A riveting exploration of six giants of modern art, revealing how misogynistic beliefs shaped their work and smuggled dangerous ideas into museums worldwide
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.
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.
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.
The Misogynists is an essential reconsideration of the modern canon and the narratives that continue to shape how we see—and value—art today.
Praise
“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
“Inspired by fourth-wave feminism, art historian Allison Leigh takes a newly critical look at the female nude in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century painting, specifically in the works of some of its major representatives—Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, and Picasso. What she uncovers is what has always been in plain sight—blatant hostile sexism. Written in an accessible and engaging style and beautifully illustrated, the book has the potential to forever change the way we look at these artists’ paintings of female nudes—and at the nude in art generally. May it lead to new ways of teaching and exhibiting the works in question.”
—PETRA TEN-DOESSCHATE CHU, Professor Emerita of Art History at Seton Hall 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
