The Changing Status of Feminist Art History
How art history has grappled with evolving concepts of female agency
When, in 1971, Linda Nochlin asked the question “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, her answer would stir art history to think again about how its annuls of greatness were constructed.
Two things emerged from Nochlin’s famous essay. The first was that women were not merely absent from the history of painting and sculpture, but they had been structurally omitted by the institutions that produce it.
The second was that to reinstate women into the story of art would mean more than adding their names to the roll call of great artists. To do so would be to overlook the practical and professional barriers that have, until recently, hindered women in the field of the fine arts. Nochlin wrote:
“The feminist’s first reaction is to swallow the bait, hook, line and sinker, and to attempt to answer the question as it is put: i.e., to dig up examples of worthy or insufficiently appreciated women artists throughout history.”
Instead, Nochlin argued, historians would have to tackle a more fundamental question: in what ways was art and it’s histories biased towards men?
