With the publication this month of Luisa Roldan, by Catherine Hall-van den Elsen, Lund Humphries launches a timely new book series: Illuminating Women Artists. This beautifully illustrated series is the first to focus in a sustained way on individual women artists throughout history, to recognize their accomplishments, to revive their name recognition, and to make their works better known to contemporary readers. It is a significant contribution to a movement underway—among scholars, museums, art dealers, collectors, and the wider world of cultural heritage—to re-assess and contextualize historically the contributions of women artists.

Illuminating Women Artists was conceptualized at a pivotal moment in contemporary life, when the call to dismantle structural bias was taking on new urgency. As social justice movements—such as #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and #TransLivesMatter—have exposed assumptions about gender, race, and sexual identity, they have infused research with a new energy around these topics.

The first set of volumes in the series focuses on artists from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Although identity categories as they are defined today vary in regard to the past, early modernity of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and our contemporary moment share a desire to contend with the power structures that have repressed individuals and groups, albeit in historically distinct ways. Building on five decades of feminist studies that sought to write women artists into a history of art that, traditionally focused on male artists, the books in the Illuminating Women Artists: Renaissance and Baroque sub-series make evident the ways that women artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries negotiated—and sometimes resisted—structural constraints in the sphere of the visual arts.

The books, each written by a leading specialist in the field of art history, interweave established conclusions with new discoveries to reframe our understanding of the lives, artistic production, and works of art by women in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. They reveal the varied ways in which women in these early modern centuries skillfully navigated restrictive gender norms of the period to claim productive lives as artmakers, and to develop innovative approaches to the works they produced. The series features women from across a spectrum of social classes and conditions, and their works varied in subject matter and in artistic media that included the familiar forms of sculpture, painting, and printmaking, as well as other ways of art making highly valued in the past, including papercutting.

In some cases, the books represent the first monograph or the first English-language monograph dedicated to their subject. The abundant gorgeous color illustrations in the series’ books help bring the artists’ works and accomplishments vividly to life. Written in an engagingly readable style, these books are aimed to appeal to scholars, artists, students, and the art-loving public.

Luisa Roldán, by Catherine Hall-van den Elsen, is the initial book in the series, published in partnership with Getty Publications. The book presents the first overview in English of the life and work of this eminent Spanish Baroque sculptor (1652–1706) who was renowned in her lifetime for her exquisitely crafted and painted wood and terracotta sculptures and served as court sculptor to Spanish kings. The author presents a fascinating account of the social dynamics, gender constructs, and artistic contexts in which Roldán navigated her career. Hall-van den Elsen provides insightful analysis of art works and discussions of commissions, materials and techniques. While ‘rooted in serious scholarship’, the book is ‘both highly readable and delightful’ (Marjorie Trusted, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Victoria and Albert Museum).

To celebrate the new publication, author Catherine Hall-van den Elsen will be joined in conversation by sculpture historian Holly Trusted. They will introduce Roldán within a wider historical and social context, exploring her development as a sculptor from her early days in Andalucía to her later works in Madrid.
Wednesday 20 October 2021, 12:00 – 13:30 BST / Online
Register to attend

The second volume to be published in partnership with Getty Publications (available February 2022) is devoted to Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–/after 1654). This artist’s bold and sensitive depiction of female subjects gained her renown in her lifetime, and has captivated contemporary art enthusiasts. Artemisia expert Sheila Barker sets her subject within the contexts of an emergent early modern feminism and the intellectual and artistic currents to which she was exposed. Though her life was often turbulent, Artemisia adroitly managed to establish herself as a sought-after painter of figural compositions depicting classical and sacred subjects, a category of art from which women were often excluded. Tracing Artemisia’s career in Florence, Rome, Venice, Naples, and London, Barker analyzes the evolution of her artistic style and handling of subject matter. The book presents newly discovered paintings, unpublished documents, and new interpretations of the work of this fascinating Baroque woman artist.

Currently thirteen additional volumes are under contract and more are in the planning stages. Additional information about the forthcoming books can be found here and here.

This piece was written by Illuminating Women Artists series editors Marilyn Dunn (Loyola University Chicago) and Andrea Pearson (American University, Washington, D.C.).