(Photography : Jean-Claude Aubry)

Perspective, a biannual devoted to art history news, has published its issue for the first half of 2024. Entitled “Autonomy”, the issue examines “autonomy in art, based on key moments such as the rise of aesthetic philosophy in the 18th century, or modernist formalism and the avant-gardes of the last century. (…) Historians of art and architecture, anthropologists, philosophers and artists will examine the myth and prehistory of this concept through the links between art history and the human sciences, the relationship of art, works of art and artists to the social and moral fields and to political struggles, or by approaching works and images as vectors of emancipation or motors of autonomy.

Among the many contributions, let’s highlight the fascinating conversation between Béatrice Josse and Fabienne Dumont on the theme of “Feminist fabrications of art and art history: a ‘paradoxical radicality’?” Béatrice Josse founded the Fonds régional d’art contemporain de Lorraine and is deeply committed to women artists. Our friend Fabienne Dumont (photo above), art historian and critic, is a specialist in feminist, gender, queer and masculinist issues in contemporary art in France and abroad.

This dialogue emphasizes the “essential work of art historians and so-called feminist critics, who read, reread, research and discover works that have been invisibilized by mainstream history” (Béatrice Josse), and illustrates it with numerous examples of resistance to “the place assigned to women and the world that men were constructing for them and their children. At the same time, women artists began to regain possession of their representations” (Fabienne Dumont).

Fabienne Dumont is currently working on a new edition for Presses du réel of Histoire de l’art et lutte des sexes, a 1978 book by Françoise Hadjinicolaou, who attacked “the lack of feminist vision in Nicos Hadjinicolaou’s Marxist thought” in Histoire de l’art et lutte des classes.Translated with DeepL.com (free version)