The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (review)

L'Esprit Créateur These paradoxes are sharply framed and elaborated. The first four chapters illustrate in significant ways how the paradoxical representations of women throughout history continue to shape and trouble our experience of identity in relation to appearance. In contrast to the power of these chapters, Chapters 5 and 6 are less convincing. First, I was perplexed by Tseëlon's use of Lacanian registers of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic which seemed to obstruct rather than facilitate her argument, and often it was unclear whether her brand of psychoanalytic inquiry was Freudian or Lacanian; indeed, Tseëlon offers up a Freud that looks a good deal like Lacan and a Lacan that looks a bit like Sartre. The last chapter, which considers the effects of postmodernism on fashion, while excellent in its own terms (with an especially incisive critique of Baudrillard), seems not altogether related to the rest of the book. This brings me to a point of confusion I have throughout the book—whether it is about women's appearance in general or fashion in particular. While the book suggests in the beginning that it is interested in the variety of concerns relating to women's appearance, it is fundamentally about how women are shaped by the clothing they wear, how they "wear" their bodies as a kind of clothing, and how, ultimately, attention to the vicissitudes of women's fashion reveals a complexity of identity-formation for which neither essentialist nor constructionist, modernist nor postmodernist theories can adequately account. Thus, I often found it beside the point (and often less interesting) when Tseëlon strayed into material that was not especially relevant to (and much less original than) her work on fashion. This book should be read—not only as an excellent model of thoroughgoing crossdisciplinary studies, but for its frequently brilliant cultural insights. I think of Tseëlon's detailed and chilling comparison of the process of mummification and cosmetic surgery, or her facility for zeroing in on the underlying ideological similarities between otherwise opposing theoretical camps, or, finally, the way she progresses from her opening paradoxes situated in history and myth to the nervously matter-of-fact self-appraisals from contemporary readers of women's magazines. Chapter 2, "Masking the Self," opens with the history of equating femininity with artifice and ends with women discussing the various roles they assume through clothing: "My clothes are telling people who I am . . . the only information people have to my identity." Such juxtapositions are the best examples I have seen to date of the impossibility of discussing agency in relation to cultural imperatives. The materials from the questionnaires are unsettling because they leave us with no real answers —rather, only more uncertainty as to how we carve out identities from the shards of cultural materials. I applaud Tseëlon for refusing to seal shut with too much analysis these disparate voices. Virginia L. Blum University of Kentucky Mary D. Sheriff. The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pp. xiv + 353. $40.00 This book will create a stir in many circles. Sheriffs narrative of eighteenth-century art is provocative and illuminating; it makes evident that the boundaries between the methods of literary history and art history are rapidly dissolving. Art history has come a long way since the days of Rankean domination and the axiomatic separation of form from content. Today the discipline has engendered a multitude of interpretive schemes which analyze all manner of content in art. Prominent among today's theoretical approaches, one might cite Bryson's semiotic investigation (Word and Image); marxism as practiced by Tom Crow (Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris) or T. J. Clark (The Painting of Modern Life); the feminist works of Griselda Pollock (Vision and Difference) or Linda Nochlin (The Politics of Vision); social and intellectual history—itself informed by 114 Spring 1997 Book Reviews Bourdieu's Distinction—such as Kathleen Pyne's Art and the Higher Life; the formalism of Yve-Alain Bois (Painting as Model); psychoanalysis in Michael Fried, Courbet 's Realism; Carol Armstrong's poststructuralist interpretation of Degas (Odd...