“Painting Against Women: Misogyny, Modern Art, and the Impacts of Sexist Oppression, Then and Now”

Allison Leigh, an art historian specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and Russian art, will present a talk drawn from her upcoming publication, The Misogynists: A Reckoning with Modern Art (Abrams, Nov. 10, 2026), as part of the 2026-2027 Laura C. Harris Series.

Across the last two centuries, several of the artists canonized as the greatest painters of the modern era produced work with a strikingly consistent theme: contempt for women. Edgar Degas’s depictions of ballerinas and bathers as animalian; Pablo Picasso’s violent fragmentation of female sex workers’ bodies under the aegis of Cubist innovation—much of the art now enshrined as central to modernism’s achievement is predicated on degrading or disdainful representations of women. Leigh’s talk offers an introductory account of how such varied expressions of misogyny came to saturate the modernist tradition, and of the ways art history as a field has normalized this content, conditioning students and museum-goers alike toward self-silencing in the face of overtly sexist imagery.

Emerging from Leigh’s experience teaching undergraduates, the talk surveys how misogynistic discourse across a range of fields has shaped both women and their representation historically. The project advances a renewed feminist methodology, one that situates misogyny in modern art not as isolated or exceptional, but as symptomatic of systemic structures.

Leigh’s talk speaks directly to this year’s Laura C. Harris Series theme, Feminist Temporalities and the Futures We Strive For, which explores how feminists understand, use, and disrupt time rather than assuming it moves in a straight line. Her ‘then and now’ framing takes up this same question within art history: rather than treating misogyny in modernist painting as something safely confined to the past, she shows how it persists into the present, continuing to shape how women are seen, taught about, and studied. In doing so, her talk takes up the series’ central question of what counts as “progress,” and for whom, resisting a linear narrative in which such contempt belongs safely to the past.

This talk builds on Leigh’s broader work on gender and representation. She is associate professor of art history and the SLEMCO & Board of Regents Support Fund Endowed Professor in Art at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where her research develops new feminist approaches to art history and examines how masculinity has been portrayed across different historical periods. That work shows up in her book Picturing Russia’s Men: Masculinity and Modernity in 19th-Century Painting (Bloomsbury, 2020) and in the co-edited volume Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter, and Representation (Manchester University Press, 2023) — both of which laid the groundwork for the ideas she’ll present in this talk.

Leigh’s research has been presented at institutions including the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace, the Netherlands Institute for Art History at The Hague, Yale University, UCLA, and New York University. She previously held a faculty appointment in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City.

Sponsored by the Laura C. Harris Series, Denison Museum, the Art History & Visual Culture Program, and the Women’s & Gender Studies Program.