Mary D. Garrard – författare

Artemisia Gentileschi is by far the most famous woman artist of the pre-modern era. Her art addresses issues that resonate today, such as sexual violence and women’s problematic access to political power. Her forceful paintings with their vigorous female protagonists have excited modern audiences, especially feminists.This book breaks new ground by placing the artist in the context of women’s political history, and the feminist protest that was bubbling in early modern Europe. Mary D. Garrard discusses recently discovered paintings, offers fresh perspectives on known works and examines the artist anew in the context of early modern feminism. This beautifully illustrated book, now in paperback, gives a full portrait of a strong woman and a great artist who fought back through her art.

Artemisia Gentileschi, widely regarded as the most important woman artist before the modern period, was a major Italian Baroque painter of the seventeenth century and the only female follower of Caravaggio. This first full-length study of her life and work shows that her powerfully original treatments of mythic-heroic female subjects depart radically from traditional interpretations of the same themes.

Mary D. Garrard, author of the acclaimed Artemisia Gentileschi, furthers her study of the seventeenth-century artist in this groundbreaking investigation of two little-known paintings. Taking as case studies the Seville Mary Magdalene and the Burghley House Susanna and the Elders, paintings of circa 1621-22 attributed to Artemisia, Garrard examines the ways that identity, gender, and market pressures interact both in the artist's work and in the criticism and connoisseurship that have surrounded it.

This volume is the third in an influential series of anthologies by editors Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard that challenge art history from a feminist perspective. Following their "Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany" (1982) and "The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History" (1992), this new volume identifies female agency as a central theme of recent feminist scholarship. Framed by a lucid and stimulating critical introduction, twenty-three essays on artists and issues from the Renaissance to the present, written in the 1990s and after, offer a nuanced critique of the poststructuralist premises of 1980s feminist art history.The contributors include: Allison Arieff, Janis Bergman-Carton, Babette Bohn, Norma Broude, Anna C. Chave, Julie Cole, Bridget Elliott, Mary D. Garrard, Sheila ffolliott, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Ruth E. Iskin, Geraldline A. Johnson, Amelia Jones, Maud Lavin, Julie Nicoletta, Carol Ockman, Erica Rand, John B. Ravenal, Lisa Saltzman, and Mary D. Sheriff.

Feminist historians of science and philosophy have shown that during the Italian Renaissance, the profound shift in the concept of nature - from an organic worldview to the scientific - was assisted by the gender metaphor that defined nature as female. In this provocative and groundbreaking book, Mary D. Garrard extends this analysis to the history of art and proposes that the larger shift was both anticipated and mediated by the visual arts. In case studies of such major figures as Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Giorgione, and Titian, Garrard examines the changing relationship of art and nature in the Renaissance, and shows how they were cast by artists and theorists as gendered competitors in a steadily escalating rhetoric.

A groundbreaking account of the fascinating late paintings of three women Renaissance artists by one of the field’s pioneersSofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Artemisia Gentileschi—the most important women artists of Renaissance Italy—all deviated radically from their earlier work in their last years. Because their late paintings are anomalous and puzzling, they have been virtually ignored, and treated as peripheral to the artists’ core identities and oeuvres. In this book, Mary Garrard, a founding pioneer in feminist art history, presents a major reevaluation of the late works of Anguissola, Fontana, and Gentileschi, showing how in their final years they deliberately changed direction to produce bold, transgressive, and surprising paintings that upended gendered expectations.While great male artists have been praised for their “heroic” or “tragic” late works, historians have largely overlooked the creative imaginations of older women artists. In this important book, Garrard questions that bias as she explores the adventurous late-life art of Anguissola, Fontana, and Gentileschi. What emerges is a compelling account of how each artist met the universal experience of ageing with an idiosyncratic response—Anguissola through influential formal innovation, Fontana through quirky yet deadly serious humor, and Gentileschi through satirical dialogue with her own early work.Adding new chapters to the stories of these artists, Sofonisba, Lavinia, Artemisia challenges art historians and critics to consider what is missed when late-life creativity goes unnoticed.