Linda Nochlin on Women's Art

Linda Nochlin speaks for just over an hour on "Consider the Difference: American Women Artists".

From the Smithsonian



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYRnH-DmO7E


Linda Nochlin, the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, pioneered the study of women and art with her groundbreaking 1971 essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" Considered the foremost scholar of feminist art history, she has authored numerous publications, including Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (1988) and Representing Women (1999). She was also the co-curator of the landmark exhibition Women Artists: 1550—1950, held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976. A former professor of art history at Yale University and Vassar College, Nochlin is also known for her work on Gustave Courbet. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and is currently a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Nochlin on Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Nochlin

It took a while to find the original essay online - however I eventually found it, so if you want to read the essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" go here

http://www.miracosta.edu/home/gfloren/nochlin.htm

a quote from the essay

"The fact of the matter is that there have been no supremely great women artists, as far as we know, although there have been many interesting and very good ones who remain insufficiently investigated or appreciated; nor have there been any great Lithuanian jazz pianists, nor Eskimo tennis players, no matter how much we might wish there had been. That this should be the case is regrettable, but no amount of manipulating the historical or critical evidence will alter the situation; nor will accusations of male-chauvinist distortion of history. There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cezanne, 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.

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-education understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs, and signals. The miracle is, in fact, that given the overwhelming odds against women, or blacks, that so many of both have managed to achieve so much sheer excellence, in those bailiwicks of white masculine prerogative like science, politics, or the arts. "