women in art

I found Charlotte Streifer Rubenstein's American Women Artists at the Chicago Rare Book Center in Evanston a couple of years ago.  It was a blazing June day and a friend of mine was selling jewelry at the Custer Street Art Fair, so I went into the bookstore to browse and escape the heat.  The friendly staff gave me a chilled glass of white wine, and they had air conditioning and a wealth of wonderful books that kept me happy for the next hour.  I spotted American Women Artists on my way out, bought it on impulse and have enjoyed it ever since.

American Women Artists was originally published in 1982 and is time-limited, but otherwise it's a fine anthology beginning with Native American works and spanning through to the late 20th century.  There have been so many great American women artists, and this book is an excellent starting point to discover their lives and talents and the creative movements they were part of.  Yes, we know Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe and Grandma Moses, but how about Jane Stuart, Sarah Goodridge, Cecilia Beaux, Lilla Cabot Perry, Marguerite Zorach, Grace Hartigan, Isabel Bishop, Malvina Hoffman, Agnes Tait, Romaine Brooks, Kay Sage, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel and Janet Fish?  And there are plenty of other names within the 560 pages (along with color and black and white reproductions), and anyone truly interested in American women in art should really seek out this book as a resource. 

When I was a child, there weren't roles available for women then in the arts, really. The most imaginative thing they could think of would be a school teacher, which is what my aunt was.  -- Grace Hartigan (1922-2008)

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. -- Cicero

Pictured:  Reading -- Frederick Childe Hassam, 1888 (Hunter Museum of American Art)

july and julie and julia

I have to note that I found this particular copy of Julie & Julia in the dumpster behind my apartment building.  However, it was way at the top of the dumpster and discovered on a bitterly cold March day, so it's not like I had to dive in there among festering heaps of garbage to pull it out.  The book wasn't with any other books so I don't think it was part of a group purge -- it just seemed like someone didn't like what they were reading and simply threw it out in protest.  Or they opened up their apartment window, hurled it off into the four winds and it happened to land in the dumpster below.

I read the book because I had heard much about it and then I saw the subsequent Meryl Streep/Amy Adams movie.  The film version of Julie & Julia, re-envisioned by the recently late great Nora Ephron, seemed more cohesive and left me with a stronger sense of the joy of food, cooking and life.  And I think that's how some other people and the Academy Award panel felt, but then again there is still a faction that prefers the edgier, more personal pace of the book, originally based on Julie Powell's blog.  And there's also a part of me that totally respects the frustration from whence her blog/book came, in terms of being trapped at a job that is just not where you want to be in life and wondering desperately how to escape.  The idea of taking on all of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking was brilliant, and I think if I'd kept up with it as a blog before it was published I would have really enjoyed each new post and recipe success/fiasco and getting to know Julie as well as Julia.  However, I can see where hardcore Julia Child fans or foodies might have expected something more sensual and richly paced like Under the Tuscan Sun, which is ironically, a better book than film.  So as the French say,  à chacun son goût, or everyone has his or her own taste and that's why books can earn 5 star Amazon reviews and/or end up in city dumpsters.