In the 1992 postscript to her essay “Patrilineage,” published in Art Journal the year prior, Mira Schor argued for the necessary interruption of male-dominated art history through the production of histories of and by women. “The method is really very simple,” she explained. “It will always be a man’s world unless one seeks out and values the women in it” (Mira Schor, “Patrilineage,” in Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, 117). Despite the changes of nearly two and a half decades, this lesson remains relevant (sadly, so do many in Schor’s essay): unless new narratives are explicitly created to kick against its mold, history is bound to take the shape of the patriarchal society into which it is written.

With The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium, authors Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal, and Sue Scott build upon the work of their earlier volume, After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art (New York: Prestel, 2007). After the Revolution focused on twelve women artists, devoting a twenty-page essay to each; The Reckoning looks at a younger generation and divides this attention over the work of twenty-five artists, with far briefer introductions to those included. As the authors explain, the broadening of their scope is intentional, reflecting the increase in opportunities for women artists as well as both the globalization of contemporary art and progress of global feminisms. The choice also allows for a structured presentation of this work, one that would be less effective with fewer artists. Separating the twenty-five artists into four thematic categories, the authors give shape to a directed, rather than encyclopedic, survey text and, while focusing on the work of a select group born after 1960, the volume charts a history of matrilineal influence through a cross-generational network of women artists.

The legitimation of artists, and women artists in particular, has traditionally been established through the field’s leading men: accomplished, as Schor writes, through an invocation of the “mega-fathers” of art history (pairing the work of a younger female artist with that of, for example, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, or Joseph Beuys) or of literature and theory (Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault) (“Patrilineage,” 99). Artists and their work are historicized, validated, and even invalidated by citing male forebears rather than the influence of female predecessors. The Reckoning’s significance thus lies in the pointed task its authors undertake. Using the loose delineation of four thematic categories—titled “Bad Girls,” “Spellbound,” “Domestic Disturbances,” and “History Lessons”—The Reckoning traces continuity and difference between the work of a younger generation and the work of women artists before them. Or, as the authors state in their introduction, “work by what we came to think of as our artist’s foremothers” (8).

While I have approached The Reckoning through the lens of Schor’s “Patrilineage,” it is clear that Heartney, Posner, Princenthal, and Scott take Linda Nochlin’s hallmark essay of 1971 as their touchstone text. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” shapes the introduction of After the Revolution, and Nochlin’s preface to that first book in turn shapes the arc of The Reckoning (Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ARTnews 69, no. 9 [January 1971]: 22–39, 67–71). As Nochlin wrote in After the Revolution, remarking on the changes that have occurred as a result of the feminist art movement, “After the revolution comes the reckoning. Exactly what has been accomplished, what changed?” (7) The Reckoning aims to answer this question, yet in focusing on the work of artists born after the rise of the American feminist movement “who have benefited from the ground-breaking efforts of their predecessors,” it presents a return to Nochlin’s first question, about Great Women Artists, as well (7). Using introductory essays at the start of each thematic category to tie the work of a younger generation to the “landmark works” of their “foremothers,” The Reckoning secures the preeminence of the “exemplary artists” presented in the pages of After the Revolution while introducing a new generation of women artists who, because of the successes of those before them as well as their own, “are now positioned to reshape visual culture” (8).

Though intending to reflect a global approach, The Reckoning tells a U.S.-centric story, not only in the selection of artists and the earlier figures to whom they are tied (Martha Rosler, Carolee Schneemann, and Nancy Spero, among others), but in the way this work is discussed. Its authors intimate a Western perspective—if not a definitively North American viewpoint—throughout, and contextual references to “our culture” (see Posner on Janine Antoni and Wangechi Mutu) bring this bias to the fore. The Reckoning assumes a North American audience, and, while acknowledging the work of women artists working beyond U.S. borders, it is very much rooted in a legacy of American feminism, from its artistic foremothers to its chosen vocabulary. The Reckoning’s four themes allow the authors to shape a history of women artists that extends from the drives of preceding eras, identifying continuity and difference through this categorization. They describe “Bad Girls,” which examines the body’s role in forging (and challenging) identity, and “Spellbound,” a focus on an embrace on the subconscious, the irrational, and the surreal, as subjective categories addressing individual experience; the remaining two are social categories that highlight conflicts between individual and communal identity, taking on women’s relationships to home and family (“Domestic Disturbances”) and issues of social responsibility and national identity (“History Lessons”). With the exception of the final section, “History Lessons,” the same qualities that make these titles catchy also strike a slight tone of sensationalism, or, even as they refute them, echo terms that have been historically used to pigeonhole the work of women and now feel both outdated and limiting. The authors themselves write that “the four themes might be thought of as a four-pointed net thrown over our subject,” and to me the breakdown felt like a trap (8).

That the artists fit only uncomfortably into these themes, however, speaks to the work as well as the categories. The book’s second section, “Spellbound,” includes entries on Antoni, Cao Fei, Nathalie Djurberg, Pipilotti Rist, sisters Jane and Louise Wilson, and Lisa Yuskavage. While the work of these artists can in part be read in relation to the “language of dreams” historicized (and, to Princenthal’s credit, complicated) by the section’s introductory essay, these artists could easily be presented within any of the book’s other sections. Antoni’s photographs of her parents dressed in the likeness of the opposite partner and her sculptures in chocolate and soap could be viewed as “Domestic Disturbances,” the Wilsons’ videos of significant sites in history taken as “History Lessons,” and Yuskavage’s provocative paintings grouped within “Bad Girls.” Princenthal, in her reading of the work of Louise Bourgeois, a “paradigmatic antecedent” for the work of the women in this section, acknowledges the porous boundaries of The Reckoning’s thematic sections: Bourgeois could be seen as one of the “Bad Girls,” too (70). The authors’ categories help to hone the focus of their book, but ultimately (thankfully) these labels do not stick to the work within.

The Reckoning’s individual entries, however, land with different effect. Each author has contributed a longer essay that begins each section, and the short texts focused on individual artists are divided between them; the result is a diversity of voices that seems appropriate for both the breadth of work covered and the loose tether of book’s themes. But these entries also vary in quality and depth: some, despite their short length, succeed in opening the work of an artist to new interpretations, while others flatten the range of the discussed artwork’s meanings. Posner’s entries in particular fall into this latter category. Moving quickly through the highlights of an artist’s career, there are times when the smooth trajectories of Posner’s texts undercut the complexities of the works they introduce. Writing on Antoni’s Lick and Lather (1993), Posner describes the work’s provocative material process—“the artist molded fourteen classical self-portrait busts, seven in chocolate and seven in soap; then gently yet persistently licked off the chocolate and washed away the soap, gradually distorting and effacing her own image”—and then explains it away in the following sentence: “with these acts, Antoni suggested the mutability of female identity and the illusion of fixed notions of the self” (78). Is this really it? Truly, there is so much more: the intimate self-love in the actions of licking and washing one’s own portrait; the darker, self-destructive tendencies that could be read beneath this—a type of compelled indulgence paired with an obsessive need to clean, or efface, one’s own image; or the way that traditional gender roles are performed or critiqued through a woman’s self-portrait which is then consumed and scrubbed away. A survey text is meant to function as an introduction or a jumping-off point, and, given the few pages devoted to each artist in The Reckoning, it would be unreasonable to expect that its authors could comprehensively cover the breadth of an artist’s career. But entries like this run the risk of discouraging any jumping off by boxing the work into the narrow confines of tidy definition.

The Reckoning’s strongest texts present the highlighted artist within a context that gives both a community and history for her work, laying down potential paths for expanded research, and Scott provides especially rich contributions on Cicely Brown (“Bad Girls”) and Kate Gilmore (“Domestic Disturbances”). Scott ties Gilmore’s work to Kiki Smith, Eva Hesse, Bourgeois, Schneemann, VALIE EXPORT, and Marina Abramović, as well as Minimalism’s ordered structure and Expressionism’s color and messy materiality. Similarly expansive readings characterize each section’s introductory text. Scott opens “Domestic Disturbances” with the collaborative project Womanhouse, initiated by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro in 1971, and follows this with a reading of Rosler’s 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen. More than drawing simple threads between earlier works and the projects of contemporary artists, the authors of The Reckoning use the space of these introductions to recontextualize and cement the pioneering influence of women within historic movements and media. In “Spellbound,” Princenthal argues for the liberating, even activist, potential in the Surrealist language of dreams and spells; Scott includes a quote by Rosler, who remembers how performance and video began as feminist mediums in the 1960s but remained largely ignored until adopted by male artists whose work became iconic: “Ironically, feminism is responsible for the reinvigoration of performance” (121).

The way that The Reckoning tells this history—and who is included in it—is important, as it both frames the work presented in its pages and sets an example for future scholarship. “Most art schools do not provide enough information on women artists, and what little material they do offer is often without a pedagogic and theoretical framework,” Schor wrote. “The art student, male or female, has few tools for disrupting patrilineage” (“Patrilineage,” 108). Since Schor’s 1990 essay, there have been great contributions to women’s art history, and The Reckoning adds to the roster of exhibitions, texts, and artworks that have given a new generation a foundation on which to build. The book is quite deliberately the product of many voices and the presentation of many more; as its authors explain, most of the artists included in the volume contest definitions of identity (sexual, cultural, personal), as well as the nature of female experience and meaning of the term “feminism” (some even “choose not to speak of it at all”) (9). Highlighting disagreement as well as accord, The Reckoning provides a set of tools in the form of a history that is not a single straight arc but a network of insistently divergent lines. Its main contribution is as a source, a drawing together of resources and—if the listing of MA and PhD theses in the book’s bibliography can be taken as a sign of the authors’ high regard for student research—an ever-evolving history of women artists is one of the project’s primary goals. So I guess the question is this: what comes after the reckoning?