M/modesty

This small, soft-cover book explores power dynamics in two modesties - one that was dictated as a rule of obligatory decorum for women in England and France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and one that was developed as a painterly ideal by a number of male artists in the same era. It is different for a man or a woman to value reticence against the historic backdrop of male visibility. M/modesty addresses the similarities and asymmetries of modesty in society and painting, and explores spectrums of agency therein. An associative thread runs from Honoré de Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece, a painting by Paul Cézanne that hangs in the National Gallery in London, Charlotte Brontë's Villette and Lucy Kincaid's closely related Lucy.
"A meditation on the possible forms and fronts of hesitancy, delay and indirectness, painter Julia Dubsky's first book is modestly scaled but promiscuous in scope." - Amelia Groom.