Women, art, and society

A reappraisal of the position and work of women artists from the Middle Ages to the present. It examines the way in which women´s work has been perceived in the history of Western art - often in direct reference to gender - and re-examines the works themselves. Contents: Art history and the woman artist; the middle ages; the Renaissance ideal; the other Renaissance; domestic genres and women painters in Northern Europe; amateurs and acedemics - a new ideology of femininity in France and England; sex, class and power in Victorian England; toward Utopia - moral reform and American art in the 19th century; seperate but unequal - women´s sphere and the new art; modernism, abstraction and the New Woman, 1910-25; modernist representation; the female body; gender, race and modernism after World War II; feminist art in North America and Great Britain; new directions - a partial overview; worlds together, worlds apart.