Female artists: A book highlighting the 20th-century women artists who were sidelined by men

ART HISTORY

A Woman’s Eye, Her Art

Drusilla Modjeska

Penguin, $55

“Of course the women were important, but it was because they were our muses.” With these words, Roland Penrose, second husband of artist-photographer Lee Miller, dismisses the contribution to art history of a talented group of women artists (including Miller) who worked from the 1920s to the mid-1940s.

In A Woman’s Eye, Her Art , Australian writer Drusilla Modjeska (she emigrated from England in 1971) writes these women back into history, continuing a developing (and welcome) trend of Australian writers resurrecting the stories of talented women whose stories have been subsumed in those of their male partners – such as Anna Funder in Wifedom (Eileen O’Shaughnessy) and Kate Grenville in A Room Made of Leaves (Eliz