Research and Course Guides: Art and Design: Women in Art History

General Books and eBooks about Women and Art

The Devout Hand: Women, Virtue, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Italy by Patricia Rocco After the Counter-Reformation, the Papal State of Bologna became a hub for the flourishing of female artistic talent. The eighteenth-century biographer Luigi Crespi recorded over twenty-eight women artists working in the city, although many of these, until recently, were ignored by modern art criticism, despite the fame they attained during their lifetimes. What were the factors that contributed to Bologna's unique confluence of women with art, science, and religion? The Devout Hand explores the work of two generations of Italian women artists in Bologna, from Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614), whose career emerged during the aftermath of the Counter Reformation, to her brilliant successor, Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665), who organized the first school for women artists. Patricia Rocco further sheds light on Sirani's students and colleagues, including the little-known engraver Veronica Fontana and the innovative but understudied etcher Giuseppe Maria Mitelli. Combining analysis of iconography, patronage, gender, and reception studies, Rocco integrates painting, popular prints, book illustration, and embroidery to open a wider lens onto the relationship between women, virtue, and the visual arts during a period of religious crisis and reform. A reminder of the lasting power of images, The Devout Hand highlights women's active role in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Christian reform and artistic production.
ISBN: 9780773551381
Publication Date: 2017-11-29
Woman and Art in Early Modern Latin America by Kellen Kee McIntyre (Editor); Richard E. Phillips (Editor) This anthology centers on the visual representation of woman in early modern Latin America, that is, the social and cultural construction and definition of female identity as evidenced by the art document. Artists in this period were collectively aware of a vocabulary of gender that could be tailored to deliver varying messages about the position of women in vice regal culture and society. This volume is organized not in the predictable linear framework, by periods and centuries, but rather by the realization that throughout much of this period, Spanish authorities and others envisaged the Spanish colonies of the Americas in gendered terms. Proffered as the female body, the "New" (virginal by implication) World was at differing times adored, pursued, courted, seduced, defiled, exploited, reviled, and denounced by those (males) who encountered "her." This mentality is born out in the various forms of female representation that are discussed in this fully illustrated book. Contributors include: C. Cody Barteet, Mar a Elena Bernal-Garc a, Magali M. Carrera, Carol E. Damian, Carolyn Dean, Catherine R. DiCesare, Lori Boornazian Diel, Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Ray Hernandez-Duran, Andrea Lepage, Kellen Kee McIntyre, Penny Morrill, Elizabeth Q. Perry, Richard E. Phillips, Michael J. Schreffler, and Christopher C. Wilson. ERRATUM TO CHAPTER 7 Ray Hern ndez-Dur n, "El Encuentro de Cort s y Moctezuma: The Betrothal of Two Worlds in Eighteenth-Century New Spain" (pp. 181-206). On page 194, second paragraph, third sentence, should read: "Marina's absence in the encounter painting, where she normally mediates contact between the men, emphasizes the phallogocentric aspect of the historic meeting." The original phrasing, using the pivotal term, 'phallogocentric' (a reference to a gendered form of exchange or communication) was changed to 'phallus-centered, ' which not only alters a central idea in the argument, but actually has nothing to do with the image in question.
ISBN: 9789004153929
Publication Date: 2006-12-01
Women, Art, and Society by Whitney Chadwick Whitney Chadwick's acclaimed study challenges the assumption that great women artists are exceptions to the rule, who 'transcended' their sex to produce major works of art. While acknowledging the many women whose contribution to visual culture since the Middle Ages have often been neglected, Chadwick's survey amounts to much more than an alternative canon of women artists: it re-examines the works themselves and the ways in which they have been perceived as marginal, often in direct reference to gender. In her disussion of feminism and its influence on such a reappraisal, the author also addresses the closely related issues of ethnicity, class and sexuality. With a new preface and epilogue from an exciting new authority on the history of women artists, this revised edition continues the project of charting the evolution of feminist art history and pedagogy in recent years, revealing how artists have responded to new strategies of feminism for the current moment.
Call Number: N8354 .C48 2020
ISBN: 9780500204566
Publication Date: 2020-09-08
Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe by Melissa Hyde (Editor); Jennifer Milam (Editor) The eighteenth century is recognized as a complex period of dramatic epistemic shifts that would have profound effects on the modern world. Paradoxically, the art of the era continues to be a relatively neglected field within art history. While women's private lives, their involvement with cultural production, the project of Enlightenment, and the public sphere have been the subjects of ground-breaking historical and literary studies in recent decades, women's engagement with the arts remains one of the richest and most under-explored areas for scholarly investigation. This collection of new essays by specialist authors addresses women's activities as patrons and as "patronized" artists over the course of the century. It provides a much needed examination, with admirable breadth and variety, of women's artistic production and patronage during the eighteenth century. By opening up the specific problems and conflicts inherent in women's artistic involvements from the perspective of what was at stake for the eighteenth-century women themselves, it also acts as a corrective to the generalizing and stereotyping about the prominence of those women, which is too often present in current day literature. Some essays are concerned with how women's involvement in the arts allowed them to fashion identities for themselves (whether national, political, religious, intellectual, artistic, or gender-based) and how such self-fashioning in turn enabled them to negotiate or intervene in the public domains of culture and politics where "The Woman Question" was so hotly debated. Other essays examine how men's patronage of women also served as a vehicle for self-fashioning for both artist and sponsor. Artists and patrons discussed include: Carriera; Queen Lovisa Ulrike and Chardin; the Bourbon Princesses Mlle Clermont, Mme AdélaÃ¯de and Nattier; the Duchess of Osuna and Goya; Marie-Antoinette and Vigée-Lebrun; Labille-Guiard; Queen Carolina of Naples, Prince Stanislaus Poniatowski of Poland and Kauffman; David and his students, Mesdames Benoist, Lavoisier and Mongez.
ISBN: 9780754607106
Publication Date: 2003-11-28
Women Building History by Wanda Corn; Charlene Garfinkle (Contribution by); Annelise K. Madsen (Contribution by) This handsomely illustrated book is a welcome addition to the history of women during America's Gilded Age. Wanda M. Corn takes as her topic the grand neo-classical Woman's Building at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a structure celebrating modern woman's progress in education, arts, and sciences. Looking closely at the paintings and sculptures women artists made to decorate the structure, including the murals by Mary Cassatt and Mary MacMonnies, Corn uncovers an unspoken but consensual program to visualize a history of the female sex and promote an expansion of modern woman's opportunities. Beautifully written, with informative sidebars by Annelise K. Madsen and artist biographies by Charlene G. Garfinkle, this volume illuminates the originality of the public images female artists created in 1893 and inserts them into the complex discourse of fin de siècle woman's politics. The Woman's Building offered female artists an unprecedented opportunity to create public art and imagine an historical narrative that put women rather than men at its center.
ISBN: 9780520241114
Publication Date: 2011-03-08
Women Made Visible by Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda 2020 Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS) Book Prize In post-1968 Mexico a group of artists and feminist activists began to question how feminine bodies were visually constructed and politicized across media. Participation of women was increasing in the public sphere, and the exclusive emphasis on written culture was giving way to audio-visual communications. Motivated by a desire for self-representation both visually and in politics, female artists and activists transformed existing regimes of media and visuality. Women Made Visible by Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda uses a transnational and interdisciplinary lens to analyze the fundamental and overlooked role played by artists and feminist activists in changing the ways female bodies were viewed and appropriated. Through their concern for self-representation (both visually and in formal politics), these women played a crucial role in transforming existing regimes of media and visuality--increasingly important intellectual spheres of action. Foregrounding the work of female artists and their performative and visual, rather than written, interventions in urban space in Mexico City, Aceves Sepúlveda demonstrates that these women feminized Mexico's mediascapes and shaped the debates over the female body, gender difference, and sexual violence during the last decades of the twentieth century. Weaving together the practices of activists, filmmakers, visual artists, videographers, and photographers, Women Made Visible questions the disciplinary boundaries that have historically undermined the practices of female artists and activists and locates the development of Mexican second-wave feminism as a meaningful actor in the contested political spaces of the era, both in Mexico City and internationally.
ISBN: 9781496202031
Publication Date: 2019-04-01
Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century by Hilary Fraser This book sets out to correct received accounts of the emergence of art history as a masculine field. It investigates the importance of female writers from Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake and George Eliot to Alice Meynell, Vernon Lee and Michael Field in developing a discourse of art notable for its complexity and cultural power, its increasing professionalism and reach, and its integration with other discourses of modernity. Proposing a more flexible and inclusive model of what constitutes art historical writing, including fiction, poetry and travel literature, this book offers a radically revisionist account of the genealogy of a discipline and a profession. It shows how women experienced forms of professional exclusion that, whilst detrimental to their careers, could be aesthetically formative; how working from the margins of established institutional structures gave women the freedom to be audaciously experimental in their writing about art in ways that resonate with modern readers.
ISBN: 9781107075757
Publication Date: 2014-09-04

Featured Books and eBooks about Women in Ancient Art

I, Claudia by Diana E. Kleiner; Susan B. Matheson A comprehensive study of the lives of Roman women as revealed in Roman art. It concentrates on the evidence provided by portraits, reliefs, wall-paintings, architecture and decorative arts. The catalogue entries describe more than 180 works, and seven essays-by Natalie Kampen, Klaus Fitschen, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Susan Treggiari and others-discuss gender theory, portraits of empresses and princesses, the portrayal of women as goddesses and women's roles in society, the home, literature and artistic patronage.
Call Number: N5763 .I25 1996
ISBN: 0894670751
Publication Date: 1996-01-01
Women in the Ancient World by Jenifer Neils This book takes a fresh look at visual representations of women in the ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and analyzes them for indications of women's roles in these societies. After examining their traditional functions as wives and mothers, the author presents evidence of women's participation in the public and religious spheres. Juxtapositions comparing images and attitudes of each society reveal whether the women portrayed are meant to be examples of perfect femininity or the object of scorn, faithful wives or untouchable priestesses or high-living prostitutes. Depictions of goddesses and the dress and adornments of women are analyzed for what they divulge about ideals of feminine beauty and attitudes toward female nudity.  The text is packed with quotations from contemporary sources that reveal details about women in the ancient world, often with surprising resonance for our own time. The illustrations, many specially commissioned, include public art and domestic artifacts: sculptures, wall and mummy case paintings, engravings, silver objects, and jewelry.  
Call Number: HQ1127 .N45 2011
ISBN: 9781606060919
Publication Date: 2011-10-11

Featured Books and eBooks about Women in Medieval through 19th Century Art

Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens by J. Vanessa Lyon Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens argues that the Baroque painter, propagandist, and diplomat, Peter Paul Rubens, was not only aware of rapidly shifting religious and cultural attitudes toward women, but actively engaged in shaping them. Today, Rubens's paintings continue to be used -- and abused -- to prescribe and proscribe certain forms of femininity. Repositioning some of the artist's best-known works within seventeenth-century Catholic theology and female court culture, this book provides a feminist corrective to a body of art historical scholarship in which studies of gender and religion are often mutually exclusive. Moving chronologically through Rubens's lengthy career, the author shows that, in relation to the powerful women in his life, Rubens figured the female form as a transhistorical carrier of meaning whose devotional and rhetorical efficacy was heightened rather than diminished by notions of female difference and particularity.
ISBN: 9789462985513
Publication Date: 2020-07-15
Poussin's Women by Troy Thomas Poussin's Women: Sex and Gender in the Artist's Works examines the paintings and drawings of the well-known seventeenth-century French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) from a gender studies perspective, focusing on a critical analysis of his representations of women. The book's thematic chapters investigate Poussin's women in their roles as predators, as lustful or the objects of lust, as lovers, killers, victims, heroines, or models of virtue. Poussin's paintings reflect issues of gender within his social situation as he consciously or unconsciously articulated its conflicts and assumptions. A gender studies approach brings to light new critical insights that illuminate how the artist represented women, both positively and negatively, within the framework in his seventeenth-century culture. This book covers the artist's works from Classical mythology, Roman history, Tasso, and the Bible. It serves as a good overview of Poussin as an artist, discussing the latest research and including new interpretations of his major works.
ISBN: 9789048552382
Publication Date: 2020-08-11

Featured Books and eBooks about Women Artists

Berthe Morisot, the first lady of Impressionism by Margaret Shennan
Call Number: ND553.M88 S54 1996
ISBN: 075091226X
Publication Date: 1996
Elisabeth Vigee le Brun by Gita May The story of Marie Antoinette's portraitist, a remarkable woman living in dangerous times The foremost woman artist of her age, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755--1842) exerted her considerable charm to become the friend, and then official portraitist, of Marie Antoinette. Though profitable, this role made Vigée Le Brun a public and controversial figure, and in 1789 it precipitated her exile. In a Europe torn by strife and revolution, she nevertheless managed to thrive as an independent, self-supporting artist, doggedly setting up studios in Rome, Naples, Venice, Milan, Vienna, St. Petersburg, and London. Long overlooked or dismissed, Vigée Le Brun's portraits now hang in the Louvre, in a room of their own, as well as in all leading art museums of the world. This gripping biography tells the story of a singularly gifted and high-spirited woman during the revolutionary era and explores the development and significance of her art. The book also recounts the public and private lives of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, connecting  her with such personalities of her age as Catherine the Great, Napoleon, and Benjamin Franklin, and setting her experiences in the context of contemporary European politics and culture. A generous selection of illustrations, including sixteen of Vigée Le Brun's portraits presented in full color, completes this exceptional volume.
Call Number: ND553.V5325 M39 2005
ISBN: 0300108729
Publication Date: 2005-10-06
Frida Kahlo by María Hesse; Achy Obejas (Translator) One of the most important artists of the twentieth century and an icon of courageous womanhood, Frida Kahlo lives on in the public imagination, where her popularity shows no signs of waning. She is renowned for both her paintings and her personal story, which were equally filled with pain and anguish, celebration and life. Thousands of words, including her own, have been written about Kahlo, but only one previous biography has recorded her fascinating, difficult life. Frida Kahlo by María Hesse offers a highly unique way of getting to know the artist by presenting her life in graphic novel form, with striking illustrations that reimagine many of Kahlo's famous paintings. Originally published in Spanish in 2016, Frida Kahlo has already found an enthusiastic audience in the Spanish-speaking world, with some 20,000 copies sold in just a few months. This translation introduces English-language readers to Kahlo's life, from her childhood and the traumatic accident that would change her life and her artwork, to her complicated love for Diego Rivera and the fierce determination that drove her to become a major artist in her own right. María Hesse tells the story in a first-person narrative, which captures both the depths of Frida's suffering and her passion for art and life.
ISBN: 9781477317280
Publication Date: 2018-09-04
Georgia O'Keeffe by Charles C. Eldredge Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings - the exquisite recesses of flowers, the southwestern hills, clouds, and bleached bones, the sculptural abstract forms painted in strong, clear colours - are beloved by critics and public alike. This book examines O'Keeffe's life and work, focusing on the quintessential American qualities of her art and her idiosyncratic way of seeing.
Call Number: ND237.O5 A4 1993
ISBN: 0300055765
Publication Date: 1993-05-26
Lavinia Fontana’s Mythological Paintings: Art, Beauty, and Wisdom by Liana De Girolami Cheney This volume investigates emblematic and art-historical issues in Lavinia Fontana's mythological paintings. Fontana is the first female painter of the sixteenth century in Italy to depict female nudes, as well as mythological and emblematic paintings associated with concepts of beauty and wisdom. Her paintings reveal an appropriation of the antique, a fusion between patronage and culture, and a humanistic pursuit of Mannerist conceits. Fontana's secular imagery provides a challenging paragone with the male tradition of history painting during the sixteenth century and paves the way for new subjects to be depicted and interpreted by female painters of the seventeenth century.
ISBN: 9781527558274
Publication Date: 2020
The Life and Work of Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757) by Angela Oberer The Life and Work of Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757): The Queen of Pastel is the first extensive biographical narrative in English of Rosalba Carriera. It is also the first scholarly investigation of the external and internal factors that helped to create this female painter's unique career in eighteenth-century Europe. It documents the difficulties, complications, and consequences that arose then -- and can also arise today -- when a woman decides to become an independent artist. This book contributes a new, in-depth analysis of the interplay between society's expectations, generally accepted codices for gendered behaviour, and one single female painter's astute strategies for achieving success, as well as autonomy in her professional life as a famed artist. Some of the questions that the author raises are: How did Carriera manage to build up her career? How did she run her business and organize her own workshop? What kind of artist was Carriera? Finally, what do her self-portraits reveal in terms of self-enactment and possibly autobiographical turning points?
ISBN: 9789048541409
Publication Date: 2020-07-28
The Life Histories of Five Contemporary Welsh Women Artists by Penelope Collet Demonstrates the value and achievement of a group of artists who are usually neglected by art historians and critics because they are female. This book intends to make public the lives and works of women artists who have been little known because of marginalization due to gender.
ISBN: 9780773426672
Publication Date: 2012-08-19
Mary Cassatt by Judith Barter Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was one of the few women artists to have succeeded professionally in her era, and the only American invited to exhibit with the French Impressionists. Extensively illustrated with paintings, prints and pastels spanning Cassatt's whole career, this volume, published to accompany a travelling exhibition in the USA, contains essays which trace the artist's development from her early influences to her critical role in bringing Old Master and Impressionist art to the United States.
Call Number: N6537.C35 A4 1998
ISBN: 0810940892
Publication Date: 1998-10-15
Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe by Tanja L. Jones (Editor) This volume presents the first collection of essays dedicated to women as producers of visual and material culture in the Early Modern European courts, offering fresh insights into the careers of, among others, Caterina van Hemessen, Sofonisba Anguissola, Luisa Roldán, and Diana Mantuana. Also considered are groups of female makers, such as ladies-in-waiting at the seventeenth-century Medici court. Chapters address works by women who occupied a range of social and economic positions within and around the courts and across media, including paintings, sculpture, prints, and textiles. Both individually and collectively, the texts deepen understanding of the individual artists and courts highlighted and, more broadly, consider the variety of experiences of female makers across traditional geographic and chronological distinctions. The book is also accompanied by the Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts digital humanities project (www.globalmakers.ua.edu), extending and expanding the work begun here.
ISBN: 9789048540228
Publication Date: 2021-09-16
Women Artists of the Harlem Renaissance by Amy Helene Kirschke (Editor) Women artists of the Harlem Renaissance dealt with issues that were unique to both their gender and their race. They experienced racial prejudice, which limited their ability to obtain training and to be taken seriously as working artists. They also encountered prevailing sexism, often an even more serious barrier. Including seventy-two black-and-white illustrations, this book chronicles the challenges of women artists, who are in some cases unknown to the general public, and places their achievements in the artistic and cultural context of early twentieth-century America. Contributors to this first book on the women artists of the Harlem Renaissance proclaim the legacy of Edmonia Lewis, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Augusta Savage, Selma Burke, Elizabeth Prophet, Lois Maillou Jones, Elizabeth Catlett, and many other painters, sculptors, and printmakers. In a time of more rigid gender roles, women artists faced the added struggle of raising families and attempting to gain support and encouragement from their often-reluctant spouses in order to pursue their art. They also confronted the challenge of convincing their fellow male artists that they, too, should be seen as important contributors to the artistic innovation of the era.
ISBN: 9781628460346
Publication Date: 2014-08-04