Women Artists | 9780789207685 | By Nancy G. Heller

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Lilly Martin Spencer (1822-1902). Detail of The Artist and Her Family at a Fourth of July Picnic, c. 1864. Oil on canvas, 49-1/2 x 63 in. (125.7 x 160 cm).The Nineteenth Century:With increasing emphasis on maternal bliss and feminine accomplishment as the nineteenth century progressed, many American women artists came to view domesticity as a proper subject for their art. As in seventeenth-century Holland and Flanders, the newly prosperous middle class in nineteenth-century America expressed a strong preference for scenes of everyday life. Genre painting dominated the art market, and Lilly Martin Spencer was one of its most acclaimed practitioners. Her intimate portrayals of domestic dramas were extremely popular. The Artist and Her Family at a Fourth of July Picnic, the artists depiction of her own familys game of blind mans bluff, is one of the finest examples of Spencers large-scale, multifigure genre scenes.

Helen Frankenthaler (born 1928). Spiritualist, 1973. Acrylic on canvas, 73 x 60 in. (182.9 x 152.4 cm).The Postwar Era:Young artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell gravitated to the downtown New York art world of the 1950s and began their careers as Abstract Expressionists. Frankenthaler is well known for developing a new technique of soaking diluted paint directly into unprimed canvas. She used this innovative technique to create color-filled canvases, like Spiritualist, that seem to float on air. Her work in this vein formed a bridge between Abstract Expressionist painting of the 1950s and color-field painting of the 1960s.

Elizabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun (1755-1842). Portrait of Princess Belozersky, 1798. Oil on canvas, 31 x 26-1/4 in. (78.7 x 66.7 cm).The Eighteenth Century:At a time when a premium was placed on courtly charm and women served as muse, one exceptionally successful salonnière, the painter Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, used these attitudes to her own advantage. Possessed of the remarkable ability to render all who came before her in a highly flattering manner, in 1779 she became court painter to Marie Antoinette, whose portrait she painted more than twenty times. Vigée-Lebruns flattering portrayals of the aristocracy often are viewed as proof of the superficiality of life at court and the disintegrating social order. It is ironic that, like the unpopular and ill-fated Marie Antoinette, many successful women of the era became targets for the anger felt toward the excesses of the men who wielded power.

Alice Neel (1900-1988). T.B. Harlem, 1940. Oil on canvas, 30 x 30 in. (76.2 x 76.2 cm).The Early Twentieth Century:In the transition from the old guard to the avantgarde, women artists played active roles as they moved away from the limits of home and family. Part of this change can be measured in the types of subjects that women now felt free to pursue--most notably, the nude. Alice Neels portrayal of a young man suffering from tuberculosis presents a difficult, depressing subject, but it also confounds expectations that such a vulnerable nude would necessarily be female.

Sue Coe (born 1952). Thank You America (Anita Hill), 1991. Lithograph (9/30), 46 x 32 in. (116.8 x 81.3 cm).The 1970s to the 1990s:The 1970s and 1980s were a time of reassessment and realignment in the United States and in the world at large. New ways of seeing became part of this tide of change. Not only did artists involve themselves in political and social causes, they also sought to transform the world of art. Weary of the dominance of modernist theory, artists in all media jettisoned theories of pure form and color in favor of more inclusive ideas, experimental media, and new definitions of the power relationships within the arts.

Women Artists
An Illustrated History (4th Edition)

By Nancy G. Heller
Size: 10 x 11" 312 pages
220 illustrations, 160 in full color
Published 2004
ISBN: 978-0-7892-0768-5
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Paperback $39.95
Also as a Tiny Folio for $11.95

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Firmly established as one of the premier histories of women in the fine arts, Nancy G. Hellers Women Artists returns in an expanded fourth edition.

"The last 20 years of scholarship have brought many forgotten women artists to attention, but too often their presentation has been marred by anachronistic feminist rhetoric. Nancy G. Hellers lucid, evenhanded Women Artists is a noteworthy exception." -- Washington Post

With coverage of the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium, nearly half the volume is now devoted to the remarkable period from 1960 to the present, when women artists emerged as the most dynamic force in contemporary art.

New to this edition are innovative contemporary American artists, such as Janine Antoni and Renee Cox, as well as major international figures, including Irans Shirin Neshat, Shahzia Sikander from Pakistan, and the Icelandic sculptor and performance artist Katrin Sigurdardottir. As in past editions, all the artists works are represented in large-format color reproductions, and the artists careers are examined in concise critical biographies.

Nancy G. Heller is Professor of Art History at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Her most recent book is Women Artists: Works from the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

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