Book Description
This sumptuously illustrated book surveys five hundred years of artistic output from a pantheon of women who broke rules, defied convention, and paved the way for generations to follow. Why over the course of history have so few women been recognized as "great" artists? Explanations and rationalizations for this phenomenon abound, but women have been producing brilliant works of art for as long as their male contemporaries. This latest volume in the successful Icons series profiles forty-five female artists and their significant contributions to the canon of art history. This book starts in the sixteenth century, when women were first formally allowed to participate in the period's artistic enlightenment, and continues through today, when artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman and Jenny Holzer have firmly established themselves as critically and commercially important. Icons of Art: Women Artists uses elegantly designed double-paged spreads to examine the life, challenges and accomplishments of its subjects. Each entry includes a large-scale four-color reproduction of a specific work, a brief, illuminating biographical sketch, and accompanying illustrations, photographs and documents. Written with a scholar as well as the layperson in mind, this attractively designed, wide-ranging volume offers incontrovertible proof of the power and range of women artists.
Icons of Art: Women Artists FROM THE PUBLISHER
This sumptuously illustrated book surveys five hundred years of artistic output from a pantheon of women who broke rules, defied convention, and paved the way for generations to follow.
Why over the course of history have so few women been recognized as "great" artists? Explanations and rationalizations for this phenomenon abound, but women have been producing brilliant works of art for as long as their male contemporaries. This latest volume in the successful Icons series profiles forty-five female artists and their significant contributions to the canon of art history.
This book starts in the sixteenth century, when women were first formally allowed to participate in the period's artistic enlightenment, and continues through today, when artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman and Jenny Holzer have firmly established themselves as critically and commercially important. Icons of Art: Women Artists uses elegantly designed double-paged spreads to examine the life, challenges and accomplishments of its subjects. Each entry includes a large-scale four-color reproduction of a specific work, a brief, illuminating biographical sketch, and accompanying illustrations, photographs and documents. Written with a scholar as well as the layperson in mind, this attractively designed, wide-ranging volume offers incontrovertible proof of the power and range of women artists.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
A museum consultant and profile journalist, Buchholz offers an introductory coffee-table book aimed at the browsing public. Divided into centuries from the 16th century to the present, the book provides thematic introductions for each time period (e.g., "Women Artists and the Academies") along with some general history. Buchholz's choice of artists from 500 years is appropriate, and the plates are very fine, yet the pale discussions, presented on facing pages, do little to illuminate the subject. Further, the book contains particularly unsuitable "fillers." Forty-five color plates of women's work appear-but so do 25 color illustrations of works by male artists. Chapter introductions begin with long lists of male artists' names, and time lines identify men's cultural activities, not women's. Ann Harris and Linda Nochlin's fundamental Women Artists: 1150-1950 (1976. o.p.) and National Museum of Women in the Arts (1987. o.p.) are superior; also useful is Nancy Heller's Women Artists: An Illustrated History, just released from Abbeville in an expanded fourth edition.-Mary Hamel-Schwulst, Univ. of Southern Mississippi Lib., Long Beach Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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