The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel
How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? Did women even work as artists before the twentieth century? And what is the Baroque anyway?
Discover the glittering Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century USA and the artist who really invented the Readymade. Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of post-War artists in Latin America and the women artists defining art in the 2020s. Have your sense of art history overturned, and your eyes opened to many art forms often overlooked or dismissed. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan, this is the history of art as it’s never been told before.
By Sophie
The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich once made my annual ABC Top 5. I Loved learning how one masterpiece flowed into another and why. And yet… There’s only 1 woman in that book (Kathe Kollwitz). Where was Frida Kahlo? Georgia O’Keeffe? Tracy Emin? Yayoi Kusama? Judith Leyster? Marina Abramovic?
Well, thank goodness for Katy Hessel, art historian and The Great Women Artists podcast host. Her The Story of Art Without Men highlights only women, beginning roughly in the middle ages and going right up to the 2020s. I loved getting to know this side of art history. She includes art disciplines traditionally not considered High Art (i.e. quilting, performance art), showing the exquisite difficulty, beauty and skill needed to make them. Hessel is passionate about her subject and it shines through in everything.
I do hope the next edition showcases even more women from around the globe.
And I also hope the next edition has an image of every art piece mentioned (Gombrich’s book does, after all…).
