Name: Linda Nochlin
Born: 1933
Education: B.A. in Philosophy from Vassar, minors in Art History and Greek, 1951; M.A. in English from Columbia University, 1952; Ph.D in Art History from New York University, 1963.
Dissertation: The Development and Nature of Realism in the Work of Courbet
Research: feminist art history, 19th and 20th century modernism, contemporary art, theory
Selected publications:
- The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (2001)
- Representing Women (1999)
- The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (1996)
- Realism (1993)
- The Politics of Vision (1991)
- Courbet Reconsidered (1989)
- "Courbet's L'origine due Monde: The Origin without an Original," October 37 (Summer 1986): 76-86.
Contributions to the discipline: Nochlin is one of the important early feminist art historians. Her ironically titled 1971 article, "Why Have There Been no Great Women Artists?" became the clarion around which subsequent feminist artists and art historians--as well as progressive art historians--rallied. Instead of attempting to elevate minor women artists to a status of males artists of the period, the article focused on the "feminist gaze," and the coded, gender-biased reception major art works, then and today. Methodologically, Nochlin employed the theories of the linguist Roman Jakobson and his dichotomy between realism and romanticism for her studies on the art of those same eras. Elsewhere she has written that Claude Lévi-Strauss's concept of "bricolage" the idea of adopting a methodology to fit your topic, appealed to her as well as Walter Benjamin, the sociological work of Jane Gallup, and Julia Kristeva. - Dictionary of Art Historians
Turning point: "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" Art News 69 (January 1971): 22-39.
Excerpt: The question "Why have there been no great women artists?" has led us to the conclusion, so far, that art is not a free, autonomous activity of a super-endowed individual, "influenced" by previous artists, and more vaguely and superficially, by "social forces," but rather, that the total situation of art making, both in terms of the development of the art maker and in the nature and quality of the work of art itself, occur in a social situation, are integral elements of this social structure, and are mediated and determined by specific and definable social institutions, be they art academies, systems of patronage, mythologies of the divine creator, artist as he-man or social outcast.
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