Differencing the Canon - Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories - Grand Format

In this major new book, renowned art historian Griselda Pollock makes a compelling intervention into a debate at the very centre of feminist art history : shouldn't the traditional canon of the 'Old Masters' be rejected, replaced or reformed ? What 'difference' can feminist 'intervention in art's histories' make ? Should we simply reject the all-male succession of 'great artists' in favour of an all-woman litany of artistic heroines ? Or should we displace present gender demarcations and allow the ambiguities and complexities of desire to shape our readings of art ? Differencing the canon moves between feminist re-readings of the canonical modem masters - Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Manet - and the 'canonical' artists of feminist art history, Artemisia Gentileschi and Mary Cassatt.
Pollock avoids both an unnuanced critique of masculine canons and an unquestioning celebration of women artists. She draws on psychoanalysis and deconstruction to examine the project of reading for 'inscriptions in the feminine', and asks what the signs of difference might be in art made by an artist who is 'a woman'. Pollock argues that in order for difference to be understood as more than the patriarchal binary of Man/Woman we must acknowledge the differences between women which are shaped by the racist and colonial hierarchies of modernity.
Pollock returns to Gayatri Spivak's injunction that we must always ask : "Who is the Other woman ? ", and explores questions of sexuality and cultural difference in modernist representations of black women such as Laure in Manet's Olympia, and in the work of contemporary artist Lubaina Himid.