Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: An Historiographical Perspective on Women Making Netherlandish Art History
- 2 Catharina Van Hemessen’s Self-Portrait: The Woman Who Took Saint Luke’s Palette
- 3 By Candlelight: Uncovering Early Modern Women’s Creative Uses of Night
- 4 In Living Memory: Architecture, Gardens, and Identity at Huis ten Bosch
- 5 Louise Hollandine and the Art of Arachnean Critique
- 6 Reclaiming Reproductive Printmaking
- 7 Towards an Understanding of Mayken Verhulst and Volcxken Diericx
- Index
1 - Introduction: An Historiographical Perspective on Women Making Netherlandish Art History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: An Historiographical Perspective on Women Making Netherlandish Art History
- 2 Catharina Van Hemessen’s Self-Portrait: The Woman Who Took Saint Luke’s Palette
- 3 By Candlelight: Uncovering Early Modern Women’s Creative Uses of Night
- 4 In Living Memory: Architecture, Gardens, and Identity at Huis ten Bosch
- 5 Louise Hollandine and the Art of Arachnean Critique
- 6 Reclaiming Reproductive Printmaking
- 7 Towards an Understanding of Mayken Verhulst and Volcxken Diericx
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The introductory essay suggests that Netherlandish art historians need to explicitly utilize feminist theory in scholarship and pedagogy in order to relate content that is temporally and culturally distant to contemporary audiences.
Keywords: feminism; feminist historiography; collaborative art history; Netherlandish art; feminist pedagogy
The idea for this volume originated in the Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA) affiliated session at the Southeast College Art Conference (SECAC), “Women Artists and Feminist Historiography in and of the Netherlands” held in Columbus, Ohio in October, 2017. Four panelists presented themes related to under-recognized women artists working in the Netherlands circa 1600. The papers shared a common theme of each woman's prominence during her own time and their subsequent historiographical neglect. The speakers all expressed frustration over the continued promotion of male artists and their work in publications and curricula, the conventional narrative of the myth of the male genius artist and concomitant erasures of women's contributions and experiences that Linda Nochlin revealed as a function of systemic discrimination over forty years ago.
Collaborative Knowledge-Making
As we learn when we come together at conferences, sharing knowledge through collaboration and inclusion is empowering. We learn, grow, and are enriched by difference of thought and manner. As a collection of essays, this volume is a collaboration of a kind – albeit still within the structures of the institutions of academia and publishing. I hope that it serves as a touchstone for future action towards structural change not only in scholarship, Netherlandish art history, and art history as a discipline, but also in the institutions that support it. While perhaps not radical, all the contributions here are important as we continue to deconstruct and reconstruct a foundation for inquiry.
Despite the presence of many female artists and art historians (my own institution boasts eighty percent women undergraduate art majors, and this is hardly an anomaly), the topics of research, courses, and methodologies employed continue to follow canonical (male) artists and the institutionalized norms of valuation, in biographies and monographs. The exhibition devoted to Clara Peeters in 2016 was the Prado's first ever exhibition devoted to a female artist.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500-1700 , pp. 13 - 26Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019