The Politics Of Vision

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 1 GEN 1990

In nine essays accompanied by 62 plates, Nochlin ( Women, Art, and Power ) incisively questions the canonization of artists while examining the subordination of women as reflected in Western painting. She reminds us that the term ``avant-garde'' was once applied to Gustave Courbet's militantly radical realism. She laments Degas's ``simpleminded anti-Semitism,'' yet finds that his prejudice, with a few flagrant exceptions, had little or no effect on his art. She traces a latent ideology of male domination and colonialism in the artificial orientalism of Eugene Delacroix and Jean-Leon Gerome. In the Belgian Leon Frederic's proletarian triptych Stages of a Worker's Life she perceives a reactionary clinging to fatalistic religious beliefs. Other pieces deal with Seurat, Manet, Pissarro, Puerto Rican realist painter Francisco Oller, and French reporter-illustrator Paul Renouard, whose drawing of long-suffering weavers influenced Van Gogh.