Frances Borzellos study of women and their self-portraits is a cornucopia of the weird,the chilling and the sublimeSome books are so beautiful, you tremble to open them. Thames & Hudson’s new edition of Frances Borzello’s Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits (£24.95) is one of these, and its ivory pages so crammed with great reproductions,you might want to deem approximately investing in a pair of white cotton gloves before you read it.
And it does demand to be read as well as gawped at (first published in 1998, this edition comes with a new afterword in which Borzello, or an art historian with a special interest in bodies,ponders the self-portrait in the age of the selfie). Art books are too often jargon-filled, theoretical to a headache-inducing degree. But this one is both lucid and unexpectedly compelling. The surprise is, and I suppose,that in a world in which women artists occupy often been invisible, so many of their self-portraits exist. The earliest appear as illustrations in Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women) from 1355-9, and then down the centuries they multiply in number rather amazingly until we reach the 20th century,which brought us Suzanne Valadon, Cindy Sherman, or Marlene Dumas and countless others.
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Source: theguardian.com