Originally published in English in 1981 as
Old Mistresses. Women, Art, and Ideology and translated here into French for the first time under the title
Maîtresses d'autrefois. Femmes, art et idéologie, the ninth volume of the "Lectures maison rouge" series is not a history of women's art. This seminal volume by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock is far more radical and emancipatory and, indeed, still relevant today. Their book deals as much with what art history, as a discipline and ideology, has done and is still doing to
women artists and their work, as with what their practices are doing or could do to art history, if they were fully studied and considered.
The five parts of the book combine indepth case studies—from Sofonisba Anguissola, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Berthe Morisot, to Meret Oppenheim, Eva Hesse, and Mary Kelly—analyses of the structures of artistic production, such as the ideological opposition between art and craft or the stereotypes assigned to the "feminine essence," and dynamic developments on the oriented way in which the discipline "art history" has been forged, socially and symbolically.
The authors study the way women artists have been defined, characterized, included, relegated, and separated through the centuries, showing "that the erasure of women from the history of art was not the legacy of antiquated prejudice; it was, in fact, the product, the actively produced result of the way modernist Art History and the modernist museum in the twentieth century constructed a narrative of its own contemporaries." Spanning art history from Antiquity and the Middles Ages to modern art and the feminist practices of the 1970s, Parker and Pollock thus offer a salutary investigation to all those who, with them, not only want to add feminine names to art history, but also to profoundly modify its writing.
The book is introduced by art historian and Geneva University Professor Giovanna Zapperi and features a recent foreword by Griselda Pollock, firmly anchoring
Maîtresses d'autrefois in the present.
This volume is the ninth title of the “Lectures maison rouge” series, directed by Patricia Falguières and coedited with la Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Paris.
Rozsika Parker (1945-2010) was a writer and critic in art history and psychoanalysis. In 1984, she published The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, an important work on the intertwined histories of embroidery, gender ideologies, and women's resistance through creativity.
Griselda Pollock (born 1949 in South Africa) is a feminist art historian and curator. Now Emerita Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds, she also created and directed the transdisciplinary Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History. She is the 2020 Laureate of the Holberg Prize, in 2023, she received the CAA Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art, and in 2024, the Prix Mondial Nessim Habif from the University of Geneva.
