The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution, and Resilience: Five Hundred Years of Women’s Self Portraits

In this idiosyncratic and fascinating primer, critic and artist Higgie (There’s Not One) skillfully restores marginalized women self-portraitists to their rightful place in the art pantheon. Interweaving biographical profiles and pointed cultural commentary, she charges through 500 years of art history to reveal her trailblazing subjects’ “shared desire to try to make sense of the world with a paintbrush.” Noting that “a self-portrait is not only a description of concrete reality, it’s also an expression of an inner world,” Higgie brings to light the lives of a number of women artists whose creations were a way to assert their existence in a milieu that often overlooked them. Italian artist Sofonisba Anguissola’s subversive painting The Chess Game (1555) rendered her the “first artist to portray her family as a primary subject,” while Mary Beale’s double portrait of her and her husband in 1675 flipped “traditional marriage roles.” For Frida Kahlo, art became “a form of catharsis” mentally and physically (after surviving a bus accident at 18, she underwent 32 operations before dying of complications related to her injuries almost 30 years later). Meanwhile, German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker’s 1906 self-portrait was “a defiant... acknowledgment of the energy and ambition that consumed her.” Full of edgy insights, this engrossing survey will delight art connoisseurs and general readers alike. Agent: David Godwin, David Godwin Assoc. (Oct.)