting’s quiet power. In Weimar Berlin, revue performers were often presented as decorative types, symbols of nightlife, modernity, and erotic display. German artist Jeanne Mammen, herself a famously independent artist and a keen observer of urban women, resists that flattening. Here she redirects attention from entertainment to exhaustion and from fantasy to labor. The Museum of Modern Art (Berlinische Galerie) in Berlin notes that the front figure carries Mammen’s own features and the second resembles her sister Mimi, which makes the image feel even more layered. This is not just a scene of performers, but a subtle meditation on self-projection, family resemblance, and the masks women were asked to wear in modern 1920s European city life. Instead of selling glitter, the painting reveals the human cost beneath it. The result is tender, unsparing, and deeply modern.

“Revuegirls” by Jeanne Mammen (German) - Oil on cardboard / 1928-1929 - Berlinische Galerie (Berlin, Germany) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomenArtists #JeanneMammen #Mammen #BerlinischeGalerie #NeueSachlichkeit #art #artText #kunst #arte #GermanArtist #WomenPaintingWomen #WeimarArt #GermanArt #1920sArt

The title suggests emotional ease, but American artist Maxfield Parrish makes contentment feel constructed as much as felt. By 1927, he was one of the most famous image-makers in the United States, celebrated for painstaking technique, glowing layered color, and scenes that could move easily between fine art and mass reproduction. This picture belongs to his well-known “girls on rocks” era, a formula that became enormously popular through commercial commissions, including an Edison Mazda calendar. Two young women sit close together on a sunlit rocky ledge in a dreamlike landscape. The woman at left sits higher, her body turned three-quarters toward us, one knee drawn up and loosely encircled by her arms. Her other leg extends downward over the rock face, her bare foot suspended in open air. Her draped garment is warm brown with violet undertones, catching amber light across the shoulder and thigh. She has light skin and softly waved golden hair. She glances down at a second young woman beside her who has fair skin and darker brown hair and sits lower on the ledge in a pale lilac-pink dress. She leans slightly forward and tilts her face toward the sun, creating a quiet moment of each witnessing beauty. Behind them rises a massive field of deep violet shadow, broken only at the top by distant blue and rose-tinted mountains. Parrish paints the stone in glowing oranges, mauves, and purples, so that the figures seem held between warmth and coolness plus nearness and distance so nothing interrupts the mood. The painting sits between fantasy and advertising as well as intimacy and design. The women are calm, but they are also arranged with precision to become emblems of serenity in a modern visual marketplace hungry for beauty, light, and escape. Parrish’s gift was to make artifice feel effortless. The result is both tender and slightly unreal with companionship as atmosphere, leisure as ideal, and femininity transformed into a radiant, collectible dream.

“Contentment” by Maxfield Parrish (American) - Oil on masonite / 1927 - National Museum of American Illustration (Newport, Rhode Island) #WomenInArt #MaxfieldParrish #Parrish #MaxParrish #NMAI #NationalMuseumofAmericanIllustration #arte #art #artText #AmericanArtist #AmericanArt #1920sArt

Two women sit on a deep window ledge, shown in profile against a dreamlike view of Córdoba, Spain. At right, a dark-haired young woman in working-class dress folds her legs beneath her and raises a tarot card for the other to see. At left, her companion leans back with a long, elegant neck, heavy-lidded eyes, and a face turned inward with melancholy. Their bodies are close, but their moods do not meet. The fortune-teller seems alert, almost sly. The other woman appears distant, absorbed by private sorrow. Spanish artist Julio Romero de Torres stages them with velvety skin, dark hair, and sculptural stillness, setting their figures against a city assembled like emotional theater. In the middle distance, another tiny drama unfolds: a woman seems to reach toward a man as if trying to stop him, while farther back a red-shawled figure lingers in a doorway. The whole scene feels paused between prophecy and aftermath. Romero de Torres was already a celebrated painter by 1920, known for images of women that fused Andalusian identity, symbolism, desire, and unease. Here, he turns card-reading into a meditation on love’s imbalance. The cards are not light entertainment, but are a warning. The museum’s interpretation links the painting to sadness, indifference, and dangers of loving a married man, with the secondary scene acting almost like a cinematic flash of the story behind the sitter’s stress. The layered storytelling matters. the picture is not simply about “fortune” but about emotional knowledge, especially the kind women are left to carry, intuit, and survive. Romero de Torres often used paired women to suggest dualities like sacred and profane, innocence and experience, or hope and resignation. In this work, the contrast is quieter and more human: one woman reads signs, the other lives their consequences. The invented yet recognizable Córdoba behind them turns private heartbreak into civic myth, making female feeling the true monument at the center of the canvas.

“La Buenaventura (The Fortune-telling)" by Julio Romero de Torres (Spanish) - Oil on canvas / 1920 - Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga (Málaga, Spain) #WomenInArt #JulioRomeroDeTorres #RomeroDeTorres #MuseoCarmenThyssenMalaga #arte #BlueskyArt #artText #spanishartist #SpanishArt #FortuneTelling #1920sArt

Canadian artist Prudence Heward turns a familiar social scene into something psychologically charged. A pair of women are not decorative accessories on a gentleman’s evening out. They occupy public space on their own terms. That matters in 1928. The theatre becomes a modern arena of female independence, spectatorship, and self-possession, where women go not only to watch but also to be visible. Two young women sit side by side before a performance begins, seen from just behind, as if we occupy a row directly behind them. Their bare upper backs and necks catch a soft, creamy light that stands out against the dark theatre. Both wear black evening dresses cut low across the shoulders. The woman at left has a smooth, simple back, while the woman at right wears a dress with a sheer patterned panel that curls across the fabric in pale loops. Their chestnut-brown hair is parted and gathered into low, polished buns. The woman on the right turns slightly, her cheek and nose visible in profile as she holds a white program in one hand. Around them, other audience members dissolve into shadowy shapes. Deep red seat backs curve across the foreground with a midnight-blue garment partially over the right seat, while cool blue-gray walls rise in broad vertical bands on the stage. The museum notes that the sitters may be Marion and Elizabeth Robertson, the sisters of Beaver Hall Group artist Sarah Robertson, which adds an intimate, almost insider quality to the scene. Heward had returned from Paris only a short time earlier and was developing the bold, sculptural style that would make her one of Canada’s most incisive painters of women. Contemporary critics reduced the picture to “a study of décolleté,” but another praised its “originality” and “vigour.” That tension is still the point. The painting acknowledges the social gaze, yet refuses to flatten these women into spectacle. They feel alert, self-contained, and modern to be present in the crowd, but not absorbed by it.

“At the Theatre” by Prudence Heward (Canadian) - Oil on canvas / 1928 - Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Montreal, Québec) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #PrudenceHeward #Heward #MontrealMuseumOfFineArts #art #arttext #WomenPaintingWomen #arte #CanadianArt #1920sArt #CanadianArtist

“Dancing at the New Carlton Café in Shanghai"
#gin #dancing #1920sArt #jazzmusic #jazzart #nightlife #jazz

This woodblock print by Japanese artist Yamamura Kōka (山村耕花) is important not only for its glamour but for what it represents in Japanese modern art. It is widely regarded as one of the earliest … and often described as the first … shin-hanga (新版画) images of the moga (モガ), or “modern girl”: who were urban, fashionable, socially visible, and shaped by new forms of leisure. Rather than an older idealized bijinga type, these women occupy a cosmopolitan public world of nightlife, performance, and looking. Two women sit at a round white-clothed café table in the foreground, watching a line of dancers beyond. At left, a pale-skinned woman with a sleek auburn bob leans her chin on her hand. Her peach-pink dress slips off one shoulder, and a vivid red shawl patterned with large flowers spills across her lap. At right, another woman sits with her back partly turned, wearing a sleeveless black dress covered in blue, coral, and cream floral forms. She wears a bright red cloche hat decorated with flowers and holds an open fan edged in peacock colors. On the table are a pair of stemmed cocktail glasses. In the background, four women dance with almost unseen men. Each woman dances with her back to us and with raised arms beneath tall blue arches. Their bobbed hair, sleeveless dresses, and rhythmic poses give the scene an airy, stylish energy. Yamamura flattens space into soft blue and cream planes, using elegant contour and decorative pattern to make the room feel modern, theatrical, and sophisticated. Shanghai matters here. By placing the scene in the New Carlton Café, Yamamura presents the city as a 1920s international contact zone where Japanese print design, Western-style dance culture, and Art Deco sensibility meet. Better known for actor prints, he turns instead to women whose poise and independence signal a changing era. The result is both elegant and quietly radical with beauty redefined through modern motion, public pleasure, and female presence.

“踊り上海ニューカールトン所見” (“Dancing at the New Carlton Café in Shanghai”) by 山村耕花 / Yamamura Kōka (Japanese) - Woodblock print on paper / 1924 - Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) #WomenInArt #YamamuraKoka #山村耕花 #CarnegieMuseumOfArt #artText #JapaneseArtist #Shinhanga #新版画 #Moga #モガ #1920sArt

Happy #Catterday!
Lotte Laserstein (German/Swedish, 1898 - 1993) • Self-Portrait with a Cat • 1928 #art #fineart #painting #LotteLaserstein #WomanArtist #1920sArt #20thCenturyGermanArt #CatsInPaintings #cats #Self-Portrait #NewObjectivityMovement #GermanArtist #WomenInTheArts #Art&Culture

Happy #Caterday!
Suzanne Valadon (French, 1865-1938) • Raminou sitting on a cloth • 1920
#art #ArtHistory #SuzanneValadon #WomanArtist #ArtHerstory #WomenInArtHistory #ModernArt #PostImpressionism #painting #cats #OilPainting #PetPortrait #artwork #1920sArt #FrenchArtist