The Misogynists - by Allison Leigh (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A riveting exploration of six giants of modern art, revealing how misogynistic beliefs shaped their work and smuggled dangerous ideas into museums worldwide

A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Art Book for Fall 2026, and one of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2026

Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, and Picasso have long been considered essential figures in the history of modern art. But these six men were also unrepentant misogynists. In The Misogynists, art historian and professor Allison Leigh delves deep into the lives of these figures to show how they truly felt about women, how those beliefs worked their way into their art, and how these facts have been brushed aside by collectors, curators, and critics.

These six were wildly influential artists in their time and remain widely known--and loved--today. Their paintings are the jewels of permanent collections in the world's most important art museums, and you can find reproductions of their works on all manner of merchandise, from T-shirts and socks to magnets and phone cases. They also exploited and degraded women in ways that shocked their contemporaries. And their sexist views infused the artworks, allowing dangerous ideas about women's proper roles and overall value to pervade our temples of culture.

Blending extensive research and intense observation, and drawing on letters, contemporary criticism, scholarly biographies, and the work of gender theorists, psychologists, and philosophers, Leigh crafts a thoroughly readable, engrossing mixture of historical narrative, art criticism, and social analysis. The Misogynists is an essential reconsideration of the modern canon and the narratives that continue to shape how we see--and value--art today.

Review Quotes

"Inspired by fourth-wave feminism, art historian Allison Leigh takes a newly critical look at the female nude in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century painting, specifically in the works of some of its major representatives--Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, and Picasso. What she uncovers is what has always been in plain sight--blatant hostile sexism. Written in an accessible and engaging style and beautifully illustrated, the book has the potential to forever change the way we look at these artists' paintings of female nudes--and at the nude in art generally. May it lead to new ways of teaching and exhibiting the works in question."

"To read The Misogynists is to sit in the classroom with Allison Leigh and her students for a thrilling seminar. By looking closely at familiar paintings, in tandem with fine-grained historical analysis, The Misogynists will persuade open-minded readers that many of the much-vaunted innovations of Modernist painting are premised on violence towards women, both in paint and in person. It is a powerful, timely provocation, a call to arms that reminds us that the project of a feminist art history is more urgent than ever today."

"What I love about this book is that it is a cry of the heart. It takes its irresponsibility seriously: to tell the truth. For the truth can appear only in a passionate point of view, won and lost in personal experience. A beautiful story about what it is to teach and think about art history now."

About the Author

Allison Leigh is the SLEMCO & Board of Regents Support Fund Endowed Professor in Art at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors and has been invited to present her research at international museums and universities, including the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Yale University, UCLA, and the Art Academy of Latvia. She is the author of a previous academic monograph, Picturing Russia's Men: Masculinity and Modernity in 19th-Century Painting (Bloomsbury, 2020) and was the coeditor of Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter, and Representation (Manchester University Press, 2023). She lives in Lafayette, Louisiana.