Arts
Abstract art was invented by a woman nobody knew
Hilma af Klint painted vast abstract canvases from 1906, years before Kandinsky. She left instructions that they not be shown for 20 years after her death, so the world found out late.
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A bus crash made Frida Kahlo a painter
Bedridden at 18 with a shattered spine, she had a mirror fixed above her bed and began painting herself. Of her 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits.
Women artists signed their work with men's names
Across Edo Japan and Renaissance Europe, women painted under fathers' or husbands' studio names, so much surviving art credited to men was partly or wholly made by women.
Maya Angelou did not speak for almost five years
After a childhood trauma she went mute, and spent those silent years reading everything she could. She emerged to become a poet who read at a presidential inauguration.
Zaha Hadid built for years without a single completed building
Her curving designs were called unbuildable and won competitions that were never realised. She became the first woman to win architecture's Pritzker Prize.
Coco Chanel made black the colour of style
Black was the colour of mourning until her 1926 little black dress. Vogue predicted it would become a uniform for women everywhere, and it did.
Josephine Baker was a wartime spy
The Paris stage star smuggled secrets for the French Resistance written in invisible ink on her sheet music, using her fame to pass through checkpoints unsearched.