On the Cover
Emma Amos,
Let Me Off Uptown (2000),
oil on linen, laser transfers and
Kente collage, Adinkra cloth.
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GUIDELINES
PREVIOUS ISSUE
PARALLEL PERSPECTIVES
By Joan Marter and Margaret Barlow
PORTRAITS, ISSUES, AND INSIGHTS
EMMA AMOS: ART AS LEGACY
By Lisa E. Farrington
LEE BONTECOU: PLASTIC FISH AND GRINNING SAW BLADES
By Mona Hadler
PAINTING MARRIAGE: EVA HESSE’S ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
By Kirsten Swenson
MY MEMORIES OF EVA HESSE
By Cindy Nemser
CAROLINE SHAWK BROOKS: THE "CENTENNIAL BUTTER SCULPTRESS"
By Pamela H. Simpson
MARTHA COFFIN DERBY’S GRAND TOUR:
"IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO TRAVEL WITHOUT IMPROVEMENT"
By Jessica Lanier
REVIEWS
In Passionate Pursuit : A Memoir
BY ALESSANDRA COMINI
Reviewed by Virginia Pitts Rembert
Women and Experimental Filmmaking
EDITED BY JEAN PETROLLE AND VIRGINIA WRIGHT WEXMAN
Reviewed by Shana McGuire
Frida Kahlo
EDITED BY EMMA DEXTER AND TANYA BARSON
I Will Never Forget You… Frida Kahlo to Nickolas Muray: Unpublished photographs and letters
BY SALOMON GRIMBERG
Reviewed by Lynda Hoffman-Jeep
Gertrude Stein: Woman without Qualities
BY G. F. MITRANO
Reviewed by Julie L’Enfant
Painting the Difference, Sex and Spectator in Modern Art
BY CHARLES HARRISON
Reviewed by Britta C. Dwyer
The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830-1870
BY SUSAN WALLER
Reviewed by Heather McPherson
The Satirical Gaze:
Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England
BY CINDY MCCREERY
Reviewed by Heidi Strobel
Envisioning Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art, 1350-1530:
Experience, Authority, Resistance
BY ANDREA PEARSON
Reviewed by Martha L. Dunkelman
The Medusa Reader
EDITED BY MARJORIE GARBER AND NANCY J. VICKERS
Reviewed by Carolyn Springer
Byzantine Women and Their World
BY IOLI KALAVREZOU
Reviewed by Marice E. Rose
Suddenly there seems to be an interest in feminist art by mainstream media and institutions. The February issue of Art News devoted half its pages to feminism. Within several weeks in March, the New York Times reported on a daylong symposium about women artists; the exhibit “Wack, Art and the Feminist Revolution! (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) was reviewed favorably by Holland Cotter; Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum was reviewed (not so favorably) by Roberta Smith; and Gail Levin’s biography of Judy Chicago had a glowing review in the Times Sunday Book Review. What does it all mean? Are feminists in positions of power in the mainstream? The debate about what is feminist art seems to have been recycled. Although WAJ is a feminist periodical, its contents were never purely feminist. Rather, we have sought to document women artists of achievement who have produced significant bodies of work despite gender restrictions. The three contemporary artists featured in this issue have all had feminist readings, although none has been identified as a “feminist artist.” Lisa Farrington takes a unique approach to examining the achievements of our cover artist Emma Amos, a dedicated teacher and African American artist/activist. She discusses the artist’s “espousal of the theme of ‘art as legacy’ or the genealogical process.” Besides gaining insights into how influential individuals marked Amos’s unique journey, we are reminded that identity, gender, and race issues often find direct expression in women’s art.
The dark-centered openings of Lee Bontecou’s early wall sculptures unfailingly received feminist readings. Here Mona Hadler explores, through the dissonance of her personal imagery and her eclectic choice of materials and sources, how Bontecou’s work “embodies the paradox of the space age in the pairing of the cosmic and the brutal.”
A teenage Eva Hesse mused about her desire to be “a real artist,” writes Kirsten Swenson, noting that this “was understood not as a neutral choice but in conflict with the ‘role of wife’ prescribed to girls coming of age in the 1950s.” The “troubling incompatibility” she felt “between being a woman, in particular being a wife, and being an artist” gave rise to her abandonment of abstract expressionism as well as her troubled marriage. Following this article is Cindy Nemser’s brief memoir about her legendary interviews with Hesse shortly before the artist’s untimely death at age thirty-four.
Pamela Simpson introduces a resourceful artist whose unusual medium won her notoriety. In the 1870s Caroline Shawk Brooks, known as “the butter woman,” packed her neoclassical style butter sculptures on ice and showed them around the country and as far away as Paris. Brooks also discovered that butter was ideal for casting her creations into plaster for reproduction in marble or bronze. “Brooks’s choice of subject matter,” including Lady Godiva, Queen Isabella, and Lucretia Mott, “indicates her own identification with strong women and contemporary feminists’ causes,” writes Simpson. An earlier American traveler, Martha Coffin Derby, sought to distinguish herself, not as an artist but as “a woman of great taste,” writes Jessica Lanier. In 1803, when she sailed to Europe for her “Grand Tour,” she was one of few women to do so. John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Derby as Saint Cecilia suggests how Americans turned to such Grand Manner portraiture, including allegory and personification, to embody their relative sophistication.
Among the wave of art historians coming of age during the feminist passions of the 1970s and 1980s, few were more influential than Alessandra Comini. Virginia Pitts Rembert reviews In Passionate Pursuit, her captivating and detailed account of “an interesting life that still has chapters to be written.” Rembert explains how Comini, following her seemingly boundless interests, shares the spirit and intelligence that imbue her teaching, lectures, and writing.
The timeless fascination with Medusa, a “trait evidently shared by Ovid, Freud, and Gianni Versace,” makes The Medusa Reader (edited by Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers) “useful, entertaining, and eclectic,” writes reviewer Carolyn Springer. The collection includes references from literature, philosophy, psychology, advertising, and the arts (from Louis Marin on Caravaggio’s Self Portrait as Medusa to Jo Springer quoting the Betty Crocker Home Library’s The Pleasures of Crewel).
Few artists controlled their own image more successfully than Frida Kahlo. The Tate Modern’s solo exhibition catalogue, edited by Emma Dexter and Tanya Barson, and Salomon Grimberg’s I will never forget you…Frida Kahlo to Nickolas Muray: Unpublished Photographs and Letters, taken together, writes Lynda Hoffman-Jeep, “address what it means in terms of Kahlo to see and to be seen, as well as to write and to be read.”
In Painting the Difference, Sex and Spectator in Modern Art, Charles Harrison revisits key works of Impressionism in terms of seeing and being seen. Harrison “argues that with the advent of modernity women represented in paintings began to gaze out of the picture plane to confront the viewer, thereby shifting the way the spectator interacted with the two-dimensional surface of the image,” writes reviewer Britta Dwyer, adding that, “In fact, it is at the level of the picture plane…that key modern issues related to gender and sexuality are worked out.”
Who were these women confronting the viewer with their gaze? Many were professional models, the subject of Susan Waller’s The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830-1870, “reviewed here by Heather McPherson. In reality, the growing public role of women that gave rise to their modern (feminist?) gaze outward was barely tolerated. As Heidi Strobel notes in her review of Cindy McCreery’s The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late-Eighteenth Century England, the spate of satirical prints that “capture[d] the ebbs and flows of public opinion,” reflected harshly on the “contemporary debate and concern about women’s unnatural presence in public places.”
Even in patriarchal societies, women found areas in which to demonstrate their will and exert power, as Martha Dunkelman and Marice Rose reveal in their reviews of Andrea Pearson’s Envisioning Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art, 1350-1530, and Ioli Kalavrezou’s Byzantine Women and Their World, respectively. In other reviews, Julie L’Enfant looks at G.F. Mitrano’s Gertrude Stein: Woman without Qualities, which explores Stein’s links with modernity and how the artists she knew influenced her development. Reviewer Shana McGuire calls Women and Experimental Filmmaking, an anthology edited by Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman, “essential reading” on the history of women’s experimental cinema.
The variety of articles and reviews published in this issue reflect the diversity of our submissions. All are touched by the feminist thought and approaches that co-exist in our twenty-first-century global community.
Joan Marter and Margaret Barlow, co-editors
Published semiannually—May and November—since 1980, Woman's Art Journal continues to represent the interests of women and art worldwide. Our articles and reviews
cover all areas of women in the visual arts, from antiquity to the present day. Each issue presents current research on a variety of topics, featuring "portraits" of women artists, "issues and
insights," and discerning reviews of recent books and exhibition catalogues. Each article is well researched and clearly written. Our authors are international scholars in their fields. A typical
60-page issue contains 20-25 color plates and 25-35 black-and-white illustrations.
WAJ is indexed on all major art indexes and bibliographies, and is used as a supplementary text in many university courses on women and art. The journal is found in university and major
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