Gentileschi

If the name Artemisia Gentileschi doesn’t leap to one’s lips, Kate Hamill’s play “The Light and the Dark” at 59E59 Theaters offers a generous introduction.

Much of the information in the play’s 145 minutes will be familiar to anyone who has spent time reading Gentileschi’s Wikipedia page or has seen other recent plays inspired by her life.

And of the 12 on loan, only one is by a woman - Gentileschi's Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria.

In the popular telling, Claudel is to France what Gentileschi was to Italy and Kahlo to Mexico: the overlooked artist as victim — a casualty not just once, but twice.

The welcome revival of interest in the paintings and sculptures of Gentileschi, Kahlo and Claudel since the 1970s and ’80s was led by second-wave feminists, and it represented an effort to transform victimhood into survivorship in the cultural sphere.