A Woman's Eye, Her Art

How six extraordinary women artists of the twentieth century reframed the narrative through their art and lives.

When a woman makes art, what does she see? When she picks up her brush and looks in the mirror? When she takes off her clothes and paints herself naked? Or when she raises her camera and turns it towards another woman, a model naked there in front of her? And how is she seen when she turns to face the men, the artists, her colleagues, her friends, her lovers?

A Woman's Eye, Her Art looks back to the lives and art of European modernist women who recast the ways in which women's bodies could be seen - from the self-portraits of Paula Modersohn-Becker, to the Surrealist Claude Cahun who exposed the masquerades of femininity, to the radical nudes of photo-artists Lee Miller and Dora Maar. Alongside them in Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century were many artist-women, their friends and colleagues, including Clara Westhoff-Rilke and Gabriele M nter, Leonora Carrington and Meret Oppenheim. In this book, Drusilla Modjeska examines why these women still matter and, in the vein of her seminal and bestselling work Stravinsky's Lunch, connects their past to our present.

This beautiful book, richly illustrated and elegantly written is about the spirit it took for these artist-women to step out on that path, and the courage it took to stay there. It is the story of what they saw, and how they were seen as they crashed against the hypocrisies that are embedded deep in the structures of society. And it is about hard-fought freedoms as in their different ways they changed the landscape of the art world and reframed the narrative.

About the Author

Drusilla Modjeska is one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers. Her books include the award-winning Poppy and the bestselling The Orchard and Stravinsky’s Lunch, which won the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Her novel The Mountain was critically acclaimed and shortlisted for a number of awards; and in 2015 she published her memoir, Second Half First, which was also shortlisted for several prizes. She lives in Sydney.