On the Cover
Elizabeth Murray
Painter's Progress (1981)
oil on canvas, 19 panels, 9'8" x 7'9".
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Bernhill Fund and gift of Agnes Gund, 1983.
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PREVIOUS ISSUE
PARALLEL PERSPECTIVES
By Joan Marter and Margaret Barlow
PORTRAITS, ISSUES, AND INSIGHTS
LEE MILLER'S REVENGE ON CULTURE: PHOTOJOURNALISM, SURREALISM, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
By Caitlin S. Davis
THE ART OF HELEN LUNDEBERG: ILLUMINATING PORTRAITS
By Donna Stein
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE AND EMILY CARR: HEALTH, NATURE, AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS
By Sharyn R. Udall
WOMEN ARTISTS IN THE JAPANESE POSTWAR AVANT-GARDE: CELEBRATING A MULTIPLICITY
By Midori Yoshimoto
REVIEWS
Elizabeth Murray
BY ROBERT STORR
Reviewed by Corinne Robins
Joan Snyder
BY HAYDEN HERRERA, WITH JENNI SORKIN AND NORMAN L. KLEEBLATT
Reviewed by Cassandra Langer
Gender, Politics, and Allegory in the Art of Rubens
BY LISA ROSENTHAL
Reviewed by Lilian H. Zirpolo
American Women Modernists: The Legacy of Robert Henri, 1910-45
EDITED BY MARIAN E. WARDLE
Reviewed by Roberta K. Tarbell
Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York
BY MIDORI YOSHIMOTO
Reviewed by Karen Kurczynski
Louise Bourgeois
BY ROBERT STORR, PAULO HERKENHOFF, AND ALLAN SCHWARTZMAN
Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art
BY MIGNON NIXON
Louise Bourgeois' Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing
BY MIEKE BAL
Reviewed by Robert J. Belton
Lee Miller: A Life
BY CAROLYN BURKE
Reviewed by Lynda Hoffman-Jeep
Alice Aycock: Sculpture and Projects
BY ROBERT HOBBS
Reviewed by Christine Filippone
Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker
BY GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW
Reviewed by Jennifer Heusel
The Art of Rachel Whiteread
EDITED BY CHRIS TOWNSEND
Reviewed by Robin Rice
For WAJ , this is the 53rd issue, but for us, it is the first. With very different sets of skills and experiences, and with only a nodding acquaintance, we assumed the task of keeping WAJ afloat and on course. Although presented with more hurdles than expected, we have worked well together and believe this issue continues the journal's high standards.
Publication was slated to end last November, and all new submissions had been turned away for more than a year. We instantly began networking to attract authors and reviewers for our first issue and oversaw the naming of the new editorial board. The distinguished scholars who graciously agreed to serve are taking an active role in the jurying and selection of articles.
Inviting Ute Tellini to be our book review editor––to coordinate the complex task of selecting books and finding reviewers––was an inspired move. An art historian with a doctorate from Rutgers and a longtime contributor to WAJ , she quickly engaged authors for the dozen reviews of recent books included here.
By happenstance, the subjects in this first issue are mostly of the 20th century. In keeping with the journal's history, our interests encompass women artists and images of women from all ages, and we expect future issues to be more indicative of the breadth of women's participation in the history of art. However, even given their contemporaneity, the articles in this issue display geographical and topical variety.
Authors Sharyn Udall and Caitlin Davis write on familiar artists, but take a novel approach by exploring connections between their mental and physical states and the creative process. Udall writes on similarities in the way that the North American icons Georgia O'Keeffe and Emily Carr experienced bouts of depression. “In their work and in their words,” she writes, “lies evidence that both painters incorporated…imaginative body images, deeply entwined with illness, into the ongoing processes of identity formation and creativity.”
The model and photographer Lee Miller, best known for her collaborations with the Surrealist artist Man Ray in Paris, later took on the demanding role of war photojournalist. In examining Miller's photograph Revenge on Culture (1940), taken during the London Blitz, Caitlin Davis found some striking personal connections. According to Davis, “Miller's image of a ruined statue not only refers to the annihilation of a city and the attempted destruction of a civilization by the horrors of modern
warfare, but also contains more than one veiled reference to Miller herself.”
The aftermath and destruction of World War II brought about some positive changes for women in Japan, including their admission to the major art schools. Midori Yoshimoto describes a subsequent blossoming of avant-garde art that included dozens of women, whose work was gathered recently for a major exhibition in Japan. Here she highlights “just four of these extraordinary women––Saori Akutagawa, Mitsuko Tabe, Sayako Kishimoto, and Miyori Hayashi…to illuminate [their] striking multiplicity of content and styles.”
California modernist painter Helen Lundeberg traveled little and experienced the world of art through books, writes Donna Stein. Her intellectual approach to painting drew from across the art spectrum, from the Renaissance to Surrealism, and her “illuminating portraits,” including her well-known Double Portrait in Time (1935), capture not so much a particular life but “the stages and transitory nature of life,” writes Stein.
Most of the reviews are of monographs, some of them monumental, such as Robert Hobbs's Alice Aycock: Sculpture and Projects (reviewed by Christine Filippone). In two instances, the reviewers of major exhibition catalogues, Corinne Robins of Elizabeth Murray (by Robert Storr) and Cassandra Langer of Joan Snyder (by Hayden Herrera et al), also discuss related exhibitions, at the Museum of Modern Art and the Jewish
Museum, respectively. Robert Belton reviews “three reappraisals of [Louise] Bourgeois's life and work written from entirely different perspectives.” The books are Louise Bourgeois by Robert Storr, Paulo Herkenhoff, and Allan Schwartzman; Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art by Mignon Nixon; and Louise Bourgeois'Spider: The Architecture of Art Writing by Mieke Bal.
The subjects of monographs reviewed by Robin Rice and Jennifer Heusel also are well known, though their stories are far from complete. The books are, respectively, Chris Townsend's The Art of Rachel Whiteread and Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw's Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker .
Two of the reviews in this issue turned out to complement two of the articles: Karen Kurczynski's review of Midori Yoshimoto's Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York adds insights on several of the artists Yoshimoto discusses in her article, and Lynda Hoffman-Jeep's review of Carolyn Burke's Lee Miller: A Life fills in some details of Miller's life story.
The sole entry on an earlier century is Lilian Zirpolo's review of Gender, Politics, and Allegory in the Art of Rubens by Lisa Rosenthal. Here Zirpolo disputes the author's success in demonstrating that her new method of analysis can explain “the polyvalent meanings” regarding notions of gender and politics in Rubens's art.
Rescuing women artists from obscurity was a job undertaken by Marian Wardle in American Women Modernists: The Legacy of Robert Henri . The book's “brilliantly colored images of mostly unknown works by little known artists,” says reviewer Roberta Tarbell, will be “the most spectacular presentation ever of their work.” This rescue mission has been one focus of WAJ and will continue. In the future we will be publishing articles on women artists of all periods of art history, and giving attention to feminist interpretations of images of women.
We thank Founding Editor and Publisher Elsa Honig Fine for her excellent stewardship of WAJ , and her willingness to have the journal continued by new editors, a new publisher, and a new editorial board.
Joan Marter and Margaret Barlow
Published semiannually—May and November—since 1980, Woman's Art Journal continues to represent the interests of women and art worldwide. Our articles and reviews
cover all areas of women in the visual arts, from antiquity to the present day. Each issue presents current research on a variety of topics, featuring "portraits" of women artists, "issues and
insights," and discerning reviews of recent books and exhibition catalogues. Each article is well researched and clearly written. Our authors are international scholars in their fields. A typical
60-page issue contains 20-25 color plates and 25-35 black-and-white illustrations.
WAJ is indexed on all major art indexes and bibliographies, and is used as a supplementary text in many university courses on women and art. The journal is found in university and major
libraries worldwide and in selected museum bookshops, including the Metropolitan (New York), Philadelphia, and Nelson-Atkins (Kansas City), and the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington,
D.C.). The full text is also available in the electronic versions of the Art Index and through JSTOR’s Arts & Sciences III Collection.
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WAJ is available by subscription.