Gill Perry
In this fourth volume of the Art of the Twentieth Century series, the contributors address a fascinating variety of themes relating to art from the 1960s to the end of the century—the period of “postmodernism.”
The collection was the result of a research project initiated by Gill Perry and first featured as a Special Issue of the journal Art History. It was reprinted as: Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women’s Practice, Blackwells, 2004, (with an additional essay). The collection explores ideas of ‘visibility’ and ‘difference’ in contemporary practice, locating women’s art within a matrix of overlapping historical, cultural and post-colonial frameworks.
During the Georgian period there was a remarkable proliferation of seductive visual imagery and written accounts of female performers. Focusing on the close relationship between the dramatic and visual arts at this time, this beautiful and stimulating book explores popular ideas of the actress as coquette, 'whore', celebrity, muse and creative agent, charting her important symbolic role in contemporary attempts to professionalise both the theater and the practice of fine art.Gill Perry analyses the complex ways in which these identities were both constructed and challenged through portraits