Format:
XIV, 353 S. : Ill.
ISBN:
0-226-75275-5
Content:
Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842) was an enormously successful painter, a favorite portraitist of Marie-Antoinette, and one of the few women accepted into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In her role as an artist, she was simultaneously flattered as a charming woman and vilified as monstrously unfeminine. In the Exceptional Woman, Mary D. Sheriff uses Vigee-Lebrun's career to explore the contradictory position of "woman-artist" in the moral, philosophical, professional, and medical debates about women in eighteenth-century France. Central to Sheriff's analysis is one key question: given the cultural norms and social attitudes that regulated a woman's activities, how could Vigee-Lebrun conceive of herself as an artist, and indeed become a successful one, in old-regime France. Paying particular attention to painted and textual self-portraits, Sheriff shows how Vigee-Lebrun's images and memoirs undermined the assumptions about "woman" and the strictures imposed on women. Engaging ancien-regime philosophy as well as modern feminism, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and art criticism, Sheriff's interpretations of Vigee-Lebrun's paintings challenge us to rethink the work of this controversial woman artist.
Language:
English
Subjects:
Art History
Keywords:
1755-1842 Vigée-Lebrun, Louise-Elisabeth
;
Kunstpsychologie
;
Methode
;
Anatomie
;
Ästhetik
;
Künstlerin
;
Biografie
