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Between the two world wars, Paris served as the setting for unparalleled freedom for expatriate as well as native-born French women, who enjoyed unprecedented access to education and opportunities to participate in public, artistic and intellectual life. Many of these women--including Colette, Tamara de Lempicka, Sonia Delaunay, Djuna Barnes, Augusta Savage, and Lee Miller--made lasting contributions to art and literature.
Incorporating recent theories of feminism and diaspora, Women Artists in Interwar France: Framing Femininities returns the Société des Femmes Artists Modernes, known as FAM, to its proper place in the history of modern art. Paula Birnbaum's study explores how FAM artists including Suzanne Valadon, Marie Laurencin, and Tamara de Lempicka, approached the self-portrait, motherhood and the female nude, as well as their response to marginalization and the reactionary politics of 1930s France.
This is the first book to examine the connections between diaspora - the movement, whether forced or voluntary, of a nation or group of people from one homeland to another - and its representations in visual culture. Two foundational articles by Stuart Hall and the painter R.B. Kitaj provide points of departure for an exploration of the meanings of diaspora for cultural identity and artistic practice. A distinguished group of contributors, who include Alan Sinfield, Irit Rogoff, and Eunice Lipton, address the rich complexity of diasporic cultures and art, but with a focus on the visual culture of the Jewish and African diasporas. Individual articles address the Jewish diaspora and visual culture from the 19th century to the present, and work by African American and Afro-Brazilian artists.
The first monograph on a Surrealist cult classic, Reading Claude Cahun's Disavowals offers a comprehensive account of Cahun's most important published work, Aveux non avenus (Disavowals), 1930. Jennifer L. Shaw provides an encompassing interpretation of this groundbreaking work, paying careful attention to the complex interrelationship between the photomontages and writings of Aveux non avenus. This study argues that the texts and images of Aveux non avenus not only explore Cahun's own subjectivity, they formulate a trenchant social and cultural critique. Shaw explores how Cahun's work both calls into question the dominant culture of interwar France - with its traditional gender roles, religious conservatism, and pronatalism - and takes to task the era's artistic avant-garde and in particular its models of desire. This volume cuts across the disciplinary boundaries of interwar art studies, demonstrating how one artist's personal exploration intervened in wider contemporary debates about the purpose of art, the role of women in French culture, and the status of homosexuality, in the aftermath of World War I.
Maurice Maeterlinck described his libretto Ariane et Barbe-bleue as "a sort of legendary opera, or fairy [opera], in three acts." In 1907, Paul Dukas finished setting Maeterlinck's libretto to music, and the opera's Paris premiere was lauded as a landmark in operatic history. Ariane & Bluebeard: From Fairy Tale to Comic Book Opera offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary look at this historic opera, including its structure, reception, and cultural implications. This lively collection juxtaposes chapters from experts in music, literature, the visual arts, gender studies, and religion and philosophy with vibrant illustrations by comic artist P. Craig Russell and interviews with performers and artists. Featuring material from newly discovered documents and the first English translation of several important sources, Ariane & Bluebeard allows readers to imagine the operain its various incarnations: as symbolist show, comic book, children's fairy tale, and more.
"This illustrated book is the first full-length examination of Puvis's murals and their critical reception during the artist's lifetime. Jennifer L. Shaw explains that Puvis's paintings were imagined to embody a vision of France. Although his regional images, allegories of the French heritage, and evocations of the nation as an embracing motherland were all part of a grand tradition of public art, Puvis's painting style was more closely alligned with the avant-garde. Rather than providing a specific narrative or allegory of France, Puvis's murals provoked viewers to experience their own fantasies of Frenchness; rather than using the close brushwork favored by most of his contemporaries, Puvis used large, flat areas of color to render his subjects. Shaw persuasively argues that Puvis was the only painter of the period to unite the traditions of public art and modernist form. Her original analysis of Puvis's art underlines his importance to the history of modernism; her examination of the public response to his art illuminates debates about art, subjectivity, and national identity in fin-de-siecle France."--BOOK JACKET.
As the twentieth century dawned, progressive educators established a national organization for adolescent girls to combat what they believed to be a crisis of girls' education. A corollary to the Boy Scouts of America, founded just a few years earlier, the Camp Fire Girls became America's first and, for two decades, most popular girls' organization. Based on Protestant middle-class ideals--a regulatory model that reinforced hygiene, habit formation, hard work, and the idea that women related to the nation through service--the Camp Fire Girls invented new concepts of American girlhood by inviting disabled girls, Black girls, immigrants, and Native Americans to join. Though this often meant a ...
Graphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888–1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. But after she was arrested by the French police and then murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, she was all but lost to history, and most of her paintings have been destroyed or gone missing. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, this biography recovers Szalit’s life and presents a stunning collection of her art. Szalit was a sought-after artist. Highly regarded by art historians and critics of her day, she made a name for herself with soulful, sometimes humorous illustrations of Jewish and world literature by Sholem Aleichem, Heinrich ...
This book explores the creative women of the "Lost Generation" including painters, sculptors, film makers, writers, singers, composers, dancers, and impresarios who all pursued artistic careers in the years leading up to, during, and following World War I. These women’s stories, and the art they created, commissioned, mobilized as propaganda, and performed shed light on the shifting nature of gender norms during this period. With the combined knowledge and expertise from different contributors, chapters in this book consider how modernist practices continued their development in women’s hands during the war through networks forged by and for women artists in the absence of their male col...
A unique history of one of American radicalism's most fiercely outspoken figures