Mistresses of yesteryear

Published in 1981, Mistresses of Yesteryear, a seminal work by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock does not propose a history of art in the feminine. Her project is much more radical, emancipatory and, in fact, still relevant today. He is equally interested in art history as a discipline and ideology, has done and still does to women artists and their works that what their practices do or could do to art history, if they were fully studied and considered. The book's five parts combine in-depth case studies – from Sofonisba Anguissola and Berthe Morisot to Meret Oppenheim and Mary Kelly –, analyses of structures of artistic production, such as the ideological opposition between art and crafts or stereotypes assigned to “feminine essence”, and vigorous developments on the oriented manner in which the discipline "history of art" was forged, socially and symbolically. The authors offer thus a salutary research for all those who, with them, do not want not only to add female names to the history of art but also to profoundly modify the writing. Translated for the first time into French, The book is introduced by art historian Giovanna Zapperi and benefits from from a recent preface by Griselda Pollock, resolutely anchoring Mistresses from the past to the present.