On the Cover
Alice Neel
Mary D. Garrard (1977)
oil on canvas, 33 1/4" x 29 1/4".
Private collection.
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GUIDELINES
PREVIOUS ISSUE
PARALLEL PERSPECTIVES
By Joan Marter and Margaret Barlow
PORTRAITS, ISSUES, AND INSIGHTS
ALICE NEEL AND ME
By Mary D. Garrard
ALICE NEEL’S WOMEN FROM THE 1970S: BACKLASH TO FAST FORWARD
By Pamela Allara
ALICE NEEL AS AN ABSTRACT PAINTER
By Mira Schor
REVISITING WOMANHOUSE: WELCOME TO THE (DECONSTRUCTED) DOLLHOUSE
By Temma Balducci
NANCY SPERO’S MUSEUM INCURSIONS: ISIS ON THE THRESHOLD
By Deborah Frizzell
REVIEWS
Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism
EDITED BY NORMA BROUDE AND MARY D. GARRARD
Reviewed by Ute L. Tellini
The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies: Christine De Pizan’s Renaissance Legacy
BY SUSAN GROAG BELL
Reviewed by Laura Rinaldi Dufresne
Intrepid Women: Victorian Artists Travel
EDITED BY JORDANA POMEROY
Reviewed by Alicia Craig Faxon
Eve’s Daughter/Modern Woman: A Mural by Mary Cassatt
BY SALLY WEBSTER
Reviewed by Caroline I. Harris
Off the Pedestal: New Women in the Art of Homer, Chase, and Sargent
EDITED BY HOLLY PYNE CONNOR
Reviewed by Donna Gustafson
Framing Women
EDITED BY SANDRA CARROLL, BIRGIT PRETZSCH AND PETER WAGNER
Reviewed by Melissa Percival
Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné
BY BARBARA BUHLER LYNES
Reviewed by Sascha Scott
Women Potters, Transforming Traditions
BY MOIRA VINCENTELLI
Rustic Cubism, Anne Dangar and the Art Colony at Moly-Sabata
BY BRUCE ADAMS
Magdalene Odundo
EDITED BY ANTHONY SLAYTER-RALPH
Reviewed by Pamela H. Simpson
Wild Girls—Paris, Sappho & Art: The Lives & Loves of Natalie Barney & Romaine Brooks
BY DIANA SOUHAMI
Reviewed by Cassandra Langer
My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Curator
BY KATHARINE KUH
Reviewed by Karen Bearor
Tina Modotti & Edward Weston: The Mexico Years
BY SARAH M. LOWE
Tina Modotti
BY MARGARET HOOKS
Reviewed by Robin Rice
Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa 1910-1994
EDITED BY MARION ARNOLD AND BRENDA SCHMAHMANN
Reviewed by Elizabeth Rankin
Dialogues: Women Artists From Ireland
BY KATY DEEPWELL
Reviewed by Patricia Briggs
While planning this Fall/Winter issue, we were aware that this is a special moment for commemorating the history of the feminist art movement. This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the groundbreaking exhibition “Women Artists 1550-1950,” co-curated by Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin. Also Douglass College at Rutgers University is celebrating the thirty-fifth anniversary of its Women Artists Series, which created early solo exhibition opportunities for women artists. Next March, The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, which will house a permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, opens at the Brooklyn Museum with “Global Feminisms,” an international exhibition of contemporary women artists. Among other museum offerings across the country will be the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles’s “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution.” With this issue, we intend to contribute to this celebration of feminist art.
Mary Garrard is one of the outstanding scholars who helped bring feminist methodologies to art history. In addition to her groundbreaking books on Renaissance and Baroque topics, she and Norma Broude have assembled several anthologies of feminist scholarship, the latest of which, Reclaiming Female Agency, “focuses on women who have exercised agency as artists, patrons, viewers, and tastemakers,” writes reviewer Ute Tellini. In a more unusual role––as a portrait subject––Garrard graces our cover, as an accompaniment to her fascinating account of having Alice Neel paint her portrait. Acluster of articles on Neel also features essays by Pamela Allara, who argues that “Neel was more radical in questioning … ‘what is a woman’ than many feminists in the early 1970s,” and Mira Schor, who documents her belief that Neel “is a great abstract painter!” The articles are based on presentations last year for a Neel symposium at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Neel “lived by her feminism,” writes Garrard, “by her insistent nose-thumbing of convention and her outlandish defiance of rules for women.”
In the beginning, there was Womanhouse, and Temma Balducci describes ways in which this revolutionary 1972 California project “helped lay the groundwork for the exploration of gender construction through parody and exaggeration that continues to be important for feminist art.” Change was in the air on the East Coast as well, thanks to artist-activists like Nancy Spero, and according to Deborah Frizzell, the archetypal images in Spero’s 2003 Hymn to Isis project continue themes that the artist originated in the early 1970s. She describes how Spero “mined the full range of power relations as depicted in centuries of patriarchal representations of women set against a foreground of transformed, ancient matriarchal symbols.”
Many names reappear throughout this issue chronicling the numerous interconnections among feminist artists and scholars. Mentioned often is the prolific and influential art historian Arlene Raven, whose death at age 62 in early August saddened several generations of feminists who relied on her incisive critical writings and passionate support for the causes of women artists.
Our large crop of reviews reflects the wide range of recent publications that confirm feminist thinking is no recent invention. Six hundred years ago, Christine de Pizan was celebrating the accomplishments of women in her City of Ladies, and reviewer Laura Dufresne Rinaldi calls Susan Groag Bell’s account of her search for remnants of the tapestries based on that 1405 book “as exciting as a good mystery novel.”
Jordana Pomeroy’s Intrepid Women: Victorian Women Travel describes how nineteenth-century women writers and artists “overturned stereotypes of timidity, domesticity and limited opportunities for their sex,” writes reviewer Alicia Craig Faxon. These adventurers exemplified the spirit of the New Woman, whose image as recorded by leading male artists is the subject of an exhibition and catalogue prepared by Holly Pyne Connor and reviewed here by Donna Gustafson. Reviewer Caroline Harris observes that Sally Webster, in her book on Mary Cassatt’s Modern Woman mural for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, points out how the artist—not known for her feminist views—apparently comments on women’s education by subverting the traditional story of Eve’s temptation to portray the generous sharing of knowledge among women. The shifting ways in which women are defined, or “framed,” in particular during two radically different periods—the Enlightenment and Postmodernist—are discussed by Melissa Perival in her review of Framing Women, a collection of essays.
The recent Georgia O’Keeffe catalogue raisonné, prepared by Barbara Buhler Lynes, is notable for maintaining its focus on the art, rather than the life, of this American legend, writes reviewer Sascha Scott. In looking back on her own interesting life in My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Curator, Katharine Kuh “enlists the reader as a watercooler confidant” as she details her experiences with famous artists and “breathes life into our mental images of them,” writes reviewer Karen Bearor. Diana Souhami’s account of the decidedly “Wild Girls” on the other side of the Atlantic that gathered in Paris around Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks during the interwar years is reviewed by Cassandra Langer.
Pamela Simpson looks at three books on women pottery makers that could not be more diverse: Moira Vincentelli’s world tour of women potters; Bruce Adams’s monumental study of Cubist ceramic artist Anne Dangar; and Anthony Slayter-Ralph’s monograph featuring the sensational contemporary work of Magdalene Odundo. The brief but brilliant career of the photographer Tina Modotti is illuminated in two volumes reviewed by Robin Rice.
Two surveys round out the reviews. Elizabeth Rankin discusses Between Union and Liberation: Women in South Africa 1910-1994, a collection of essays edited by Marion Arnold and Brenda Schmahmann from a postmodern, postapartheid perspective. Finally, Patricia Briggs reviews Dialogues: Women Artists from Ireland, in which Katy Deepwell records and illustrates her in-depth interviews with sixteen artists whose progressive work in the 1990s broke with the traditional “romantic stereotypes of Irishness.”
We have been encouraged by your reception of the “new” Woman’s Art Journal, and we extend our thanks to our authors, reviewers and subscribers for your continued support.
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.
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