ART : Unearthing a Buried Treasure of Women’s Sculpture : Laguna Beach artist Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein’s latest book puts the spotlight on a number of American artists from the past whose works have been ignored.

Nearly 20 years ago, at the height of the women’s movement, a plethora of exhibitions and books began calling attention to women artists, famous and forgotten, past and present. Archives were combed, tape recorders were switched on, dim corners of museums were scrutinized, and decades of assumptions about the way women’s art is made, promoted, exhibited and assessed began to be questioned.

Among the better-known feminist art history books published in the ‘70s are Eleanor Munro’s “Originals: American Women Artists,” Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin’s “Women Artists: 1550-1950” and Eleanor Tufts’ “Our Hidden Heritage: Five Centuries of Women Artists.”

By now, it might seem that the basic biographical ground has been pretty well covered, at least for the non-specialist reader.

But last year, Laguna Beach artist and teacher Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein--author of “American Women Artists From Early Indian Times to the Present” (1982)--came out with a hefty volume in the same vein: “American Women Sculptors: A History of Art in Three Dimensions.”

Rubinstein writes in her introduction that her “principal purpose . . . has been to unearth a buried history.” Although women sculptors are prominent today, she argues, “the public is unaware of their long record of accomplishment.”

In the book, she makes a conscientious effort to describe--however briefly--the careers of women who worked in non-traditional or craft media (basket weaving, ceramics), on architectural commissions, and in the field of performance art, as well as those who made sculpture in more conventional, free-standing forms.

A decade of intensive research paid off with a slew of names (mostly from the 19th Century and earlier) left out of the standard art history books, although numerous well-known and justly celebrated contemporary sculptors--including Louise Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Jenny Holzer, Jackie Winsor, Lynda Benglis, Maria Nordman, Ana Mendieta, Alice Aycock and Mary Miss--also find a place here. Rubinstein seems to have gone out of her way to include artists from the West Coast and other regions outside New York and New England, contrary to the usual bias of art history books.

Frequently, however, the stories Rubinstein tells about the trials and tribulations of lesser-known women sculptors are more interesting then their work, much of which appears as bland and mediocre (sometimes for different reasons) as that of their now-forgotten male colleagues.

The point, of course, is that those men generally got the training (especially in modeling from the nude), the emotional support (from non-competing wives or mistresses), the commissions and the acclaim denied women artists. A few managed to prevail against the odds, though Rubinstein is generally quick to suggest how much further their careers might have progressed in a different social climate.

Anne Whitney, for example, was born into a wealthy and supportive Massachusetts family in 1821. When her marriage prospects were thwarted--because of hereditary insanity in her sweetheart’s family--she became a schoolteacher, one of the few careers open to a woman of her era. But she also gained entre to a larger and more stimulating world through the poetry she published in Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly, and friendship with such leading feminists of her day as Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and Antoinette Brown, the first ordained minister in America.

One legend has it that Whitney discovered art after idly modeling sand dampened by an overturned watering can; another has her sketching an overturned flower pot. In any case, at 36 she turned decisively to sculpture. A few years later, she studied anatomy privately with a doctor.

In her early 40s, while studying with William Rimmer (a gifted and eccentric self-taught doctor, painter and sculptor who specialized in nudes), Whitney modeled a male nude Rubinstein believes may be the first by an American woman.

In later years, Whitney’s commissions included a marble statue of American revolutionary leader Samuel Adams for the U.S. Capitol. When the Boston Art Committee refused to commission a memorial for abolitionist Charles Sumner from her “because she was a woman,” Whitney bided her time. Twenty-seven years later, her bronze of Sumner was installed in Cambridge, Mass.

Whitney’s first life-size piece, a fully clothed marble “Lady Godiva” (in the private collection of two women who are art historians), looks like a zillion other boring statues from a dull moment in American sculpture, judging by the indifferent photo--one of numerous static, poorly lighted and usually undersize black-and-white photographs that give “American Women Sculptors” the gray, budget-conscious look of a textbook.

Godiva’s right hand clutches a fold of her skirt while her left hand seems to be curved decoratively at her waist. She leans back slightly and looks up, perhaps at some

unseen authority figure. Her famous hair is bundled up against her head.

But Rubinstein writes that the Anglo-Saxon gentlewoman is actually opening her belt buckle--the first step toward shedding her clothes, after deciding to take up her husband’s perverse challenge. (She wanted him to reduce taxes in the earldom; he finally agreed--if she would ride naked through a crowded marketplace.)

Although Rubinstein doesn’t say it in so many words, the viewer realizes that Whitney chose to portray a woman about to perform an undignified but socially conscious deed in such a way that no prurient content can be read into the image. (In a footnote, Rubinstein quotes Tufts quoting a male colleague of Whitney’s, who urged the artist to keep Godiva’s clothes on because she was “a virtuous woman.”)

Another, more leisurely and analytical book might have paused here to recall how often such a choice (nude or clothed?) may have come up for sculptors of the past, and how male and female artists may or may not have chosen different solutions, for different reasons. Another author might have discussed whether Victorian constraints on overt sexuality and emphasis on the family had a different impact on male and female artists--or even how the myth of the overturned pot or vase might have grown up around a woman artist.

But the relentlessly encyclopedic format Rubinstein has chosen precludes such digressions. Missing in the book is a sense of art history as an activity involving sophisticated analysis in addition to studiously collecting and organizing primary and secondary sources. In the ‘90s, it seems oddly old-fashioned to go back to the early days of feminist art history, when 90% of the job involved digging up prodigious amounts of raw data and making it available to a hitherto unsuspecting public (a la Judy Chicago’s installation, “The Dinner Table”).

Rubinstein attempts to ward off this criticism in a footnote, in which she says that “if theory is to continue to grow and develop properly, it has to be accompanied by an ever-expanding body of information. . . . Feminist critics and historians run the risk of developing theories based on the ‘anointed ones’ who have been selected by the patriarchy unless research continues to go forward.”

The other vexing aspect of the book is its tacit refusal to make more than the most gentle of value judgments, to sort out the leading lights from the also-rans, and explain the difference. But such distinctions--all-important to someone primarily interested in finding good work, no matter who made it--are no doubt peripheral to Rubinstein’s passionate curatorship of the fragile history of women’s art.

Her drumbeating on behalf of women sculptors sometimes can be a bit excessive, however. She writes that Patience Wright (1725-86), “an expert at publicity and self-promotion,” was “considered by many to be America’s first professional sculptor.” Wright dreamed up all sorts of crack-brained schemes of political derring-do to support the American colonies’ cause. She also had the novel idea of portraying prominent leaders as costumed wax figures.

Only two of these figures survive, but judging by the photograph of an avuncular looking William Pitt (the English statesman), Wright had a knack for capturing a lively likeness. Rubinstein reasonably notes that Wright’s career “captures so vividly the unfulfilled dreams and wasted talent of American women artists.”

She goes on to say that Wright “might have peopled our public buildings with admirable portraits in marble and bronze,” had society given her a chance. “Instead, (Antoine) Houdon (whose sculptures in the U.S. immortalize leaders of the American Revolution) had to be brought to our shores for this purpose.” But Houdon wasn’t just any old male artist; he was the leading portrait sculptor of France, America’s great ally during the war!

In any case, granted that wax is more perishable than bronze, Wright’s impetuous, make-do sensibility might not have been well-served by the ultra-dignified mainstream media of her day. It seems a pity that she didn’t live to enjoy the radical politics and experiment climate of the 1960s.

Of course, it’s not as though the past few decades have been a bed of roses for women artists--not even for Yoko Ono, who was once a conceptual artist, lest we forget.

Her first exhibition in 1961 “included an irregular piece of canvas laid on the floor entitled ‘Painting to Be Stepped On.’ ” Other Ono works offered more blatant critiques of art as commodity. One piece was simply a price list of her work; another piece consisted of the artist selling shares in herself.

Ono’s quixotic efforts were not taken seriously by the art establishment. But, as Rubinstein reminds us--scrupulously quoting art critic David Bourdon--when conceptual artists Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner “did virtually the same things” years later, their work was “respectable and collectible.”

Ultimately, Rubinstein’s book is most valuable as a carefully documented and richly anecdotal reference guide, to dip in and out of as need or fancy strikes.