On the occasion of Griselda Pollock’s presence in Geneva and the award ceremony for the 2024 Nessim Habif World Prize of the Université de Genève, the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is delighted to welcome the author for a conversation about the publication of Maîtresses d’autrefois. Femmes, art et idéologie (312 pages, 20 euros, JRP|Editions, 2024).

A unique encounter with a pioneer of feminist art history: forty years after the publication of her seminal work, co-authored with Rozsika Parker, Griselda Pollock looks back on their salutary research, which proposes not only to add female names to the artistic canon but to radically change the way art history is written.

Griselda Pollock will be in conversation with Giovanna Zapperi, professor at the University of Geneva and author of the book’s foreword, on Thursday 10 October at 6.30pm.

An evening organized in collaboration with the Faculté des Lettres of the University of Geneva.

Griselda Pollock will give a public lecture entitled Feminist thought, « Artworking », and Critical Humanities in the Dystopic Present on 9 October at 7pm at the University of Geneva, Uniphilosophes, Amphi Jeanne Hersch.

About the book:

Originally published in English in 1981 as Old Mistresses. Women, Art, and Ideology and translated here into French for the first time under the title Maîtresses d’autrefois. Femmes, art et idéologie is not a history of women’s art. This seminal volume by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock is far more radical and emancipatory and, indeed, still relevant today. Their book deals as much with what art history, as a discipline and ideology, has done and is still doing to women artists and their work, as with what their practices are doing or could do to art history, if they were fully studied and considered.

The five parts of the book combine indepth case studies—from Sofonisba Anguissola, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Berthe Morisot, to Meret Oppenheim, Eva Hesse, and Mary Kelly—analyses of the structures of artistic production, such as the ideological opposition between art and craft or the stereotypes assigned to the “feminine essence,” and dynamic developments on the oriented way in which the discipline “art history” has been forged, socially and symbolically.

Parker and Pollock thus offer a salutary investigation to all those who, with them, not only want to add feminine names to art history, but also to profoundly modify its writing.

The book is introduced by art historian and Geneva University Professor Giovanna Zapperi and features a recent foreword by Griselda Pollock, firmly anchoring Maîtresses d’autrefois in the present.

Griselda Pollock is Professor emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art,
University of Leeds