Before you leave...
Take 20% off your first order
20% off
Enter the code below at checkout to get 20% off your first order
Discover summer reading lists for all ages & interests!
Find Your Next Read

A riveting exploration of six giants of modern art, revealing how misogynistic beliefs shaped their work and smuggled dangerous ideas into museums worldwide
Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, and Picasso have long been considered essential figures in the history of modern art. They were wildly influential artists in their time and remain widely known--and loved--today. Their paintings are the jewels of permanent collections in the world's most important art museums, and you can find reproductions of their works on all manner of merchandise, from T-shirts and socks to magnets and phone cases.
But these six men were also unrepentant misogynists. They exploited and degraded women in ways that shocked their contemporaries. And their sexist views infused the artworks, allowing dangerous ideas about women's proper roles and overall value to pervade our temples of culture.
In The Misogynists, art historian and professor Allison Leigh delves deep into the lives of these figures to show how they truly felt about women, how those beliefs worked their way into their art, and how these facts have been brushed aside by collectors, curators, and critics. Blending extensive research and intense observation, and drawing on letters, contemporary criticism, scholarly biographies, and the work of gender theorists, psychologists, and philosophers, Leigh crafts a thoroughly readable, engrossing mixture of historical narrative, art criticism, and social analysis.
Allison Leigh is the SLEMCO & Board of Regents Support Fund Endowed Professor in Art at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors and has been invited to present her research at international museums and universities, including the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Yale University, UCLA, and the Art Academy of Latvia. She is the author of a previous academic monograph, Picturing Russia's Men: Masculinity and Modernity in 19th-Century Painting (Bloomsbury, 2020) and was the coeditor of Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter, and Representation (Manchester University Press, 2023). She lives in Lafayette, Louisiana.
Thanks for subscribing!
This email has been registered!
Take 20% off your first order
Enter the code below at checkout to get 20% off your first order