Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Introduction: And Now for Something Completely Different
- 1 The Back Story of Twentieth-Century Art
- 2 The Greatest Artists of the Twentieth Century
- 3 The Most Important Works of Art of the Twentieth Century
- 4 The Greatest Artistic Breakthroughs of the Twentieth Century
- 5 The Greatest Women Artists of the Twentieth Century
- 6 Creating New Genres: Conceptual Artists at Work and Play in the Twentieth Century
- 7 And Now for Something Completely Different: The Versatility of Conceptual Innovators
- 8 You Cannot Be Serious: The Conceptual Innovator as Trickster
- 9 Painting by Proxy: The Conceptual Artist as Manufacturer
- 10 Co-Authoring Advanced Art
- 11 Language in Visual Art
- 12 Portraits of the Artist: Personal Visual Art in the Twentieth Century
- 13 The Rise and (Partial) Fall of Abstract Painting in the Twentieth Century
- 14 The Globalization of Advanced Art in the Twentieth Century
- 15 Artists and the Market: From Leonardo and Titian to Warhol and Hirst
- 16 The State of Advanced Art: The Late Twentieth Century and Beyond
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
5 - The Greatest Women Artists of the Twentieth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Introduction: And Now for Something Completely Different
- 1 The Back Story of Twentieth-Century Art
- 2 The Greatest Artists of the Twentieth Century
- 3 The Most Important Works of Art of the Twentieth Century
- 4 The Greatest Artistic Breakthroughs of the Twentieth Century
- 5 The Greatest Women Artists of the Twentieth Century
- 6 Creating New Genres: Conceptual Artists at Work and Play in the Twentieth Century
- 7 And Now for Something Completely Different: The Versatility of Conceptual Innovators
- 8 You Cannot Be Serious: The Conceptual Innovator as Trickster
- 9 Painting by Proxy: The Conceptual Artist as Manufacturer
- 10 Co-Authoring Advanced Art
- 11 Language in Visual Art
- 12 Portraits of the Artist: Personal Visual Art in the Twentieth Century
- 13 The Rise and (Partial) Fall of Abstract Painting in the Twentieth Century
- 14 The Globalization of Advanced Art in the Twentieth Century
- 15 Artists and the Market: From Leonardo and Titian to Warhol and Hirst
- 16 The State of Advanced Art: The Late Twentieth Century and Beyond
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Introduction
Recent decades have witnessed an intense interest in the role of women in the art of the past. Scores of museum exhibitions have been devoted to the work of women artists, and scores of monographs have examined the contributions of women to our artistic heritage.
As is common in the humanities, however, the scholarly attention devoted to the role of women artists has been qualitative rather than quantitative. As a result, we now have a large amount of scholarship that analyzes the contributions of individual women artists, or of particular groups of women artists, but we do not have studies that provide systematic evaluation of the relative importance of different women artists. This chapter will begin to remedy this deficiency.
Specifically, this chapter will investigate the question of which women made the greatest contributions to art during the past century. Women played a far greater role in the art of the twentieth century than in any earlier time. So for example the third edition of Nancy Heller's Women Artists, published in 1997, a textbook written “to provide a richly illustrated overview of some of the most interesting professional women painters and sculptors in the Western world, from the Renaissance to the present,” devotes fully 144 pages to the twentieth century, substantially more than the total of only 97 pages devoted to all earlier centuries. This concentration is a product of the fact that the twentieth century witnessed, in Heller's words, “a profusion of women artists.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art , pp. 93 - 111Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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