The MODERN WOMEN ARTISTS collection is a series published by Eiderdown Books to outline an alternative history of art.
The books reveal the story of important female artists whose art might otherwise be overlooked, overshadowed or forgotten. Working across a range of disciplines and artistic styles in the first half of the twentieth century, all of the women included in this series were 'modern'.
Read together, these books begin to redress the untold history of modern art.
No 7: NINA HAMNETT by Alicia Foster
Nina Hamnett (1890–1956) was an artist, illustrator and writer who was associated with the bohemian and avant-garde circles of the London and Parisian art scenes in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Hamnett’s career included designs for the Bloomsbury Group’s Omega Workshops; she was also an artist’s model for her friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and published her life-story in two autobiographies. But it was her sensitive and formal still life paintings, her striking, often acerbic drawings, and her perceptive portraits of poets, dancers and friends which defined her achievements as an artist.
Alicia Foster brings together works from public and private collections to foreground the accomplishments of a talented and ambitious woman who wasn't afraid to do things differently. In this book, for the first time, Nina Hamnett is celebrated as an artist in her own right.
