Linda Nochlin

Linda Nochlin (born January 30, 1931, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died October 29, 2017) was an American feminist art historian whose 1971 article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” led to new research into forgotten and underappreciated women artists throughout history and, more broadly, raised consciousness among scholars regarding the way history is analyzed and recorded.

Nochlin attended Vassar College and graduated in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. She earned a master’s degree in English from Columbia University in 1952 and a doctorate in art history—with a focus on realism and Gustave Courbet—from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (NYU) in 1963. Her dissertation was published in 1976 as Gustave Courbet: A Study of Style and Society. Nochlin taught art history at Vassar, beginning as an instructor in 1952 and as a professor from 1963 through 1979. She published two books on 19th-century art in 1966, Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848–1900 and Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874–1904. The pivotal shift in her focus occurred in 1969, when she began teaching one of the college’s first art history courses on women, “The Image of Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.”

In 1971, on the heels of the feminist movement, ARTnews magazine published as its cover story Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”—the article that is cited as having launched a generation of feminist artists and the field of feminist art history, criticism, and theory. In the article, Nochlin states that there are no great women artists not because they were forgotten by history but because of the unequal training available to women in the world’s art institutions. She goes on to say that the question reaches far beyond the issue of the missing women artists and instead challenges long-held societal norms and the subjugation of women throughout time. Those questions sparked what became a paradigm shift in the way art history was researched, analyzed, and taught. Nochlin’s article is also credited with leading to changes in curatorial practices in art museums, which began to witness more exhibitions on women artists. In 1976 Nochlin co-curated (with Anne Sutherland Harris) “Women Artists: 1550–1950” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and cowrote the accompanying exhibition catalog.

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Nochlin left Vassar for a professorship at the graduate school at the City University of New York, a position she held from 1980 until 1990. During the 1980s she returned to her research on Courbet and cowrote (with Sarah Faunce) Courbet Reconsidered (1988), also the title of the exhibition she co-curated at the Brooklyn Museum (1988–89; with Sarah Faunce). Nochlin also published Women, Art, and Power, and Other Essays (1988) and The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (1989).

After teaching at Yale University from 1990 to 1992, Nochlin became a professor of modern art at NYU. Among her many publications from the 1990s and 2000s are Women in the 19th Century: Categories and Contradictions (1997), Representing Women (1999), and Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye (2006). In 2001 Nochlin revisited her fundamental question in a paper titled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Thirty Years After,” in which she considered the changes that have taken place in art and art history since her article was first printed. Six years later she co-curated “Global Feminisms,” the inaugural exhibition of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.