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Bachelors

Bachelors

by Rosalind E. Krauss

Hardcover
$35.00 Paperback

228 pp., 7 x 9 in,

Hardcover
9780262112390
Published: January 28, 1999
Publisher: The MIT Press

$50.00

Paperback
9780262611657
Published: August 25, 2000
Publisher: The MIT Press

$35.00

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These essays on nine women artists are framed by the question, born of feminism, "What evaluative criteria can be applied to women's art?"

Since the 1970s Rosalind Krauss has been exploring the art of painters, sculptors, and photographers, examining the intersection of these artists concerns with the major currents of postwar visual culture: the question of the commodity, the status of the subject, issues of representation and abstraction, and the viability of individual media.

These essays on nine women artists are framed by the question, born of feminism, "What evaluative criteria can be applied to women's art?" In the case of surrealism, in particular, some have claimed that surrealist women artists must either redraw the lines of their practice or participate in the movement's misogyny. Krauss resists that claim, for these "bachelors" are artists whose expressive strategies challenge the very ideals of unity and mastery identified with masculinist aesthetics. Some of this work, such as the "part object" (Louise Bourgeois) or the "formless" (Cindy Sherman) could be said to find its power in strategies associated with such concepts as écriture feminine. In the work of Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, or Sherrie Levine, one can make the case that the power of the work can be revealed only by recourse to another type of logic altogether. Bachelors attempts to do justice to these and other artists (Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Louise Lawler, Francesca Woodman) in the terms their works demand.

Rosalind E. Krauss is University Professor in the Department of Art History at Columbia University, where, from 1995 to 2006, she held the Meyer Schapiro Chair in Modern Art and Theory. She is a founding editor of October and the author of Passages in Modern Sculpture, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Myths, The Optical Unconscious, Bachelors, Perpetual Inventory, Under Blue Cup (all published by the MIT Press), and other books.

[S]timulating, difficult, and often dazzling...Bachelors is a smart and often profound book that makes avaluable contribution to the gendered field it abhors.
Carol Zemel
Women's Review of Books

Rosalind Krauss's Bachelors is a brilliant and provacative account of the achievement of some of the major women artists of out time. Original both in its theoretical iconoclasm and its meticulous visual analyses, it provides feminists scholarship with new angles of vision and art history more generally with an invaluable critical resource.
Linda Nochlin, Wallace Professor of Modern Art, Institutue of Fine Arts, New York University

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