“A trenchant look at how misogyny shaped the work of six lionized artists . . . With just enough bite to fire up readers, this is a clear-eyed indictment of art history’s willingness to forgive the misdeeds of its male stars.” PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“To read The Misogynists is to sit in the classroom with Allison Leigh and her students for a thrilling seminar. By looking closely at familiar paintings, in tandem with fine-grained historical analysis, The Misogynists will persuade open-minded readers that many of the much-vaunted innovations of Modernist painting are premised on violence towards women, both in paint and in person. It is a powerful, timely provocation, a call to arms that reminds us that the project of a feminist art history is more urgent than ever today.” —TIM BARRINGER, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University “What I love about this book is that it is a cry of the heart. It takes its irresponsibility seriously: to tell the truth. For the truth can appear only in a passionate point of view, won and lost in personal experience. A beautiful story about what it is to teach and think about art history now.” —ALEXANDER NEMEROV, author of Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York |
COMING NOVEMBER 2026
A riveting exploration of six giants of modern art, revealing how misogynistic beliefs shaped their work and smuggled dangerous ideas into museums worldwide... A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Art Book for Fall 2026, and one of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2026 Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, and Picasso have long been considered essential figures in the history of modern art. But these six men were also unrepentant misogynists. In The Misogynists, art historian and professor Allison Leigh delves deep into the lives of these figures to show how they truly felt about women, how those beliefs worked their way into their art, and how these facts have been brushed aside by collectors, curators, and critics. These six were wildly influential artists in their time and remain widely known—and loved—today. Their paintings are the jewels of permanent collections in the world's most important art museums, and you can find reproductions of their works on all manner of merchandise, from T-shirts and socks to magnets and phone cases. They also exploited and degraded women in ways that shocked their contemporaries. And their sexist views infused the artworks, allowing dangerous ideas about women's proper roles and overall value to pervade our temples of culture. Blending extensive research and intense observation, and drawing on letters, contemporary criticism, scholarly biographies, and the work of gender theorists, psychologists, and philosophers, Leigh crafts a thoroughly readable, engrossing mixture of historical narrative, art criticism, and social analysis. The Misogynists is an essential reconsideration of the modern canon and the narratives that continue to shape how we see—and value—art today. |
Picturing Russia's Men:
Masculinity and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Painting
Allison Leigh
A vital new approach to the study of masculinity within art history, the book investigates the dissatisfaction that developed from the breakdown in prevailing conceptions of manhood outside of the usual Western European context. Drawing on a wide variety of source material, including previously untranslated letters and journals, the book explores the deep structures of masculinity to reveal the conflicting desires and aspirations of men in the period.
Masculinity and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Painting
Allison Leigh
A vital new approach to the study of masculinity within art history, the book investigates the dissatisfaction that developed from the breakdown in prevailing conceptions of manhood outside of the usual Western European context. Drawing on a wide variety of source material, including previously untranslated letters and journals, the book explores the deep structures of masculinity to reveal the conflicting desires and aspirations of men in the period.
Winner of the Heldt Prize for Best Book
in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Women’s and Gender Studies
(2021)
in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Women’s and Gender Studies
(2021)
"Beautifully illustrated, full of incisive new readings of familiar paintings, Picturing Russia's Men excavates the innumerable ways in which the institutions of academy, army, and family shaped the male artist’s identity and output. With its blend of close reading, theoretical sophistication, and wide-ranging research, this fine study brilliantly dispels the common misperception that there is little more to be said about Russian painting of the nineteenth century."
Wendy Salmond, Professor of Art History, Chapman University, USA
Wendy Salmond, Professor of Art History, Chapman University, USA
"Engaging with a remarkable spectrum of behaviours, expectations, violations, and stereotypes, this book generates new understanding of masculinity and modernity by considering paintings as revelatory, questioning, and even constitutive of what it meant to be a man during a turbulent half-century of imperial rule."
Rosalind P. Blakesley, Professor of Russian and European Art, University of Cambridge, UK
Rosalind P. Blakesley, Professor of Russian and European Art, University of Cambridge, UK
"An important and eye-opening contribution to the Slavic field and our studies of modernism in Russia. Through an examination of male portraiture, it traces the breakdown, between 1825 and 1881, of various myths surrounding masculinity—from the solid heroic code of virtuous, courageous manhood to the ambiguities of doubt-ridden individualism."
Elizabeth Valkenier, Adjunct Associate Professor of Art History, Columbia University, USA
Elizabeth Valkenier, Adjunct Associate Professor of Art History, Columbia University, USA
Read the Introduction
About the Author
|
Allison Leigh is an art historian, professor, and public lecturer. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University and now teaches in the School of Visual Arts at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City and has written numerous articles and book chapters on the history of masculinity. In 2021, she won the Barbara Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Women’s and Gender Studies for Picturing Russia’s Men: Masculinity and Modernity in 19th-Century Painting. She currently resides in Lafayette, Louisiana. |
Read the reviews...
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Russian Orientalism in a Global Context:
Hybridity, Encounter, and Representation, 1740–1940
|
This volume features new research on Russia's historic relationship with Asia and the ways it was mediated and represented in the fine, decorative, and performing arts and architecture from the mid-eighteenth century to the first two decades of Soviet rule. It interrogates how Russia's perception of its position on the periphery of the west and its simultaneous self-consciousness as a colonial power shaped its artistic, cultural and national identity as a heterogenous, multi-ethnic empire.
Reviews "An ambitious volume that advances at an urgent moment our understanding of the imperial matrices within which Orientalist art emerged." Rosalind P. Blakesley, The Russian Review "The volume demonstrates the importance of Russian and Slavic studies to postcolonial approaches to art history." Kamran Karimullah, The Muslim World Book Review |
Listen to an Interview with the Editors
