12. “THE CANON”
A LIST OF ARTWORKS/ARTISTS CONSIDERED TO BE "ESSENTIAL"
The Western Art Canon
13. HARVARD ART GALLERY
“PAIRINGS” (2014)
exhibiting together two works from the collection, that
speak to each other, that form a lineage of practice, but
that haven’t been considered together before (in and
outside of canon)
14. JACKSON POLLOCK: NO. 2 (1950)
JOAN SNYDER: SUMMER ORANGE (1970)
“PAIRINGS” HARVARD ART GALLERIES
15. TO THINK
ABOUT:
Think about these pairings in terms of Nochlin’s
argument – is it the pairing that is important, or
deeper institutional/historical reason why they
weren’t considered together? Does the pairing
indicate an institutional or historical shift, etc.)?
17. YOUNG WOMAN DRAWING (1801)
(PORTRAIT OF CHARLOTTE DU VAL
D'OGNES)
• Marie Denise Villers
• (French, Paris 1774–1821?)
• Oil on canvas
• 63 1/2 x 50 5/8 in.
• collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
18. Originally ascribed to Jacques Louis David and listed as such at the Met.
It was first exhibited at the 1801 Salon, in Paris
During the year that Jacques Louis David boycotted the exhibition.
A member of the Val d'Ognes family believed it had been painted by David.
In 1951 curator Charles Sterling hypothesized that it was actuall painted by
a "little known woman artist” based on David boycotting the Salon.
19. REATTRIBUTION X2
• Sterling attributed the painting to Constance Marie Charpentier
based on analysis of her painting, Melancholy (1801)
• In 1977 it is finally attributed to Constance Marie Charpentier
• In 1995, Margaret Oppenheimer successfully argued that Villers
painted the work.
• Oppenheimer's reattribution is based on a modello by Villers, A
Young Woman Seated by a Window.
• Art historian Anne Higonnet argues that Portrait of Charlotte du
Val d'Ognes is a self-portrait
• Met finally attributes to Villers in1997
22. The painting and its reattribution sets up an interesting dilemma:
How do you begin to talk about women, feminism and art history
when women artists have been ignored for so long?
23. “Why Have
There Been
No Great
Women
Artists?”
• First published in ARTnews in 1971
• Considered to be one of the first major works of
feminist art history
• Maura Reilly, a curator, writer, and author states
in her preface to Women Artists: The Linda
Nochlin Reader (2015) that the essay was as “a
dramatic feminist rallying cry.”
• “This canonical essay precipitated a paradigm
shift within the discipline of art history and as
such Nochlin’s name became inseparable from
the phrase, ‘feminist art,’ on a global scale.”
24. “Richard turned to me and said, ‘Linda, I would love to show women artists,
but I can’t find any good ones. Why are there no great women artists?’ He
actually asked me that question. I went home and thought about this issue
for days. It haunted me. [art dealer Richard Feige, 1971]
[Susan Rothenberg, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Agnes Denes, Alice
Neel, Nancy Graves, etc.]
25. 1.The question “Why Are There No Great Women Artists?” is implicitly biased.
2. It already assumes that there aren’t any — that unlike men, women aren’t capable of
achieving artistic greatness
3. “The feminist’s first reaction is to swallow the bait. That is, to dig up examples of worthy or
insufficiently appreciated women artists throughout history”
4. Nochlin rejected the approach on the basis that it does “nothing to question the assumptions
lying behind the question”
26. NOCHLIN IN A NUTSHELL:
Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” posited the first methodological
approach for feminist art history:
instead of bolstering the reputations of critically neglected or forgotten women
artists, the feminist art historian should pick apart, analyze, and question the social
and institutional structures that underpin artistic production, the art world, and art
history
27. “There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse,
or even in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents
for the same. If there actually were large numbers of “hidden” great women artists, or if there really should be
different standards for women’s art as opposed to men’s — and one can’t have it both ways — then what are
feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo
is fine as it is.”
28. “But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts
as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those,
women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white,
preferably middle class and above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our
hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions
and our education.”
29. “The problem lies not so much with some feminists' concept of what femininity is, but
rather with their misconception-shared with the public at large-of what art is: with
the naive idea that art is the direct, personal expression of individual emotional
experience, a translation of personal life into visual terms. Art is almost never that,
great art never is. The making of art involves a self-consistent language of form, more
or less dependent upon, or free from, given temporally defined conventions,
schemata, or systems of notation, which have to be learned or worked out, either
through teaching, apprenticeship, or a long period of individual experimentation. The
language of art is, more materially, embodied in paint and line on canvas or paper, in
stone or clay or plastic or metal it is neither a sob story nor a confidential whisper.”
30. ESSENTIALISM IN FEMINISM
• essentialism is a concept which is used to examine the attribution of fixed, intrinsic,
innate qualities to women and men.
• shared characteristics common to all women (i.e., caring, nurturing)
• normalizes and privileges specific forms of femininity/race/class
• “the personal is political”
31. CAROL GILLIGAN
IN A DIFFERENT
VOICE:
PSYCHOLOGICAL
THEORY AND
WOMEN’S
DEVELOPMENT
(1982)
women come to prioritize an "ethics of care" as
their sense of morality evolves along with their
sense of self while men prioritize an "ethics of
justice"
32. ANNETTE BAIER
“WHAT DO WOMEN WANT IN A MORAL THEORY?”
(1985)
Women philosophers create new
moral theories don’t entirely
reject the things that older
theories get right; rather, they
build on them
Women build theories like a wall
– new ideas on top of older ones
33. JUDY CHICAGO
THE DINNER PARTY
• Chicago believed that women could only make
authentic art out of their own experience. She
wanted to encourage young women art students
to challenge the kind of art school training that
encouraged females to study art, but not to be
the "serious" artists who made history.
• “The personal is political”
• Critique of The Dinner Party: Chicago
unacceptably limited feminism to the female
body/the biological
• Also linking the ornamental and the feminine,
craft and the feminine, the goddess and the
feminine, etc.
• “The piece is composed of three forty-eight-
foot-long tables arranged in a triangle, each
table holding thirty-nine place settings, each
dedicated to a mythical or historical female
figure. Most of the dinner plates are decorated
with stylized vulvas. Emily Dickinson’s vulva is
pink and lacy. Margaret Sanger’s looks like an
ominous red lobster. An additional 999 names of
goddesses and women are written on the
installation’s porcelain floor.”
34. ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
BASED ON EMOTION (THE PERSONAL)
The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.
Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.
Every good painter paints what he is.
Jackson Pollock
35. “The problem lies not so much with some feminists' concept of what femininity is, but
rather with their misconception-shared with the public at large-of what art is: with
the naive idea that art is the direct, personal expression of individual emotional
experience, a translation of personal life into visual terms. Art is almost never that,
great art never is. The making of art involves a self-consistent language of form, more
or less dependent upon, or free from, given temporally defined conventions,
schemata, or systems of notation, which have to be learned or worked out, either
through teaching, apprenticeship, or a long period of individual experimentation. The
language of art is, more materially, embodied in paint and line on canvas or paper, in
stone or clay or plastic or metal it is neither a sob story nor a confidential whisper.”
36. ISSUES WITH THIS ARTICLE
1. Nochlin buys into the notion of “artistic genius ” in answering her question (a lot of men not Rembrandt
studies, exhibited, collected, attributed)
2. Privileges certain artistic mediums (painting)
3. Does examining the work of critically neglected or forgotten women artists not challenge institutions?
4. Nochlin’s formalist approach (still in vogue in late 1960s)
37. Portrait of Charlotte du Val
d'Ognes (1801)
Pupil of Anne Louis Girodet-
Trioson (1767–1824)
Marie-Denise Villers was trained as an
artist, she studied in a well-known studio
in France, her work was part of a major
Museum’s collection, and she was still
misattributed – so there is an odd
assumption on Nochlin’s part that going
back into women’s art history means
finding untrained artists. She admits that
as she learns more about the history of
women artists that she was wrong in
these assumptions
38. THREE OUTCOMES FROM NOCHLIN
ARTICLE
1. interventions into art history + rediscovery of lost or underappreciated artists +
widening of the canon
2. launches feminist art + women
3. art institution accountability by women artists
40. There is a hierarchy in the arts: decorative art at the bottom, and the human form at
the top. Because we are men.
Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, 1918
41. “ T I F F A N Y G I R L S O N R O O F
O F T I F F A N Y S T U D I O S , ”
C I R C A 1 9 0 4 - 0 5
W O M A N ’ S G L A S S
C U T T I N G D E P A R T M E N T
42. • A “Wistera” lamp from Tiffany Studios,
circa 1901, designed by Clara Driscoll.
• Also designed famous Tulip lamp
• “We made a discovery that a broad
swath of our hallmark Tiffany lamp
collection was in fact the work of
women. Lo and behold New York City
was chockablock with women —
talented, enterprising, successful — but
their stories haven’t been told”
43. An exhibition opened in
2017 at the New York
Historical Society that
featured one hundred
illuminated Tiffany lamps
that she and her team
created and designed
48. La prose du Transsibérien et
de la Petite Jehanne de
France (1913)
a collaborative artists' book
by Blaise Cendrars and Sonia
Delaunay
49. La prose du Transsibérien
et de la Petite Jehanne de
France
Detail
50. FASHION/DESIGN
AS A UTOPIAN
IMPULSE
• She see colors as creating harmony (Orphism)
• Believes that the world could be changed through
color and the visual arts
• Asked why should the new visual language be
imprisoned by a canvas frame or an art gallery?
• Saw fashion/textiles/design as a way to bring about a
revolution in culture and communication
• Liberated color, movement and form from two
dimensions and united them off the canvas in textiles
+ clothing that she sees as” living sculptures”
51. Fabric designed by Sonia
Delaunay on the walls of
the Delaunay family salon,
1925
58. “At the present time, fashion is passing through a critical stage which corresponds to
a period of revolution. Some time before the first World War it began to free itself
from academic couture: it got rid of the corset, the high collar, all those elements of
women’s dress demanded by the aesthetic of fashion, but which were contrary to
hygiene and the freedom of movement.”
The Influence of Painting on the Art of Clothes, 1927, Sorbonne
59. Matra 530, 1968
The Matra 530 is a sports
car created and built by
the French engineering
group Matra.
Sonia Delaunay painted a
530A at the special
request of Matra's CEO
Jean-Luc Lagardère
60.
61. “WOMEN ARTISTS: 1550 -1950” (1976)
CURATED BY ANN SUTHERLAND
HARRIS AND LINDA NOCHLIN
• The first international exhibition of art
by female artists
• included eighty-three artists from
twelve countries
• Georgia O’Keefe refuses to to lend her
work; saw herself in a different category
— “one of the best painters,” period.
63. WOMEN’S
WORK
Feminist artists sought to resurrect women’s craft and decorative art
as a viable artistic means to express female experience, thereby
pointing to its political and subversive potential.
Quilting, embroidery, needlework, china painting, and sewing
associated with “the feminine.”
Throughout the history of art, decoration and domestic handicrafts
have been regarded as women’s work, and as such, not considered
“high” or fine art.
66. WOMANHOUSE, 1971-72
CREATING THEIR OWN SPACE
• A large-scale cooperative project executed as
part of the Feminist Art Program at CalArts
under the direction of Judy Chicago and Miriam
Schapiro
• 21 women artists were granted space and a
voice to present and perform work about
stereotypically “feminine” tasks, including
scrubbing floors, ironing sheets, cooking,
sewing, crocheting, and knitting
68. A.I.R. GALLERY
A.I.R. Gallery is a non-profit arts
organization founded in 1972. It is an
artist run organization and exhibition
space that supports the open exchange
of ideas and risk-taking by women
artists in order to provide support and
visibility. A self-directed governing
body, the organization is an alternative
to mainstream institutions and thrives
on the network of active participants.
71. GUERRILLA GIRLS
• Formed in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous
activist group who highlight discrimination in the art
world.
• Their targets include museums, dealers, curators and art
critics.
• They posted their first posters overnight in the
fashionable New York art district of SoHo in 1986 and
have also displayed their work as advertisements on city
buses.
• Over the years their attacks on sexism have widened to
other areas of social, racial and gender-based inequality.
• The Guerrilla Girls wear gorilla masks for public
appearances and use the names of famous deceased
artists and writers as pseudonyms.
76. • Another motif used by the Guerrilla Girls, is
this girly handwritten letter, Dearest Art
Collector (1986).
• The pink paper and sad faced flower appear
only to enhance their sarcasm.
• They have used this template for other public
letters, most of which sign off with ‘We know
that you feel terrible about this and will
rectify the situation immediately’.
77. G U E R R I L L A
G I R L S
COD E OF
E T H I CS F OR
A R T
MUSE UMS
1 9 9 0
78.
79. GALLEY TALLEY
• Facebook Group & Tumblr founded by Micol Hebron
• A group of artists from around the world collaborating to provide data, resources, and
visualizations regarding the gender inequity in contemporary galleries internationally.
• https://www.facebook.com/notes/gallery-tally-calling-for-gender-equity-in-the-art-world/how-to-
participate-in-gallery-tally/578930705521385/
• http://gallerytally.tumblr.com/
83. Some curators and dealers pointedly suggest that under-recognized women artists
represent a buying opportunity
Only a small club of women have broken $1 million at auction
Contemporary superstars like Cindy Sherman and Yayoi Kusama are rarer still
In 2015, just one living female artist, the Ethiopian-born painter Julie Mehretu (born
1970), was offered at Christie’s postwar and contemporary sale, alongside 18 living male
artists
In 2022, Nearly 60% of the works in Sotheby's ‘The Now’ sale of contemporary art are by
women artists, though they are still in the minority by value
90% of the artists in the 2020 Venice Biennale are women, it has been criticized for
sacrificing quality and as “politically correct”
84. CARMEN HERRERA (1915-2022)
• Carmen Herrera is a Cuban-American abstract, minimalist painter who
has lived in NYC since the mid-1950s
• She has been a working artist for the best part of a century, but it
wasn’t until 2004, at the age of 89, that she sold her first painting
• Her pieces are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars
• She died earlier this year at 106
• Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight was at the Whitney Museum,
September 16, 2016–January 2, 2017.
https://whitney.org/Exhibitions/CarmenHerrera#artworks-1
85. CHARLOTTE MOORMAN
(1933-1991)
• Moorman was an American cellist, performance
artist, and advocate for avant-garde music
• She was the founder of the Annual Avant Garde
Festival of New York and a frequent collaborator
with Korean artist video artists Nam June Paik
• "A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman
and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s" - Block
Museum, Chicago 2016.
http://www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/view/e
xhibitions/past-exhibits/2016/a-feast-of-
astonishments1/index.html
86. JOAN JONAS (1936)
• Pioneer of performance and video art, Jonas works
in video, installation, sculpture, and drawing, often
collaborating with musicians and dancers
• United States Representative. at the 2015 Venice
Biennale
• “They Come to Us Without a Word,” her multimedia
installation piece hailed as one of the best solo
shows to represent the United States at the
biennale in over a decade
• https://gavinbrown.biz/artists/joan_jonas/works
87. YAYOI KUSAMA (1929)
• Lived in New York from 1958 to 1973
• She created her signature dot and net motifs, developed soft
sculpture + creating staged Happenings (performance-based
events) on NYC Street
• She first used mirrors as a multi-reflective device in Infinity
Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field, 1965
• Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 but has continued to
develop her mirrored installations
• Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors -
https://hirshhorn.si.edu/kusama/infinity-rooms/#phallis-field
88. BETYE SAAR (1926)
• Started in the 1960s as a print-maker before
turning to assemblage and installation as her
principal medium, using objects she turns up
at thrift shops and garage sales: clocks, bird
cages, dolls, chairs, scales, bits of clothing
and kitsch figurines.
• Best known for the ways in which she has
employed racially charged black collectibles
in her pieces
• First museum solo exhibition in Europe in
2015 shows in in early 2016 at Roberts &
Tilton Galleries in LA
• http://www.robertsandtilton.com/artists/saar/
89. LORRAINE O’GRADY
(1934)
• Conceptual artist and performance artist
working in the 1980s and 1990s
• The artist addresses her own experience
as a person marked by racial hybrid
• Retrospective at Brooklyn Museum,
Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And in 2021
90. HOWARDENA PINDELL
(1943)
• A painter and mixed media artist, her
work explores texture, color, structures,
and the process of making art;
• She addresses intersecting issues of
racism, feminism, violence, slavery, and
exploitation
• Famous early video, Free, White and 21,
(1980)
91. HILMA AF KLINT
(1862-1944)
• - a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings
are considered among the first abstract works
known in Western art history (early 20th century)
• - af Klint family unwrapped her work in the
mid-1960s,
• - it took five more decades for the artist to
receive major institutional recognition
• - a 2013 Moderna Museet exhibition in
Stockholm, and a 2018-19 Solomon R
Guggenheim Museum show in New York.
93. Toyen (1902-1980)
born Marie Čermínová,
Toyen adopted an
ungendered pseudonym
based on the word
citoyen, French for
“citizen and referred to
themself using masculine
pronouns.
La Guerre 1945. Oil on
canvas
94. CLAUDE CAHUN
• French surrealist photographer
• Adopted the pseudonym Claude Cahun in
1914. Cahun assumed a variety of
performative personae in their self-
portraits.
• Cahun's work is both political and personal.
• In Disavowals, or cancelled confessions,
Cahun writes: "Masculine? Feminine? It
depends on the situation. Neuter is the
only gender that always suits me."
99. ASSIGNMENT 4
For your assignment you will produce an annotation of Nochlin’s essay, “Why Have There Been
No Great Women Artists?”
Annotations are useful research tools. They are created for annotated bibliographies, or
annotated bibs, which are bibliographies that include descriptive and evaluative comments about
the sources cited in a paper. These comments are also known as annotations.
Your annotation will include the following information:
A two-sentence summary of the Nochlin’s main points (description)
A three-sentence summary of the essay’s strengths and weaknesses in argument/ideas
(evaluation)
A listing of five quotations from the source that illustrate/support your first five sentences
A three to five sentence discussion, in your own words, of why the essay is relevant to the arts
today. Be specific. (evaluation)
Be sure to define terms that you use – actually define them (i.e., pull from the article and either
summarize or directly quote).
Editor's Notes
Her notion here is that art is not personal expression, but depends on technique, skill, that comes from training and education. Ok that’s why you’re all here – to train to be artists
Sonia Delaunay a similar case
See so much of Orphism in this – circles,
There was just a big retrospective of here work at The Tate Museum in London in 2015.
At LACMA - they borrow a work of hers
So this is sort of the exact opposite of what Nochlin was calling for – these women are trained as artists and they are going back to something personal and expressive
She’s also looking specifically at African American crafts, sewing quilting
They make posters
So what’s the legacy of Nochlin’s
Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob was a photographer who adopted the gender-ambiguous name Claude Cahun in 1917 and is best known for self-portraits, in which she assumed a variety of personas, often playing with gender., but not always. This photo is probably her most famous so intriguing Cahun because she is engages the spectator with her strong, direct and almost confrontational glance. Her mirror image, however, appears to look away from both the spectator and herself - so what do you think she might be saying about the role of the gaze in terms of both the artist and spectator.
