In “Unspeakable Acts,” a new book about how artists have made sense (or not) of sexual violence against women, Nancy Princenthal draws a subtle but crucial distinction: Just because an act was long deemed “unspeakable” didn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t shown. In art as in life, abuse has been a constant; what changed in the 1970s, Princenthal says, is who depicted the experience, and how it was consequently understood.

“No era or culture has lacked images of women in extremis,” Princenthal writes, pointing to a canon replete with representations of sexual violence and coercion. In the 16th century, Titian painted the rape of Lucretia three times; a hundred years later, Rembrandt painted it twice. Although their styles diverged — Titian depicted the moment of attack and Rembrandt her ensuing suicide — they both turned rape into “pure allegory,” Princenthal writes. Violent and dramatic, perhaps, but “without physical or psychological reality.”

Throughout the art-historical record, sexual violence against women was a subject typically rendered by male artists for a male audience. Princenthal shows how that finally changed in the last quarter of the 20th century. The political and cultural upheavals of the 1970s made for a decisive moment; women took an experience that had been artistically mined by men for millenniums — “the device that sets the real (male) drama in motion” — and found ways to convey it in their own terms. To do so was inherently radical, Princenthal writes, “to a degree nearly incomprehensible now, in an age where memoir is the default means of cultural expression, and trauma its dominant narrative.”

Image Credit... Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times

Princenthal, the author of a previous book about the artist Agnes Martin, takes a tangled history and weaves it into an elegant account. Performance art proved to be an especially generative form, even if some critics didn’t see it that way early on. Women performance artists were often accused of mere narcissism, while men like Chris Burden and Vito Acconci were lauded for using their bodies to articulate profound truths.