Pour l’histoire des femmes artistes : historiographie, politique et théorie

This article relates to research on the historiography of women artists. In other words, it presents a historiographic assessment covering nearly three hundred years, during which a number of European and American works, devoted wholly or in part to the history of women who have contributed to the arts, were written. Mary Sheriff highlights the essential texts of this scholarly production and contextualizes different periods of its history around two major moments: the end of the nineteenth century, in parallel to the first feminist movements in the West, and the 1970s and 1980s, following the second wave of this interest in the writing of the history of women in the arts, beginning with seminal works by Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock. A number of theoretical models that governed the understanding of this history's sources and archives, as well as the study of its specific modes of writing, lead the author to relate her material to various historiographic genres: particular history, general history, art history, women's history, gender studies, etc. The purpose of the article is to better understand this historiography in order to modify current projects: not only her own (particularly within the framework of her project on eighteenth-century women artists undertaken with Melissa Hyde), but also those of other scholars who share her interest in gender and gender studies in the various fields related to the visual arts.