Alice Maher’s Dream of St Ursula
Alice Maher’s Dream of St Ursula
Oratorio San Lodovigo, Venice, 2006.
Catalogue essay ‘Venetian Dreams and “Surrounding Stories”’.
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Crystal World
Crystal World
The Royal Society, London, 2011.
This essay is the Introduction to an exhibition catalogue ‘Crystal World’, held at the Royal Society in July-October, 2011. The exhibition was conceived and curated by Gill Perry with the Royal Society. The essay explores modern artists’ fascination with crystals and shows how different artists have been inspired in different ways by these complex, transient chemical processes and their aesthetic possibilities. It considers some of the metaphorical and literal associations of crystals, and various explorations of their real and imaginary possibilities in both art and science.
The exhibition featured the work of British artists Ackroyd and Harvey and Michelle Charles, and French artist Hubert Duprat.
The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons
The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons
Ed. and co-author with Joseph Roach, Shearer West. London: National Portrait Gallery and University of Michigan Press, 2011.
This book was written to accompany the exhibition The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 2011-12, curated by Gill Perry. The exhibition was widely reviewed, included 54 portraits and objects and involved extensive research in British archives, and some collaborative explorations with colleagues in theatre studies, music history and literature. Perry edited the book and wrote 70% (20,000 words), including three chapters and a section on biography. The book explores the role of feminine portraiture in the history and visibility of the first British actresses. It reassesses the often controversial relationship between art, gender and the theatre during the late 17th and 18th centuries, providing a critical analysis of the ‘feminine face’ of 18th-century celebrity culture.
The exhibition was designed to bring to public attention the important role of gender and feminine portraiture in perceptions of the theatre and its cultural influence, and in the construction of early celebrity culture. It also highlighted the remarkable symbiosis between the fine and dramatic arts during this period, and the important role of women in this synergy.
In the first chapter ‘Introduction: Painting Actresses’ Lives’ Perry explores the origins of the term ‘actress’ and the complex ways in which the idea of the ‘actress’ and its cultural associations have been mediated through visual culture, and biographical and autobiographical narratives. Her chapter ‘Divas, Dancing and the Rage for Music’ draws on new research on the relationship between musical and visual culture during the period, arguing that portraiture could be seen to embody (and sometimes to seek resolutions for) many of the social and cultural contradictions implicit in public musical performances (both singing and dancing) by women. Perry argues that portraiture offered another form of ‘performance’, a visual re-staging of femininity as somewhere between art and nature.
In the final chapter ‘Star Systems: Then and Now’, she explores parallels and differences with modern celebrity culture, considering some definitions and historical overviews of concepts of ‘celebrity’, often argued to have first developed in the 18th century with a growing commercial culture of consumption. It is argued that 18th-century feminine portraiture provided a visual embodiment of the conflation of public and private identities and gendered myths. She argues that we can observe the modern continuation of a ‘distinctively feminine face’ of this culture, and a parallel and voyeuristic obsession with ‘public intimacy’.
Antonia Dewhurst: Gimme Shelter
Antonia Dewhurst: Gimme Shelter
Ruthin Craft Centre, Wales, 2023.
Catalogue essay ‘Home Making’ in Antonia Dewhurst: Gimme Shelter, pp. 1-10.
Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early 20th Century
Primitivism, Cubism and Abstraction: The Early 20th Century
Co-author with Charles Harrison and Francis Frascina (Yale University Press, 1993) (30% authored), pp. 2-85. Translated into Spanish and Portuguese.
Femininity and Masculinity in 18th-Century Art & Culture
Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture
Ed. and co-author, (Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 1-17, 18-40.
Focussing on the visual arts and written texts, this edited collection emerged from an inter-disciplinary collaboration between Gill Perry and Michael Rossington. The idea for the collection emerged from the over-lapping research interests of individuals working on the Open University’s second level course The Enlightenment (code A206; first published 1993).
Through detailed discussion of written and visual texts, the editors and contributors sought to explore the shifting and nuanced uses of concepts of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ within 18th-century culture and the different ways in which they informed and influenced artistic practices. Varied methodological approaches are adopted, but overall these studies should encourage us to see that despite the dominance of certain tropes, notions of ‘feminine;’ and ‘masculine’ virtues and values were shifting and contested during the period. Perry’s essay ‘Women in Disguise’ explores portraiture as a powerful medium for the communication of social and cultural ambitions, values, beliefs and gendered assumptions, arguing for the increasing instability of the portrait genre during the later 18th century, and the crucial role played by the medium in contemporary definitions of femininity.
Academies, Museums & Canons of Art
Academies, Museums and Canons of Art
Ed. and co-author (Yale University Press, 1999).
This is the first of six books in the series Art and its Histories which also formed the main texts for an Open University course (code A216), first published in 1999. The book takes the form of a series of case studies but begins with an extended preface by Gill Perry that considers the nature of the modern discipline of art history and its origins in a western canonical tradition. Perry explores the evolving definitions and theories of art history, presenting a picture of a discipline that is in the process of renegotiating its boundaries. She considers historical notions of ‘genius’, ideas of ‘the new art history’ and ‘the social history of art’, theories of ‘looking’ and the problematic notion of the ‘canon’ of art. These are all issues explored in the case studies that follow.
Her chapter: ‘”Mere face painters”? Hogarth, Reynolds and ideas of academic art in eighteenth-century Britain’ (pp. 124 – 168) explores the shifting status of portraiture in mid eighteenth-century Britain, its relationship to ideas of academic art, and the implications of that relationship for the establishment of a canon in art. In seeking to understand what portraits by Hogarth or Reynolds might have meant to a contemporary audience, see explores their different uses of allegory and symbolism. In the process she focuses on the network of relationships between ideas of academic art and art theory, debates about the nature of masculine and feminine portraiture, and the connections between art and theatre in mid 18th-century Britain.
Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender & Knowledge c.1790-1900
Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge c.1790-1900
Co-ed. and co-author (Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 1-15, 16-41.
Difference and Excess In Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women’s Practice
Difference and Excess In Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women’s Practice
(Ed.) Art History Special Issue. Oxford, UK: Blackwells, 2003.
This book is the result of a collective research project initiated and edited by Perry, and first featured as a Special Issue of the journal Art History. It explores ideas of ‘visibility’ and ‘difference’ in contemporary practice, locating women’s art within a matrix of overlapping historical, cultural and post-colonial frameworks. Perry’s introduction ‘Visibility, Difference and Excess’ is an exploration of pertinent issues which draws on research on British art and gender in the 1990s, positing the idea of a shift in current thinking about the nature of ‘women’s practice’ and its status within contemporary British culture. She argues for an understanding of contemporary practice which is sensitive to the enabling alliances between art practice and theory. The essay also seeks to problematise notions of ‘difference’ in visual representation, exploring the fragmented and sometimes troubled nature of postmodern feminist practice. At its conception, the research project involved a group of art historians and critics, and included specially commissioned interviews with artists and academics whose work was seen to engage with issues of ‘difference’, identity or feminine ‘excess’, in the hope of expanding and developing the genre of the interview to provide rich material for academic debate (see especially interviews between Tickner and Parker, Barber and Maher and Corris and Hobbs). A diverse range of material is featured, including sculpture, painting, photography, installation, video and performance.