A Woman’s Eye, Her Art

Our struggles as women in the twenty-first century are not new. Some of our most interesting women artists had to eschew all accepted social norms in order to find a life of art. For some, it was catastrophic; for others, a liberation. But how did they view themselves through the prism of their art, and what do we, as modern women, take from their struggle?

HER BODY, HER ART looks back to the lives and art of six European modernist women, who literally recast the ways in which women’s art could be seen, and asks why they still matter. These artists were painting and creating photography across sexuality, artform, generations, movements, culture and heritage.

Paula Modersohn-Becker
Clara Westoff – and her marriage to writer Rainer Maria Rilke
Surrealist photographer and writer Claude Cahun, with her partner Marcel Moore
Gabriele Munter – and her relationship with Kandinsky
Photographer and muse to many, Lee Miller
Photographer and Picasso muse, Dora Maar

In the vein of Drusilla Modjeska’s seminal and internationally bestselling work, STRAVINSKY’S LUNCH, these fascinating reflections connect the past to the present. Modjeska examines the pitfalls of gender through the medium of art and the way that society and, to some extent, the patriarchy have assumed a level of ownership of women’s bodies.

This beautiful book, richly illustrated and elegantly written, shines a spotlight on the work of hitherto sidelined women artists – women who, each in their different ways, changed the landscape of the art world and reframed the narrative.