Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Flowers and Towers: Politics of Identity in the Art of the American New Woman

Flowers and Towers: Politics of Identity in the Art of the American New Woman

Tessler, Nira

Hardcover

Art HistoryGeneral ArtGeneral Gender Studies

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1443882704
ISBN13: 9781443882705
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Pages: 289
Weight: 1.15
Height: 1.00 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.30
Language: English
This book explores with the meaning and symbolism of the flower motif in the art of women artists, from the nineteenth century to the present day. It begins with a discussion of the symbolic significance of the flower in canonical texts such as the Song of Songs, in which the female lover is likened to a lily among the thorns, and to an enclosed garden. These allegorical images permeated into Christian iconography, attaining various expressions in the plastic arts from the twelfth through nineteenth centuries. The heart of the book is a discussion of the meaning of the change in representations of the flower, and at the same time the appearance of amazing images of masculine skyscrapers, in the works of avant-garde American women artists during the 1920s and 30s, in three hubs of Modernist art: New York, California, and Mexico. Tessler explains how modernist artists of various fields of art--such as Glaspell, Stettheimer, O'Keeffe, Pelton, Cunningham, Mather, Modotti and Kahlo-were aware of the religious symbolism of the flower in Judaism and Christianity, and turned it into an emblem of the new modern woman with her own views of the world. Flowers and Towers concludes by presenting the works of contemporary feminist American artists such as Chicago and Schapiro, who pay tribute to those same Modernist artists by creating a new and daring image of the flower and using feminine materials and techniques that link them, as it were, to their spiritual mothers.

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