The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780226752822)

Elisabeth Vig馥-Lebrun (1755-1842) was an enormously successful painter, a favorite portraitist of Marie-Antoinette, and one of the few women accepted into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In accounts of her role as an artist, she was simultaneously flattered as a charming woman and vilified as monstrously unfeminine.

In The Exceptional Woman, Mary D. Sheriff uses Vig馥-Lebrun's career to explore the contradictory position of "woman-artist" in the moral, philosophical, professional, and medical debates about women in eighteenth-century France. Paying particular attention to painted and textual self-portraits, Sheriff shows how Vig馥-Lebrun's images and memoirs undermined the assumptions about "woman" and the strictures imposed on women.

Engaging ancien-r馮ime philosophy, as well as modern feminism, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and art criticism, Sheriff's interpretations of Vig馥-Lebrun's paintings challenge us to rethink the work and the world of this controversial woman artist.


Author: Mary D. Sheriff
ISBN-10: 0226752828
ISBN-13: 9780226752822
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 10/24/1997
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.42lbs
Size: 9.38h x 6.47w x 0.86d