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Top of the pile
82
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
86/100Critics
67/100Scholars
95/100Author:
Katy Hessel
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Date:
May 2, 2023
Guided by Katy Hessel, art historian and founder of @thegreatwomenartists, discover the glittering paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century United States and the artist who really invented the "readymade." Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of postwar artists in Latin America, and the women defining art in the 2020s. Have your sense of art history overturned and your eyes opened to many artforms often ignored or dismissed. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan, this is the history of art as it's never been told before.
What The Reviewers Say
Part revisionist history, part coffee-table book, part collective portrait, part archival treasure hunt, Hessel’s treatise covers the 1500s to the present in an attempt to make good on its title.
Mapping women along a loose timeline, Hessel covers huge swaths of history in lively, lucid prose, positioning these artists within (or against) dominant genres. She documents not just what they created but also the obstacles they surmounted in doing so.
[A] positive, beautifully written corrective, which should become a founding text in the history of art by women.
This is a spirited, inspiring, brilliantly illustrated history of female artistic endeavour.
