She pointed to life drawing, a foundational skill for artists from the Renaissance to the 19th century, from which women were excluded. She discredited the “golden-nugget theory of genius”, the myth that male artists contained within them innate creativity, and called for a more socially engaged consideration of the conditions for producing art. With her characteristic wit, Nochlin demanded a revision of art history’s crumbling methods and male-ordered narratives. Nochlin’s essay explored how women artists were hobbled by institutional strictures and social prejudices: “The fault lies not in the stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education-education understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs, and signals.” Nochlin did for the history of art what Virginia Woolf did for literary studies in “A Room of One’s Own”. Linda Nochlin © Adam Husted 2006, All Rights ReservedĬonceived during the heady beginnings of the biggest feminist movement since women’s suffrage, the 1971 article helped to shatter the illusion that art history is universal and, in doing so, changed the field forever. But do the words within still make for stimulating reading? With bright, bold text pasted over a centuries-old painting, it recalls contemporary fiction such as Amina Cain’s Indelicacy and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
There is a pithy introduction by Catherine Grant, a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and more than a dozen illustrations-including a reproduction of Marie Denise Villers’s Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes (1801) on the cover.
To celebrate the essay’s 50th anniversary this year, Thames & Hudson is publishing Nochlin’s rallying cry alongside its reappraisal, “Thirty Years After”, in a standalone edition. The essay was preceded by the strapline: “Implications of the Women’s Lib movement for art history and for the contemporary art scene-or, silly questions deserve long answers.” In roughly 4,000 words, Nochlin dismantled the question to reveal the assumptions that lie behind it, as well as the answer it surreptitiously supplies: “There are no great women artists because women are incapable of greatness.”
She responded with a passionate and provocative essay published in 1971 as part of a controversial issue on “Women’s Liberation, Women Artists and Art History” in the journal ARTnews. “Why have there been no great women artists?” It is a silly question, really, and the art historian Linda Nochlin (1931-2017) certainly thought so when a male gallerist put it to her.
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