The Metamorphosis of Baubo. Myths of Woman's Sexual Energy
Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1994. 1st Edition. Octavo, publisher’s brick cloth, spine stamped in silver, black endpapers, original illustrated dust jacket.
First edition of politically radical artist, writer, and illustrator Winifred Milius Lubell’s scholarly exploration of the Baubo myth, the copy of American artist and spiritual mother of the feminist art movement, Mary Beth Edelson, with her extensive annotations. Edelson is best known for her large-scale collage "Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper," in which she replaced the faces of the disciples with noted women artists. She frequently employed the Baubo, a minor figure from ancient Greek mythology associated with fertility, humor, and female power (often with other archetypal female figures such as Sheela-Na-Gig, Medusa, and Venus), in her early works. She used self-portraiture, spiritual symbols, ritual, ecology, and ideas of individual and collective unconscious to get to the heart of the feminine experience. Many of her performances, photos, and collages reference the ideas and images Lubell explores in The Metamorphosis of Baubo, most explicitly in "Baubo's Head & Hands" (1973), "Trick or Treat: More Big Hearted Babes" (1978), and "One Blue Eye, Eager Beaver" (1978). Illustrated with black-and-white photos, drawings, and reproductions; with an introduction by Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, whose writing on ancient goddesses also had a profound influence on Edelson's work; and with notes, bibliography, and index. First printing with complete number row to copyright page. Roughly forty pages bear Edelson's pencil underlinings and marginal notes; while approximately twenty torn strips of paper and Post-it notes, two with handwritten notes, mark pages of interest to Edelson. Fine in unclipped dust jacket. An important volume from the working library of a major feminist artist, with potential for scholarly research. Item #11621
$300.00