Linda Nochlin: Feminist Art

1. Linda Nochlin is a feminist art historian. She received her undergraduate degree from Vassar College in Philosophy and also has a M.A. in English from Columbia University. She has a PHD from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts on The Development and Nature of Realism in the Work of Courbet. She taught one of the first undergraduate art history courses about women “The Image of Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” at Vassar then went on to teach at Yale.
2. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists was originally published in ArtNews in 1971, an American arts magazine including articles and reviews of artwork past and present.
3. The author is questioning the lack of women who are considered great artists. Nochlin is
She does not necessarily speak of specific artworks but in her argument she uses some artists as evidence such as: Mary Cassatt, Angelica Kauffmann, and Artemisia Gentileschi.
4. Nochlin’s main thesis is that the issue is not so much ‘why have there been no great women artists’ but how do we pick apart the systems of what is considered great art to understand how women have a have not been able to participate. Who has created this standard/what are the means of comparison/how equal are the modes of education/how subjective is the term great art/to what extent are we participating in this narrative? She brings up the point on page 136 that “attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications” making the argument that the question itself is part of the biased system of art. She goes on to address the necessity to redefine the understanding of what art is and how we
I think Nochlins argument is convincing and true. As a woman, not just an artist, I have personally witnessed and been a recipient of being viewed as less than, unskilled, or unable to complete certain tasks based on predetermined ideas standardized about women. This argument is also easily understandable after the reading and research I have been doing on systemic racism and the way these biases are not overtly taught to people but quietly and skillfully put into our minds as fact through the world we have to exist in. I find this writing so important because without an understanding of the systems we don’t have a language to discuss it, and it is through that discussion we are able to understand its problematics and discover a way to undermine and overcome