Enfilade

From Brepols:

Jennifer Griffiths and Andrea Pearson, eds., Feminist Friendships, Collaborations, and Networks in the Visual Arts: Essays in Honor of Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2026), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1915487315, €100.

Since the late twentieth century, a mounting body of studies has demonstrated that women contributed notably to the visual arts of nearly every culture, despite the ubiquity of patriarchal structures. The present volume looks to collaboration as a key factor in women’s ability to overcome those systemic obstacles in order to play decisive roles in the visual arts, whether as artists, patrons, art critics, gallerists, or interpreters in the public sphere. Until only recently, collaborations and other collective endeavors have largely been ignored by both the panoptic histories of art and the art markets, both of which are predicated on notions of individual agency and their implied prototype of idealized masculine autonomy. By means of seventeen case studies spanning from the Renaissance to the 1990s and covering several continents, the essays in this volume chronicle an enduring pattern of women artists, critics, and intellectuals pursuing their goals together. In elucidating the importance of the collaborative dynamic model, especially in its feminist iteration, these essays promote a fuller understanding of the visual arts across the globe and throughout the centuries.

This book is dedicated to the prominent feminist art historians Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, in admiration for their inspiring and influential collaborative publications on feminism and women in the visual arts.

Jennifer Griffiths is an art historian and editor who currently works at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome.
Andrea Pearson is a professor emerita of Art History at American University in Washington, D.C.

c o n t e n t s

Foreword — Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard

Introduction: On Feminist Alliances in the Visual Arts — Jennifer S. Griffiths and Andrea Pearson

1  Sisters in Art: Female Sodality in Early Modern Bologna — Babette Bohn

2  Female Networks and Collaboration: Spiritual Philanthropy, Convents, and Art Patronage in Seventeenth-Century Rome — Marilyn Dunn

3  A Female Maecenas: Vittoria della Rovere, Feminist Friendship, Collaboration, and the Arts in Baroque Florence — Adelina Modesti

4  The Banana Garden Poetry Club and Women’s Artistic Exchanges: Writing about Paintings and Friendships in Seventeenth-Century China — Lara C. W. Blanchard

5  Illustrating Nature in the Dutch Seventeenth Century: The Collective Power of a Female Community — Catherine Powell-Warren

6  Representations of Female Friendship: Vigée Le Brun’s Portrait of Mrs. Chinnery (1803) — Mary D. Sheriff

7  Brought into Friendship: Women, Social Networks, and Amitié in Some Portraits by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and Gabrielle Capet — Melissa Hyde

8  ‘My Life Has Been Devoted to Friendship’: The Danish Painter Bertha Wegmann and the Feminist Reinvention of the Friendship Image — Carina Rech

9  Mary Cassatt and Louisine Havemeyer’s Friendship: A Personal, Professional, and Political Alliance — Ruth E. Iskin

10  An American Dantista and Her Friends — Jacqueline Marie Musacchio

11  ringl + pit, from Their House to Bauhaus: Collaborative Partnership, Modernist Photography, and Queer Visual Forms — Elizabeth Otto

12  Lesbian Collaboration as Subterfuge in the Works of Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun — Julie Cole

13  The Force of Futurist Friendship: Růžena Zátková, Natalia Goncharova, and Benedetta — Jennifer S. Griffiths

14  We Shall Overcome: Women, Art, and Anti-Fascist Networks in Buenos Aires — Georgina G. Gluzman

15  A Friendship Written in the Stars: The Artistic Constellation of Alma Thomas and Delilah Pierce — Elizabeth Carmel Hamilton

16  Black Feminist Art: Negotiating Networks and Identities — Lisa Farrington

17  Heresies’ Heresies: Collaboration and Dispute in a Feminist Publication on Art and Politics — Amy Tobin

List of Illustrations