Prolegomenon. The Ideology of the Gaze in Photography: Canons and Anti-canons of Women Art Dealers’ Portraits

How do we look at photographic portraits of twentieth-century women entrepreneurs? How do they shape our imagination and memory about the relationship between women and the art market? The research presented in this volume questions entrenched perceptions of visual sources in art-market studies, applying new perspectives to images charting the course of modern art-market history that destabilize traditional conceptions of female identities and power structures. This survey introduces the reader to the book’s structure, through the analysis of a selection of women art dealers’ photographic portraits placed at the beginning of each chapter, and to the results of a visual philological study using these photographs as primary sources to examine women’s roles in modern art markets. It outlines an iconographic taxonomy of the woman gallerist, starting on a methodological level with archived visual documents selected by the contributing scholars whose individual chapters analyze these women’s agency. The research therefore has a strong choral identity: each photograph has been expertly selected from its respective archive for its historical weight, and the conclusions reached are indebted to the scientific arguments contained in each chapter.