Valentine Grande and Eva Rossetti, FEMINIST ART. Women who revolutionized art, Madrid, Editorial Liana, Colec. Bromeliad, 2023.
Dew of the Villa
The emergence of illustrated books about women artists made by feminist authors has been gaining weight in the publishing scene in recent years. Some are directed, with pedagogical purpose, to the little ones.
In other cases, these are books aimed at an ageless audience, from childhood-adolescence to young adults. The impact in our country can be measured by its growing presence in the cultural media. the feminist magazine m-arteyculturavisual It has also echoed, publishing several articles, among which I would highlight the one dedicated to the graphic novel on Georgia O’Keeffe that the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum commissioned from the artist Maria Herreros on the occasion of the O’Keeffe retrospective at the museum.
At the Liana publishing house, directed by Marta Tutone, this interest in artists is one of its strong points. So far they have published: Bad Girls. 15 stories of creative and brave women, Lee Miller. five portraits y Kusama. Obsessions, loves and art.
To those who join now FEMINIST ART. Women who revolutionized art, written by Valentina Grande and illustrated by Eva Rossetti. Both have also published together My Salinger (2017) y Gertrude Stein and the Lost Generation (2022). Valentina Grande is a teacher, writer and directs two Italian literature radio programmes. She is also the author of the scripts for the graphic novels Raymond Carver. a story (2019) y Bauhaus, the idea that changed the world (2021). For her part, Eva Rossetti, cartoonist and illustrator, graduated with a thesis on the reinterpretation of the myth of the border in American independent cinema after 9/11, and at the Scuola Romana dei Fumetti in 2015. Feminist Art It was created during the confinement of the pandemic and was published in 2020. It has already been translated in Germany, the US and the United Kingdom, and soon in Korea and France.
Feminist Art is a graphic novel with a clear feminist commitment, dedicated to the Biblioteca delle donne de Bologna, which is part of that wonderful network of Casa delle donne where documents of the feminist struggle in Italy are treasured, well rooted since the beginning of the seventies with the group Female revoltled by Carla Lonzi and her manifesto Let’s talk about Hegel.
It is a very beautiful and original book, composed with great sensitivity, far from clichés and elaborated with very good criteria. The first thing that surprises about this graphic novel that brings together four stories is precisely the complex choice of three essential artists and artivist group in the genealogy of feminist art: Judy Chicago, Faith Ringgold, Ana Mendieta and the Guerrilla Girls. Four figures, four attitudes that form a basic mosaic of an intersectional feminism: attentive to social class, race, ecology, and the diversity of genders and sexual orientations.
Then, it also seems to me to highlight the capacity for synthesis in the script of each one of these stories, which goes to the essentials precisely isolating some not-so-usual details in each one of these biographies, illustrated in very suggestive environments and landscapes, which transport you to the experiences lived by these protagonists.
But beyond this literary prowess in syntheses, the threads that unite these stories are: In the first place, approaching these figures from their childhood, which is equivalent -by empathic mimesis- to a return to the childhood of the readers who, In reality, they are already preconditioned by having in their hands this reading format, the illustrated book, with which we all begin to read. Another important wicker would be the connections with family history and other influences, for example, in the case of Judy Chicago, the influence of her leftist father, persecuted by McCarthy; or the figure of her grandmother for Faith Ringold.
In addition, the importance in each of these biographies of relationships with other colleagues, with which each story connects us with other artists. For example, in the case of Ana Mendieta, her performative closeness to Adrien Piper, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Eleanor Antin or Cindy Sherman. Although, logically, the story that brings together the most connections is that of the Guerrilla Girl through her impersonations of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Eva Hesse, Käthe Kollwitz, Frida Kahlo, Alma Thomas and Georgia O’Keeffe. In short, some connections that forward to continue the inquiries about other feminist artists.
But, above all, a way of understanding the biographies that means that each of these figures, being heroines, do not stand up as solitary geniuses, but always refer to a sisterhood sisterhood.
The result, which is reinforced as this book progresses, is an invitation to what was called awareness in the seventies, that is, to feminist conversion; or to its reactivation, not from a merely intellectual or ideological level, but incorporated by the emotions that this beautiful reading arouses.
And from that field of intersectional plurality, which allows the possibility that readers imagine themselves plotting their own adventure.