Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? by Linda Nochlin

Art, at its best, provoked pleasure and pain. She saw in Degas’ brothel monotypes a sanctuary from stifling bourgeois norms rather than simply a manifestation of misogyny. Where feminists rounded on Renoir as an oppressive purveyor of the “natural”, she revelled in his late nudes as celebrations of flesh in a world which restricted women into corsets. Nothing excited Nochlin more than to unravel and reveal these contradictions. For enmeshed in the project of modernity were misogyny and misanthropy on a large scale. But what complicated the picture was sexual politics. The challenge of avant-garde art was its capacity to destabilise conventional wisdom, to trouble representation itself. Though she remained devoted to modernist “masters” – to Courbet she added Manet, Degas and Seurat, among others – she was passionately concerned with the relationship between beauty and social justice. Her two great professional commitments were already in place: an attachment to 19th-century French painting, its realist aesthetics and political engagement and a lifelong exploration of what it is to think, write and view as a woman.

She had earned a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts of NYU where, in 1963, she submitted a dissertation on realism in the work of Gustave Courbet. By then she had been widowed (her first husband, Philip Nochlin, died in 1960) and remarried (in 1968, to the architectural historian Richard Pommer). Her radical awakening happened in 1969, and as a young professor at Vassar College (her alma mater) she began teaching the first course in Women and Art. Her mother encouraged Linda to surpass the reigning expectations of girlhood and to turn her precocious passion for reading, art and music into a lifelong commitment to writing. The only child of Jules Weinberg, a newspaper distributor, and Elka Heller, she was born in New York, and grew up in the liberal enclaves of Brooklyn’s secular Jewish intelligentsia. Nochlin’s feminism was formed in the women’s movement of the 1960s.

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? by Linda Nochlin