Killing Men & Dying Women

With theoretic acuity, Griselda Pollock revisits New York Abstract Expressionism to propose a feminist reading of the Jewish-American artist Lee Krasner that is as astonishing as it is compelling. Seeking to discover inscriptions of feminine sexual difference, these psychoanalytically inspired essays revolve around a conceptual triangulation, in which Krasners position as a painter-woman in abstract art is conceived as a third position, interrogating and reworking two competing components of her creative energy with Jackson Pollock as an iconisation of her identity as an artist and Marilyn Monroe as an iconisation of her identity as a woman. The triptych that emerges is utterly riveting. Elisabeth Bronfen, Professor of English and American Studies, University of Zurich Killing Men & Dying Women represents an exciting new development for Griselda Pollocks work. She deconstructs the misogyny of 1950s America as well as an art establishment that critically ignored and institutionally marginalised the women artists of Abstract Expressionism. Making an unflinching use of feminist psychoanalytic theory, she argues for a more significant maternal relation in the human psyches development than traditional psychoanalysis allows. This perspective brings into visibility occluded modes of feeling and understanding that womens art, fragilely, preserves. The image and the story of Marilyn Monroe is woven into the texture of the argument, upsetting the decades transcendent image of woman and revealing the patriarchal insecurities it represented. Laura Mulvey, Professor of Film Studies, Birkbeck, University of London A book that reveals art history as a concerted and difficult and passionate business a contest, a battle, in short, a lived experience. Alexander Nemerov, Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University -- .

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds -- .

Introduction 1 Prophecy, 1956 2 Five essays on sexuality (and art) 3 What did Greenberg not say, or dare to think? 4 Is the gesture male? 5 Is the artist hysterical? 6 Massacred women do not make me laugh, nor do the agonies of Marilyn Monroes body 7 Dancing space: Prophecy to Sun Woman I 8 Three memories: Rosenberg and Monroe Appendix: Sexual difference Index -- .