Published in 2013 (first published 1982)
224 pages
Rozsika Parker (1945-2010) published widely in Art History and Psychoanalysis. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine first appeared in 1984. Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence was published in 1995. She and Griselda Pollock together wrote Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981) and edited Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-1985 (1987).
Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and, since 2001, Director, Centre CATH (Cultural Analysis, Theory & History) at the University of Leeds, UK. Known for her critical interventions in feminist, social, Jewish and postcolonial studies in art’s histories, her work ranges from nineteenth and twentieth century fields to that of contemporary art and cinema, museum studies and cultural theory. Her publications include Old Mistresses, Vision and Difference, Avant-Garde Gambits, Generations and Geographies, and Differencing the Canon.
What is this book about?
How was it possible, by the later twentieth century, to have erased women as artists from art history so comprehensively that the idea of ‘the artist’ was exclusively masculine? Why was this erasure more radical in the twentieth century than ever before? Why is everything that compromises greatness in art coded as ‘feminine’? Has the feminist critique of Art History yet effected real change?
With a new Preface by Griselda Pollock, this new edition of a truly groundbreaking book offers a radical challenge to a women-free Art History. Parker and Pollock’s critique of Art History’s sexism leads to expanded, inclusive readings of the art of the past. They demonstrate how the changing historical social realities of gender relations and women artists’ translation of gendered conditions into their works provide keys to novel understandings of why we might study the art of the past. They go further to show how such knowledge enables us to understand art by contemporary artists who are women and can contribute to the changing self-perception and creative work of artists today.
