The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution, and Resilience: Five Hundred Years of Women's Self Portraits

by Jennifer Higgie

Overview

A dazzlingly original and ambitious book on the history of female self-portraiture by one of today's most well-respected art critics.

Her story weaves in and out of time and place. She's Frida Kahlo, Loïs Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She's Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she's Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She's haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cézanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She's railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she's hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available.

Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval.

In The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639362936
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	09/13/2022
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	167,429
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer who lives in London. Previously the editor of frieze magazine, she has written and illustrated a children's book There's Not One; is the author of the novel Bedlam and is the author of The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience—Five Hundred Years of Women's Self Portraits, also available from Pegasus Books.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

The Deceits of the Past 3

The City of Women 7

Their Little Hands, So Tender and So White 9

Cabinet of Curiosities 11

The Fault in Our Stars? 13

A Self-Portrait Is Never One Thing 16

1 Easel 21

The Liberating Looking Glass 23

The Equal of the Muses and Apelles 30

How to Paint an Apricot 42

1 Want to Be Everything 47

2 Smile 55

The Lodestar 56

They Call Me Madame Van Dyck 59

3 Allegory 75

A Story, Stilled 75

It's True, It's True 80

The Sun of Italy and the Gem of Europe 90

My Grey Hair 97

Self-Portrait Hesitating 101

4 Hallucination 111

I Do Not See the (Woman) Hidden in the Forest 112

There Are Things That Are Not Sayable 119

I Am the Subject I Know Best 128

5 Solitude 135

Fine and Fierce Things 136

The Strange Form 143

I've Scraped By, Up and Down 163

6 Translation 179

Tradition Thinks for You, but Heavens! How Dull! 180

To Be Known by Name 189

To Draw Seeing Every Feather 201

Self Portrait as Tahitian 211

7 Naked 223

Open to Everything 224

The Model Models for Herself 241

The Painting and the Painter 254

Epilogue 261

Notes 263

Acknowledgements 314

Illustration Credits 316

Index 318

Editorial Reviews

Higgie’s book is a useful primer for those seeking to understand the obstacles and challenges faced by women artists over the centuries, as well as a timely assessment of what it means to look at women artists from history today. It’s a subject that’s been covered before, but with Higgie’s background at Frieze, she’s equally plugged into the contemporary currents of feminist art as she is its historical context, lending the text an important freshness... For those wanting to move beyond biography and learn more about the why and how of the struggle of women artists to make their voices heard, The Mirror and the Palette is an important and brilliantly accessible resource.

VOGUE

Higgie has organized the book thematically to bob and weave through the ties that have bound female painters — and blow open the so-called liberties they’ve taken with their art. Coming exactly 50 years after Linda Nochlin published her famous essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ Higgie wants to lay the question to rest, once and for all.

Vulture, New York Magazine - Hillary Kelly

In this candid book by Jennifer Higgie, an Australian art critic, each painter endures some life-changing trauma. The stark message is that women need to suffer in order to make great paintings, and that trauma is the alchemical ingredient necessary for transforming talent into genius.

The New York Times Book Review - Celia Paul

Higgie’s writing is at its most emotionally evocative, even lyrical, when she imagines multitudes of women in their tiny attics and dimly lit studios, looking at themselves and deciding how they want to be remembered. She reflects the feelings of countless women, known and unknown... By skillfully balancing the historical and the imaginative, The Mirror and the Palette is not only a delight to read, but inspirational.

Art Fuse

"A master storyteller and brilliant translator of sensory experiences, Higgie makes us care about her artists as people. She is able to retrieve personalities from historical obscurity with just a few words. An eye-opening intervention in the
memory system of art history, The Mirror and the Palette is a major contribution, not least for the author’s appealing, accessible writing. She shows that we are still just coming to terms with how biased our institutions have been, and how much bigger the story of art really is."

Times Literary Supplement - Julie M. Johnson

★ 09/13/2021

In this idiosyncratic and fascinating primer, critic and artist Higgie (There’s Not One) skillfully restores marginalized women self-portraitists to their rightful place in the art pantheon. Interweaving biographical profiles and pointed cultural commentary, she charges through 500 years of art history to reveal her trailblazing subjects’ “shared desire to try to make sense of the world with a paintbrush.” Noting that “a self-portrait is not only a description of concrete reality, it’s also an expression of an inner world,” Higgie brings to light the lives of a number of women artists whose creations were a way to assert their existence in a milieu that often overlooked them. Italian artist Sofonisba Anguissola’s subversive painting The Chess Game (1555) rendered her the “first artist to portray her family as a primary subject,” while Mary Beale’s double portrait of her and her husband in 1675 flipped “traditional marriage roles.” For Frida Kahlo, art became “a form of catharsis” mentally and physically (after surviving a bus accident at 18, she underwent 32 operations before dying of complications related to her injuries almost 30 years later). Meanwhile, German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker’s 1906 self-portrait was “a defiant... acknowledgment of the energy and ambition that consumed her.” Full of edgy insights, this engrossing survey will delight art connoisseurs and general readers alike. Agent: David Godwin, David Godwin Assoc. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Higgie’s inevitably sprawling narrative taking its structure from what is essentially a group biography – though she [titles] her chapters not for the women they portray, but for vague moods and themes (Solitude, Hallucination, Naked). Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman, Alice Neel, Helene Schjerfbeck, Suzanne Valadon and – yes – Frida Kahlo: all of them are here. Among the less-well-known names she includes are those of the Australian artist Nora Heysen, and the New Zealander Rita Angus.

The Guardian

Higgie’s writing is at its most emotionally evocative, even lyrical, when she imagines multitudes of women in their tiny attics and dimly lit studios, looking at themselves and deciding how they want to be remembered. She reflects the feelings of countless women, known and unknown... By skillfully balancing the historical and the imaginative, The Mirror and the Palette is not only a delight to read, but inspirational.

Arts Fuse

12/01/2021

In this volume, London-based Australian art critic Higgie examines self-portraits by women artists from the Western tradition, grouped thematically. She first establishes that women have historically struggled to be socially accepted as artists; forbidden to draw from models in art schools, women artists often turned to themselves as subjects. Then she turns to the self-portraits—some by well-known painters (Frida Kahlo; Alice Neel), but many by artists are little known outside their own countries. Themes include self-portraits of the artist at her easel (Italian Renaissance painter Sofonisba Anguissola); allegorical self-portraits (Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi); and self-portraits by painters who thrived on solitude (20th-century English artist Gwenn John; Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck; Australian artist Nora Heyson). The chapter "Translation" features 20th-century artists (Australian Margaret Preston; New Zealander Rita Angus; Hungarian Indian Amrita Sher-Gil) whose works attempted to reconcile the Western European pictorial language of modernism with the native artistic traditions of their countries. VERDICT This engaging and accessible book is recommended for anyone interested in women artists, but readers will need to have another reference source nearby, as images are limited to one or two reproductions per artist.—Sandra Rothenberg, Framingham State Univ. Lib., MA

Library Journal

2021-08-17
An art critic examines female self-portraits and identity over the course of five centuries.

As editor at large of frieze magazine and the presenter of Bow Down, a podcast about women in art history, Higgie has an extensive knowledge of the works of women artists, most of whom have struggled historically with being accepted as serious artists. They have been excluded from artistic training, denied access to materials, underrepresented in commercial galleries and by art critics, and have faced physical and emotional abuse. However, as the author contends, “If she had access to a mirror, a palette, an easel and paint, a woman could endlessly reflect on her face, and, by extension, her place in the world.” Focusing primarily yet not exclusively on self-portraits, Higgie explores various aspects of the lives and times of numerous painters, including Artemisia Gentileschi, Frida Kahlo, Rita Angus, Amrita Sher-Gil, and Suzanne Valadon. The author does not follow a linear pattern; rather, she groups her minibiographies by categories such as Allegory, Hallucination, Solitude, Translation, and Naked, moving back and forth across time and genre. While her book is well researched and provides wonderful descriptions of the selected works to which she refers, at times, Higgie appears to struggle with a desire to find a stronger connection between the artists than exists. Frequently, she ponders if the artists may have met or known of each other’s work, followed by the reluctant answer that we do not know. This pattern feels stilted and detracts from the flow of the book. While the text initially feels dry and academic, perhaps due to limited information being available related to the early artists, Higgie finds her stride around the midpoint, creating an overall fascinating commentary about the identity of female artists. The book includes color photos of many of the works discussed.

A mostly engaging analysis of the resilience of female artists throughout modern history.

Kirkus Reviews