Published in 2020
224 pages
6 hours and 52 minutes
Catherine McCormack is an art historian, author and independent curator. She has a PhD from University College London where she has worked as a Teaching Fellow and is currently a consultant lecturer at Sotheby’s Institite of Art where she founded the Women and Art study programme. Her written work has been published in international exhibition catalogues and academic journals as well as The Architectural Review and Harper’s Bazaar and as an educator she has taught and led talks at all of London’s major museums. In 2019 she wrote The Art of Looking Up.
What is this book about?
A bold reconsideration of women in art – from the ‘Old Masters’ to the posts of Instagram influencers
A perfect pin-up, a damsel in distress, a saintly mother, a femme fatale …
Women’s identity has long been stifled by a limited set of archetypes, found everywhere in pictures from art history’s classics to advertising, while women artists have been overlooked and held back from shaping more empowering roles.
In this impassioned book, art historian Catherine McCormack asks us to look again at what these images have told us to value, opening up our most loved images – from those of Titian and Botticelli to Picasso and the Pre-Raphaelites. She also shows us how women artists – from Berthe Morisot to Beyonce, Judy Chicago to Kara Walker – have offered us new ways of thinking about women’s identity, sexuality, race and power.
Women in the Picture gives us new ways of seeing the art of the past and the familiar images of today so that we might free women from these restrictive roles and embrace the breadth of women’s vision.
