Women, Art and Society by Whitney Chadwick (review)

lustrates the various methods of shading -such as lambert, gouraud and phong-in a clear and beautiful manner . While future editions of the book would be enhanced by pictures and descriptions of some of the important modem graphics supercomputers , the book is sure to be of interest to scientists, artists and educated laypeople. WOMEN, ART AND SOCIETY by Whitney Chadwick. Thames and Hudson, London, U.K., 1990. 383 pp., illus. Paper, $14.95. ISBN: 0-500-20241-9. Reviewed byRogerF. Malina, Center forEUVAstrophysics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A. This is an important book of painfully thorough scholarship. It documents the work ofwomen artists, and its context in society from the Middle Ages to today. The author claims not to offer any new biographical or archival facts about women artists, but rather to reframe the many issues raised by feminist research in the arts. The author is too modest. Through a comprehensive review of both artists' work and its art historical documentation , Chadwick paints a large canvas that is depressingly convincing. Although the place, ofwomen in art is but a microcosm of the sexism of society at large, it also is an amplification of the struggle in the larger context . As Chadwick argues, 'The bizarre but all too common transformation of the woman artist from a producer in her own right into a subject for representation forms a leitmotif in the history of art". In her Preface she cites the examples of painters Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, who were among the founding members of the British Royal Academy in 1768. In a painting byJohann Zoffany, the two women artists do not appear in the group portrait of the founders, rather they are relegated to being the subjects of portraits on the wall of the academy studio. Women were barred from the study of the nude model, which formed the basis of academic training , and indeed were barred from membership until 1936. Other key evidence is the systematic misattribution of work by women artists to male artists, whether they worked in the studios of those artists or were contemporaries. To reassemble the work of the eighteenthcentury Venetian painter Giulia Lama, scholars were forced to reattribute the work that had been mistakenly attributed to Federico Bencovitch , Tiepolo, Domenico Maggiotto, Francesca Capella, Antonio Petrini,Jan Lyss and Zurbaran. The work ofFlemish painterJudith Leyster began to disappear soon after her death into the oeuvre's of Gerald van Honthorst, Molenaer and Frans Hals. During the nineteenth century the categories of 'woman artist' and 'female school' were developed, leading to the wholesale rewriting of the history of art with separate and distinct lineages for men and women. Once separated, women and their art could easily be omitted completely from later accounts. The commercial art marketplace, echoing the sexist outlook of the male purchasers, reinforced the omissions of the art historians. Chadwick does not address women artists who use contemporary science and technology in particular, and such a study would be a valuable addition to the literature. At first glance one would predict that because women are systematically excluded from scientific and technical careers, and fathers are unlikely to transmit technical skills to their daughters, there would be few women artists using new media where state-of-theart technical skills are required. A countering influence, however, could be that art-and-technology artists are in general marginal within the mainstream art institutions and commercial art marketplace, thus rendering the endemic sexism of the system less effective. The list of women artists using holography as an art medium is impressive and their work original and pioneering, as demonstrated in the recent Leonardo special issue on holography [1]. In computer graphics and video, and in other innovative forms, women are well represented among the leading artists. Yet, as soon as galleries, museums and the commercial auction houses intervene, it is my impression that the statistics indicated a decline of the proportional representation. It would be interesting to examine the statistics for women among artist-in-residence programs within corporations or technical programs at universities. Chadwick describes her work as an introductory text-and it is-in the sense of being accessible and clearly written...