But that wasn’t because there was something inherently missing in the female human being. The fact is, she told her “dear sisters,” there was no woman artist who was the equivalent of Michelangelo or Cezanne or Picasso. In this single sentence, Nochlin turned the question on its head. “…nor have there been any great Lithuanian jazz pianists, nor Eskimo tennis players, no matter how much we might wish there had been.” “The fault, dear brothers” This might have seemed the raising of a white flag of surrender, but Nochlin attached a second clause to that first one: “The fact of the matter is that there have been no supremely great women artists, as far as we know, although there have been many interesting and very good ones who remain insufficiently investigated or appreciated…” She eschewed defensiveness or overblown claims, and wrote directly and simply: “No supremely great women artists”Ī half century ago, Nochlin ruffled feathers - in the most trouble-making of ways - by taking an aggressively serious look at the question: Why have there been no great women artists? (Even though, in the ARTnews special issue in which the essay appeared, she called it a “silly question.”) Of course, making trouble was exactly what Nochlin had aimed to do with her initial essay. “feminist art history is there to make trouble, to call into question, to ruffle feathers in the patriarchal dovecotes…At it strongest, a feminist art history is a transgressive and anti-establishment practice meant to call many of the major precepts of the discipline into question.” Which, to her mind, was just as it should be. In other words, feminist art historians were being accused, she wrote, of undermining the ideological and esthetic biases of the male-dominated discipline.
There is still resistance to the more radical varieties of feminist critique in the visual arts, and its practitioners accused of such sins as neglecting the issue of quality, destroying the canon, scanting the innately visual dimension of the artwork, and reducing art to the circumstances of its production…” Thirty-five years later, writing in an essay in Women Artists at the Millennium, she noted that great changes had occurred in art and the study of art, but she was far from complacent.įeminist art history had entered the mainstream in “the work of the best scholars, as an integral part of a new, more theoretically grounded and socially and psychoanalytically contextualized historical practice,” but it was far from fully accepted, Nochlin wrote in this 2006 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Thirty Years After”:
In 1971, Linda Nochlin wrote her groundbreaking ARTnews essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” as a manifesto of the new feminist art history, challenging millenniums of art-field tyranny by males.
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