“Our booksellers championed The Story of Art Without Men from the start. It is a must-have for any booklover’s shelf: as essential as it is enjoyable. Written with wit and ease, the resulting book, packed full of beautiful illustrations, can be devoured in one-sitting or dipped into at a whim. This is a book which will be prized for years to come; a feast for the senses, as well as the mind.” - Kate Skipper, Waterstones Chief Operating Officer

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"The Story of Art Without Men is a sumptuously illustrated history of women artists from 1500 to the present day, at once broad in scope and meticulously researched. Though the book aims to be accessible to people with minimal prior knowledge of the topic, to "break down the stigma around elitism in art", even connoisseurs will discover new artists in its pages." - Times Literary Supplement

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"The Story of Art Without Men should be on the reading list of every A-level and university art history course and on the front table of every museum and gallery shop." – The Times

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"Katy Hessel ... created this positive, beautifully written corrective, which should become a founding text in the history of art by women ... The Story of Art Without Men brings centuries-old figures to life while giving form and gravitas to emergent voices and covering every substantial movement from dadaism to civil-rights-era antiracist art along the way." - The Observer

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"Hessel is clear-sighted and impartial enough not to over-claim for her subjects but show that they are full of interest and every bit as worthy of attention as their male peers." – The New Statesman

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"The Story of Art Without Men, which describes how women achieved artistic excellence against colossal odds, has firmly cracked open the canon." - The Spectator

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"I can’t wait to give this to my teenage daughter." – The i Newspaper

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"Katy Hessel's unapologetically revisionist book campaigns against the patriarchy of the art world" - The Financial Times

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"Hessel’s book is a revelation and an important first step towards redressing the balance of an art world in which women have been sidelined, stepped over and trampled upon for far too long.” – Refinery 29

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"Hessel never condescends . . . with a first-person delivery akin to writers such as Jennifer Higgie and Olivia Laing, illustrating what makes an artist or artwork genuinely meaningful." - The Sydney Morning Herald 

 

"It will change the history of art." – Tracey Emin

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Discover the glittering Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century USA, and the artist who really invented the Readymade. Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of postwar artists in Latin America, and the women artists defining art in the 2020s. Have your sense of art history overturned, and your eyes opened to many art forms often overlooked or dismissed. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan this is the history of art as it's never been told before.

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Published by Hutchinson Heinemann (Penguin), September 2022

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