“If I really am so good,” said the fearless and licentious Italian artist Carol Rama in 1983, “then I don’t get why I had to starve so long, even if I am a woman.” Her first show, in 1945, was shuttered by the Turin police before it even opened, and for decades after, her erotic watercolors and rubber-slicked abstractions were appreciated by only a few. Some great artists wait their whole lives for recognition. Some female artists have to wait even longer.