In Conversation with Alastair Laurence.
To celebrate International Women’s Day, and in collaboration with Threads, our guest is the art historian Frances Borzello.
Frances’ latest book is a fully revised and updated edition of A World of Our Own, one of the first explorations of how women have always practised as artists, but for centuries have been overlooked in the art world. Their work derided as second-rate, and presence unwelcome in a male profession, it examines how, against the odds, women overcame these difficulties.
Starting in the Renaissance A World of Our Own reconstructs the changing world of women artists. How seventeenth-century painters like Artemisia Gentileschi and Judith Leyster enjoyed success by depicting subjects relevant to women, as did eighteenth-century greats Angelica Kauffmann and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun with their themes of motherhood. With further breakthroughs in the nineteenth century, as women strove to be admitted to exhibiting societies and opened art schools. Finally, through the twentieth century, as Augusta Savage, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, Cindy Sherman, Mona Hatoum and others led the way for today’s artists to secure their rightful place.
Frances Borzello is also the author of The Naked Nude, Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits and At Home: The Domestic Interior in Art, all published by Thames & Hudson.
ONLINE TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE