ABSTRACT
In A Room o/One's Own, Virginia Woolf wrote that "if women had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid, infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater." Further, Woolf observed that "imaginatively [woman] is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. ,,1 While Woolf was addressing the issue of women as fictional characters, her observations applied equally well to women aspiring to art careers as well as women who appear as fictional characters (i.e., not portraits) in paintings. A visit to an art museum provides the same impression of women as does a perusal of great literature. Women are everywhere--nude, clothed, heroic, splendid, sordid, mean-but the women themselves, both painters and models, remain largely unknown. The implications of women as art objects are complex, diverse, and much discussed--but equally intriguing and seldom addressed is the anonymity of those female art objects, and not just the nude ones. Reasearch into the lives and identities of these women grants them a rightful place in the history of art; it in no way devalues or detracts from the work of art itself Seeing the models as human beings is yet another way of seeing art and of enriching one's appreciation of it.
