You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is an eye- and mind-popping study of self-representational art by ten female artists, whose groundbreaking works span the last century. Thus, it documents the changes in art, in the surrounding culture, and in the experience of women in that time frame. Its author, Danielle Knafo, a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and art critic, has undertaken a monumental feat of scholarship, which she says took fifteen years to complete. Knafo has chosen women she identifies with and admires in terms of their personal courage, strength, and revolutionary spirit: “Each artist, it now seems, has told me something central about myself, about being a woman and facing the things a woman must face, not only by virtue of her gender but also because she is a human being living in a cultural time and place. So, I see their lives and work as tracing a scintillating trajectory not only through female self-representational art but also through the last century of our history” (p. 171).
The ten artists are the German Kathe Kollwitz , who departed from established, idealized depictions of the female body to painting women's faces tortured by war, poverty, and loss; the French-born Claude Cahun , a little-known surrealist photographer, artist, and political activist whose work challenged and expanded the boundaries of gender; Mexico's famous Frida Kahlo , whose bold paintings represented women's unique experiences and pain; Charlotte Salomon , German-born, killed in Auschwitz, who transformed the terrible traumas of her young life into a moving and amazingly multimedia work; the American Carolee Schneemann (b. , who launched female performance art when minimalist art was at its peak and asserted the validity of female sexual pleasure; another American, Hannah Wilke , who unwrapped what had been unexpressed artistically in creating depictions of the female genitals and