The Mirror and the Palette
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this idiosyncratic and fascinating primer, critic and artist Higgie (There's Not One) skillfully restores marginalized women self-portraitists to their rightful place in the art pantheon. Interweaving biographical profiles and pointed cultural commentary, she charges through 500 years of art history to reveal her trailblazing subjects' "shared desire to try to make sense of the world with a paintbrush." Noting that "a self-portrait is not only a description of concrete reality, it's also an expression of an inner world," Higgie brings to light the lives of a number of women artists whose creations were a way to assert their existence in a milieu that often overlooked them. Italian artist Sofonisba Anguissola's subversive painting The Chess Game (1555) rendered her the "first artist to portray her family as a primary subject," while Mary Beale's double portrait of her and her husband in 1675 flipped "traditional marriage roles." For Frida Kahlo, art became "a form of catharsis" mentally and physically (after surviving a bus accident at 18, she underwent 32 operations before dying of complications related to her injuries almost 30 years later). Meanwhile, German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker's 1906 self-portrait was "a defiant... acknowledgment of the energy and ambition that consumed her." Full of edgy insights, this engrossing survey will delight art connoisseurs and general readers alike. Agent: David Godwin, David Godwin Assoc.
