From Library Journal
This beautiful, oversize, and especially well-crafted volume surveys women artists from the Middle Ages through the present. A chronological summary by Barlow, associate editor of the Women's Art Journal, touches on nearly 300 painters and sculptors--whose works are then highlighted by the 281 large, high-quality color plates making up the bulk of the book. Geared to those unfamiliar with the subject, this study is not path-breaking but will, as Barlow hoped, "inspire others to learn more." Unfortunately, there are neither footnotes nor a bibliography, and it will be up to librarians to recommend further reading on the subject, e.g., the basic reference Dictionary of Women Artists (LJ 12/97), Frances Borzello's fascinating Seeing Ourselves: Women's Self-Portraits (LJ 9/1/98), and Elizabeth Martin and Vivian Meyer's Female Gazes: Seventy-Five Woman Artists (Second Story, 1997). Highly recommended for the browsing reader and for interested students and scholars of all ages.
-Mary Hamel-Schwulst, Towson Univ., MD Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From the Inside Flap
achievements of women in the arts have, until recently, been a well-kept secret, and the (re)discovery of women artists is one of the great ongoing adventures of the twentieth century, revealing vibrant, long-neglected chapters in humanity's history, and redefining our very understanding of what art is. From Caterina dei Vigri, a medieval artist-nun, whose name is known to us by chance, to the late-eighteenth-century Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, one of the most talented and successful portraitists of her splendid and doomed era, to today's brash, subtle, ribald multimedia virtuosas, Women Artists presents a wealth of information on the subject with nearly 300 colorplates of works by extraordinary female artists from over five centuries.
Margaret Barlow's informative and well-researched text highlights the lives and accomplishments of well-known and lesser-known women whose art has stood for something more than the sum of its parts. Women Artists takes up the moving, insightful, and ultimately inspiring exploration of women's invisible history, the heartfelt religious paintings, fulsome stilllifes, skillful portraits, monumental sculpture, earthworks, and neon installations--the full gamut of women's participation in the development of Western art. Additionally, included here are diary and journal entries, letters, and snippets of autobiographies of several women artists whose lives and achievements have cast a particular drama or influence. The stories of these and the other women included in this volume--Judith Leyster, Angelica Kauffmann, Emily Mary Osborn, Camille Claudel, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Georgia O'Keeffe, Käthe Kollwitz, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Faith Ringgold, Judy Chicago and scores of others--deserve a prominent place in the long and continuing history of art. The struggle goes on to bring women into the public world of museums and galleries. The last word is far from written.
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
