NMC Library
Image from Google Jackets

The mirror and the palette : rebellion, revolution, and resilience: five hundred years of women's self portraits / Jennifer Higgie.

By: Publication details: New York, NY : Pegasus Books, 2022.; ©2021.Edition: First Pegasus Books paperback editionDescription: 328 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 24 cmISBN:
  • 1639362932 (pbk.)
  • 9781639362936 (pbk.)
Other title:
  • Five hundred years of women's self portraits
  • Rebellion, revolution, and resilience
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 704.042 23
LOC classification:
  • N8354 .H54 2022
Contents:
The deceits of the past -- The city of women -- Their little hands, so tender and so white -- Cabinet of curiosities ; The fault in our stars? -- A self-portrait is never one thing -- Easel. The liberating looking glass -- The equal of the muses and Apelles -- How to paint an apricot -- I want to be everything -- Smile. The lodestar -- They call me Madame Van Dyck -- Allegory. A story, stilled -- It's true, it's true -- The sun of Italy and the gem of Europe -- My grey hair -- Self-portrait hesitating -- Hallucination. I Do Not See the (Woman) Hidden in the Forest -- There are things that are not sayable -- I am the subject I know best -- Solitude. Fine and fierce things -- The strange form -- I've scraped by, up and down -- Translation. Tradition thinks for you, but heavens! how dull! ;-- To be known by name -- To draw seeing every feather -- Self-portrait as Tahitian -- Naked. Open to everything -- The model models for herself -- The painting and the painter -- Epilogue.
Summary: "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." --publisher's website.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [263]-313) and index.

The deceits of the past -- The city of women -- Their little hands, so tender and so white -- Cabinet of curiosities ; The fault in our stars? -- A self-portrait is never one thing -- Easel. The liberating looking glass -- The equal of the muses and Apelles -- How to paint an apricot -- I want to be everything -- Smile. The lodestar -- They call me Madame Van Dyck -- Allegory. A story, stilled -- It's true, it's true -- The sun of Italy and the gem of Europe -- My grey hair -- Self-portrait hesitating -- Hallucination. I Do Not See the (Woman) Hidden in the Forest -- There are things that are not sayable -- I am the subject I know best -- Solitude. Fine and fierce things -- The strange form -- I've scraped by, up and down -- Translation. Tradition thinks for you, but heavens! how dull! ;-- To be known by name -- To draw seeing every feather -- Self-portrait as Tahitian -- Naked. Open to everything -- The model models for herself -- The painting and the painter -- Epilogue.

"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." --publisher's website.

Powered by Koha