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A Women’s History Month Tribute to Linda Nochlin

© 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.

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