This Dark Country

Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century

This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Buy on Amazon Buy on Waterstones.com
*This page contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app

1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date 19 Aug 2021 | Archive Date 19 Aug 2021

Talking about this book? Use #ThisDarkCountry #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!


Description

Lemons gleam in a bowl. Flowers fan out softly in a vase. A door swings open in a sparsely furnished room. What is contained in a still life – and what falls out of the frame?

For women artists in the early twentieth century, including Ethel Sands, Nina Hamnett, Vanessa Bell and Gwen John, who lived in and around the Bloomsbury Group, this art form was a conduit for their lives, their rebellions, their quiet loves for men and women. Gluck, who challenged the framing of her gender and her art, painted flowers arranged by the woman she loved; Dora Carrington, a Slade School graduate, recorded eggs on a table at Tidmarsh Mill, where she built a richly fulfilling if delicate life with Lytton Strachey.

But for every artist we remember, there is one we have forgotten; who leaves only elusive traces; whose art was replaced by being a mother or wife; whose remaining artworks lie dusty in archives or attics.

In this boldly original blend of group biography and art criticism, Rebecca Birrell brings these shadowy figures into the light and conducts a dazzling investigation into the structures of intimacy that make – and dismantle – our worlds.

Lemons gleam in a bowl. Flowers fan out softly in a vase. A door swings open in a sparsely furnished room. What is contained in a still life – and what falls out of the frame?

For women artists in...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9781526604019
PRICE £25.00 (GBP)

Available on NetGalley

NetGalley Shelf App (PDF)
Send to Kindle (PDF)

Average rating from 6 members


Featured Reviews

Women in the art world have always played second fiddle throughout the ages, despite big names like Kusama, O'Keefe and Kahlo having easily recognisable and much loved work.

Knowing right from the very cover that This Dark Country focused on women, drew me in immediately. I am slightly ashamed to say that I had never heard about any of the incredibly talented women featured in this book, but I love that Birrell not only tells of their art, but of their lives and the person behind the artwork.

Was this review helpful?

What a gloriously radical approach to art criticism this book is! Birrell combines elements of group and individual biography with traditional art criticism and then tops it all with the kind of creative response that it more frequently found, I'd say, in the best literary criticism, the type that doesn't often make the crossover into the general public sphere. Birrell is deeply self-conscious, as contemporary scholars have to be, of the forces of race, gender, sexuality and social class and the ways that they inflect the lives and identities of the female artists she is writing about most of whom are white, upper middle class and privileged - and yet the picture is more complicated than that as the book goes on to show with subtlety and nuance.

I'd say this is the sort of book that may enrage anyone accustomed to 'traditional' conservative art criticism, the sort that talks blithely of 'genius' and 'masterpiece' without ever interrogating those terms. But for anyone who who enjoys the way postmodern scholarship and literature have been tearing through down the boundaries that separate 'personal writing' from criticism and even fiction, this fresh, stimulating and exciting.

Was this review helpful?

Readers who liked this book also liked: