World of Art: Women, Art, and Society

This acclaimed study challenges assumptions in seeing "great" women artists, like Artemisia Gentileschi, as exceptions who "transcended" their sex in producing major works of art. While acknowledging the many women whose contributions to visual culture since the Middle Ages have often been neglected and the role of art history in enabling access to these works, this critical survey provides much more than an alternative canon of women artists: it re-examines the works themselves and the ways in which they have been perceived as marginal, often in direct reference to gender. In her discussion of feminism and its influence on such a reappraisal, the author also addresses the closely related issues of ethnicity, class and sexuality. For this extensively revised, expanded and newly illustrated edition, Chadwick brings her pioneering book right up to date in the light of new research, while two new chapters focus on the work of contemporary, postmodern artists whose work is consciously informed by feminism.