Reclaiming Female Agency

This volume is the third in an influential series of anthologies by editors Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard that challenge art history from a feminist perspective. Following their Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (1982) and The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (1992), this new volume identifies female agency as a central theme of recent feminist scholarship. Framed by a lucid and stimulating critical introduction, twenty-three essays on artists and issues from the Renaissance to the present, written in the 1990s and after, offer a nuanced critique of the poststructuralist premises of 1980s feminist art history.



Contributors: Allison Arieff, Janis Bergman-Carton, Babette Bohn, Norma Broude, Anna C. Chave, Julie Cole, Bridget Elliott, Mary D. Garrard, Sheila ffolliott, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Ruth E. Iskin, Geraldline A. Johnson, Amelia Jones, Maud Lavin, Julie Nicoletta, Carol Ockman, Erica Rand, John B. Ravenal, Lisa Saltzman, Mary D. Sheriff

Norma Broude, Professor of Art History at American University, is author of Impressionism, a Feminist Reading: The Gendering of Art, Science, and Nature in the 19th Century (1991), among other books. Mary D. Garrard is Professor Emerita of Art History at American University and author of Artemisia Gentileschi around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity (California, 2001), among other publications. Broude and Garrard are also the editors of The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, Power and Impact (1994).

Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reclaiming Female Agency

1. Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist
Mary D. Garrard

2. Learning to Be Looked At: A Portrait of (the Artist as) a Young Woman in Agnès Merlet’s Artemisia
Sheila ffolliott

3. Artemisia’s Hand
Mary D. Garrard

4. The Antique Heroines of Elisabetta Sirani
Babette Bohn

5. Pictures Fit for a Queen: Peter Paul Rubens and the Marie de’ Medici Cycle
Geraldine A. Johnson

6. The Portrait of the Queen: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s Marie-Antoinette en chemise
Mary D. Sheriff

7. Depoliticizing Women: Female Agency, the French Revolution, and the Art of Boucher and David
Erica Rand

8. Nudity à la grecque in 1799
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

9. A Woman’s Pleasure: Ingres’s Grande Odalisque
Carol Ockman

10. Conduct Unbecoming: Daumier and Les Bas-Bleus
Janis Bergman-Carton

11. The Gendering of Impressionism
Norma Broude

12. Selling, Seduction, and Soliciting the Eye: Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère
Ruth E. Iskin

13. Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman or the Cult of True Womanhood?
Norma Broude

14. The “Strength of the Weak” as Portrayed by Marie Laurencin
Bridget Elliott

15. New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: Gender, Race, and the Origins of Cubism
Anna C. Chave

16. The New Woman in Hannah Höch’s Photomontages: Issues of Androgyny, Bisexuality, and Oscillation
Maud Lavin

17. Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, and the Collaborative Construction of a Lesbian Subjectivity
Julie Cole

18. Louise Bourgeois’s Femmes-Maisons: Confronting Lacan
Julie Nicoletta

19. Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender and the Body in Helen Frankenthaler’s Painting
Lisa Saltzman

20. Minimalism and Biography
Anna C. Chave

21. The “Sexual Politics” of The Dinner Party: A Critical Context
Amelia Jones

22. Cultural Collisions: Identity and History in the Work of Hung Liu
Allison Arieff

23. Shirin Neshat: Double Vision
John B. Ravenal

Contributors
Index