The Artemisia Files – Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People - Hardcover

Bal, Mieke

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9780226035819: The Artemisia Files – Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226035816 ISBN 13: 9780226035819

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2005

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One of the first female artists to achieve recognition in her own time, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653) became instantly popular in the 1970s when feminist art historians "discovered" her and argued vehemently for a place for her in the canon of Italian baroque painters. Featured alongside her father, Orazio Gentileschi, in a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artemisia has continued to stir interest though her position in the canon remains precarious, in part because her sensationalized life history has overshadowed her art. In The Artemisia Files, Mieke Bal and her coauthors look squarely at this early icon of feminist art history and the question of her status as an artist. Considering the events that shaped her life and reputation - her relationship to her father and her role as the victim in a highly publicized rape case during which she was tortured into giving evidence - the authors make the case that Artemisia's importance is due to more than her role as a poster child in the feminist attack on traditional art history; here, Artemisia emerges more fully as a highly original artist whose work is greater than the sum of the events that have traditionally defined her. The fresh, engaging discourse in The Artemisia Files will help to both renew the reputation of this artist on the merit of her work and establish her rightful place in the history of art.

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Review:

"The Artemisia Files makes an important contribution to the current debates surrounding Artemisia Gentileschi. This collection of essays has a potential audience not only of scholars in art history, gender and women's studies, and cultural history but also of the more general public. It brings together a group of noted scholars whose work has energized and charged the entire discipline of art history."--Mary Sheriff, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"Over the last generation Artemisia has been transformed from a talented curiosity--a successful female artist working in the seventeenth century--into a standard bearer of early feminist consciousness. This book offers a fascinating glimpse into the critical frame of mind underlying this transformation."--Keith Christiansen, Jayne Wrightsman Curator of Italian Painting, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

"An engaging and provocative collection of essays about the now infamous Italian woman artist, Artemesia Gentileschi. Responding to the outpouring of recent exhibitions, articles, monographs and even a film focusing on and to some degree, sensationalizing the life and works of this artist, the pieces in The Artemisia Files try to shed light on this talented painter's actual accomplishments and to deconstruct the myths that surround her art and work. Each of the six authors directly confronts both contemporary and historical discourses on hotly debated issues of attribution and interpretation and attempts the difficult task of divorcing the skilled artist from the sexualized or scandalous woman."--Linda Nochlin, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

About the Author:

Mieke Bal is professor in and cofounder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her previous books include Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis; Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History; and Louise Bourgeois' Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing, the last two published by the University of Chicago Press.

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