"There is a good principle, which created order, light, and man, and an evil principle, which created chaos, darkness, and women" -- Pythagoras, 6th century B.C.

"The woman artist is merely ridiculous" -- Auguste Renoir, 19th century A.D.

Has the art world improved at all for the woman artist? Not anywhere near enough, according to The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art.

This second book by a group of women artists who call themselves "the conscience of the art world" packs a whollop in its slim, 95-page volume. Humor and a strong feminist argument combine to point out the missing links, oversights and outright injustices in art history in criticism.

The Bedside Companion avoids blind anger and shallow rhetoric, delivering its messages with tongue-in-cheek bulls-eye aim. The book moves period-by-period from classical Greece and Rome ("Classi Babes") and the Medieval Period ("Hot Flashes from the Middle Ages") all the way to present day.

The book is colorful and heavily illustrated with photographs, graphics and posters. The authors have pasted gorilla heads on the necks of female figures in paintings. "Guerrilla girl" is an honorary title given to feminist artists from all periods who have flown in the face of convention and authority in order to express themselves creatively.

Despite the weight of its ideas, the Bedside Companion is a book one can pick up at intervals and start reading at any point. Scattered throughout are commentaries on the historical status of women (e.g. "[in the Renaissance a woman] could salvage her reputation by marrying any man who raped her") and boxed-in quotations from both men and women (e.g. "I thought I was revolutionary, and I [realized] I was evolutionary," Kathe Kollwitz).

Fictionalized letters and journal entries tell the stories of some artists in their "own" words -- these, along with a post-posthumous obituary of Mary Cassatt and a movie marquee shouting the scandalous tragedy of Camille Claudel (Rodin's sculptress lover) escape gimmickiness in their understanding of each artist's mindset. Extensive research and -- dare I say a "womanly intuition" -- mark much of the writing in this book.

The only weak points are a comic book discussion of the rape of painter Artemisia Gentilesehe and two overworked postcards "from" photographer Tina Modotti.

Best of all, the Bedside Companion, fulfilling its primary goal, brings to light artists and works previously unknown. The Guerrilla Girls do not recognize the historical exclusion of woman artists as only a feminist issue but also as an ethnic one. From the medieval Bayeux Tapestry to the African motifs in quilter Harriet Powers' work, the Guerrilla Girls have begun to create a new canon to challenge "a bunch of white male masterpieces and movements, a world of 'seminal' and 'potent' art where the few women you hear about are white."

The Guerrilla Girls include those more well-known women who have been overshadowed by the men of their times: Hildegard von Bingen, Georgia O'Keefe and Edmonia Lewis. Beyond that, the book gives tantalizing glimpses into the lives and creations of artists nearly buried by the oversight of historians: Gunta Stoltz and the Bauhaus weavers of the 1920s, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, Native American potter Maria Montoya and photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

The Bedside Companion narrates irony after irony: the European ban on women drawing from live nude models ("How was a girl to make an important painting if she didn't know a guy's ass from his elbow?"), the criticism that lauded male Impressionists' use of everyday subject matter but called Mary Cassatt's material "trivial," the discover of sculptress Edmonia Lewis' "The Death of Cleopatra" in a Chicago junkyard in the 1970s.

The Guerrilla Girls (who never name themselves) have created nearly a "mistresspiece," to borrow one of their terms. Open-eyed, the Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art tears apart the discrepancies, hypocrisies, and prejudices of the "stale, male, pale, Yale" art world and, on the verge of absolutely outrageous, creates a new timeline for art history.