Differencing the Canon: Feminism and the Writing of Art's Histories

by Pollock; Griselda

• ISBN13: 9780415066990
• ISBN10: 0415066999
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-03-23
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

In this major new book, renowned art historian Griselda Pollock enters the debate at the very center of the culture wars: Should the traditional canon of the Old Masters be rejected, replaced or reformed? And 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. Avoiding both an unrelenting critique of masculine canons and the unquestioned celebration of women artists, Pollock asks both how women read and what might be different about art made by a woman. She unpacks the representations 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 Bronte's Lucy Snowe, artists representations of Cleopatra and Angela Carter's Black Venus, and argues that it is not enough simply to read as awoman; we must also acknowledge the differences between women shaped by racism and colonialism. Inspiring and original, Differencing the Canon offers an intervention that attempts to make difference a creative and dynamic process, opening up the possibilities of reading the complexity of visual art.

Author Biography

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art, and Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, at the University of Leeds.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	x	(3)
Preface	xiii	(5)
Acknowledgements	xviii
PART I Firing the canon	3	(38)
1 About canons and culture wars	3	(20)
Theoretical models for the critique of the canon: ideology and myth	6	(3)
What is the canon - structurally?	9	(4)
Psycho-symbolic investment in the canon, or, Being childish about artists	13	(10)
2 Differencing: feminism's encounter with the canon	23	(18)
Three positions	23	(6)
About difference and differance	29	(4)
Thinking about women...Artists	33	(8)
PART II Reading against the grain: reading for...	41	(56)
3 The ambivalence of the maternal body: re/drawing Van Gogh	41	(24)
A feminist reading of Van Gogh?	41	(2)
Bending women	43	(3)
Inside a studio behind the vicarage in Nuenen	46	(4)
Sexuality and representation	50	(3)
What are they really talking about?	53	(3)
Class, sexuality and animality	55	(2)
Freud, Van Gogh and the Wolf Man: Mater and nanny	57	(3)
Who's seeing whose mother? Feminist desire and the case of Van Gogh	60	(5)
4 Fathers of modern art: mothers of invention: cocking a leg at Toulouse-Lautrec	65	(32)
Late-coming and premature departure	65	(2)
Debasement and desire: registers of social and sexual difference	67	(3)
Looking up to dad	70	(5)
When small is not enough	75	(2)
Whose [who's] missing [the] Phallus? What's in the gloves?	77	(4)
Deconstructing the derriere: the physical other	81	(6)
Loving women	87	(3)
Conclusion	90	(7)
PART III Heroines: setting women in the canon	97	(104)
5 The female hero and the making of a feminist canon: Artemisia Gentileschi's representations of Susanna and Judith	97	(32)
Seeing the artist or reading the picture?	98	(1)
Feminists and art history: what women?	98	(5)
Susanna and the Elders	103	(5)
Trauma, memory and the relief of representation	108	(7)
Decapitation or castration: Judith Slaying Holofernes	115	(14)
6 Feminist mythologies and missing mothers: Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Bronte, Artemisia Gentileschi and Cleopatra	129	(40)
A feminist myth of the twentieth century: murdered creativity and the female body	129	(3)
Lucy Snowe meets Cleopatra: the resistant feminist reader and the female body	132	(6)
Missing mothers: inscriptions in the feminine: Cleopatra	138	(20)
Coda: rapish scenes and Lucretia	158	(11)
7 Revenge: Lubaina Himid and the making of new narratives for new histories	169	(32)
A post-colonial feminist revenge on the canon?	169	(4)
On some painting in Revenge	173	(13)
History painting	186	(3)
On mourning and melancholia	189	(2)
Covenant versus terrorism	191	(10)
PART IV Who is the other?	201	(116)
8 Some letters on feminism, politics and modern art: when Edgar Degas shared a space with Mary Cassatt at the Suffrage Benefit Exhibition, New York 1915	201	(46)
Letter I: On the question of I and non-I	201	(12)
Letter II: On the social other	213	(13)
Letter III: On the jouissance of the other	226	(4)
Letter IV: On the mortality of the other	230	(4)
Letter V: On the exhibition with the other	234	(13)
9 A tale of three women: seeing in the dark, seeing double, at least, with Manet	247	(70)
Introduction: Laure, Jeanne and Berthe	247	(11)
Berthe	258	(3)
Jeanne	261	(16)
Laure	277	(28)
Conclusion	305	(12)
Epilogue	317	(1)
Bibliography	318	(10)
Index	328