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15 books match the query 'Women in art'
Cassatt Reconsidered
Mary G. Morton
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 0
A sweeping reconsideration of the artist we thought we knew—and the forces that obscured her legacy.
Fiercely ambitious and independent, Mary Cassatt defied expectations to become one of the most radical artists of the Impressionist movement, though she was—and remains—the least understood. Cassatt commanded and manipulated strains of old master and contemporary painting to express her female subjectivity through a brilliantly modern oeuvre on par with those of the most revered Impressionists. However, mishandled by the Parisian art establishment during her lifetime, and later by art historians and curators, she became known almost exclusively as a sentimentalizing painter of mothers and children.
How did this happen to the most aspiring, revolutionary female artist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In Cassatt Reconsidered, author Mary G. Morton probes this central question and more, demonstrating how Cassatt disturbed conventional ideals of femininity, childhood, and maternity, an uncompromising feat for which she paid dearly during her lifetime and in the annals of art historiography.
Vibrantly illustrated with more than 100 images, Cassatt Reconsidered rewards readers with a fuller understanding of an artist who stands apart for daring to express, on her own terms, the unique, intimate experiences of modern women.
Figures of Speech
Men and Maidens in Ancient GreeceGloria Ferrari
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Ferrari begins by developing a theoretical perspective on visual representation, arguing that artistic images give us access to how their subjects were imagined rather than to the way they really were. For instance, Ferrari's examinations of the many representations of women working wool reveal that these images constitute powerful metaphors—metaphors, she argues, which both reflect and construct Greek conceptions of the ideal woman and her ideal behavior.
From this perspective, Ferrari studies a number of icons representing blameless femininity and ideal masculinity to reevaluate the rites of passage by which girls are made ready for marriage and boys become men. Representations of the nude male body in Archaic statues known as kouroi, for example, symbolize manhood itself and shed new light on the much-discussed institution of paiderastia. And, in Ferrari's hands, imagery equating maidens with arable land and buried treasure provides a fresh view of Greek ideas of matrimony.
Innovative, thought-provoking, and insightful throughout, Figures of Speech is a powerful demonstration of how the study of visual images as well as texts can reshape our understanding of ancient Greek culture.
Fuseli and the Modern Woman
Fashion, Fantasy, FetishismEdited by David Solkin
Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022
Best known for his notoriously provocative painting The Nightmare, Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) cultivated a reputation for eccentricity, with vividly stylized images of supernatural creatures, muscle-bound heroes, and damsels in distress. While these convinced some viewers of the greatness of his genius, others dismissed him as a charlatan, or as completely mad.
By bringing together more than fifty of his works, this volume offers unprecedented access to see one of the finest draftsmen of the Romantic period at his most innovative and exciting. Visitors to the show and readers of the lavishly illustrated catalog will further be invited to consider how Fuseli’s drawings of women, as products of the turbulent aftermath of the American and French Revolutions, speak to concerns about gender and sexuality that have never been more relevant than they are today.
The exhibition showcases drawings brought together from international collections, including the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand, and other European and North American institutions.
Hersilia's Sisters
Jacques-Louis David, Women, and the Emergence of Civil Society in Post-Revolution FranceNorman Bryson
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 0
In 1799, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) exhibited his Intervention of the Sabines, a history painting featuring the ancient heroine Hersilia, he added portraits of two contemporary women on either side of her—Henriette de Verninac, daughter of Charles-François Delacroix, minister of foreign affairs, and Juliette Récamier, a well-known and admired socialite. Drawing on many disciplines, Norman Bryson explains how such a combination of paintings could reveal the underlying nature of the Directoire, the period between the vicious and near-dictatorial Reign of Terror (1793–94) and the coup in 1799 that brought Napoleon to power.
Hersilia’s Sisters illuminates ways that cultural life and civil society were rebuilt during these years through an extraordinary efflorescence of women pioneers in every cultural domain—literature, the stage, opera, moral philosophy, political theory, painting, popular journalism, and fashion. Through a close examination of David’s work between The Intervention of the Sabines (begun in 1796) and Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (begun in 1800), Bryson explores how the flowering of women’s culture under the Directoire became a decisive influence on David’s art. With more than 150 illustrations, this book provides new and brilliant insight into this period that will captivate readers.
I Claudia II
Women in Roman Art and SocietyEdited by Diana E. E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson
University of Texas Press, 2000
I, Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome—an exhibition and catalog produced by the Yale University Art Gallery—provided the first comprehensive study of the lives of Roman women as revealed in Roman art. Responding to the popular success of the exhibit and catalog, Diana E. E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson here gather ten additional essays by specialists in art history, history, and papyrology to offer further reflections on women in Roman society based on the material evidence provided by art, archaeology, and ancient literary sources.
In addition to the editors, the contributors are Cornelius C. Vermeule, Rolf Winkes, Mary T. Boatwright, Susan Wood, Eve D'Ambra, Andrew Oliver, Diana Delia, and Ann Ellis Hanson. Their essays, illustrated with black-and-white photos of the art under discussion, treat such themes as mothers and sons, marriage and widowhood, aging, adornment, imperial portraiture, and patronage.
In the Crossfire of History
Women's War Resistance Discourse in the Global SouthLava Asaad
Rutgers University Press, 2022
The transformative mode of these examples expands the definition of heroism and defiance. To prevent these types of heroism from slipping into the abyss of history, this collection brings forth and celebrates women’s fortitude in conflict zones. In the Crossfire of History shines a light onwomen across the globe who are resisting the sociopolitical and economic injustices in their nation-states.
Junctures in Women's Leadership
The ArtsBrodsky, Judith K
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Amongst the women discussed are Bertha Honoré Palmer, Louise Noun, Samella Lewis, Julia Miles, Miriam Colón, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, Bernice Steinbaum, Anne d’Harnoncourt, Martha Wilson, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Kim Berman, Gilane Tawadros, Joanna Smith, and Veomanee Douangdala.
My Fair Ladies
Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial EvesWosk, Julie
Rutgers University Press, 2015
The fantasy of a male creator constructing his perfect woman dates back to the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. Yet as technology has advanced over the past century, the figure of the lifelike manmade woman has become nearly ubiquitous, popping up in everything from Bride of Frankenstein to Weird Science to The Stepford Wives. Now Julie Wosk takes us on a fascinating tour through this bevy of artificial women, revealing the array of cultural fantasies and fears they embody.
Our Lady Of Victorian Feminism
The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George EliotKimberly VanEsveld Adams
Ohio University Press, 2000
Our Lady of Victorian Feminism is about three nineteenth-century women, Protestants by background and feminists by conviction, who are curiously and crucially linked by their extensive use of the Madonna in arguments designed to empower women.
In the field of Victorian studies, few scholars have looked beyond the customary identification of the Christian Madonna with the Victorian feminine ideal—the domestic Madonna or the Angel in the House. Kimberly VanEsveld Adams shows, however, that these three Victorian writers made extensive use of the Madonna in feminist arguments. They were able to see this figure in new ways, freely appropriating the images of independent, powerful, and wise Virgin Mothers.
In addition to contributions in the fields of literary criticism, art history, and religious studies, Our Lady of Victorian Feminism places a needed emphasis on the connections between the intellectuals and the activists of the nineteenth-century women's movement. It also draws attention to an often neglected strain of feminist thought, essentialist feminism, which proclaimed sexual equality as well as difference, enabling the three writers to make one of their most radical arguments, that women and men are made in the image of the Virgin Mother and the Son, the two faces of the divine.
Picasso's Demoiselles
The Untold Origins of a Modern MasterpieceSuzanne Preston Blier
Duke University Press, 2019
Picturing Political Power
Images in the Women’s Suffrage MovementAllison K. Lange
University of Chicago Press, 2020
For as long as women have battled for equitable political representation in America, those battles have been defined by images—whether illustrations, engravings, photographs, or colorful chromolithograph posters. Some of these pictures have been flattering, many have been condescending, and others downright incendiary. They have drawn upon prevailing cultural ideas of women’s perceived roles and abilities and often have been circulated with pointedly political objectives.
Picturing Political Power offers perhaps the most comprehensive analysis yet of the connection between images, gender, and power. In this examination of the fights that led to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Allison K. Lange explores how suffragists pioneered one of the first extensive visual campaigns in modern American history. She shows how pictures, from early engravings and photographs to colorful posters, proved central to suffragists’ efforts to change expectations for women, fighting back against the accepted norms of their times. In seeking to transform notions of womanhood and win the right to vote, white suffragists emphasized the compatibility of voting and motherhood, while Sojourner Truth and other leading suffragists of color employed pictures to secure respect and authority. Picturing Political Power demonstrates the centrality of visual politics to American women’s campaigns throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing the power of images to change history.
Pin-Up Grrrls
Feminism, Sexuality, Popular CultureMaria Elena Buszek
Duke University Press, 2006
Beginning with the pin-up’s origins in mid-nineteenth-century carte-de-visite photographs of burlesque performers, Buszek explores how female sex symbols, including Adah Isaacs Menken and Lydia Thompson, fought to exert control over their own images. Buszek analyzes the evolution of the pin-up through the advent of the New Woman, the suffrage movement, fanzine photographs of early film stars, the Varga Girl illustrations that appeared in Esquire during World War II, the early years of Playboy magazine, and the recent revival of the genre in appropriations by third-wave feminist artists. A fascinating combination of art history and cultural history, Pin-Up Grrrls is the story of how women have publicly defined and represented their sexuality since the 1860s.
Sowing the Body
Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of WomenPage duBois
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Venus in Exile
The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century ArtWendy Steiner
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Willem de Kooning Nonstop
Cherchez la femmeRosalind E. Krauss
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Krauss demonstrates that contrary to popular conceptions of de Kooning as an artist who painted chaotically only to finish abruptly, he was in fact constantly reworking the same subject based on a compositional template. This template informed all of his art and included a three-part vertical structure; the projection of his male point of view into the painting or sculpture; and the near-universal inclusion of the female form, which was paired with her redoubled projection onto his work. Krauss identifies these elements throughout de Kooning’s oeuvre, even in his paintings of highways, boats, and landscapes: Woman is always there. A thought-provoking study by one of America’s greatest art critics, Willem de Kooning Nonstop revolutionizes our understanding of de Kooning and shows us what has always been hiding in plain sight in his work.