Singular Women: Writing the Artist

by Kristen Frederickson, Sarah E. Webb (Editor)

In this groundbreaking volume, contemporary art historians―all of them women―probe the dilemmas and complexities of writing about the woman artist, past and present. Singular Women proposes a new feminist investigation of the history of art by considering how a historian's theoretical approach affects the way in which research progresses and stories are told. These thirteen essays on specific artists, from the Renaissance to the present day, address their work and history to examine how each has been inserted into or left out of the history of art. The authors go beyond an analysis of the past to propose new strategies for considering the contributions of women to the visual arts, strategies that take into account the idiosyncratic, personal, and limited rhetoric that confines all writers.

Genres: Art

Paperback

First published February 2, 2003

Reviews

[Bops · Rating 2 out of 5]

Published in 1996, inspired by a CAA panel this book is geared toward internal debates in the feminist art history world. There is much discussion devoted to the reworking, or reposition the artist monograph into a feminist space, or at least not a masculinist space and way too many mentions of the collective authors' dissertations. Overall it was repetitive, or more generously underlines a specific self-reflective moment in contemporary discourse. But there are a few moments including "A Light in the Galaxy: Judith Leyster" by the amazingly named Firma Fox Hofrichter and "So, What are you working on?" Categorizing the exceptional woman" by Mary D. Sheriff. Sheriff's chapter reminds me of slightly uncomfortable discussion of Lee Krasner by Anne Wagner in " Three Artist (Three Women). How do Feminist historians position the traitor, the artist who is so resolutely playing to the patriarchy? I was shocked to learn that the Whitney Museum of American Art destroyed much of Jo Hopper's work, considering it trash compared to her husband's. The volume also includes many mentions of the process of writing art historical texts, which when handled by a genuinely good writer were engaging, but in the hands of many of these authors seemed like self-aggrandizement.

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Art and Feminisim in the mid 1990's