The Exceptional Woman - Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art
Author(s): Mary D. Sheriff
Elisabeth Vigée-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 accounts of 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 Vigée-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. Paying particular attention to painted and textual self-portraits, Sheriff shows how Vigée-Lebrun's images and memoirs undermined the assumptions about woman and the strictures imposed on women.
Engaging ancien-régime philosophy, as well as modern feminism, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and art criticism, Sheriff's interpretations of Vigée-Lebrun's paintings challenge us to rethink the work and the world of this controversial woman artist.
Product Information
General Fields
- :
- : University of Chicago Press
- : University of Chicago Press
- : 0.54
- : 24 October 1997
- : .2 Centimeters X 1.67 Centimeters X 2.37 Centimeters
- : books
Special Fields
- : Mary D. Sheriff
- : Mary D. Sheriff
- : 368
- : 368
- : 759.4
- : 759.4
- : English
- : English
- : Paperback
- : Paperback