Griselda Pollock

Griselda Pollock provides concrete historical analyses of key moments in the formation of modern culture to reveal the sexual politics at the heart of modernist art, exploring the writings of Elizabeth Siddall, Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot.

Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art

Vision and Difference

Vanessa Corby

"Encountering Eva Hesse presents new writing on the work of Eva Hesse (1936-70) by international artists, curators, and art historians who examine the varied framings of exhibition, studio, and writing for their encounters with these still challenging works of art."--BOOK JACKET.

Encountering Eva Hesse

In this book, art historian Griselda Pollock makes a compelling intervention into a debate at the very centre of feminist art history: should the traditional canon of the 'Old Masters' be rejected, replaced or reformed? What 'difference' can feminist 'interventions in art's histories' make? Should we simply reject the all-male succession of 'great artists' in favour of an all-woman litany of artistic heroines? Or should we displace present gender demarcations and allow the ambiguities and complexities of desire to shape our readings of art? Differencing the Canon moves between feminist re-readings of the canonical modern masters - Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Manet - and the 'canonical' artists of feminist art history, Artemisia Gentileschi and Mary Cassatt. Pollock avoids both an unnuanced critique of masculine canons and an unquestioning celebration of women artists. She draws on psychoanalysis and deconstruction to examine the project of reading for 'inscriptions in the feminine', and asks what the signs of difference might be in art made by an artist who is 'a woman'.

Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories

Differencing the Canon

Generations and Geographies brings together a collection of artists, critics and researchers to consider the question of sexual difference and its significance in the production and reception of visual representation by women artists.

Feminist Readings

Generations & Geographies in the Visual Arts

The publication of 'Vision and Difference' marked a milestone in the development of modern art history. Its introduction of a feminist perspective into this largely male-oriented discipline made shockwaves that are still felt forcefully today. Drawing upon feminist cultural theory previously little applied to the visual arts, Griselda Pollock offers concrete historical analyses of key moments in the formation of modern culture to reveal the sexual politics at the heart of modernist art. Crucially, she not only provides a feminist re-reading of the work of canonical male Impressionist and Pre-Raphaelite artists including Edgar Degas and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but also re-inserts into art history their female contemporaries - women artists such as Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Casting her critical eye over the contemporary art scene, Pollock discusses the work of women artists such as Mary Kelly and Yve Lomax, highlighting the problems of working in a culture where the feminine is still defined as the object of the male gaze. Now published with a new introduction by Griselda Pollock, 'Vision and Difference' remains as powerful and as essential reading as ever for all those seeking not only to understand the history of the feminine in art but also to develop new strategies for representation for the future.

Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art

Fred Orton

Vincent van Gogh

Artist of His Time

Vincent Van Gogh

Continuing her feminist reconceptualisation of the ways we can experience and study the visual arts, world renowned art historian and cultural analyst, Griselda Pollock proposes a series of new encounters through virtual exhibitions with art made by women over the twentieth century. Challenging the dominant museum models of art and history that have been so exclusive of women's artistic contributions to the twentieth century, the virtual feminist museum stages some of the complex relations between femininity, modernity and representation. Griselda Pollock draws on the models of both Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas and Freud's private museum of antiquities as well as Ettinger's concept of subjectivity as encounter to propose a differencing journey through time, space and archive. Featuring studies of Canova 's Three Graces and women artist's modernist reclamations of the female body, the book traverses the rupture of fascism and the Holocaust and ponders the significance of painting and drawing in their aftermath. Artists featured include: Georgia O'Keeffe, Josephine Baker, Gluck, Charlotte Salomon, Bracha Ettinger and Christine Taylor Patten.

Time, Space and the Archive

Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum

Sutapa Biswas

Over the last 17 years, Sutapa Biswas has been one of the leading artists of her generation. She has produced an evocative and challenging body of work, engaging with feminism, cultural identity and memory. This book examines the artists' oeuvre, and looks at all aspects of her working practice.

This groundbreaking study, the definitive introduction to the work of artist Mary Cassatt, places her work in the wider context of nineteenth-century feminism and art theory and is now updated with color illustrations. This groundbreaking study redefines the status of the beloved American artist Mary Cassatt, placing her work in the wider context of nineteenth- century feminism and art theory. Mary Cassatt looks at the artist’s work in light of her time as an advocate for women’s intellectual life and political emancipation. Esteemed by her contemporaries for her commitment to what she and her radical colleagues in Paris termed “the new art”—now called impressionism—Cassatt brought her discerning gaze and compositional inventiveness to the study of the subtle, often psychological, social interactions of women in public and private spaces. Focusing on key moments of engagement and change over the artist’s long career, art historian Griselda Pollock discusses Cassatt’s artistic training across Europe, her profound study of the Old Masters, and places fresh emphasis on the artist’s interest in Manet and other contemporary French and Spanish painters as well as her influence on American collections of French modernism. Now revised with a new preface, updates to the bibliography, and color illustrations throughout, this book offers a reevaluation of the work of this important artist as seen through the frames of class, gender, space, and difference.

Mary Cassatt: Painter of Modern Women (Second) (World of Art)

In this major book, Griselda Pollock engages boldly in the culture wars over `what is the canon?` and `what difference can feminism make?` Do we simply reject the all-male line-up and satisfy our need for ideal egos with an all women litany of artistic heroines? Or is the question a chance to resist the phallocentric binary and allow the ambiguities and complexities of desire - subjectivity and sexuality - to shape the readings of art that constantly displace the present gender demarcations?

Feminism and the Writing of Art's Histories

Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art

Jean-François Millet

Psychoanalysis and the Image brings together an influential team of international scholars who demonstrate innovative ways to apply psychoanalytical resources in the study of international modern art and visual representation. Examines psychoanalytic concepts, values, debates and controversies that have been hallmarks of visual representation in the modern and contemporary periods Covers topics including melancholia, sex, and pathology to the body, and parent-child relations Advances theoretical debates in art history while offering substantive analyses of significant bodies of twentieth century art Edited by internationally renowned art historian Griselda Pollock.

Transdisciplinary Perspectives

Psychoanalysis and the Image

Rozsika Parker

Why is everything that compromises greatness in art coded as 'feminine'? Has the feminist critique of Art History 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.

Women, Art and Ideology

Old Mistresses

Jacques Rancière

Georges Didi-Huberman

Musée cantonal des beaux-arts (Lausanne)

Alfredo Jaar

Spanning from the 1970s until today, this compelling new monograph traces the development of the respected Chilean-born, New York-based conceptualist--from his earliest public interventions to his latest installations. Some of the highly political subjects range from the plight of Amazonian gold miners to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and there are several previously unpublished works that the artist created in his hometown of Santiago during Pinochet's repressive military dictatorship, as well as numerous works made by collating and rethinking press clippings. Working with public interventions, installations, photography and video, Jaar examines the nature of images and their viewers' relationships to them. His work tackles the very possibility of producing art based on events that we would prefer to ignore, and of creating images in a context characterized both by their over-abundance and, paradoxically, by their invisibility. Texts by art historians Georges Didi Huberman, Griselda Pollock and Nicole Schweizer and philosopher Jacques Rancière.

Alfredo Jaar : The Politics of Images

Alfredo Jaar : la politique des images

Victoria Anderson

The tale of the serial wife-murderer Bluebeard, his defiant, and surviving, final wife, a bloodied key and a secret chamber of horrors, has fascinated writers, composers, artists and film-makers throughout modern times. It is a unique story that dares to disclose and explore masculine violence: the homme fatal. This transdisciplinary book explores the deep appeal of the Bluebeard story for twentieth-century culture. Its major focus is how the modernist imagination used the elements of Bluebearda??s tale to explore masculinitya??s anxieties in the face of the emerging demands of women for redefinition and sexual equality: anxieties also of ethnic and cultural difference, and fundamental disquiet about sexuality, pathology and violence in the masculine. With chapters by Maria Tatar, Elisabeth Bronfen, Mererid Puw Davies, Ian Christie, David Cooper, Michael Hiltbrunner and the editors, the volume undertakes cultural, contextual and musicological analyses of Bartoka??s opera 'Duke Bluebearda??s Castle', tracing Bluebearda??s evolution from Perrault in the seventeenth century to the cinematic hommes fatals of Melies, Fritz Lang and Hitchcock. The result is an intriguing kaleidoscope of sexuality, curiosity, violence and death.

Death and Secrets from Bartók to Hitchcock

Bluebeard's Legacy

Do artists travel away from or towards trauma? Is trauma encrypted or inscribed in art? Or can aesthetic practices – after-images – bring about transformation – that does not imply cure or resolution-of the traces – after-affects – of trauma, personal trauma or historical traumas inhabiting the world whose traces artists also process as participants in and sensors for our life-worlds and histories? How does the viewer, coming belatedly or from elsewhere, encounter works bearing such traces or seeking forms through which to touch and transform them? These are some of the questions posed by major feminist art historian and cultural analyst, Griselda Pollock, in her latest installation of the virtual feminist museum. In closely-read case studies, we encounter artworks by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ana Mendieta, Louise Bourgeois, Alina Szapocznikow, Anna Maria Maiolino, Vera Frenkel, Sarah Kofman and Chantal Akerman to explore trauma and bereavement, fatal illness, first and second generation Holocaust experience, migration, exile and the encounter with political horror and atrocity. Offering a specifically feminist contribution to trauma studies, and a feminist psychoanalytical contribution to the study of contemporary art, this volume continues the conceptual innovations that have been the hall-mark of Pollock's dedicated exploration of feminist interventions in art's histories.

Griselda Pollock

About

Books

Join the club