Written by In this monthly blog, I’ll share select highlights from WAJ ’s stack of new books awaiting review.
Does a title in this list catch your interest? Would you be receptive to reviewing it for us? Please let me know at apoe@womansartjournal.org. If the book is a good fit, I’ll ask the publisher to ship you a complimentary hard copy, and your review will appear in an upcoming WAJ issue.
Happy reading!
Alison Poe, PhD
WAJ Book Reviews Editor
These books on Expressionism might lend themselves well to a double review, but a review of just one would also be fine:
Shulamith Behr, Woman Artists in Expressionism: From Empire to Emancipation (Princeton University Press, November 2022). “Explores the richness of women’s engagement in, and the shaping of, Expressionism” (viii), with reconsiderations of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Marianne Werefkin, Gabriele Münter, Nell Walden, Jacoba van Heemskerck, and other European avant-garde women artists, dealers, and patrons.
Ingrid Pfeiffer, ed., Paula Modersohn-Becker (Hirmer, February 2022). The catalogue of last year’s retrospective of the artist at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt.
If your research employs a wide-angle lens, consider reviewing one of these recent exhibition catalogues, each on a panoply of women artists:
Andrea Karnes, ed., with contributions by Emma Amos, Faith Ringgold, Lorna Simpson, and S. Janelle Montgomery. Women Painting Women (DelMonico Books; DAP/ArtBook, May 2022). From the Modern Art Museum at Fort Worth, a treatment of nearly 50 international 20th- and 21st-century woman painters and their innovative approaches to the female subject and to the genre of portraiture.
Elisabeth Hodermarsky, Helen A. Cooper, Linda Konheim Kramer, and Marta Kuzma, On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale (Yale University Press, October 2021). Essays on the history of women in the Yale School of Art (formerly the School of the Fine Arts) and catalogue entries for 79 women who studied there from the 1880s through 2011, including Sheila Hicks, Eva Hesse, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Howardena Pindell, Lisa Yuskavage, Rina Banerjee, Mickalene Thomas, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby.
This American sculptor (1945–1999) was also one of the subjects of Stephanie Sparling Williams’s article in the WAJ Fall/Winter 2021-22 issue:
Horace D. Ballard, ed., with contributions by Eve Biddle, Zoe Dobuler, and Sarah Montross, Mary Ann Unger: To Shape a Moon from Bone (Williams College Museum of Art, August 2022). This catalogue of an exhibition at Williams last year sheds greater light on the artist’s monumental, sinuous abstract sculptures and related works on paper.