In this major new 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?

In this major new book, renowned 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 a feminist approach to art history make?
Differencing the Canon moves between feminist re-readings of modern masters - Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Manet - and the canonical artists of feminist art history Artemisia Gentileschi and Mary Cassatt. Pollock asks both how women read and what might be different about art made by a woman. Pollock unpacks the representation of culturally resonant female figures in a range of texts, from Manet's depiction of the model Jeanne Duval in his painting Olympia, to Charlotte Brontë's Lucy Snowe, artists representations of Cleopatra and Angela Carter's Black Venus. She argues that it is not enough simply to read as a woman; we must also acknowledge the differences between women shaped by racist and colonial hierarchies.

This text brings together a collection of artists, curators, critics and researchers to consider the question of sexual difference and its significance in the production and reception of visual representation by women artists. "Generations" indicates a sense of awareness of the historical and political positioning of women whereas "Geographies" calls attention to their location in terms of nationality, imperialism, migration, exile, diaspora and social difference. Drawing on a range of current theoretical perspectives, works by women artists of the 20th century are examined in terms of themes such as the mother, the body, the land and history/memory. As well as representing artistic practices in the United States, Canada and Europe through the work of Orlan, Ana Mendieta and Jenny Saville, the book counters the west's artistic hegemony by equally studying women working in non-western contexts, such as the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuna, Shimada Yoshika from Japan, Jin-me Yoon and Re-Hyun Park from Korea and Bracha Lichtenberg from Israel. British/Zanibari artist Lubiana Himid provides specially commissioned art.

"Generations and Geographies" collects a unique assembly of artists, curators, critics and researchers to consider the question of sexual difference and its significance in the production and reception of visual representation by women artists."Generations" indicates a sense of awareness of the historical and political positioning of women, whereas "Geographies" calls attention to their location in terms of nationality, imperialism, migration, exile, diaspora and social difference.
Drawing on the fullest range of current theoretical perspectives, works by women artists of the twentieth century are examined in terms of themes such as the mother, the body, the land and history/memory. While representing artistic practices in the United States, Canada and Europe through the work of Orlan, Ana Mendieta and Jenny Saville, "Generations and Geographies" counters the West's artistic hegemony by equally studying women working in non-western contexts. Unique coverage of such artists as Chilean Cecilia Vicuna, Shimada Yoshika from Japan, Jin-me Yoon and Re-Hyun Park from Korea, Bracha Lichtenberg from Israel, and British/Zanibari artist Lubiana Himid provides a long awaited international scope to the study of feminist theory in the visual arts.

Griselda Pollock reintroduces an important feminist forerunner in this new, full-colour setting of Helen Rosenau’s 1944 book Woman in Art   Helen Rosenau (1900–1984) was part of the influential migration of European Jewish intellectuals who fled to Britain and the United States during the 1930s, bringing with them exciting innovations in art history’s methods. Only Rosenau, however, centred gender in her analysis. The result—her book Woman in Art: From Type to Personality—is a feminist art-historical project, as relevant today as when it was first published in 1944, in which Rosenau drew on contemporary discussions of gender in anthropology, philosophy, sociology, law, theology, history, and literature.   In this new volume, ahead of the eightieth anniversary of its original publication, Rosenau’s erudite and accessible text is prefaced with a personal memoir by Adrian Rifkin, who was once her student, new research into the refugee experience by Rachel Dickson, and a portrait of Rosenau as feminist intellectual by Griselda Pollock. In conversation with this new setting of the original text, richly illustrated with colour images, Pollock offers eye-opening new readings of key aspects of Rosenau’s methods, concepts, arguments, and interpretations of famous artworks, establishing the place of Rosenau’s “little book of 1944� in the historiographies of both feminist thought and cutting-edge art history across two centuries.

This title was first published in 2000. "Work and the Image", published in two volumes, addresses a critical theme in contemporary social and cultural debates whose place in visual representation has been neglected. Ranging from Greek pottery to contemporary performance, and exploring a breadth of geo-national perspectives including those of France, Britain, Hungary, Soviet Russia, the Ukraine, Siberia and Germany, the essays provide a challenging reconsideration of the image of work, the meaning of the work process, and the complex issues around artistic activity as itself a form of work even as it offers a representation of labour. Volume I includes interdisciplinary case studies which plot the changing definitions of work as labour, craft, social relations and a source of historical identity, while analyzing the role of visual representation in their formation and transformation. The diverse essays cover such topics as anti-slavery movements and enunciation of workers' rights, revolutionary politics, relations of class and gender, industrial masculinities and women's rural sociality, unemployment and subjectivity, Stalinist aesthetics and nationalist identities.

This title was first published in 2000. Published in two volumes, "Work and the Image" addresses a critical theme in contemporary social and cultural debates whose place in visual representation has been neglected. Ranging from Greek pottery to contemporary performance, and exploring a breadth of geo-national perspectives including those of France, Britain, Hungary, Soviet Russia, the Ukraine, Siberia and Germany, the essays provide a challenging reconsideration of the image of work, the meaning of the work process, and the complex issues around artistic activity as itself a form of work even as it offers a representation of labour. With a shared focus on the 20th century, the era of modernity and its postmodern aftermath, the essays in this volume examine the diverse ways in which the social relations of work in industrial societies from both capitalist and socialist regimes were publicly and privately mediated by changing forms of visual representation. The authors discuss traditional analyses of the image of the worker in the light of contemporary critical theories that address the question of the subjectivity of the worker in relation to class, gender, nationhood and the concept of modernity.

In an innovative and experimental format, Griselda Pollock provides another new impetus in ways of thinking and writing about the visual arts.

Neither cybernetic nor etherised, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum is a poetic laboratory breaking the museum's rigid rules to create encounters with and between images by and about women as they engaged with and were defined by modernity. Tracking the complex relays between femininity, modernity and representation by means of a sequence of virtual exhibitions, this book reframes art in the twentieth century 'with women in mind.' Initially exploring how modernist women engaged creatively with the legacies of western art's prime representation of femininity - the nude female body - the book also contemplates the traumatic rupture scorched into the culture of the West by the Holocaust. What can be the function of art after the atrocity inflicted on bodies by Nazi terror and mass murder? What can feministtheory and aesthetic practice contribute to the debates about art after Auschwitz?

In our era of Liquid Modernity with its dizzyingly accelerating pace of change, how can art making working with media such as painting and drawing call upon us to take time, and reclaim the meaning of time - times of making, times of viewing, times of thinking?

Calling upon both the Freudian museum and Aby Warburg's Memory Atlas as resources for feminist cultural analysis, this book is another major contribution to contemporary art history and cultural studies.

This title was first published in 2000. "Work and the Image", published in two volumes, addresses a critical theme in contemporary social and cultural debates whose place in visual representation has been neglected. Ranging from Greek pottery to contemporary performance, and exploring a breadth of geo-national perspectives including those of France, Britain, Hungary, Soviet Russia, the Ukraine, Siberia and Germany, the essays provide a challenging reconsideration of the image of work, the meaning of the work process, and the complex issues around artistic activity as itself a form of work even as it offers a representation of labour. Volume I includes interdisciplinary case studies which plot the changing definitions of work as labour, craft, social relations and a source of historical identity, while analyzing the role of visual representation in their formation and transformation. The diverse essays cover such topics as anti-slavery movements and enunciation of workers' rights, revolutionary politics, relations of class and gender, industrial masculinities and women's rural sociality, unemployment and subjectivity, Stalinist aesthetics and nationalist identities.

This title was first published in 2000. Published in two volumes, "Work and the Image" addresses a critical theme in contemporary social and cultural debates whose place in visual representation has been neglected. Ranging from Greek pottery to contemporary performance, and exploring a breadth of geo-national perspectives including those of France, Britain, Hungary, Soviet Russia, the Ukraine, Siberia and Germany, the essays provide a challenging reconsideration of the image of work, the meaning of the work process, and the complex issues around artistic activity as itself a form of work even as it offers a representation of labour. With a shared focus on the 20th century, the era of modernity and its postmodern aftermath, the essays in this volume examine the diverse ways in which the social relations of work in industrial societies from both capitalist and socialist regimes were publicly and privately mediated by changing forms of visual representation. The authors discuss traditional analyses of the image of the worker in the light of contemporary critical theories that address the question of the subjectivity of the worker in relation to class, gender, nationhood and the concept of modernity.

In this selection of recent essays, Pollock insightfully engages all major areas of contemporary theory, especially focusing on sexed subjectivities, post-colonialism and Marxist-informed history. In her commentary, Penny Florence places Pollock's critique of modernism, art history, and criticism within the context of the social, political, and ideological developments that have taken place since the 1970s. Florence recognizes in Pollock's work a critical model that moves beyond the contradictions that take place within the history of art. Pollock's own essays and Florence's commentary elaborate the complexities in evaluating this prominent theorist and feminist, whose work demands a capacity to sustain contradiction.

In this selection of essays, Griselda Pollock engages all areas of contemporary theory, especially focusing on sexed subjectivities, post-colonialism and Marxist-informed history. In her commentary, Penny Florence places Pollock's critique of modernism, art history, and criticism within the context of the social, political and ideological developments that have taken place since the 1970s. Florence recognizes in Pollock's work a critical model that moves beyond the contradictions that take place within the history of art. Pollock's own essays and Florence's commentary elaborate the complexities in evaluating this prominent theorist and feminist, whose work demands a capacity to sustain contradiction.

The definitive introduction to the artist Mary Cassatt, placing her work in the wider context of 19th-century feminism and art theory. A close ally of Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt was the only American painter at the heart of the Impressionist group in Paris. Highly respected on both sides of the Atlantic, Cassatt was a forthright advocate for women's intellectual, creative and political emancipation. She brought her discerning gaze and compositional inventiveness across many media to the subtle social interactions of women in public and private spaces, such as at the theatre, and in moments of intimacy with children, where she was one of the most attentive and unsentimental analysts of the infant body and the child's emerging personality. Tracing key moments in Cassatt's long career, art historian Griselda Pollock highlights Cassatt's extensive artistic training across Europe, analysing her profound study of Old Masters while revealing her intelligent understanding of both Manet and Courbet. Pollock also provides close readings of Cassatt's paintings and her singular vision of women in modernity. Now revised with a new preface, updates to the bibliography and colour illustrations throughout, this book offers a rich perspective on the core concerns of a major Impressionist artist through the frames of class, gender, space and difference.

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. Crucially, she not only explores a feminist re-reading of the works 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. 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, Vision and Difference is as powerful 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.

Do artists travel away from or towards trauma? Is trauma encrypted or inscribed in art? Or can aesthetic practices (after-images) bring about transformation of trauma, personal trauma or historical traumas? Can they do this in a way that does not imply cure or resolution of the traces (after-affects) of trauma? How do artists themselves process these traces as participants in and sensors for our life-worlds and histories, and 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. -- .

In an innovative and experimental format, Griselda Pollock provides another new impetus in ways of thinking and writing about the visual arts.

Neither cybernetic nor etherised, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum is a poetic laboratory breaking the museum's rigid rules to create encounters with and between images by and about women as they engaged with and were defined by modernity. Tracking the complex relays between femininity, modernity and representation by means of a sequence of virtual exhibitions, this book reframes art in the twentieth century 'with women in mind.' Initially exploring how modernist women engaged creatively with the legacies of western art's prime representation of femininity - the nude female body - the book also contemplates the traumatic rupture scorched into the culture of the West by the Holocaust. What can be the function of art after the atrocity inflicted on bodies by Nazi terror and mass murder? What can feministtheory and aesthetic practice contribute to the debates about art after Auschwitz?

In our era of Liquid Modernity with its dizzyingly accelerating pace of change, how can art making working with media such as painting and drawing call upon us to take time, and reclaim the meaning of time - times of making, times of viewing, times of thinking?

Calling upon both the Freudian museum and Aby Warburg's Memory Atlas as resources for feminist cultural analysis, this book is another major contribution to contemporary art history and cultural studies.

'Pollock's account points in an exciting direction for the future of feminist artistic production and theory.' - Art History

'Vision and Difference is a needed and major contribution to feminism and Art History.' - The Art Bulletin

Lumen, a survey of the four-decade career of British-Indian artist Sutapa Biswas, accompanies two solo exhibitions of the artist's work held in 2021-22. Biswas emigrated from India to the UK with her family in the 1960s. Taking the long histories of colonialism together with personal memories, Biswas's art meditates on questions of migration, identity and belonging. Her practice has consistently interrogated Western tradition and discourse, pushing past absences, exclusions and limited representations to make evident the entwined histories of culture and politics. This publication details Biswas's career from its origins in the Black Arts Movement in the 1980s to her important photographic installations of the 1990s and her subsequent major moving-image works, including her newly commissioned film Lumen. The first substantial publication on the artist in over 17 years, it features two new conversations with the artist and two commissioned essays. It also includes a republication of Griselda Pollock's important text on Biswas's work, along with a postface reflecting on their relationship in the decades since the essay's original publication. Published on the occasion of the exhibition: Sutapa Biswas: Lumen BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (26 June 2021-22 March 2022) and Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge (16 October 2021-30 January 2022).

What did it mean for painter Lee Krasner to be an artist and a woman if, in the culture of 1950s New York, to be an artist was to be Jackson Pollock and to be a woman was to be Marilyn Monroe? With this question, Griselda Pollock begins a transdisciplinary journey across the gendered aesthetics and the politics of difference in New York abstract, gestural painting. Revisiting recent exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism that either marginalised the artist-women in the movement or focused solely on the excluded women, as well as exhibitions of women in abstraction, Pollock reveals how theories of embodiment, the gesture, hysteria and subjectivity can deepen our understanding of this moment in the history of painting co-created by women and men. Providing close readings of key paintings by Lee Krasner and re-thinking her own historic examination of images of Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler at work, Pollock builds a cultural bridge between the New York artist-women and their other, Marilyn Monroe, a creative actor whose physically anguished but sexually appropriated star body is presented as pathos formula of life energy. Monroe emerges as a haunting presence within this moment of New York modernism, eroding the policed boundaries between high and popular culture and explaining what we gain by re-thinking art with the richness of feminist thought. -- .

Concentrationary Memories has, as its premise, the idea at the heart of Alain Resnais's film Night and Fog (1955) that the concentrationary plague unleashed on the world by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s is not simply confined to one place and one time but is now a permanent presence shadowing modern life. It further suggests that memory (and, indeed, art in general) must be invoked to show this haunting of the present by this menacing past so that we can read for the signs of terror and counter its deformation of the human. Through working with political and cultural theory on readings of film, art, photographic and literary practices, Concentrationary Memories analyses different cultural responses to concentrationary terror in different sites in the post-war period, ranging from Auschwitz to Argentina. These readings show how those involved in the cultural production of memories of the horror of totalitarianism sought to find forms, languages and image systems which could make sense of and resist the post-war condition in which, as Hannah Arendt famously stated 'everything is possible' and 'human beings as human beings become superfluous.' Authors include Nicholas Chare, Isabelle de le Court, Thomas Elsaesser, Benjamin Hannavy Cousen, Matthew John, Claire Launchbury, Sylvie Lindeperg, Laura Malosetti Costa, Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman, Glenn Sujo, Annette Wieviorka and John Wolfe Ackerman.

What did it mean for painter Lee Krasner to be an artist and a woman if, in the culture of 1950s New York, to be an artist was to be Jackson Pollock and to be a woman was to be Marilyn Monroe? With this question, Griselda Pollock begins a transdisciplinary journey across the gendered aesthetics and the politics of difference in New York abstract, gestural painting. Revisiting recent exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism that either marginalised the artist-women in the movement or focused solely on the excluded women, as well as exhibitions of women in abstraction, Pollock reveals how theories of embodiment, the gesture, hysteria and subjectivity can deepen our understanding of this moment in the history of painting co-created by women and men. Providing close readings of key paintings by Lee Krasner and re-thinking her own historic examination of images of Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler at work, Pollock builds a cultural bridge between the New York artist-women and their other, Marilyn Monroe, a creative actor whose physically anguished but sexually appropriated star body is presented as pathos formula of life energy. Monroe emerges as a haunting presence within this moment of New York modernism, eroding the policed boundaries between high and popular culture and explaining what we gain by re-thinking art with the richness of feminist thought. -- .

The influential cultural critic Elisabeth Bronfen sets out in this book a conversation between literature, cinema, and visual culture. The crossmappings in and between these essays address the cultural survival of image formulas involving portraiture and the uncanny relation between the body and its representability, the gendering of war, death and the fragility of life, as well as sovereignty and political power. Each chapter tracks transformations that occur as aesthetic figurations travel not only from one historical moment to the next, but also from one medium to another. Following Bronfen on these journeys into the cultural imaginary, the reader encounters prominent artists such as Edgar Degas, Francesca Woodman, Paul McCarthy, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Wagner, Pablo Picasso and William Shakespeare, alongside Classical Hollywood's film noir and melodrama, and the TV series The Wire and House of Cards.

In 1945, French political prisoners returning from the concentration camps of Germany coined the phrase 'the concentrationary universe' to describe the camps as a terrible political experiment in the destruction of the human. This book shows how the unacknowledged legacy of a totalitarian mentality has seeped into the deepest recesses of everyday popular culture. It asks if the concentrationary now infests our cultural imaginary, normalizing what was once considered horrific and exceptional by transforming into entertainment violations of human life. Drawing on the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and the analyses of violence by Agamben, Virilio, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, it also offers close readings of films by Cavani and Haneke that identify and critically expose such an imaginary and, hence, contest its lingering force.