Mar 3, 2005 - © Jessica Cresseveur

While I usually focus on the title of this topic(women painters), this month I am going to pause to pay tribute to a remarkable feminist scholar whose work has motivated me to contribute what I can to feminist art history. She has been quoted as stating that "[c]ontemporary art and art criticism are unimaginable without feminism."(1) Of course, I am speaking of none other than Linda Nochlin.

In 1971, the magazine Art News published an essay whose title posed a question that would spearhead an entirely new branch of art history. The essay was called "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"(2) written by the then Vassar College professor. As the title suggests, the essay explores possible reasons as to why women artists had not achieved the same historical notoriety as their male counterparts. Why, for instance, does traditional art history and art appreciation refer to Michelangelo as "great" and a "genius," while Artemisia Gentileschi gets little attention? Why have so many women artists fallen out of history, despite the strides that they made in their lifetimes?(3) These questions and Nochlin's answers to them influenced the scholarship of further issues of women in the visual arts, giving rise to feminist art history.

Nochlin's essay sparked a wave of feminist scholarship that continues to this day. In addition to individual articles and essays, entire books and journals committed to feminist art history began frequent publication. By mid-decade feminist scholars were delving into the "new" art history, applying fields such as psychology and linguistics to the original discipline. For example, Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"(4) (published four years after "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?") explains male activity and female passivity in relation to the gaze by using Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory.

In 1977, Nochlin teamed up with Ann Sutherland-Harris, who, at the time, was an associate professor in the art department of State University of New York at Albany, to organise the landmark exhibition Women Artists, 1550-1950 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition, which Time magazine's Robert Hughes called "one of the most significant theme shows to come along in years,"(5) re-introduced into the canon the works of many "lost" women artists, including Marie-Guillemine LaVille-Leroulx-Benoist, Mary Cassatt, and Artemisia Gentileschi. To this day, the catalogue,(6) which includes discussions of artists (such as Nanine Vallain) whose works were not included in the exhibition, remains a must-read for all feminist art historians.

In addition to reintroducing women artists into the art historical canon, Nochlin has written extensively on how women have been represented in the visual arts. Her book, Representing Women, analyses works by both men and women artists from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. One such example is in the first chapter "The Myth of the Woman Warrior," in which she points out that, despite the seeming strength of the female personification of Liberty during the French Revolutionary eras, they are depicted as passive, ill at ease, and/or marginalised.(7) This is in keeping with government and philosophical discouragement of women entering the public sphere.

What is interesting about this remarkable scholar, who describes her family as consisting of intellectuals and rebels and whose mother "did not want [her] to marry or get pregnant because...she thought [she] should just be brilliant and creative,"(8) compared her feminist awakening to St. Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. She elaborates by explaining that it was as if she had been blind beforehand but afterward had "seen the light."(9) Where would art history be had this "conversion" not happened? Given the sociological climate of the early 1970s, feminist art history would still most likely have been launched. However, a question remains: would this alternative scholar have been as tireless and dedicated to her field as Nochlin has been? Rather than pondering what might have been, I am thankful that art historical scholarship has played out the way it has. And it is with that that I join feminist art historians around the world over in paying a debt of gratitude to Linda Nochlin.

Further Reading

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Notes

(1) Nochlin, Linda, Andrea Fraser, Amelia Jones, et al. "Feminism and Art [Nine Views]: (Panel Discussion)." Artforum International (1 Oct. 2003): n.pag. Rpt. at Looksmart Find Articles.

(2) Available in Nochlin's Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (Boulder, CO, 1988): 145-78.

(3) Berthe Morisot, for example, was one of the leaders of the Impressionists, helping to organise their exhibitions. Arguably, she was responsible for keeping the group together. However, her being a woman led to her near omission from the mainstream art historical canon.

(4) Originally published in Screen 16:3 (Autumn 1975): 6-18.

(5) Hughes, Robert. "Rediscovered: Women Painters." Time (10 Jan. 1977). n. pag. Rpt. at Time Archives. (Subscription required)

(6) Sutherland-Harris, Ann and Linda Nochlin. Women Artists, 1550-1950 (Los Angeles, 1977).

(7) Nochlin, Linda. "The Myth of the Woman Warrior." Representing Women (London, 1999): 42.

(8) Roth, Moira. "Of Self and History: Exchanges with Linda Nochlin, Art Historian." Art Journal (Fall 2000): n.pag. Rpt at Look Smart Find Articles.

(9) Nochlin. "Memoirs of an Ad-Hoc Art Historian." Representing Women: 17.