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Women Artists and Modernism
Manufacturer: Manchester University Press
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ASIN: 0719050820 |
Book Description
Women Artists and Modernism is an anthology of new essays on women artists in the twentieth century. Katy Deepwell introduces the volume with an examination of the developments and methodologies within feminist art history and an outline of the broader connections between the issues by the individual essays. The contributors take a woman artist or group of women as a case study and, and using examples from their lives and work, explore and question the interpretations of women and modernism/modernity. The contributors are women art historians, academics and art theorists from America, Canada and Britain.
Book Description
Early American modernist art has been defined for decades by a narrow range of works by almost entirely male New York-based artists in the circles of Alfred Stieglitz and Walter Arensberg. Typically, Georgia O'Keeffe is the solitary acknowledged exception to these male-dominated modernist circles. But, Marian Wardle and the contributors to this long-overdue collection issue a powerful challenge to this narrow view. They reveal that scores of women artists of the period produced works that were significant, influential, and indubitably modern.
All the women considered in this study were once the art students of the popular and perhaps most influential American art teacher of the twentieth century, Robert Henri (1865-1929). Henri encouraged an art that was expressive of personal emotions and experience and that was grounded in life. He preached equality among different media and approaches to art. Giving heed to his teachings, his women students engaged in a wide variety of artistic production. Collectively, the stunning variety and power of their work in painting, sculpture, printmaking, textiles, decorative arts, and furniture broadens our understanding of American modernism and illuminates the role of women artists in shaping it. Yet, these women have remained largely unstudied, and virtually unknown, even among art historians.
The seven new essays included in this volume move beyond the famed Ashcan School—the small group of Henri's male students who worked in a narrow range of urban realist subjects—to recover the lesser known work of his women students. The contributors, who include well-known scholars of art history, American studies, and cultural studies demonstrate how these women participated in the "modernizing" of women's roles during this era; how gender controlled their art, productivity, sales, and reception; how their many styles, media, and subjects enrich our understanding of modern American art; and how the work of modern women artists relates to women's involvement in other areas of modern American society and culture, including labor and social reform, patronage, literature, dance, and music.
Lavishly illustrated and complemented by short biographies of more than 400 of Henri's students, this delightful collection adds a long-ignored but deserving dimension to an expanded story of American modernism and to women's contributions to the arts. "Long overdue, this richly documented book restores the female presence in early twentieth-century American art, design, and craft. Brava to all the contributors for their mighty labors in the archives and museum collections."—Wanda M. Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin professor in art history, Stanford University
"An interesting and important contribution to our understanding of the roles of Robert Henri's women students in reshaping the meaning of the modern in American visual culture."—Whitney Chadwick, Professor of Art History, San Francisco State University
Customer Reviews:
A Definitive and Long Overdue Book on American Women Artists.......2006-01-18
It is very much to the credit of the young art museum at Brigham Young University that they are publishing such fine catalogues that not only enhance the Museum's large collection, but serve to fill voids in the compendium of art literature. This superb catalogue, edited by Marian Wardle, gives evidence of the vision of Campbell B. Gray, the Director of the Museum: his presence is palpable and promises a strong commitment to the art world.
Aptly subtitled 'The Legacy of Robert Henri, 1910 - 1945' this collection of works by women artists reflects the emphasis of the great teacher on the modernist perceptions of his pupils. The names of the artists sadly are not household names, but after reading and viewing this fine book it is embarassing to admit that fact. This is not an overview of 'lesser art' championing a feminist movement: this is an investigation into the art of women artists whose work is informed by their state of being women with all the powerful inferences that suggests.
Wisely, this catalogue is lead by essays written by contemporary women in the arts. Editor Wardle introduces the précis in 'Thoroughly Modern: The "New Women" Art Students of Robert Henri'; Sarah Burns offers 'fabricating the Modern: Women in Design'; Helen Langa writes 'American Women Printmakers: Adventurous Choices, Modernist Innovations'; Betsy Fahlman essays 'The Art Spirit in the Classroom: Educating the Modern Woman Artist'; Erika Doss offers 'Complicating Modernism: Issues of Liberation and Constraint among the Women Art Students of Robert Henri'; Gwendolyn Owens contributes 'Hidden Histories: Robert Henri's Female Students and the Market for American Art'; and finally Lois Palken Rudnick concludes the book with 'Modernizing Women: The New Woman and American Modernism'.
A broad spectrum of information, this: an even broader exposure to the visuals about which they write!
The photographs, which accompany the texts in appropriate places, create a sense of history that will be difficult to match in other books about this interesting subject. But the overwhelming part of the book is the art itself. These are paintings and prints of astonishingly fine quality, works that vie equally with those of men artists from this period. The reader makes refreshing discoveries on almost every page to the point of putting the Brigham Young University Art Museum on the travel itinerary for art lovers. And as with any exceptional, scholarly book there is a complete 'Artists' Biographies' section at the back of the book, a very fine compilation by Stephanie Andrews McNairy. This is an historically important, aesthetically rewarding book that deserves a large audience. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, January 06
Beautiful and Informative !!!.......2005-09-03
American Women Modernists...was stunningly beautiful, and contains fresh information, including many illustrations, about a long over-looked topic.
I particularly liked the extensive listing of "Artists' Biographies", and the very helpful "Notes sections. The nine-page Bibliography is an excellent resource for those of us interested in learning about so many talented contributors to American art.
A "must-read" for all art collectors!
Book Description
Peggy Guggenheim emerges in Mistress of Modernism as the ultimate self-invented woman, a cultural mover and shaker who broke away from her poor-little-rich-girl origins to shape a life for herself as the enfant terrible of the art world. Peggy's visionary Art of This Century gallery in New York, which brought together the European surrealist artists with the American abstract expressionists, was an epoch-shaking "happening" at the center of its time. Dearborn's unprecedented access to the Guggenheim family, friends, and papers contributes rich insight to Peggy's traumatic childhood in German-Jewish "Our Crowd" New York, her self-education in the ways of art and artists, her caustic battles with other art-collecting Guggenheims, and her legendary sexual appetites: her lovers included Max Ernst, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Duchamp, to name a mere few. Here too is a poignant portrait of Peggy's last years as l'ultima dogaressa -- the last duchess -- in her palazzo in Venice, where her collection still draws thousands of visitors every year. Mistress of Modernism is the first definitive biography of a woman whose wit, passion, and provocative legacy come compellingly to life.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent writing and research........2006-10-16
I became interested in reading about Peggy Guggenheim when I visited her museum in Venice last spring. It was one of the highlights of my trip.
Mary Dearborn did an excellent job. However, I found Peggy Guggenheim's life pathetic. She was a completely selfish person and an unimaginably awful mother. My heart went out to her children. Her childhood was not ideal, but certainly not so bad that she couldn't avoid winning the worst semi-wealthy mother of the century.
The author gets 4 stars. Peggy Guggenheim gets minus 10,000 stars.
A Well Written Story of a Fascinating Person.......2006-06-30
Peggy Guggenheim brought abstract expression to the forefront of the art world. Behind the scenes, Guggenheim led a torrid, Bohemian existence, unrestrained by middle class conventions. Mary V. Dearborn captures the essense of of Peggy against the back drop of the art she helped to promote.
Well written, easily readable, and thoroughly researched. Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim is a must read for anyone who loves art, or just loves to read a good biography.
Wealth sanitizes trashy behavior.......2004-11-27
I had eagerly awaited this book because I had been disappointed in Guggenheim's own CONFESSIONS OF AN ART ADDICT. I wanted a book that didn't skip over some obvious issues, like the reasons for the multiple marriages and a daughter's suicide. I was not disappointed in Mary V. Dearborn's MISTRESS OF MODERNISM. Dearborn delivers a warts-and-all biography that is nonetheless sympathetic, and extremely readable. I read this book quickly even though I put it down often to think about the implications of what I had just read.
Can one have too much money? As I read this book I wondered if Peggy might have been happier if she had had to work for a living. As Dearborn points out, Peggy was a "poor" Guggenheim whose fortune was only a fraction of her Uncle Sol's. The bohemian crowd that Peggy wanted to be a part of assumed that Peggy's fortune was far larger than it actually was. As a result, she had the reputation of being a cheapskate even though she supported a handful of people she was not even related to until they died. (This list would include Djuna Barnes, ex-husbands and ex-husbands' previous wives and widows, etc.) She also subsidized a lot of other people at various times on a temporary basis. The people in this milieu seem to have had extremely poor parenting skills. Peggy and her sisters spent their childhood virtually segregated from adults. Could that be why she and her surviving sister were such poor mothers? Peggy's son grew up to be an ambitionless playboy and her daughter Pegeen committed suicide. Peggy's sister murdered her own two small sons by pitching them off a balcony. She got away with it. Peggy, her sister and her daughter were promiscuous and seemingly had voracious sexual appetites. What set them apart from their peers was that Peggy and Pegeen were open about their affairs. Peggy practically advertised hers with the publication of her autobiography OUT OF THIS CENTURY and scandalized New York society. (This book explains that CONFESSIONS OF AN ART ADDICT is an extremely expurgated and revised version of OUT OF THIS CENTURY that Peggy put together years later. It deals only with Guggenheim's career as a collector. I would now love to get my hands on the original OUT OF THIS CENTURY!) Yet, through it all Peggy seems to have had very little self esteem. The men she was involved with were often physically abusive. There was a streak of masochism in her. (Was this a generational attitude? Peggy's friend Emily (whom she supported) admitted in her diary that she herself enjoyed being beaten.) I came away with the impression that Peggy was basically a bland person who just wanted to be loved. She never knew whether she was really loved or whether people just loved her money.
This book is very well written and presents brief, vivid minibiographies of virtually the entire dramatis personae. It has made me curious to see the work of the artists that Peggy promoted. This book tells an important part of the story of American art in the 20th Century. Those with an interest in this subject will want to read this book as soon as possible. I would especially recommend MISTRESS OF MODERNISM to anyone who has visited Peggy's museum in Venice or who is planning to visit there.
The Artful Biography.......2004-11-01
I didn't realize when I picked this up that I'd be reading about Nazi interrogations, the anarchist Emma Goldman, rescuing Jewish artists from Vichy France, and cultural politics during the Cold War. Quite a life.
There are two really illuminating things about this book: First, it provides a great travelogue of the avant-garde cultural scene in the 1920s and 1930s, which Peggy seemed to be acquainted with every crack and corner of; second, it gives a first-hand view of how that scene was distilled into the post-war art world of New York. Peggy had a crucial role in creating the love-it-or-hate-it art business we know today - in fact, by the mid-50s it had got a bit too rich even for her!
I have to say I didn't know much about Peggy Guggenheim before I read this book. I learned a lot about her and about the constellation of artists she patronized, encouraged, and helped raise to prominence. There's plenty of good gossip here, about Max Ernst (her second husband), Samuel Beckett (who she had a torrid affair with), Yves Tanguey, etc., but also some splendid cultural history. The appendix is almost worth the price of admission: Even by the standards of the time, I think, Peggy was paying pocket money for some of the 20th century's greatest works of art! Dearborn reprints some of the records from Peggy's gallery, and it's enough to make you drool!
It's possible to argue that Peggy was just in the right place at the right time, but Dearborn makes a good argument that she was a lot more than that. Very interesting and liberated woman who was misunderstood a lot in her time and even after her death, but who changed art history.
great social history and biography.......2004-10-22
I have read Mary Dearborn's books on Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. I was impressed with the scope of her research, her analysis of her subjects' psyches, and her ability to place her subjects in the popular and high culture of their times. Mistress of Modernism is this kind of work. Jackson Pollack's critics, Emma Goldman's friendship, Laurence Vail's superficially affable responses to life, Djuna Barnes' literary contacts, Peggy in Paris, and Peggy in Venice are all treated in this way. In choosing Peggy Guggenheim as a subject, Dearborn knew that a story with many dramatic moments was possible. She tells it in a way that is not only entertaining and surprizing, but in a way that truly memorializes her subject.
Book Description
This opulently illustrated book reveals how Alfred Stieglitz's search for a pure, essential "woman in art" led him to several women before his vision found ultimate expression in Georgia O'Keeffe, whom Stieglitz portrayed as the shining, liberated feminine figure of his movement. Modernism and the Feminine Voice explores a group of extraordinary women who developed their voices through an affiliation with the Stieglitz circle--Gertrude Käsebier, Pamela Colman Smith, Anne Brigman, and Katharine Nash Rhoades--and shows how these artists helped define the woman modernist through their lives and their individual photographs and paintings. Profoundly revising Stieglitz's story of the woman modernist as embodied in the person and imagery of Georgia O'Keeffe, this pioneering book demonstrates that O'Keeffe was one voice among several which deserve recognition as the vanguard of American modernism. Kathleen Pyne adds fascinating but overlooked material to the history of modernism in New York with this book, which accompanies a major exhibition of the artists' works.
In contrast to previous views of O'Keeffe's self-identity as that of either a forceful, hard-working professional or a strong, erotically charged woman, Pyne posits a new theory, that O'Keeffe had a secret self-identity that was indebted to Stieglitz's notion of the feminine voice as intuitive and childlike yet resistant to his eroticizing. While Stieglitz succeeded in canonizing O'Keeffe as the lone woman artist of modernism in New York, he based his image of O'Keeffe as the ideal woman on the contributions of the earlier women photographers and painters explored here. With abundant illustrations and detailed discussions of each artist's work, this engrossing book argues convincingly that O'Keeffe was not the only woman artist in the Stieglitz circle worthy of our contemplation.
Book Description
This original and sharply obser-vant book gives new significance to three important figures in the history of twentieth-century art: Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Anne Wagner looks at their imagery and careers, relating their work to three decisive moments in the history of American modernism: the avant-garde of the 1920s, the New York School of the 1940s and 1950s, and the modernist redefinition undertaken in the 1960s. Their artistic contributions were invaluable, Wagner demonstrates, as well as hard-won. She also shows that the fact that these artists were women--the main element linking the three--is as much the index of difference among their art and experience as it is a passkey to what they share.
Customer Reviews:
inviting but not satisfying.......2002-08-09
I picked up this book after seeing the Hesse retrospective in San Francisco. Although it provides a lot of useful background, the reading the art are somehow too pat. I guess it is a problem to always refer to the artist's life, however fascinating, to explain their work? And the 'feminist' framework did seem forced -- the photos were very suggestive but the author seemed afraid to really go for it. Why is so much academic writing afraid to make a strong argument or provocative, unexpected analysis?
Insightful, scholarly, and accessible.......2000-12-18
One is reluctant to criticize the reviews of other customers, yet the two reviews prior to mine attempt to force upon Wagner's book both an historical framework and a point of view that are outside of her intended goal. If one reads the book for what it is, one finds a work of analytical insight, scholarship, humanity, and understanding of historical context. Enjoy it, savor it, reflect upon it!
well-reviewed feminist art criticism.......1999-09-26
Everyone who reviewed it seemed to love this overview of the careers of 3 artists: Krasner, Hesse. It's a fun read, with great photos, but I wish art historians would start to see there's more to the sixties than Hesse: what about Agnes Martin, Lee Bontecou, Yoko Ono, Alison Knowles, and all the rest??
Wagner wants to be a good feminist, but ultimately, her approach is surprisingly traditional: canonical figures, marriage plot, sticks to the US, the known and alrady successful. Wants to avoid being "radical" or disturbing at all costs.
disappointing account of three artists.......1999-09-26
Wagner presents 3 kay artists but her analysis is thin -- after 200+ pages, we get to the conclusion that "altho gender doesn't entirely determine our lives, it does inflect them..." or something like that. Seems to be totally unaware of feminist work on modernism in other fields (ie lit, film) and never questions the whole "marriage" (heterosexuality) framework she sets up. As a trade press book, it'd be fine, but as a university press book -- seems thin, uninformed.
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Irene Rice Pereira: Her Paintings and Philosophy (American Studies Series)
Karen A. Bearor
Manufacturer: University of Texas Press
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ASIN: 0292738587 |
Book Description
Artist Irene Rice Pereira was a significant figure in the New York art world of the 1930s and 1940s, who shared an interest in Jungianism with the better-known Abstract Expressionists and with various women artists and writers seeking "archetypal" imagery. Yet her artistic philosophy and innovative imagery elude easy classification with her artistic contemporaries. In consequence, her work is rarely included in studies of the period and is almost unknown to the general public. This first intellectual history of the artist and her work seeks to change that. Karen A. Bearor thoroughly re-creates the artistic and philosophical milieu that nourished Pereira's work. She examines the options available to Pereira as a woman artist in the first half of the twentieth century and explores how she used those options to contribute to the development of modernism in the United States. Bearor traces Pereira's interest in the ideas of major thinkers of the period--among them, Spengler, Jung, Einstein, Cassirer, and Dewey--and shows how Pereira incorporated their ideas into her art. And she demonstrates how Pereira's quest to understand something of the nature of ultimate reality led her from an early utopianism to a later interest in spiritualism and the occult. This lively intellectual history amplifies our knowledge of a time of creative ferment in American art and society. It will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in the modernist period.
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The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars
Manufacturer: Rutgers University Press
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Paris France
ASIN: 0813532922 |
Book Description
Between the two world wars, Paris served as the setting for unparalleled freedom for expatriate as well as native-born French women, who enjoyed unprecedented access to education and opportunities to participate in public, artistic and intellectual life. Many of these women--including Colette, Tamara de Lempicka, Sonia Delaunay, Djuna Barnes, Augusta Savage, and Lee Miller--made lasting contributions to art and literature.
In this book, an internationally recognized roster of art historians, literary critics, and other scholars offers a nuanced portrait of what it meant to be a modern woman during this decisive period of modernism's development. Individual essays explore the challenges faced by women in the early decades of the twentieth century, as well as the strategies these women deployed to create their art and to build meaningful lives and careers. The introduction underscores the importance of the contributors' efforts to address larger questions about modernity, sexuality, race, and class.
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Women Artists and the Decorative Arts, 1880-1935: The Gender of Ornament
Manufacturer: Ashgate Publishing
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ASIN: 0754605965 |
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We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism
Marsha Meskimmon
Manufacturer: University of California Press
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ASIN: 0520221346 |
Book Description
Marsha Meskimmon furnishes a fresh perspective on the art of women in the Weimar Republic and in the process reclaims the lost history of a number of artists who have not received adequate attention--not only because they were women but also because they continued to align themselves with the modes of realistic representation the Expressionists regarded as reactionary. Reconsidering the traditional definitions of German modernism and its central issues of race politics, eugenics, and the city, Meskimmon explores the structures that marginalized the work of little known artists such as Lotte Laserstein, Jeanne Mammen, Gerta Overbeck and Grete Jurgens. She shows how these women's personal and professional experiences in the 1920s and 1930s relate to the visual imagery produced at that time. She also examines representations of different female roles--prostitute, mother, housewife, the "New Woman" and "garçonne"--that attracted the attention of these artists. Situating her exploration on a strong theoretical base, she ranges deftly over mass visual culture--from film to poster art and advertising--to create a vivid portrait of women living and creating in Weimar Germany.
Customer Reviews:
Forgotten History.......2000-04-14
The years between the two World Wars in Germany were marked by a degree of turmoil in the nation's politics, economics and culture that was unprecedented at the time and remains unmatched to this day in the rest of Western European and American history. Unlike the 1960s, when social movements took place against a background of affluence, the rampant inflation and unemployment of the Weimar Republic meant there was no security whatsoever to counterbalance the tremendous changes penetrating to every corner of society. Everything which had once been fixed and solid became fluid and insubstantial; in Marx's words,"All that is solid melts into air". Gender roles in particular, which until that time had been enshrined as a kind of divine division of labour, were transformed from institutions into issues. Language lagged behind the pace of change: thus, that new breed of woman who cut her hair, played sport, took a job and followed fashion was simply called "die neue Frau". Similarly, the name garçonne was borrowed from French to describe the androgynous young city-dweller who made no secret of her bi- or homosexuality. The garçonne and the "neue Frau",while not strictly new in the sense of never having existed before, did attain a new level of visibility in public life and the mass media in the 1920s and 1930s. More often than not, they existed in combination with, rather than opposition to, traditional roles such as the mother, the Hausfrau and the prostitute. In Marsha Meskimmon's book We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and The Limits of German Modernism, she explores the ways in which women perpetuated, refigured and fought against roles both old and new. Women artists occupied a unique position in the Weimar era. The nature of their work - painting or drawing in a studio, not employed as a sales assistant in a shop or a labourer in a factory - placed them at the borders between public and private, bourgeois and proletarian. While this ambiguity gave them more freedom to occupy numerous identities (wife, artist, mother) simultaneously, it also made their status more tenuous. Those married to male artists were sometimes able to negotiate an egalitarian partnership, but more often than not wives were overshadowed by their husbands and, in the case of Marta Hegemann and Anton Räderscheidt, sometimes even abandoned by them. As many of the women artists Meskimmon discusses were politically active - they were generally committed Socialists or Communists - their work featured realistic scenes of unemployment lines and hungry children gazing into gleaming shop windows, as well as satirical family portraits which mocked the bourgeois ideal of domesticity. Realism was not considered avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s, however, and their work was classified as "women's art": hence painter Gerta Overbeck's lament that lends the book its title, "We weren't modern enough". During their lifetimes, many women artists supported themselves by drawing illustrations for children's books (this at least seemed "natural"). After their deaths, their work remained in the hands of their families or a handful of private collectors, mostly in Germany. With the exception of Käthe Kollwitz, who is not profiled in this book, most women artists of the era never found commercial success, and their names are forgotten today: Grethe Jürgens, Jeanne Mammon, Lou Albert-Lasard, Lotte Laserstein. By documenting this part of history generally omitted in favour of folklore about the Weimar Republic's leading male figures, Meskimmon contributes a great deal to our understanding of the period as well as women's ongoing struggle for equality and recognition. However, it is unfortunate that her book takes such a fascinating subject and renders it stiff and awkward in academic jargon. All too often, Meskimmon uses words such as "alterity", "polyvocality", and "located subject", when a less scholarly turn of phrase would convey the same idea in a more immediate way. In her attempt to resurrect the histories of artists who were written out of the canon because they were women, Meskimmon's gender-studies idiom runs the risk of condemning them to yet another special-interest ghetto. Nevertheless, by detailing the many identities which women chose and rejected in the Weimar era, Meskimmon reveals these artists as women who made their lives on their own terms.
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Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (Im) Positionings (Impositionings)
B. J. Elliott
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0415053668 |
Book Description
In this beautifully illustrated and provocative study, Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace reassess women's literary and artistic contribution to modernism. Deploying the work of Pierre Bourdieu to identify the cultural field of modernist production, Elliot and Wallace disclose the modernism, emphasizing the avant-gardist symbolics of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, the professionalism of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, and the construction of female genius by Gertrude Stein and Maurie Laurencin. Closely and carefully attending to the particularistic and, at times, highly self-conscious constructions of the identity of women artists, Elliot and Wallace survey the various possibilities and constraints of interpellation, the cultural logics of their positions, as well as their relations vis-a-vis male artists.
Not simply a study of the cultural field of modernism, this text provides a trenchant and compelling look at the way disciplines, such as English Literature and Art History, are implicitly and insiduously instituted through their location of the formal qualities of the objects of cultural study. Breaking the divisions which pervade most of the major scholarship on the period,
Women Artists and Writers provides a critical and interdisciplinary intervention in and around the field of modernist cultural production.
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