Painting Professionals: Women Artists & the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930

Abstract

The most recent addition to the impressive series on Gender and American Culture that this press has sponsored since 1988, Kirsten Swinth's ambitious study argues for the central role of gender in the construction of art world institutions and, indeed, American visual culture between 1870 and 1930. Swinth, an associate professor of history at Fordham University, wishes to distinguish herself from art historians whose “concern … has been with art—with the development of styles and patterns of artistic influence—rather than with the history of women or even the history of art world institutions.” Throughout the six chapters of this extensively researched book, she traces two generations of women painters through three periods of change—women's initial foray in large numbers into the Gilded Age art world of the 1870s and 1880s, the cultural backlash against women's successes of the 1890s, and the era of modernism from 1910 to 1930, in which the movement toward individualism and self-realization allowed men to reclaim the domain of high art.