At home in the studio : the professionalization of women artists in America / Laura R. Prieto.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Prieto, Laura R., 1968- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women artists--United States--History.

Women artists.

Women in the professions--United States--History.

Women in the professions.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (304 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, [2001]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

This engaging cultural history examines the emergence of a professional identity for American women artists. By focusing on individual sculptors, painters, and illustrators, Laura Prieto gives us a compelling picture of the prospects and constraints faced by women artists in the United States from the late eighteenth century through the 1930s. Prieto tracks the transformation from female artisans and ladies with genteel "artistic accomplishments" to middle-class professional artists. Domestic spaces and familial metaphors helped legitimate the production of art by women. Expression of sexuality and representation of the nude body, on the other hand, posed problems for these artists. Women artists at first worked within their separate sphere, but by the end of the nineteenth century "New Women" grew increasingly uncomfortable with separatism, wanting ungendered recognition. With the twentieth century came striking attempts to reconcile domestic lives and careers with new expectations; these decades also ruptured the women's earlier sense of community with amateur women artists in favor of specifically professional allegiances. This study of a diverse group of women artists--diverse in critical reception, geographic location, race, and social background--reveals a forgotten aspect of art history and women's history.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Peculiarly Fitted to Art

2 Domesticating Professional Art

3 Figures and Fig Leaves

4 Sculpting Butter: Gender Separatism and the Professional Ideal

5 Portrait of the Artist as a New Woman

6 Making the Modern Woman Artist

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [279]-283) and index.

ISBN:

9780674278059

0674278054