Representing women

Abstract

Women - as warriors, workers, mothers, sensual women, even absent women - haunt 19th- and 20th-century Western painting: their representation is one of its most common subjects. Representing Women brings together Linda Nochlin's most important writings on the subject, as she considers work by Millet, Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Seurat, Cassatt and Kollwitz, among many others. In her riveting, partly autobiographical, extended introduction, Nochlin documents her own pioneering approach to art history; throughout the seven essays in this book, she argues for the honest virtues of an art history that rejects methodological assumptions, and for art historians who investigate the work before their eyes while focusing on its subject matter, informed by a sensitivity to its feminist spirit.

Contents

Introduction: Memoirs of an ad hoc art historian -- The myth of the woman warrior -- Géricault: the absence of women -- The image of the working woman -- Courbet's real allegory: rereading The Painter's Studio -- A house is not a home: Degas and the subversion of the family -- Mary Cassatt's modernity -- Body politics: Seurat's Poseuses.