Over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, several of the artists who would come to be known as the greatest of all modernist painters made artworks with a similar essential content. From paintings showing women being gruesomely murdered by Eugene Delacroix to the erotically charged depictions that Paul Gauguin made of his thirteen-year-old Polynesian bride—much of what is now considered the most important modern art focused repeatedly on either violent, degrading, or demeaning depictions of women.
THE MISOGYNISTS: A History of Modern Art in Six Painters is the first book to urgently investigate the behavior of not only these artists, but also that of their most renowned contemporaries—Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, and Pablo Picasso—to uncover the ways that artworks reflected negative attitudes towards women which have become a vital underlying element in art history. The book methodically situates the work of these men within each of their respective historical eras to reveal the ways that each not only shocked their contemporaries but exceeded even the harshest of dominant dialogues surrounding gender roles in the period. |
Russian Orientalism in a Global Context brings together eleven essays by an international group of scholars to investigate the ways that Russian visual culture was impacted by encounters—both real and imagined—with the representational traditions of the so-called East or Vostok.
Following the Napoleonic wars, the Russian Empire’s aggressive expansionist campaigns led to the annexation of vast new lands in the Caucasus and Central Asia, resulting in the large-scale assimilation of religiously and ethnically diverse groups of people. However, given the country’s perpetually conflicted self-identification as neither fully European nor quintessentially Asian, the established Western European genre of Orientalist painting remained ambiguous and elusive in the Russian context, challenging the fixed Saidian binary that has dominated postcolonial discourse. For Russian artists the demarcations between the “self” and the “other” were much more porous than for their French and British counterparts, resulting in an Orientalist mode that was more prone to hybridity, syncretism, and even self-Orientalization. |