Nochlin Women Art and Power Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists

Linda Nochlin's "Why Have There Been No Keen Women Artists?" (1971) is mostly considered the starting time major work of feminist fine art history. Maura Reilly, a curator, writer, and collaborator of Nochlin's, described the piece of work as "a dramatic feminist rallying cry." "This approved essay precipitated a prototype shift within the bailiwick of fine art history," Reilly states in her preface to Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader (2015), "and as such her name became inseparable from the phrase, 'feminist art,' on a global scale." A dryly humored analysis of the values by which artists are historicized and discussed, "Why Accept There Been No Corking Women Artists?" posited the first methodological approach for the discipline: that instead of bolstering the reputations of critically neglected or forgotten women artists, the feminist art historian should choice apart, analyze, and question the social and institutional structures that underpin artistic production, the fine art world, and art history.

In her ain words, Nochlin grew up in "a secular, leftist, intellectual Jewish family" in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. In 1951, she graduated with a BA in philosophy and a minor in Greek and art history at Vassar College. Vassar is ane of the and then-chosen "Vii Sisters," a group of historic women's colleges along the Northeastern US (it became coeducational in 1969). "The good matter most a women's college…was that women had a chance to do everything," Nochlin stated in a 2015 interview with Reilly. "We were non pushed to the margins considering there were no gendered margins…we were all there was." In 1952, Nochlin obtained a masters in English literature at Columbia earlier undertaking her PhD in fine art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she wrote her doctorate on the work of Gustave Courbet. Aside from "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?," Nochlin is perchance all-time known for her 1971 book, Realism, a landmark report on the 19th-century motility.

Shortly after she began teaching art history at Vassar, Nochlin had a conversation with an (unnamed) associate that inverse her life. She recalls the exchange in her 1994 essay, "Starting from Scratch":

"Have yous heard most Women'south Liberation?" she asked me. I already was, I said, a liberated woman and I knew plenty almost feminism — suffragettes and such — to realize that we, in 1969, were beyond such things. "Read these," she said brusquely, "and you will change your listen."

Nochlin'due south friend handed her a stack of 2d-wave feminist literature. It included publications such as Redstockings Newsletter and Everywoman. "This was vivid, furious, polemical stuff, written from the guts and the eye," Nochlin wrote. "That dark, reading until two a.one thousand., making discovery later on discovery, cartoonish light bulbs going off in my caput at a frantic pace, my consciousness was indeed raised, as information technology was to exist over and over over again within the course of the next year or so."

Nochlin amended the discipline of her upcoming seminar (listed only as "Art 364b") to The Image of Women in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Together with her students, Nochlin combed through the visual tropes of fine art history. Amongst the class's listed subjects were 'Woman as angel and devil in 19th-century art,' 'Pornography and sexual imagery,' and 'The theme of the prostitute.' "Nosotros were doing the spadework of feminist art history," Nochlin recalled, "and we knew it."

A year after, Nochlin attended a Vassar graduation ceremony where Gloria Steinem was the speaker. Steinem was invited past Brenda Feigen, a friend of Nochlin'southward, and the sister of art dealer Richard Feigen. Nochlin after cited her interaction with the art dealer equally the catalyst for "Why Have At that place Been No Bully Women Artists?":

Afterwards, Richard turned to me and said, "Linda, I would beloved to show women artists, but I tin can't notice any skilful ones. Why are in that location no not bad women artists?" He actually asked me that question. I went home and idea well-nigh this issue for days. Information technology haunted me. It fabricated me call back, considering, first of all, it implied that there were no groovy women artists. 2d, because it causeless this was a natural condition. It but lit up my heed. [It] stimulated me to do a great deal of further research in a variety of fields in order to "answer" the question and its implications.

Building upon the enquiry she conducted with her students, Nochlin wrote the essay for inclusion in Vivian Gornick and Barbara Moran's Women in Sexist Society (1971), where it was originally titled "Why Are There No Keen Women Artists?" However, the essay first appeared in the January 1971 edition of ArtNews, an event specially dedicated to "Women'due south Liberation. Woman Artists, and Art History."

The issue'south cover reproduced an 1801 portrait of "Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d'Ognes" from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection, which was once thought to accept been painted by Jacques-Louis David. The choice of this painting was pertinent, not only because it depicted a woman drawing, but because it had recently been reattributed to a woman, Constance Marie Charpentier (1767–1849). An ArtNews editorial note describes the portrait as "perhaps the greatest moving-picture show ever painted by a woman." Nine years later, the painting was reattributed to some other artist, Marie Denise Villers (1774–1821). The Met Museum besides clarified its stance on the painting's subject field, retitling the workmore cautiously as "Young Woman Drawing."

The painting'southward shaky attribution underlines the fact that feminist art history should not be understood as just a necessary corrective — or to employ Nochlin'south words, as something to exist "grafted on to a serious, established discipline" — but as an ongoing project. A feminist art history, as Nochlin views information technology, would non just entail a more thorough investigation of the painting'due south provenance and history, but would necessitate an investigation into why the painting was misattributed as well every bit the reasons for its art historical and critical neglect. The women'south question, Nochlin argues, "tin can become a goad, an intellectual instrument, probing basic and 'natural' assumptions, providing a paradigm for other kinds of internal questioning, and in turn providing links with paradigms established past radical approaches in other fields."

The first half of "Why Are In that location No Keen Women Artists?" is devoted to Nochlin'south methodological thesis. She argues that Women'southward Liberation has been "chiefly emotional — personal, psychological, and subjective — centered," but she asserts that in gild to exist effective it also "must come up to grips with the intellectual and ideological basis of diverse intellectual [and] scholarly disciplines." In this regard, she refers to John Stuart Mill's observation that we tend to accept whatsoever is commonplace every bit "natural."

"Those who accept privileges invariably agree on to them," wrote Nochlin. "In reality the white-male-position-accepted as-natural, or the hidden 'he' as the subject of all scholarly predicates — is a decided advantage, rather than merely a hindrance or a subjective distortion." In art history, the white, Western male viewpoint is "unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian." Nochlin's stated mission is to prove that this perspective is non only objectionable "on moral and upstanding grounds, or considering it is elitist" but considering information technology is intellectually inadequate.

The question in "Why Are At that place No Great Women Artists?" is implicitly biased. It insidiously assumes that there aren't any — that unlike men, women aren't capable of achieving creative greatness. "The feminist's first reaction is to swallow the bait," wrote Nochlin. "That is, to dig upwards examples of worthy or insufficiently appreciated women artists throughout history." Though Nochlin affirmed that such work is "certainly worth the attempt," she rejected the arroyo on the basis that it does "nothing to question the assumptions lying behind the question." "On the contrary, by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications," Nochlin concluded.

This passage remains the most controversial department of Nochlin'south essay, in part considering she went on to curate high-profile exhibitions of piece of work by women artists; for example, Women Artists: 1550–1950 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1976) and Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum (2007). As Nochlin surmised in "Starting from Scratch," such exhibition work "directly contradicted" her earlier opinion. "I said that I thought that just looking into woman artists of the past would not actually modify our estimation of their value," Nochlin states in her interview with Reilly. "Nevertheless, I went on to wait into some women artists of the by and I found that my own estimations and values had in fact inverse." That this criticism has been leveled at Nochlin is non entirely fair. She clearly didn't denigrate the rehabilitation of neglected artists. Rather, her bespeak was that the arroyo does nothing to address art history's patriarchal value organization. How is art history structured? Who is asking the questions, how are they framed, and what assumptions practice they acquit? Why are male person artists such as Michelangelo or Picasso typically described equally "geniuses," while women such every bit Berthe Morisot or Rosa Bonheur are not? Most chiefly, how is art historical value conferred?

In what is perchance the nigh quoted passage of the essay, Nochlin writes:

There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more there are black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were large numbers of "hidden" great women artists, or if there really should exist unlike standards for women's fine art equally opposed to men'due south — and i tin't take information technology both means — so what are feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same condition every bit men in the arts, and so the status quo is fine every bit it is.

But in actuality, as nosotros all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did non accept the adept fortune to exist born white, preferably middle form and to a higher place all, male person. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education.

In that location are a couple of key points to unpack in this passage. The kickoff is that Nochlin is not an essentialist. She does not believe that there is such a matter as an innate "feminine" style (this sets her autonomously from other feminists such as the creative person Judy Chicago, who has argued the opposite). "In every example, women artists and writers would seem to be closer to other artists and writers of their own menstruum and outlook than they are to each other," Nochlin observed. Patterns in field of study matter, such as the scenes of motherhood and kid-rearing depicted by artists such as Berthe Morisot or Mary Cassatt, tin exist attributed to sociological factors, artistic expectations, or personal predilection, non to gender. "If women accept turned to scenes of domestic life, or of children, and so did Jan Steen, Chardin, and the Impressionists — Renoir and Monet as well as Morisot and Cassatt. The mere option of a certain realm of subject matter, or the brake to certain subjects, is non to exist equated with a fashion, much less with some sort of quintessentially feminine style," Nochlin wrote.

Nochlin argued that terms such as "great" and "genius" are loaded with "unquestioned, oft unconscious, meta-historical bounds." These premises are then compounded by art history's "romantic, elitist, private-glorifying, and monograph-producing substructure." She demonstrates this fact by outlining certain patterns in fine art historical biographies — namely the discovery of certain "geniuses." As told past the Renaissance artist and biographer, Giorgio Vasari, Giotto'due south talent was discovered, when, as a young shepherd boy, he was observed cartoon sheep on a rock. Other artists such as Mantegna, Zurbarán, and Goya "were all discovered in similar pastoral circumstances," Nochlin jokingly observes. She doesn't dispute the truth of such stories, simply notes that they "tend both to reflect and perpetuate the attitudes they subsume." Picasso'south completion of all his required art school examinations in a unmarried solar day is a modernistic variant of what is effectively the same story, a highly fetishized and mythologized moment of talent and discovery.

Leonardo da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, and Julian Schnabel

Nochlin rejects the values of greatness and genius, non simply because they are demonstrably patriarchal, only because their application typically involves a complete disregard for historical or sociological context. Today, the vast bulk of contemporary art historians tend to avoid the utilise of such terminology and consider "genius" to be a facile concept. Yet, the notion of the masterful private continues to retain a powerful attraction over art-going audiences. The "romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing substructure" that Nochlin described, remains the stock-in-merchandise of the art industry, especially in regards to the marketing of artists and exhibitions.

This brings us to Nochlin'south final field of enquiry: the exclusion of women from fine art teaching. Discouraged from the arts (and indeed the bulk of intellectual pursuits), talented women have not had their artistic origins or moments of genius documented or discussed. This exclusion, combined with the intellectually impoverished and patriarchal values of "genius" or "greatness," explains why at that place are "no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix." The playing field and system of values are merely not the same.

The latter half of Nochlin's essay examines the institutional exclusion and handling of women artists. It is divided into four sections — 'The Question of the Nude,' 'The Lady'southward Accomplishment,' 'Successes,' and 'Rosa Bonheur' — the first of which focuses on the institutionalization of life drawing.

From the Renaissance through to the 19th century, the drawing of the nude was considered an essential creative skill. The exact parameters of this belief inverse over time, just by the 18th century it had coalesced into a highly codified and hierarchical structure. Different genres of painting were ranked. History painting (i.east. historical and mythological scenes) was considered the highest creative course. It was followed respectively by portraiture, genre, landscape, and still life painting. History painting could non seriously be attempted or lauded unless an artist had demonstrably perfected the male nude. This meant copying from other works, sculptures, and eventually from live models. Just information technology was considered improper for women to attend life cartoon classes until the late 19th century. When women were somewhen admitted, they were usually supervised by men and their models were often purposefully (and counter-productively) draped. As Nochlin surmised, "to be deprived of this ultimate stage of grooming meant, in event, to exist deprived of the possibility of creating major art works."

Nochlin provides a brief celebrated overview of life drawing, while also examining depictions of creative teaching. She notes with a wry sense of humour that Angelica Kaufmann (1741–1807) could not be represented in person in Johann Zoffany's 1771–1772 group portrait, "The Academicians of the Purple Academy," since the scene depicted includes a nude male model. Instead, she is represented in the form of an effigy on the dorsum wall.

Kauffmann was an extraordinarily rare example of a successful adult female artist from the period. In France, the best-known women artists were Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842) and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749–1803). The two artists were pitted as rivals and were subject to salacious and unfounded rumors regarding their integrity and conduct, specially Le Brun, whose association with Marie Antoinette made her an active target of pamphleteers and alphabetic character writers. Nochlin suggests that the rare and unique "successes" of artists such as Le Brun and Kaufmann were due, in office, to family unit ties. "They all, almost without exception, were either the daughters of artist fathers, or, generally later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had a close personal connexion with a stronger or more ascendant male person artistic personality," Nochlin wrote. She also observes, simply does not delve into, the connection between women artists and "the roles of benign, if not outright encouraging fathers." Although this section of the essay is less rigorously argued, Nochlin'south theory that familial connections enabled some women to circumnavigate the institutional strictures placed on them, is disarming. Bated from Kaufmann and Le Brun, she also cites Marietta Robusti, Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, and Elizabeth Chéron equally examples.

As the restrictions placed on artistic practise began to wane over the grade of the 19th century, women began to "strike out on their own." The glacial breakdown of these strictures was accompanied by the rising and establishment of a item stereotype, that of "the lady painter." In "The Lady's Accomplishment," Nochlin attributes this trope to 19th-century etiquette guides and literature. By style of example, she quotes a number of passages from Mrs. [Sarah Stickney] Ellis's The Family Monitor and Domestic Guide:

To be able to do a dandy many things tolerably well, is of infinitely more value to a woman, than to be able to excel in any ane.

Cartoon is, of all other occupations, the i virtually calculated to go on the mind from brooding upon self, and to maintain that general cheerfulness which is part of social and domestic duty… [it tin likewise] be laid downwardly and resumed, as circumstance or inclination may direct, and that without any serious loss.

In works such as these, Nochlin argued, "the insistence upon a modest, adept level of amateurism…transforms serious commitment into frivolous, cocky-indulgence, busy work, or occupational therapy." These attitudes perpetuated certain patriarchal advantages:

Such an outlook helps guard men from unwanted contest in their "serious" professional activities and assures them of "well-rounded" assistance on the home front, so that they can have sex activity and family unit in addition to the fulfillment of their own specialized talents at the same time.

Such attitudes persist today, especially in regards to the tension between family unit life and piece of work. For instance, the lack of institutional support for both maternity and paternity leave and the absenteeism of universal kid intendance makes information technology exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, for many women to resume their professions and creative passions. "The choice for women seems ever to be marriage or a career," wrote Nochlin. "I.eastward., solitude equally the toll of success or sex and companionship at the toll of professional renunciation."

Nochlin'south essay ends with an extended profile of Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899), "one of the almost successful and accomplished women painters of all fourth dimension." Bonheur specialized in equine and bovine scenes and was awarded numerous accolades, including a offset medal at the Paris Salon. Consistent with her methodological mission, Nochlin is less interested in the specifics of Bonheur's work than she is in analyzing how the artist navigated the artistic and institutional strictures of her time. Bonheur functions as the ultimate exemplar for Nochlin's essay, equally her circumstances chimed with many of the art historian's observations and conclusions about women in the arts. For instance, like Le Brun and Kaufmann, Bonheur was born into an artistic family unit. Furthermore, her father had been a member of the Saint-Simonian community, a political movement dedicated to "true equality," whose female members fabricated a point of their emancipation past wearing trousers. "My father…reiterated to me that woman'due south mission was to drag the human race, that she was the Messiah of future centuries," Bonheur told an interviewer. "It is to his doctrines that I owe the great noble appetite I take conceived for the sex which I proudly affirm to be mine."

Rosa Bonheur

Bonheur'southward career coincided with the reject of history painting and the rise of middle-class patronage. By combining her artistic naturalism with a focused specialty, Bonheur was able to stand out in the nascent art market. As Nochlin surmised, Bonheur'southward success "firmly establishes the role of institutions, and institutional change, as a necessary, if not a sufficient cause of accomplishment in fine art." However, despite her enlightened roots, Bonheur continually felt the need to justify her anarchistic artistic standing. She maintained that she wore trousers because she needed to written report animals at fairs. Referring to her shorn head at the age of xvi — a await she briefly adopted post-obit her female parent's expiry — Bonheur retorted, "who would have taken care of my curls?" The expectation to explicate abroad and then-called "masculine" needs and behaviors led Bonheur to police herself and her public image.

In examining and scrutinizing Bonheur's attitudes, Nochlin finer signposted a psychoanalytic approach to art history. In addition to yielding a bully deal of information about institutional structures and customs, the study of Bonheur's career besides provides a instance report of the internalized pressures and contradictory attitudes that women are continually forced to navigate. Perchance the most extraordinary feature of Nochlin's essay is its presaging and active encouragement of a multi-disciplinary approach to art history. Bated from psychoanalytic enquiries (vis-à-vis Bonheur'south statements and biography), Nochlin likewise delved into semiotics ('genius' and 'greatness') and social fine art history (institutions and academic structures).

"Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" was written during a watershed year for the Women'southward Liberation movement. 1970 marked the 50th anniversary of the passing of the 19th amendment. In the same year both Sisterhood is Powerful (an anthology of feminist writings) and Germaine Greer'southward The Female Eunuch were published, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) passed the US House, the Ad Hoc Women Artist'south Committee was founded in New York, and Judy Chicago established the kickoff ever feminist fine art program at Fresno Country College, California (Nochlin later visited Womanhouse, a pioneering installation work created by Chicago and Miriam Schapiro's students at CalArts). The publication of Nochlin's essay in ArtNews was hugely significant in that information technology catalyzed the art earth to face the so-chosen "women's upshot," as well as the historic and contemporaneous treatment of women artists.

The immediate reaction to Nochlin's article was decidedly mixed. The January '71 effect of ArtNews featured a number of responses to Nochlin's essay, including a dialogue between artists Elaine de Kooning and Rosalyn Drexler, who had markedly different reactions to the essay. When de Kooning posits that "the status quo in the arts is fine as it is," Drexler dissents:

What this woman who wrote the commodity may mean is there are people who manipulate the art world — who can decide by tumeling upwardly business organization, by talking, by maybe buying manufactures, past collecting, by publishing — that they tin can build a reputation, and the people who do this may feel subliminally — no matter what they say — that they wouldn't do this for a woman, or, at to the lowest degree, non for many women."

Rosalyn Drexler and Elaine de Kooning

Afterwards in the commutation, when de Kooning rejects the notion of including women in exhibitions "on the basis of some autonomous procedure or statistics" as "ridiculous," Drexler replies that "you have to start somewhere." Their chat, besides as the contributions past artists such as Rosemarie Castoro, Marjorie Strider, and Lynda Benglis, demonstrate that the renewed and growing soapbox on structural and systemic discrimination was still very much nascent in the art world, despite the activism of marginalized groups and factions such as the Art Workers Coalition (AWC), Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), and the Advertizement Hoc Women Artist's Committee.

Although Nochlin'south essay did not provide a comprehensive or systematic model for a feminist art history, information technology did posit a articulate methodological arroyo, which she keenly reiterates in her conclusion:

By stressing the institutional, rather than the individual, or private, preconditions for achievement or the lack of it in the arts, I have tried to provide a paradigm for the investigations of other areas in the field […] I have suggested that information technology was indeed institutionally made impossible for women to achieve artistic excellence, or success, on the same footing as men, no affair what the potency of their so-called talent, or genius.

As one of the first major works of the field, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" inspired countless artists and scholars to embark on their ain fields of inquiry. Indeed, the essay is best understood every bit function of a larger post-structuralist rejection of perceived binary oppositions (men/women, black/white, heterosexual/homosexual, cisgender/transgender) and the inherently unequal and unjust dichotomies that they perpetuate. "Nochlin nailed the problem four decades agone," wrote Eleanor Heartney in a 2015 tribute to the fine art historian. "That her thinking is nevertheless so current says some sorry things about contemporary culture."

Though its proponents may share the same basic values, not all feminist art historians adhere to the same conclusions or concerns. Feminist art history, like feminism itself, is not a monolithic methodology. Opinions regarding gender, race, essentialism, and the catechism vary profoundly throughout the discipline. 1 of the few maxims generally held to be truthful is that there is no such matter every bit a feminist art history. Rather, there are feminist fine art histories. Linda Nochlin's "Why Have There Been No Swell Women Artists?" stands every bit one of the showtime major strides into a rich, ongoing, and utterly essential discipline.

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Source: https://hyperallergic.com/377975/an-illustrated-guide-to-linda-nochlins-why-have-there-been-no-great-women-artists/

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