Women's Contributions to Visual Culture, 1918–1939

An exploration of women?s contributions to visual culture in major urban centres between the wars (1918-1939), this collection sheds new light on women?s relationships with the processes of modernism and modernization. Women?s work in a variety of mediums is explored, including design, print, illustration, murals, poster art, and costume design, as well as more conventional forms of painting and sculpture. International in scope, the volume discusses artists and exhibitions from the United Kingdom, Greece, Mexico, France, Ireland and the United States. The contributors place a strong emphasis on archival research yet each addresses contemporary concerns in feminist art history. By focusing on a very specific time period, the essays place a central concern on the history and theory of art and gender and are united by their coherent focus on women?s role in the agency and mediation of artistic production in the interwar period.

Contents: Introduction, Karen E. Brown; Women war artists of World War I, Katy Deepwell; 'Feminist art', 'female art', 'sexless art' in a modernist context: women's collective exhibitions in Greece, 1925-1937, Chariklia-Glafki Gotsi; 'An unsettling aura of inscrutability': imperialism, racial stereotyping and the construction of the 'exotic' by British women sculptors during the 1920s and 1930s, Jonathan Black; 'Her hands never soft': Concetta Scaravaglione at the New York World's Fair, 1939-40, Anna Maria Carlevaris; Carola Giedion-Welcker: misrepresented collaborator of modernists, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes; Norah McGuinness, W.B. Yeats and the illustrated book, Karen E. Brown; Negotiating 'new' venues in art: Doris and Anna Zinkeisen in modernising London, Britta C. Dwyer; Ethel Gabain, Evelyn Gibbs and Evelyn Dunbar: 3 approaches to professional art practice in interwar Britain, Alice Strickland; The struggles of modernising Mexico and the mural of Aurora Reyes at the Centro Escolar Revolución, Terri Geis; Index.

Karen E. Brown is IRCHSS Post-Doctoral Fellow, School of Art History and Cultural Policy, University College Dublin.