Art without history

This book reflects on how art history has studied women’s artistic practice, particularly in Europe between the 16th and 20th centuries. In this sense, it is also a history of art history—a history of how art produced by women was ignored and undervalued for so long: an art without history. And of how, in recent decades, feminist approaches have paved the way for art to finally have a history.

“Writing about the past has always been done from the present—from different presents—because it is done by human beings who observe the past from their individual and social positions, and from a particular time and place.

Our eyes seek out and see what they are prepared to see. It is in the present that we discover what was previously unknown or ignored. And it is in the present that historical themes and figures are analysed that, in the past, were considered neither relevant nor worthy of being historicised.”