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Danielle Knafo's impressive book deals with 10 female artists—most with established reputations—whose “daringly subversive” self-representational works form a trajectory of female gender representation in the 20th century. In Her Own Image is infused with the
psychological lives of these artists, for the artists are both subject and object of their art. The richness of the book's psychoanalytic, historical, and feminist inquiry is suggested by the chapter headings, e.g., “Käthe Kollwitz: The Dead Mother” and “Claude Cahun: The Third Sex.” We move from the social realism of Kollwitz through the idiosyncratic surrealism of Cahun and Frida Kahlo to Charlotte Salomon's intermedia narrative of trauma, a cross between theater and art. Her work can be thought of as a kind of prelude to the later performance art, documented in photographs, of Ana Mendieta , Adrian Piper (b. ), Cindy Sherman (b. ), Carolee Schneeman (b. ), Hannah Wilke , and Orlan (b. ). The range is breathtaking; the biographical information is comprehensive; the writing is incisive. Taken together, the book offers an overview of the ideas that informed 20th-century art in general and 20th-century women's art in particular.
Knafo is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, art critic, feminist, and professor. A historical, feminist critique informs her thinking. She cites Linda Nochlin, Whitney Chadwick, Lucy Lippard, Griselda Pollock, and many other writers whose ideas helped her historicize women and art (p. 18). “In Her Own Image,” she writes, “extends the dialogue between art history and feminism, while developing a psychoanalytic examination of women's self-representation” (p. 18). Knafo also joins the collective efforts of others who work in the “intersection of feminism, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines,” e.g., Dorothy Dinnerstein, Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin, Muriel Dimen, and Adrienne Harris. She notes the tension between “theoretical gender” (as constructed in the academy) and the “p