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Through both longer essays and shorter case studies, this book examines the relationship of European women from various countries and backgrounds to collecting, in order to explore the social practices and material and visual cultures of collecting in eighteenth-century Europe. It recovers their lives and examines their interests, their methodologies, and their collections and objects—some of which have rarely been studied before. The book also considers women’s role as producers, that is, creators of objects that were collected. Detailed examination of the artefacts—both visually, and in relation to their historical contexts—exposes new ways of thinking about collecting in relation to the arts and sciences in eighteenth-century Europe. The book is interdisciplinary in its makeup and brings together scholars from a wide range of fields. It will be of interest to those working in art history, material and visual culture, history of collecting, history of science, literary studies, women’s studies, gender studies, and art conservation.
Portraits of Anna Amalia, Duchess of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach chart a shift in perceptions of her public identity and of the gender dynamics that shaped that identity. This manuscript is more than just a patronage study or a biography; it is concerned with how a powerful woman used art to shape her identity, how that identity changed over time, and how people around her shaped it, too. This study sheds real light on the power of portraiture in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe.
Like many of their male peers, women artists have used their chosen mediums to explore and express their reactions to the violence of war, which they frequently experienced firsthand. The 345 named artists discussed in this book come from diverse backgrounds across hundreds of years. The book divides the 652 covered works of art into five general categories: those that provide support for the war effort, those that oppose war and/or support peace, those that document the impacts of war on the individuals who fight and the civilians who experience it, those that commemorate and memorialize the events and participants in war, and general representations of those who fight. While most of the women who documented the impact of war on those who experienced it were professional artists, self-taught artists have told equally compelling stories in their works. Whether working in a studio or on the battlefield, the women's professionalism and dedication allowed them to convey the impact of war powerfully.
Art history has enriched the study of material culture as a scholarly field. This interdisciplinary volume enhances this literature through the contributors' engagement with gender as the conceptual locus of analysis in terms of femininity, masculinity, and the spaces in between. Collectively, these essays by art historians and museum professionals argue for a more complex understanding of the relationship between objects and subjects in gendered terms. The objects under consideration range from the quotidian to the exotic, including beds, guns, fans, needle paintings, prints, drawings, mantillas, almanacs, reticules, silver punch bowls, and collage. These material goods may have been intended to enforce and affirm gendered norms, however as the essays demonstrate, their use by subjects frequently put normative formations of gender into question, revealing the impossibility of permanently fixing gender in relation to material goods, concepts, or bodies. This book will appeal to art historians, museum professionals, women's and gender studies specialists, students, and all those interested in the history of objects in everyday life.
A desire for intimacy in domestic spaces – motivated by a growing sense of individualistic expression, an incentive to conceal the labor or enslavement taking place, and an appetite for solace and comfort – led to interiors taking on more specific roles in the eighteenth century. By examining the architectural, visual, and material culture of eighteenth-century spaces, Intimate Interiors foregrounds the interrelated concepts of intimacy, privacy, informality, and sociability in order to show how these ideas played an increasingly integral role in the period's architectural and material design. Across eleven innovative chapters that explore issues of gender, politics, travel, exoticism, i...
This book examines contemporary feminist visual activism(s) through the lens of embodiment(s). The contributors explore how the arts articulate and engage with the current sense of crisis and political concerns (e.g. equality, decolonisation, social justice, democracy, precarity, vulnerability), negotiated with and through the body. Drawing upon the legacy of feminist art historical critique, the book scrutinises activist strategies, practices and resilience techniques in intersectional and transnational frameworks. It interrogates how the arts enable the creation of civil and political resilience, become engaged with politics as a response to disaster capitalism and attempt to reform and improve society. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, fine arts, women’s studies, gender studies, feminism and cultural studies.
This book interprets the fiber art and craft-inspired sculpture by eight US and Latin American women artists whose works incite embodied affective experience. Grounded in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, John Corso-Esquivel posits craft as a material act of intuition. The book provocatively asserts that fiber art—long disparaged in the wake of the high–low dichotomy of late Modernism—is, in fact, well-positioned to lead art at the vanguard of affect theory and twenty-first-century feminist subjectivities.
Numerous contemporary artists, particularly female artists, have chosen to examine the idealization of the female body. In this crucial book, Emily L. Newman focuses on a number of key themes including obesity, anorexia, bulimia, dieting, self-harm, and female body image. Many artists utilize their own bodies in their work, and in the act of trying to critique the diet industry, they also often become complicit, as they strive to lose weight themselves. Making art and engaging eating disorder communities (in real life and online) often work to perpetuate the illnesses of themselves or others. A core group of artists has worked to show bodies that are outside the norm, paralleling the rise of fat activism in the 1990s and 2000s. Interwoven throughout this inclusive study are related interdisciplinary concerns including sociology, popular culture, and feminism.
The reception of Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy from its origins to its appearances in contemporary visual culture reveals how its popularity was achieved and maintained by diverse audiences and in varied venues. Performative manifestations resulted in contradictory characterizations of the painted youth as an aristocrat or a "regular fellow," as masculine or feminine, or as heterosexual or gay. In private and public spaces where viewers saw the actual painting and where living and rendered replicas circulated, Gainsborough’s painting was often the centerpiece where dominant and subordinate classes met, gender identities were enacted, and sexuality was implicitly or overtly expressed.