本书构思精巧，审视了九位主要致力于肖像画的女艺术家，分析了每位艺术家创作的作品以及捕捉对象肖像和所处空间的独特方式。

这些艺术家代表了1870年以来现代主义艺术的发展；每个人都为艺术史贡献了很多，她们让长期以来的凝视概念复杂化，探索了自我、主体与艺术家之间的关系。

本书主要研究了以自画像著称的女画家和摄影师，如保拉·莫德森·贝克尔、弗里达·卡洛、辛迪·舍曼；还研究了描绘妇女儿童日常生活的女艺术家，她们处在一个对此类题材不感兴趣的创作环境，如贝尔特·莫里索、玛丽·卡萨特、洛特·拉塞斯坦。还有一些女性如艾丽斯·尼尔、玛琳·杜马斯、伊丽莎白·佩顿，她们描绘的是熟悉的事物，如朋友、家人以及**人物。

九篇文章，九位作者，单独描述了这九位艺术家和她们的主题，并作为现代肖像画年表的一部分，强调性别的动态变化。

This superbly conceived publication looks at nine women artists whose careers were devoted primarily to portraiture, analyzing both the work they produced and the unique ways in which each artist captured her subjects’ likenesses and the spaces they inhabited.

These artists represent the development of modernist art since 1870; each has made significant contributions to art history as they complicate long-held notions of the gaze and explore the relationship between the self, the subject and the artist.

Close-Up examines women painters and photographers who are known primarily for self-portraiture, such as Paula Modersohn-

Becker, Frida Kahlo and Cindy Sherman; it also looks at female artists who depicted the daily lives of women and children in a creative environment that was largely disinterested in such subjects, such as Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt and Lotte Laserstein. Still other women―Alice Neel, Marlene Dumas and Elizabeth Peyton―embrace familiarity completely and depict friends and family as well as famous figures in their paintings.

In essays by nine different authors, these artists and their subjects are considered individually and as part of a chronology of modern portraiture, with an emphasis on the dynamics of gender.