"The careers and accomplishments of women creators in Western Civilization are described in an accessible and informative mattner in the Second Edition of Women Artists in History: From Antiquity to the 20th Century. Over sixty artists, mostly painters and sculptors, are featured in this book. Selections were based on each woman's unique and important contributions to the history of art. each artist measures up to the same rigorous standards applied to male artists in other survey texts. To understand and appreciate the achievements of these outstanding women, this volume takes a thorough look at the cultural environment in which they lived and worked, as well as the social, economic, and demographic factors that influenced their art." --From back cover

The fiftieth anniversary edition of the essay that is now recognized as the first major work of feminist art theory—published together with author Linda Nochlin’s reflections three decades later. Many scholars have called Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay on women artists the first real attempt at a feminist history of art. In her revolutionary essay, Nochlin refused to answer the question of why there had been no “great women artists” on its own corrupted terms, and instead, she dismantled the very concept of greatness, unraveling the basic assumptions that created the male-centric genius in art. With unparalleled insight and wit, Nochlin questioned the acceptance of a white male viewpoint in art history. And future freedom, as she saw it, requires women to leap into the unknown and risk demolishing the art world’s institutions in order to rebuild them anew. In this stand-alone anniversary edition, Nochlin’s essay is published alongside its reappraisal, “Thirty Years After.” Written in an era of thriving feminist theory, as well as queer theory, race, and postcolonial studies, “Thirty Years After” is a striking reflection on the emergence of a whole new canon. With reference to Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, and many more, Nochlin diagnoses the state of women and art with unmatched precision and verve. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” has become a slogan and rallying cry that resonates across culture and society. In the 2020s, Nochlin’s message could not be more urgent: as she put it in 2015, “There is still a long way to go.”

Five centuries of fascinating female creativity presented in more than 400 compelling artworks and one comprehensive volume The most extensive fully illustrated book of women artists ever published, Great Women Artists reflects an era where art made by women is more prominent than ever. In museums, galleries, and the art market, previously overlooked female artists, past and present, are now gaining recognition and value. Featuring more than 400 artists from more than 50 countries and spanning 500 years of creativity, each artist is represented here by a key artwork and short text. This essential volume reveals a parallel yet equally engaging history of art for an age that champions a greater diversity of voices. "Real changes are upon us, and today one can reel off the names of a number of first-rate women artists. Nevertheless, women are just getting started."—The New Yorker

Instant New York Times bestseller The story of art as it’s never been told before, from the Renaissance to the present day, with more than 300 works of art. How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? Did women even work as artists before the twentieth century? And what is the Baroque anyway? Guided by Katy Hessel, art historian and founder of @thegreatwomenartists, discover the glittering paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century United States and the artist who really invented the “readymade.” Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of postwar artists in Latin America, and the women defining art in the 2020s. Have your sense of art history overturned and your eyes opened to many artforms often ignored or dismissed. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan, this is the history of art as it’s never been told before.

A dazzlingly original and ambitious book on the history of female self-portraiture by one of today's most well-respected art critics. Her story weaves in and out of time and place. She's Frida Kahlo, Loïs Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She's Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she's Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She's haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cézanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She's railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she's hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available. Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval. In The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery.

A revised edition of Whitney Chadwick’s seminal work on the women artists who shaped the Surrealist art movement. This pioneering book stands as the most comprehensive treatment of the lives, ideas, and art works of the remarkable group of women who were an essential part of the Surrealist movement. Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, and Dorothea Tanning, among many others, embodied their age as they struggled toward artistic maturity and their own “liberation of the spirit” in the context of the Surrealist revolution. Their stories and achievements are presented here against the background of the turbulent decades of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s and the war that forced Surrealism into exile in New York and Mexico. Whitney Chadwick, author of the highly acclaimed Women, Art, and Society, interviewed and corresponded with most of the artists themselves in the course of her research. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, now revised with a new foreword by art historian Dawn Ades, contains a wealth of extracts from unpublished writings and numerous illustrations never before reproduced. Since this book was first published, it has acquired the undeniable status of a classic among artists, art historians, critics, and cultural historians. It has inspired and necessitated a revision of the story of the Surrealist movement.

Artists, art historians, and critics look at the legacies of feminism and critical theory in the work of women artists, more than thirty years after the beginning of the modern women's movement and Linda Nochlin's landmark essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" More than thirty years after the birth of the modern women's movement and the beginnings of feminist art-making and art history, the time is ripe to examine the legacies of those revolutions. In Women Artists at the Millennium, artists, art historians, and critics examine the differences that feminist art practice and critical theory have made in late twentieth-century art and the discourses surrounding it. In 1971, when Linda Nochlin published her essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" in a special issue of Art News, there were no women's studies, no feminist theory, no such thing as feminist art criticism; there was instead a focus on the mythic figure of the great (male) artist through history. Since then, the "woman artist" has not simply been assimilated into the canon of "greatness" but has expanded art-making into a multiplicity of practices with new parameters and perspectives. In Women Artists at the Millennium artists including Martha Rosler and Yvonne Rainer reflect upon their own varied practices and art historians discuss the innovative work of such figures as Louise Bourgeois, Lygia Clark, Mona Hatoum, and Carrie Mae Weems. And Linda Nochlin considers changes since her landmark essay and looks to the future, writing, "We will need all our wit and courage to make sure that women's voices are heard, their work seen and written about." Artist Pages By: Ellen Gallagher, Ann Hamilton, Mary Kelly, Yvonne Rainer, Martha Rosler Contributing Writers: Emily Apter, Carol Armstrong, Catherine de Zegher, Maria DiBattista, Brigid Doherty, Briony Fer, Tamar Garb, Anne Higonnet, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Molly Nesbit, Mignon Nixon, Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Lisa Tickner, Anne Wagner