The Art History and Architecture Collection is a vital resource for academic libraries, offering extensive insights into various themes such as art movements, single-artist studies, decolonising art, gender and masculinity, citizenship, architecture and design. This collection aims to broaden the scope of art history, addressing a diverse range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.
The collection encompasses theories and histories of materiality, exploring the intricate relationship between making and thinking, fashion and culture, production and consumption, textiles and industry.
| Key series |
| Rethinking Art’s Histories |
| Studies in Design and Material Culture |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 17 |
| 2023/4 titles | 28 |
| 2013-2022 titles | 74 |
| Total collection | 128 |
| Keywords |
| Singleartist studies |
| Subcultures |
| Design |
| Architecture |
| Citizenship |
| Surrealism |
| Art movements |
| Decolonising art |
| Queer art |
| Gender – masculinity |
| Modernism |
| Postmodernism |
| Thema subject categories |
| Architecture |
| Avant-garde |
| Ceramics, mosaics and glass: artworks |
| Colonialism and imperialism |
| History of art |
| Material culture |
| Performance art |
| Theory of art |
SDG coverage
Art history and architecture collection
The conclusion reconsiders women’s artistic practice in the 1970s from a contemporary standpoint ranging from the MLF aftermath in the early 1980s to the current practice of privileging specific artists from the 1970s. Significant contemporary artists such as Annette Messager, Sophie Calle, ORLAN and others have enjoyed important solo exhibitions and/or prestigious prizes in biennales. Practices once marginal to the mainstream have been incorporated widely into contemporary art with 1970s feminist aesthetic strategies reappearing throughout the 2000s. The conclusion will further attest to how current scholarship has framed the history of feminism and art and how such scholarship can be widened, enhanced and changed by a focus on France during the 1970s and this book.
This groundbreaking book highlights, for the first time, a generation of women making art to define a culture of experimental thought and practice against the backdrop of the French women’s movement, or Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) (1970–1981). Women’s art is viewed in relation to some of the most exciting thinkers emerging from radical trends in philosophy and literature in France in the 1970s – Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva – who are widely seen to represent the international brand of ‘French feminism’. The women artists in this book force a timely reconsideration of the full spectrum of revolutionary practices by women in the years that followed the events of May ’68.
This chapter presents the way in which women and some men challenged contemporary practices through the body, experimental writing such as écriture féminine, and the employment of ‘soft’ materials such as embroidery, knitting, weaving and so on, in an effort to place women within a larger tradition of anonymous, artisan works. While the practice of écriture féminine was embedded in the French language, the use of soft materials in art shared a wider international heritage. It is argued that women’s soft art also shares a relationship with avant-garde French male groups of the period such as Supports-Surfaces and their dismantling of the canvas via Marxist theory into their component ‘soft’ parts. The result is a major reassessment of the way in which women were believed to be working independently of their male counterparts during this period, as evidenced by radical practice.
This chapter considers the history and influence of Psychanalyse et Politique and the relationship between interior drives and exterior politics: the role of sexuality, importance of hysteria and jouissance and the diverse spaces of women’s artistic production. Artists who were associated with the group, who exhibited at the group’s gallery and artists with a psychoanalytic focus are represented in the chapter. The group’s purchasing of the trademark MLF from the women’s movement as a strategy is also discussed. The result of the trademark battle ultimately resulted in the dissolution of the MLF, but Psychanalyse et Politique significantly impacted French culture in terms of the volume of women’s art and literature produced.
The introduction focuses on the category of ‘women artists’ in France, which is considered in light of the book’s title, Counterpractice. This chapter sheds light on the internationalism of the French women’s movement and presents a global view of French feminism as a brand with emphasis on Africa, Asia and Latin America. The history of the 1970s women’s press and the scholarship and exhibition histories concerning women artists are discussed. The core concept of the glissade is presented as a mechanism in which to read women’s art practice against multiple political and aesthetic contexts of the period.
This chapter looks at the various political groups of the MLF and its goals, and how artists (women and men) engaging in performance, body and other forms of art blur and deepen the line between political demonstration and artistic expression through their redefinition of the body. Both militant considerations and questions of subjectivity are raised in relation to the feminist dictum of the ‘personal is political’ through a restaging of psychoanalysis and post-Enlightenment thinking.
This chapter examines through archival documents, tracts and images the trajectory of the MLF and provides the necessary critical background in order to situate and contextualize the work of artists in relation to the women’s movement. The three dominant streams of MLF are discussed with their respective focus on women’s rights, psychoanalysis and Marxism with a close and comprehensive analysis of the formation, activities and dissolution of the MLF. The women’s movement became central for the organization of women artists who used strategies of resistance, visibility and collectivity in order to draw attention to their practice.
This chapter recounts the position of women in the events of May ’68 by looking closely at ideological debates surrounding the events and the symbolic use of women in politics. The progressive militancy of women and their art is also considered through image making and their role in the streets and the student-led occupation of the Paris-based École des Beaux-Arts. The seeds of the later women’s movement were sown during these events with women militants troubled by domestic duties. French women began to organize in the Sorbonne to voice their struggles to think collectively about strategies for the future. This practice would later be echoed in women’s art groups in the 1970s.
This chapter confronts the ideologies of different women’s artistic groups formed in the 1970s with the lack of exhibition opportunities for women offered by institutions and galleries. Ongoing women’s art collectives such as the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs along with the newly minted groups La Spirale, Femmes en Lutte, Collectif Femme/Art and Art et Regard des Femmes are looked at in terms of organization, politics and cultural impact. The innovations and failures of these groups in terms of experimental practices such as mystical and spiritual evocations, studio exhibitions, awareness campaigns and attempts at major shows (such as the failed 1977 exhibition of women artists at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris), and joint collective practices are assessed. The specificity of feminism and art in a French context is emphasized through individual and collective works.
Postwar futurismo included Anarchists and Socialists, such as Vinicio Paladini, Ivo Pannaggi, Avgust Cernigoj and Ruggero Vasari. This chapter explores the manner in which radical futurists welcomed the machine as a conduit of proletarian redemption and harbinger of new social and class orders. Austere and ascetic, utopian or dystopian, an emblem of rigour and discipline to engage with in the factory, the machine was instrumental in exploding social hierarchies. Conversant with the Bauhaus, voluntarily or forcibly exiled and in tension with the reactionary futurist officialdom back home, left-wing futurists were marked by a perpetual displacement and dislocated, frontier identities. The chapter includes a section on futurist music (especially Silvio Mix).