Judith Wilson
Eunice Lipton's Alias Olympia is the one book I would give a non-academic friend or lover or a U.S. Senator to explain the rigors and rewards of art historical investigation, as well as research in other esoteric humanities fields. Lipton's reading from it at the University of Virginia (where I previously taught) is the only time I have ever seen graduate students weep during a public lecture. It's hard to write anything smart, significant, and new about a central icon of the modernist canon. It's amazing that Lipton has done all of the above and revealed an emotional life that scholarship conventionally conceals.
Harriet Shorr
Suspenseful as a detective novel by Simenon, Alias Olympia rewards the reader at every turn.
Diane Wood Middlebrook
Beautifully written... compelling.
Joanna Frueh
Alias Olympia is an inspiration, to art historians and to students of art history at any level. Lipton's revelations about the profession of art history and the particulars of her engagement in it as a human being, as a woman, and as a feminist are a pleasure, poignant at many times, to read. The writing is direct and vivid, and the reader gets a fascinating view of the terrors and rewards of research, the scholar's insecurities and skills, and the interweaving of an individual's life and her work. Lipton's book is of great value because much of what she says as well as the way she says it—personally, humanly—goes publicly unsaid in academia, in art history, and in feminist scholarship. Alias Olympia dismantles the all too often deadening conservatism of art history and offers new ways of thinking and writing about the history of art.
Julia Kristeva
I greatly admire both the energy and revelations of Eunice Lipton's private-eye pursuit as she searched for traces of Victorine Meurent. Inscribing her own history as well as imaginatively elaborating upon fragments of this unknown woman artist's life gave Lipton's work a profound subjectivity that added to the pleasure of reading an excellent 'detective story' on desire, always alas poignant for women who want to be themselves. Lipton's book touched me personally.
Linda Nochlin
Eunice Lipton's remarkable study combines personal history and archival history in a literate and provocative way. in this story of a nineteenth-century painter-model, or rather, the search for the woman who posed for Manet's most famous painting, Lipton combines the search for self in the Bronx with the search for documentation about this most intriguing of models. It is the conjunction of these intertwined quests that makes the book at once poignant and to the point.
