Etched in Memory

Book excerpt: How is it that some established artists but not others come to be considered worth remembering? For answers, Etched in Memory looks at how history interacts with personal biography. The authors dig deeply into the archives for material on the careers and posthumous fates of nearly 300 British and American printmakers, half of them women, active during the Etching Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The authors examine the effects of changing taste on artistic productivity, on building a reputation, and on the selective survival of artists within the collective memory. They document the influence on careers of family milieu, of acces to art education, of sponsorship and networks, of having (or lacking) money, and of being in the right place at the right time. Being remembered requires, at minimum, that the artist's work be preserved and deposited in the cultural archives. It is here that demographics and other circumstances put women at a cumulative disadvantage.