The Union of Women Painters and Sculptors was founded in Paris in 1881 to represent the interests of women artists and to facilitate the exhibition of their work. This lively and informative book traces the history of the first fifteen years of the organisation and places it in the contexts of the Paris art world and the development of feminism in the late nineteenth century. Tamar Garb explores how the Union campaigned to have women artists written about in the press and admitted to the Salon jury and into the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and describes how the organisation's leaders took their campaigns into the French parliament itself. Although the women of the Union were often quite conservative politically, socially, and stylistically, says Garb, they believed that women had a special gift that would enhance France's cultural reputation and maintain the uplifting moral-cultural position that seemed in jeopardy at the turn of the century. Focusing on the developments that made the prominence of the organisation possible, Garb discusses the growth of the women's movement, educational reforms, institutional changes in the art world, and critical debates and contemporary scientific thought. She examines contemporary perceptions of both art and femininity, showing how the understanding of one affected the image of the other. This book reverses conventional accounts of late nineteenth-century French art, offering a new picture of the Paris art world from the point of view of a group of women who were marginalised by its dominant institutions.

The portrait offers the possibility of observation and introspection, and is at the same time one of the most private and representative artistic genres. But what distinguishes the specifically female gaze? On the occasion of the major fall exhibition 2021 at Fondation Beyeler, this catalog brings together nine women artists from Europe and America from the beginning of modernism to the present day, whose works represent an outstanding contribution to the history of the portrait. The individual view of the artists on themselves and on their surroundings in the course of time is expressed. In the catalog, renowned authors explore the individual artists and their fascinating ways of reflecting on themselves and on others. The featured artists are Mary Cassatt, Marlene Dumas, Frida Kahlo, Lotte Laserstein, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Berthe Morisot, Alice Neel, Elizabeth Peyton, and Cindy Sherman.

The Body in Time looks at two different genres in relation to the construction of femininity in late nineteenth-century France: Degas's representation of ballet dancers and the transforming tradition of female portraiture. Class, gender, power, and agency are at stake in both arenas, but they play themselves out in different ways via different pictorial languages. Degas's depictions of anonymous young female ballerinas at the Paris Opera reflect his fascination with the physical exertions and prosaic setting of the dancer's sexualized body. Unlike the standard Romantic depictions of the ballerina, Degas's dancers are anonymous spread-legged workers on public display. Female portraiture and self-portraiture, in contrast, depicted the unique and the distinctive: privileged women, self-assured individuals transgressing gender conventions. Focusing on Degas's representation of the dancer, Tamar Garb examines the development of Degas's oeuvre from its early Realist documentary ambitions to the abstracted Symbolist renderings of the feminine as cypher in his later works. She argues that despite the apparent depletion of social significance and specificity, Degas's later works remain deeply enmeshed in contemporary gendered ways of viewing and experiencing art and life. Garb also looks at the transformation in the genre of portraiture heralded by the "new woman," examining the historical expectations of female portraiture and demonstrating how these expectations are challenged by new notions of female autonomy and interiority. Women artists such as Anna Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, and Anna Bilinska deployed the language of Realism in their own self-representation. The figure of femininity remained central to the personal, political, and pictorial imperatives of artists across the spectrum of modern aesthetics. Gender and genre intersect throughout this book to show how these categories mutually impact one another.

Distance and Desire - accompanying the same-titled exhibition in Neu-Ulm - is the first major publication to stage a dialogue between the ethnographic visions of late nineteenth and early-twentieth century African photography and engagements with this imagery by contemporary artists. Presenting an extraordinary range of portraits, albums, postcards, cartes de visite, and books from Southern Africa, as well as recent photography and video art from The Walther Collection, the catalogue includes original thematic essays by leading art historians, anthropologists, and cultural critics. Distance and Desire offers new perspectives on the African archive, reimagining its diverse histories and changing meanings. Distance and Desire investigates typical representations of African subjects, from scenes in nature and romanticized images of semi-nude models, to modern sitters posing in stylized studios, critically addressing the politics of colonialism and the complex issues of gender and identity. Among many diverse topics, the catalogue examines in-depth a series of cartes de visite from the Diamond Fields in Kimberley, the figure of the Zulu, the history of South Africa's prominent studio photographers, A.M. Duggan-Cronin's extensive ethnographic study The Bantu Tribes of South Africa, and the archive of elegant family portraits reproduced by the contemporary artist Santu Mofokeng in The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890-1950. The catalogue also reveals how the heritage of African imagery figures in the practices of contemporary African and African American artists, whose compelling photography and video art reworks the archive through satire or appropriation.

The essays in this wide-ranging, beautifully illustrated volume capture the theoretical range and scholarly rigor of recent criticism that has fundamentally transformed the study of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Readers are invited to consider the profound issues and penetrating questions that lie beneath this perennially popular body of work as the contributors examine the art world of late nineteenth-century France - including detailed looks at Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Degas, Cezanne, Morisot, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. The authors offer fascinating new perspectives, placing the artworks from this period in wider social and historical contexts. They explore these painters' pictorial and market strategies, the critical reception and modern criteria the paintings engendered, and the movement's historic role in the formation of an avant-garde tradition. Their research reflects the wealth of new documents, critical approaches, and scholarly exhibitions that have fundamentally altered our understanding of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. These essays, several of which have previously been familiar only to scholars, provide instructive models of in-depth critical analysis and of the competing art historical methods that have crucially reshaped the field. Contributors of this title include: Carol Armstrong, T. J. Clark, Stephen F. Eisenman, Tamar Garb, Nicholas Green, Robert L. Herbert, John House, Mary Tompkins Lewis, Michel Melot, Linda Nochlin, Richard Shiff, Debora Silverman, Paul Tucker, and Martha Ward.

The meaning of a painted portrait and even its subject may be far more complex than expected, Tamar Garb reveals in this book. She charts for the first time the history of French female portraiture from its heyday in the early nineteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, showing how these paintings illuminate evolving social attitudes and aesthetic concerns in France over the course of the century. The author builds the discussion around six canonic works by Ingres, Manet, Cassatt, Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse, beginning with Ingres's idealized portrait of Mme de Sennones and ending with Matisse's elegiac last portrait of his wife. During the hundred years that separate these works, the female portrait went from being the ideal genre for the expression of painting's capacity to describe and embellish "nature," to the prime locus of its refusal to do so. Picasso's Cubism, and specifically "Ma Jolie," provides the fulcrum of this shift.