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Then as now, despite men’s greater “tolerance,” the choice for women seems always to be marriage or a career, i.e., solitude as the price of success or sex and companionship at the price of professional renunciation.

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? by Linda Nochlin (ARTnews, Jan 1971)

On October 29th, the revolutionary art historian Linda Nochlin passed away at the age of 86. Many art history students will know her from her elucidating covering Realism, Orientalism, or women in art. Many of her works, including “Why Have There Been No Great Female Artists?” have had a profound impact on my own studies, and reading her essays often lead me to question standards and assumptions I was led to make by the more established art historical canon.

“Why Have There Been No Great Female Artists?”, published in 1971, is probably her most famous work. It challenged the use of the word genius and its connotation to male artists and the male-centered system of academies or father-son relationship of masters and apprentices that kept women from entering the world of fine arts.

Apart from her extensive work on feminist art history, Nochlin also explored Orientalism. We read an essay called "The Imaginary Orient” in one of my art history classes. What especially struck me from this particular work was her insistence that we must study all parts of history, even those that we might be ashamed of. Orientalism is largely founded on racism and a fascination with the “other”, in this case the titular Imaginary Orient, but even if we now disagree with the misrepresentation of African, Asian, and Middle Eastern cultures and Regions by artists like Gerome and Delacroix, it is still crucial to study them in order to gain insight into the French society out of which they formed. Art truly functions as a window into the past, but not on the subject as much as on the artist and patron that produced it. While what we see is likely altered and biased, it reveals the creator’s intentions, as well as the influences of the society it was created in.

Nochlin challenged the art historical canon, centered on the views and writings of white men, and has influenced many art historians to revise art history as a field and look beyond the normalized view.

#linda nochlin #nochlin #art history #art historian #red #aesthetic #orientalism #realism #feminism #feminist #revisionist #girl power #mine

There is photography and there is photography.

Linda Nochlin/ The Imaginary Orient

#lines #nochlin #orientalism #art

In this snapshot, Orientalism is reduced to the presence of a…bad example in the “how-to-take-bad-photographs-on-your-trip” book which teaches the novice how to approximate her experience to the official version of visual reality.

Linda Nochlin/ The Imaginary Orient

#lines #nochlin #orientalism #art

Those who have no country have no language. Women have no imagery available – no accepted public language – with which to express their particular point of view. And, of course, one of the major elements involved in any successful language system is that it can be easily understood, so that its tropes have a certain mobility and elasticity, as it were – they can rise from the lowest levels of popular parlance to the highest peaks of great art.

Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

#feminism #nochlin #art history