Bøger af Marsha Meskimmon

With 43 illustrations of works by Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Cindy Sherman, and Jo Spence, among others, The Art of Reflection is the first sustained inquiry into the appropriation of self-portraiture by women painters, photographers, scultptors, and performance artists.

Marsha Meskimmon furnishes a fresh perspective on the art of women in the Weimar Republic and in the process reclaims the lost history of a number of artists who have not received adequate attention-not only because they were women but also because they continued to align themselves with the modes of realistic representation the Expressionists regarded as reactionary. Reconsidering the traditional definitions of German modernism and its central issues of race politics, eugenics, and the city, Meskimmon explores the structures that marginalized the work of little known artists such as Lotte Laserstein, Jeanne Mammen, Gerta Overbeck and Grete Jurgens. She shows how these women's personal and professional experiences in the 1920s and 1930s relate to the visual imagery produced at that time. She also examines representations of different female roles-prostitute, mother, housewife, the "New Woman" and "garçonne"-that attracted the attention of these artists. Situating her exploration on a strong theoretical base, she ranges deftly over mass visual culture-from film to poster art and advertising-to create a vivid portrait of women living and creating in Weimar Germany.

This book brings transnational feminist theory and criticism together with women's art practices to discuss the connections between aesthetics, gender and identity in a global world; shows the movement of women globally rarely matches dominant models of global exchange; traces their eccentric experiences of the effects of globalization.

Women's art has often been seen as secondary or has gone unrecognized altogether. Mobilizing contemporary feminist thinking, Marsha Meskimmon questions why this should be so and what it would take for us to realize the extent of women's extraordinary contribution to the arts.