Incredible Women Who Changed Art and History

Fifteen amazing women artists. From a Baroque painter to a modern sculptor, each of them built a bright creative destiny, led an exciting life, and created profound and significant works. However, more often than not, women artists, unlike male artists, have not attracted the close attention of the world cultural community. This informative and fascinating book fills in some of the most glaring gaps.

Bridget Quinn pays homage – teasingly, passionately, sometimes even cheekily – to artists as diverse as Artemisia Gentileschi and Edmonia Lewis, Vanessa Bell and Louise Bourgeois, Ruth Asawa and Kara Walker. What is the significance of the art they created? What is the value of the lives they lived? Why have they so often been overlooked? And why are they worthy of our attention today?

The author raises these and many other questions in her book. The vivid and lively narrative is supplemented by reproductions of the most significant works of fifteen artists. Each is dedicated to a separate chapter, the beginning of which is decorated with a portrait of the heroine, created especially for the book by independent illustrator Lisa Congdon.

Effortlessly, Bridget Quinn mixes past and present, personal and public, private and professional - an art history like you've never held in your hands before.

From the author
My family owned a Time Life series of biographies of great artists. Dozens of them sat on a shelf in my father's office, all in identical gray bindings but devoted to different painters and sculptors. I loved the series for years—until, at about age ten, I suddenly realized that there wasn't a single book about a woman. Then I discovered another terrible adult truth: Girls can't be great artists. From then on, these books only made me sad.

I went to my locker in the art library and pulled out our main textbook, Horst Janson's History of Art. I set the heavy volume down on the table and began leafing through it. Finally, on page five hundred, in the section on early seventeenth-century Italian Baroque, I saw a name - Artemisia Gentileschi - and the words: "Until now, we have not encountered women artists." I wrote it down and then slowly, page by page, worked my way through the book. When I reached the back of the book, I had a list of sixteen women's names. That was all the "official" art history, more than eight hundred pages long, had to offer.

Author: Bridget Quinn, Lisa Congdon
Artist: Lisa Congdon
Translation: Stepanova Victoria
Year of issue: 2023
Publisher: Mann, Ivanov and Ferber
Pages: 188
Cover type: Hardcover
Dimensions: 243x192x17 mm
ISBN: 978-5-00146-323-8