Old Mistresses

Women, Art and Ideology

Author: Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock Series: Bloomsbury Revelations

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How was it possible, by the later 20th C, to have erased women as artists from art history so comprehensively that the idea of 'the artist' was exclusively masculine? Why was this erasure more radical in the 20th C than ever before? This book offers a radical challenge to a women-free Art History.

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Summary

Description

Why is everything that compromises greatness in art coded as 'feminine'? Has the feminist critique of Art History yet effected real change? With a new preface by Griselda Pollock, this edition of a truly groundbreaking book offers a radical challenge to a women-free Art History.

Parker and Pollock's critique of Art History's sexism leads to expanded, inclusive readings of the art of the past. They demonstrate how the changing historical social realities of gender relations and women artists' translation of gendered conditions into their works provide keys to novel understandings of why we might study the art of the past. They go further to show how such knowledge enables us to understand art by contemporary artists who are women and can contribute to the changing self-perception and creative work of artists today.

In March 2020 Griselda Pollock was awarded the Holberg Prize in recognition of her outstanding contribution to research and her influence on thinking on gender, ideology, art and visual culture worldwide for over 40 years. Old Mistresses was her first major scholarly publication which has become a classic work of feminist art history.

About the Author

Rozsika Parker (1945-2010) was a writer and critic in Art History & Psychoanalysis and a psychotherapist. Her books include Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement 1970-1985 (with Griselda Pollock), Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence and The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (I.B.Tauris new edition, 2010).
Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History, University of Leeds, UK. Her books include Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art and Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum (2007). She is editor of Conceptual Odysseys: Passages to Cultural Analysis (2009) and, with Antony Bryant, of Digital and Other Virtualities (2010, both I.B.Tauris).