Art History | Faculty Book Shelf | American University

Radical Art by Helen Langa

"Radical Art is a landmark study, both in the history of printmaking and in the history of American art of the thirties. There is no better explicator of the graphic arts of this era and their cultural context than Helen Langa. Her thoroughly researched and compellingly written volume is a major scholarly contribution." –Betsy Fahlman, author of John Ferguson Weir: The Labor of Art

Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard

"This is an excellent cross section of current feminist theory. These essays will prove invaluable not simply for students of art history, but for readers interested in the fields of cultural studies, gender theory, sociology, and others. Broude and Garrard have produced another exceptionally important and well-thought-out text!" –Linda Nochlin, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact by Norma Broude, Mary D. Garrard, and Judith K. Brodksy

"The Power of Feminist Art is not a book: it's a milestone… Until Power, feminist art has been conspicuously absent from standard academic narratives; it's as if the 70s never happened. Now, no critic or historian, conservative or not, can argue that feminist art is insignificant." – Elizabeth Hess, Village Voice

Artemisia Gentileschi Around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity by Mary D. Garrard

"In this admirable work, at once passionately argued and lucidly written, Professor Garrard effectively considers the social, psychological, and formal complexity of the shaping and reshaping not only of the artist's feminine and feminist identity in the misogynist society of the seventeenth century but also of that identity in the disciple of art history today." –Steven Z. Levine, author of Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self

Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris edited by Norma Broude

Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany edited by Norma Broude and Mary Garrard

"...These essays represent a series of specific corrections to traditional art historical interpretations. Collectively, however, they point to a new reading of history itself, and a new definition of the cultural and social uses of art." - from the book's introduction