Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology

Why is everything that compromises greatness in art coded as 'feminine'? Has the feminist critique of Art History history yet effected real change? With a new Preface by Griselda Pollock, this new edition of a truly groundbreaking book offers a radical challenge to a women-free Art History. Parker and Pollock's critique of Art History's sexism leads to expanded, inclusive readings of the art of the past. They demonstrate how the changing historical social realities of gender relations and women artists' translation of gendered conditions into their works provide keys to novel understandings of why we might study the art of the past. They go further to show how such knowledge enables us to understand art by contemporary artists who are women and can contribute to the changing self-perception and creative work of artists today.

Rozsika Parker (1945-2010) was a writer and critic in Art History & Psychoanalysis and a psychotherapist. Her books include Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-1985 (with Griselda Pollock), Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence and The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (I.B.Tauris new edition, 2010). Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History, University of Leeds. Her books include Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art and Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum (2007). She is editor of Conceptual Odysseys: Passages to Cultural Analysis (2009) and, with Antony Bryant, of Digital and Other Virtualities (2010, both I.B.Tauris) She is Series Editor of Tauris’ New Encounters series.