Singular Women: Writing the Artist (BFI Modern Classics) [Paperback]

Kristen Frederickson (Editor), Sarah E. Webb (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520231651 | ISBN-13: 978-0520231658 | Publication Date: March 4, 2003 | Edition: 1st Printing

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A who's who of feminist work from the Renaissance to the present. . . .After organizing a panel on feminist art history in 1996, the coeditors spent the next seven years on this volume and ended up such close friends that the two now 'finish each other's sentences.'"--ARTnews -- Review

From the Inside Flap

"An interesting and original collection. A must for all those interested in women artists and the women who have written about them."--Linda Nochlin, author of Representing Women

"Kristen Frederickson and Sarah Webb have provided us with a missing link, a truly feminist art history that connects with the work done in the 1970s and thankfully ignores the 'post-feminist' hiatus. Singular Women is a model for future scholarship on women's art. If only the books it inspires are as rigorous, vigorous, varied, and readable as this one."--Lucy Lippard, author of The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on Art

"The most provocative, challenging, and intimate writing to appear in feminist art history since Linda Nochlin launched the field with her essay 'Why Are There No Great Women Artists?' Thirty years later there are both great women artists and great women writers. This book assembles some of the best and boldest among them. Not afraid to address the boring, the failed, the neglected, or the masterpiece, Singular Women sets the standard for feminist art history of the twenty-first century."--Peggy Phelan, author of the survey essay in Art and Feminism, ed. Helena Reckitt

"This important volume addresses the vexed question whether the traditional monograph, rightly under suspicion in recent years, can be reinvented to serve feminist art history well. Its excellent--and varied--essays answer with a confident and convincing affirmative, demonstrating how we can talk about women's art practice without abandoning the biographical and social stories that enable and illuminate it."--Janet Wolff, author of Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism

"Contributes new understandings to the now familiar problems of writing biographies of artists and, in particular, writing about a woman artist. It re-inscribes the woman artist in the discourse while probing--through a variety of approaches--the possibilities for a critical discourse on and appreciation of the woman artist."--Catherine M. Soussloff, author of The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept

"Demonstrates how women historians have had to develop close relationships (real or imagined) with the artists about whom they write. The reader is allowed to see the desire that constitutes, but is normally hidden within, the writing of history."--Jane Blocker, author of Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile

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Product Details

• Paperback: 278 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1st Printing edition (March 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520231651
• ISBN-13: 978-0520231658
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,134,632 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So inspiring!, February 3, 2004

By 

Beverly Wallace (Colorado Springs, CO, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Singular Women: Writing the Artist (Hardcover)

I have been a painter since the 1960s. As a contemporary female artist, it is so important to learn about the struggles so many female artists have experienced, and this book showed me how artists were able to be noticed and admired, throughout history. The various essays have many different voices, and the introduction really set the tone for a very readable but informative book. I highly recommend it!

5.0 out of 5 stars Singular Women: How do we study them?, May 28, 2011

By 

Emilie Esther Ann Schnabel - See all my reviews

This review is from: Singular Women: Writing the Artist (BFI Modern Classics) (Paperback)

Well-written, interesting content. Introduction points out the differing strategies and ideas discussed in essays about how women artists have been portrayed and how they ought to be in the future. Why does art done by male artists traditionally get looked at objectively as art, whereas art done by female artists is rarely examined without being explained or contextualized by the female artist's personal life or male artists they are associated with? The book also examines in depth, from multiple angles, the burning question of whether or not the monograph is an applicable format for studying the female artist.