The iconic Mexican painter – best known for her confronting self-portraits – was born, lived, and died in La Casa Azul. From there she received a rotating cast of fellow wealthy bohemian artists and intellectuals, as well as her neighbour Leon Trotsky, who often came round for a chat at the yellow kitchen table.

Today the house holds paintings by the artist and her partner, as well as the art, sculpture, photos, documents, books, and furnishings that Kahlo surrounded herself with for inspiration.

Käthe Kollwitz’s profound etchings and drawings of the cruelties of 20th-century working-class living were mostly made from her Berlin studio-home. When it was bombed in the Second World War, the artist was invited to live in two rooms at the Rüdenhof by one of its residents, Ida Countess of Münster. The hunting estate – a manor house on a castle pond – previously housed a menagerie of creatures collected on colonial expeditions by various rulers, and was sheltering war refugees at the time Kollwitz lived there.

She would spend less than a year at the house, eventually dying there unexpectedly in 1945. It had already been decided that the place would become a memorial to her life and work – today you can explore seven rooms of her artworks, photographs, diary excerpts and letters (and then visit the castle nearby, if you fancy). You can see Käthe Kollwitz’s work in Making Modernism.

The pioneering American artist, who devoted her practice to the New Mexico landscape, bought this sprawling hill-top site from the Catholic Church in 1945. Over the next four years, her friend Maria Chabot restored the ruined buildings using a combination of local Native American and Spanish Colonial building styles, adapted to incorporate the huge windows that O‘Keeffe had her heart set on (understandably given the views!). Aware of the atom-bomb testing sites nearby, they also added an underground shelter.

O‘Keeffe furnished the adobe mud-brick structures with mid-century modern pieces, decorated with her treasured rocks and skulls, and made good use of the local community’s acequia irrigation system to cultivate a garden full of food. She spent decades at Abiquiú, nestled among the rivers, canyons, and desert landscape that inspired so much of her art-making.

Clementine Hunter first picked up a paintbrush in her 50s, when she found a set left behind at the plantation-turned-artist-colony where she worked as a housemaid and cotton-picker. She painted on any objects she could get her hands on – including window blinds, old cardboard, jugs, and gourds.

Her whole life was spent among the Creole and African American communities in Cane River country, many descended from enslaved people, and this was the world she drew in her huge vibrant murals: working the fields, gathering pecans, washing clothes, dancing at honkey-tonks, and celebrating baptisms and funerals. She worked from a small cabin next to the Big House, where many art collectors came knocking as her work gained notoriety nation-wide. Today her vibrant murals fill many of the plantation’s larger, grander walls.

“The house seems full of young people in very high spirits, laughing a great deal at their own jokes … lying about in the garden which is simply a dithering blaze of flowers and butterflies and apples”, wrote painter Vanessa Bell in 1936. She had become a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernism, captivating the art world with her endless experiments in abstraction and colour.

Bell moved into Charleston in 1916, accompanied by her lover Duncan Grant, and his lover David ‘Bunny’ Garnett. They quickly made the place their own, painting every wall, door, fireplace, fabric, and ceramic in their distinctive styles.

Life at the Sussex farmhouse was the trio’s attempt to escape the conventions of their wealthy Edwardian backgrounds and forge a different way of being. The “young people” that filled the house were some of the century’s most radical artists, writers and thinkers – many part of the Bloomsbury Group – and included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Vita Sackville-West (whose house you can also visit down the road from Charleston).

Tucked away in a market town in southern Germany, and purchased in 1909 with inheritance from her parents, Gabriele Münter’s house was a formative locus of inspiration, conversation, and organisation for avant-garde artists of the day. Her innovative painting practice had put her at the centre of German Expressionism, and of a group loosely known as Der Blaue Reiter, which also included Marianne von Werefkin, Alexej von Jawlensky, and Wassily Kandinsky.

She spent decades of her life at the Münter-Haus, often painting the home, nearby castle, lakes and mountains in increasingly abstract and dynamic styles. When the Nazi Party became intent on destroying “degenerate art”, Münter was able to preserve many Blaue Reiter artworks in the house’s basement.

You can see Münter’s work in Making Modernism until 12 February 2023.

“It is completely perfect for me”, wrote Barbara Hepworth the year she bought her seaside home in 1949. The Wakefield-born sculptor’s artworks and ambitions soon grew to such a scale that she had to raise the height of her studio doors, and eventually buy the site opposite the house – Palais de Danse, a former cinema and dance hall.

She spent 26 years at Trewyn, until she died on the premises in a fire caused by one of her cigarettes. Today you can find over 30 of her works installed throughout the home – the most you can find permanently displayed anywhere. They’re nestled among a well-loved garden, a living room exactly as she left it, and a fully equipped workshop only missing its artist.

To nose around this former fisherman’s homestead, you’ll need to don special padded slippers that preserve the paint splatters on the floor of the legendary artists’ studio. It was home to the restlessly inventive Abstract Expressionist painter Lee Krasner, and her artist husband Jackson Pollock, who bought it with a loan from art dealer Peggy Guggenheim.

Tucked at the tip of Long Island, overlooking Accabonac Creek, the house was the couple’s attempt to get away from the chaos of NYC, where Pollock’s drinking and behaviour was debilitating. But rural life came with challenges of its own – Krasner said “it was hell, to put it mildly, for me” – the house didn’t have plumbing or central heating til several years after they moved.

Despite being a professional artist herself, Krasner worked from her upstairs bedroom studio, with canvases small enough to fit on a bedside table. After her husband died in 1956, she moved into the huge barn studio he’d been using, and her paintings expanded to the breathtaking scale and vitality she’s known for today.

Discover the trailblazing women hidden from the history of 20th-century Modernism.

Making Modernism is the first major UK exhibition devoted to pioneering women working in Germany in the early 1900s: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kӓthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin.