Review of Women, femininity and public space in European visual culture, 1789–1914. Eds. Temma Balducci and Heather Belnap Jensen (Ashgate, 2014) by Mary Healy for Modern and Contemporary France (15 June 2016). DOI: 10.1080/09639489.2016.1188789 (original) (raw)

Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789�1914

Routledge eBooks, 2017

Focusing on images of or produced by well-to-do nineteenth-century European women, this volume explores genteel femininity as resistant to easy codification vis-Ã-vis the public. Attending to various iterations of the public as space, sphere and discourse, sixteen essays challenge the false binary construct that has held the public as the sole preserve of prosperous men. By contrast, the essays collected in Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789-1914 demonstrate that definitions of both femininity and the public were mutually defining and constantly shifting. In examining the relationship between affluent women, femininity and the public, the essays gathered here consider works by an array of artists that includes canonical ones such as Mary Cassatt and Franà §ois Gérard as well as understudied women artists including Louise Abbéma and Broncia Koller. The essays also consider works in a range of media from fashion prints and paintings to private journals and architectural designs, facilitating an analysis of femininity in public across the cultural production of the period. Various European centers, including Madrid, Florence, Paris, Brittany, Berlin and London, emerge as crucial sites of production for genteel femininity, providing a long-overdue rethinking of modern femininity in the public sphere.

The Exhibitions of the Femmes Artistes Modernes (FAM), Paris, 1931-38

2019

The Société des Femmes Artistes Modernes (FAM) opened up a productive space for women artists who were active in Paris during the 1930s through annual multigenerational exhibitions and international collaborations. I argue that FAM embodied a paradox: on the one hand, it supported artists wishing to question stereotypes of gender, race, class, and nation; on the other, its institutional structure and leadership did not challenge patriarchal assumptions about women’s subordinate role in society. The paper explores this tension by comparing the work and critical reception of several artists in the group who represented the theme of motherhood. Paula J. Birnbaum* University of San Francisco * Paula J. Birnbaum is a professor at the University of San Francisco and author of Women Artists in Interwar France: Framing Femininities (Ashgate/Routledge, 2011). Her scholarship focuses on modern and contemporary art in relationship to gender and sexuality, as well as institutional and social po...