Feb 2024
"Now You see Them, Now You Don't" or Feminity, Modernity, Representation : Rethinking the Twentieth Century with Women in Mind
Paris, France
The École des modernités
Griselda Pollock is Professor Emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds. She previously taught at Canterbury College of Art, Reading University, Manchester. Her work, which has been seminal in the development of feminist visual arts studies, focuses on the critical analysis of culture, history and histories. Her numerous publications include several landmark works, including: Killing Men and Dying Women: A Woman's Touch in the Cold Zone of 1950s American Painting (Manchester University Press, 1996), Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories (Routledge, London and New York, 1999) and Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018). She is currently preparing the publication of Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau’s 'Little Book’ of 1944 (Paul Mellon Centre 2024).
Image : Griselda Pollock © University of Leeds
This lecture aims to address a paradox. What made modernity modern was radical changes to women's experience, their increasing presence in the social, political, economic structures of emerging capitalism on the one hand, and on the other, in the intellectual, cultural and artistic response to and representation of modernity itself. Yet, despite the huge debates about the modern woman and modern art being so visibly co-created by women and men, those same women were rendered by the museums' selection and by art historians invisible simply on the grounds of gender. The long shadow of that 'invisibilisation' has led to distorting narratives of 'rediscovery' of the 'forgotten'. Starting with a book published in London in 1944 titled Woman in Art: From Type to Personality which featured Barbara Hepworth's Single Form on its cover, this lecture explores the deep challenges of the prolonged effacement and then the speculative reintroduction of a false category: "women artists".
21 February, 6:30 PM
Live only
Free - Lecture in English
By Griselda Pollock
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