Ruth E. Iskin is an art historian specializing in the art and visual culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She holds a PhD from UCLA and an MA from Johns Hopkins University and is a professor emerita at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. Her first book, Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting (Cambridge University Press, 2007, Chinese translation 2010), broke new ground in its analysis of the representations of women​ as workers and consumers in Impressionist painting and demonstrated the connection between the art of Manet, Degas and other Impressionists and the Parisian consumer culture of their time. Her second book, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s-1900s (Dartmouth College Press, 2014, distributed by the University of Chicago Press), presents a cultural history of nineteenth-century posters at the crossroads of art, design, advertising, and collecting. It has been hailed by critics as the “definitive study of the poster.”
Iskin’s new book, Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York: The Making of a Transatlantic Legacy (University of California Press, January 2025), is the first comprehensive study to examine Cassatt’s life, work, and legacy through the prism of a transatlantic framework. Rather than defining her as either an American artist or a French impressionist, Iskin argues that we can best understand Cassatt through the complexity of her multiple identifications as an American patriot, a committed French impressionist, and a suffragist. A culmination of Iskin’s life-long interest in Cassatt, the book re-envisions Cassatt in the context of her transatlantic network, friendships, exhibitions, politics, and legacy.
Iskin is the editor of Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World (Routledge, 2017), a volume that explores how contemporary art canons are created​ and revised, arguing for a​ pluriversal art canon–for an inclusive and global twenty-first century. Following its publication, the MoMA invited Iskin to serve as a consultant on the new installation of its galleries in preparation for its reopening in ​2019. Iskin is co-editor of the volume Collecting Prints, Posters and Ephemera (Bloomsbury 2019), which combines a globally wide array of scholarly studies from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries on collecting, with ​contemporary voices of individual collectors.
Iskin has published numerous essays in scholarly journals, books, and museum exhibition catalogs. Her work ​has been translated into eight languages. In recent years her work was supported by the Center for the Study of the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (CASVA), the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the French National Institute for Art History in Paris (INHA).
In the 1970s, Iskin was active in independent feminist art institutions and publications in Los Angeles, as a gallery director, curator, teacher, editor, and publisher, and in 1979 ​she was awarded the NEA’s art critic’s grant. Throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s, she was head of the Visual Arts at UCLA Extension.
A faculty member of the ​Department of Arts at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev from 2002 to 2013, Iskin currently continues to advise doctoral students and to research, publish, and lecture.
