Linda Nochlin (born 1931) is an American art historian, university professor and writer. She is considered to be a leader in feminist art history studies. She is best known as a proponent of the question "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"[1]
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Nochlin was born in New York.[2] She received her BA from Vassar College, an MA in English from Columbia University, and her PhD in the history of art from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 1963.
After working in the art history departments at Yale University, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (with Rosalind Krauss), and Vassar College, Nochlin took a position at the Institute of Fine Arts, where she continues to teach.[3] In 2000, Self and History: A Tribute to Linda Nochlin was published, an anthology of essays developing themes that Nochlin has worked on throughout her career.
Nochlin has also been involved in publishing other essays and books including Women, Art, and Power: And Other Essays (1988), The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (1989), Women in the 19th Century: Categories and Contradictions (1997), and Representing Women (1999).
Her critical attention has been drawn to investigating the ways in which gender affects the creation and apprehension of art, as evidenced by her 1994 essay "Issues of Gender in Cassatt and Eakins".[4] Besides feminist art history, she is best known for her work on Realism, specifically on Courbet.
Complementing her career as an academic, she serves on the Art Advisory Council of the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR).[5]
Nochlin deconstructs art history by identifying and rejecting methodological presuppositions.[6] Across an arc of decades, she has been an advocate for "art historians who investigate the work before their eyes while focusing on its subject matter, informed by a sensitivity to its feminist spirit."[7]
In 1971, the magazine ArtNews published an essay whose title posed a question that would spearhead an entirely new branch of art history. The essay — "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" — explored possible reasons why "greatness" in artistic accomplishment have been reserved for male geniuses such as Michelangelo. Nochlin argues that general social expectations against women seriously pursuing art, restrictions on educating women at art academies, and "the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing substructure upon which the profession of art history is based "[1] have systematically precluded the emergence of great women artists.
The thirty-year anniversary of Nochlin's ground-breaking inquiry informed a conference at Princeton University in 2001. The book associated with the conference, "Women artists at the Millennium", includes Nochlin's essay ""Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" Thirty Years After". In the conference and in the book, art historians addressed the innovative work of such figures as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Francesca Woodman, Carrie Mae Weems and Mona Hatoum in the light of the legacies of thirty years of feminist art history, appeared in 2006.
Nochlin was the co-curator of a number of landmark exhibitions exploring the history and achievements of female artists.
Nochlin's published writings encompass 156 works in 280 publications in 12 languages and 20,393 library holdings.[8]