Important author of feminist art history
Linda Nochlin, art historian: b New York City, January 30, 1931; m (1) Philip Nochlin, (2) Richard Pommer; 2d; d New York City, October 29, 2017, aged 86.
‘‘Why have there been no great women artists?’’ was the title of an essay by Linda Nochlin published in 1971. In it she brushed aside the usual answers about a historic lack of appreciation, the need to rehabilitate women artists and the ‘‘inability of human beings with wombs rather than penises to create anything significant’’.
Part of the problem, she wrote, was that ‘‘the feminist’s first reaction is to swallow the bait, hook, line and sinker and to attempt to answer the question as it is put’’.
Instead, she argued, there are structural reasons why there were ‘‘no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cezanne, Picasso or Matisse’’. She added: ‘‘The fault, dear brothers, lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education.’’
By education she meant ‘‘everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, sign and signals’’.
Quoting the philosopher John Stuart Mill, she continued: ‘‘Everything which is usual appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural.’’
What if Pablo Picasso, the son of an art professor, had been born a girl, she asked. ‘‘Would [Picasso Sr] have paid as much attention or stimulated as much ambition for achievement in a little Pablita?’’
Today her essay is widely considered to be the genesis of feminist art history and is required reading for students, not least because it articulates the institutional barriers that women artists face.
Rarely inhibited by sensitivity when it came to enforcing her will, Nochlin did not confine her feminism to writing. In 1972 she responded to a 19th-century erotic French photograph called Buy My Apples, which depicts a naked woman holding a tray of apples at chest level, by creating Buy My Bananas, in which she replaced the woman with a naked man and the apples with a tray of bananas held just below his penis.
Although her intention had been to ‘‘deconstruct what was automatically acceptable about what is erotic, and for whom’’, she ended up missing out financially. ‘‘If I had only copyrighted it I could probably have made a fortune,’’ she groaned after learning how widely it had been copied.
She was born Linda Weinberg in 1931, the only child of Jewish-atheist immigrants: Jules, who worked in the newspaper distribution business and was a chain-smoking alcoholic, and Elka (nee Heller), who loved dance, music and literature.
They had met and married in Paris, where James Joyce once winked at Elka in a cafe, or so she claimed. When Linda was at home with flu when she was eight, Elka read Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man to her, and for her 12th birthday Linda was taken to see a Chekhov play.
Linda grew up in the Crown Heights district of Brooklyn, New York. She was educated at Brooklyn Ethical Culture School, studied philosophy at Vassar College, where Jacqueline Bouvier (later Kennedy Onassis) was a contemporary, and where she was astonished to find that women her age enjoyed bridge and knitting. She took an MA in 17th-century English literature at Columbia University and in 1963 completed her PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University while teaching art history at Vassar.
This was the McCarthy era and she told how an uncle with communist leanings moved to the UK ‘‘very, very quickly’’.
She became ‘‘very involved in politics and the politics of freedom and anticensorship and anti-McCarthy’’, including organising rallies and campaigning for those who had been detained. Before Roe v Wade decriminalised abortion in some circumstances, she had two illegal terminations.
She had no problem reconciling matrimony with her feminist views. ‘‘I love marriage,’’ she said. ‘‘I think it’s a mistake to equate marriage with conventional domesticity. Think DH Lawrence. He loved to iron shirts, that was his big thing, and bake bread.’’
In 1953 she married Philip Nochlin, a philosophy professor. They had a daughter, Jessica. He died in 1960, leaving her a widow at the age of 29. Eight years later she married Richard Pommer, an architectural historian with whom she had a daughter, Daisy, who is a dancer. The issue of how gender affects the creation of art remained a theme. In September a fashion collection from Dior invoked the title of Nochlin’s essay, with ‘‘Why have there been no great women artists?’’ emblazoned on a striped shirt.
Did it mark the culmination of the feminist cause? Or was this the appropriation and subjugation of a feminist slogan by a masculinedominated world? After almost five decades, the debate started by her work continues.