A timely, succinct, aesthetic inquiry into debates about sexuality, objectification, and representation.
A feminist confronts the representations of women’s bodies in the art world.
London-based art historian McCormack, the founder and course director of the Women and Art study program at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, focuses on the representation of women in art and the “roles that western culture has created for [women] as mothers, monsters and maidens” in pursuit of the “unattainably perfect Venus.” The author begins with Diego Velázquez’s famous 17th-century painting the Rokeby Venus (also known by other names), a woman “cast as little more than a rich man’s plaything,” and the scandal that erupted over its attempted 1914 destruction by a British suffragette. McCormack delves into how, over centuries—Botticelli, Titian, Picasso, Modigliani, Hottentot Venus, ads for the removal of female body hair, the anti-Venus paintings of Debra Cartwright—Venus “has been employed to make ideal versions of femininity seem normal and to teach us patriarchy’s version of sex.” This conception “satisfies a default male heterosexual gaze and leaves actual female desire without a language, without even a voice.” The “routinely overlooked” mothering paintings of Berthe Morisot capture “seemingly straightforward domestic images freighted with psychodrama and existential uncertainty,” challenging the classic Madonna and Child archetype. Art and advertising, writes the author, still struggle with depictions of breastfeeding and birthing as well as nonbinary and nonbiological mothers. The abduction, rape, sacrifice, and victimhood of the maiden, as in Titian’s The Rape of Europa, McCormack ruefully notes, has been a common subject in images and stories since the Greeks, aestheticizing violence against women into easily digestible pop culture and art. It’s time, she writes, “to see the separation between what we find intolerable in real life and what we lionise in monuments and works of art,” and she introduces us to a new generation of female artists who are doing just that.
A timely, succinct, aesthetic inquiry into debates about sexuality, objectification, and representation.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-393-54208-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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