Word Count: 3408 (text without bibliography)

FEMINISM ENTRY

Feminist Art History

There is no single ‘feminist art history.’ There is, however a multiplicity of different

methods, approaches, theories and debates that can broadly be defined as ‘feminist’ but

which have derived from very different historical and theoretical origins. These have been

instrumental in challenging and shaping the practices of art history as an academic discipline

since the 1970s as an ongoing series of debates. Historically, modern feminism in the west

can be said to have originated in the late nineteenth century with the rise of the ‘New

Woman’ and the political campaigns for women’s political enfranchisement. These reached

their height with the Suffragette Movement and the gains made for women in employment

and public life during the First and Second World Wars. This period is often referred to as

‘first wave feminism.’ However, it is ‘second wave feminism’ centred on the Women’s

Movement of the 1960s and 1970s which provided the impetus for the radicalisation of the

academy, including art history. Second-wave feminism sought a fundamental shift in social

relations and social values; women were to be valued on their own terms, not treated as

‘honorary men.’ Although born from Marxism and similarly concerned with the inequities of

social class, second wave feminism was primarily motivated by exposing the role of gender

relations and sexual inequalities within social, institutional and representational structures of

knowledge and experience (Hatt and Klonk, 2006, pp.145-146). The ‘feminist turn’ in the

humanities marked a radical shift in western approaches to culture

For art history, the idea that the work of art, its maker(s) and its conditions of viewing

and display were neutral, objective and disinterested was fundamentally challenged by a

series of groundbreaking texts beginning with Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay ‘Why have

there been no Great Women Artists?’ (Nochlin, 1971) and followed by Rosika Parker and
Griselda Pollock’s Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981); Norma Broude and

Mary Garrard’s Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (1982); Lisa Tickner’s

‘Feminism, Art History and Sexual Difference’ (Genders,1988); Griselda Pollock’s Vision

and Difference (1988) and Lynda Nead’s The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality

(1992) to name but a few. These texts have been instrumental in shaping subsequent

directions for feminist research within the discipline of western art history, both during their

own decades and subsequently. The list is far from exhaustive and does not hope to account

for the specific nuances of feminist art historical practices that have emerged over the last

four and half decades, ones characteristically inflected by differences in national tendencies

(British, North American, French in particular) and methodological approaches (Marxist,

essentialist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, postmodernist etc). Nor does it account for the

recent shift in feminist scholarship towards considerations of transnational art histories within

the contexts of globalization (e.g. Reilly and Nochlin (eds.) 2007; Meskimmon and Rowe

(eds.) 2013). Nevertheless, they offer a good place to begin unpacking some of the

methodological implications of feminism for the practices of art’s histories.

Written within the context of the consciousness-raising politics of second wave

feminism and the Women’s Movement of the 1960s and first published in Art News in 1971,

Linda Nochlin carefully posed her ironically provocative rhetorical question - ‘why have

there been no great women artists?’- as a mode of institutional critique. The essay not only

maps out some of the problems with art history as an academic discipline but also some of

the ways in which feminist thinking can challenge them. It delineates the ambitions of

feminism as a project in not only reformulating what should constitute art history’s objects of

study but also how feminism can and should transform the discipline in its entirety by asking

differently formulated questions. The choice of Nochlin’s question was a strategy for

interrogating both the underlying assumptions inherent within it and for exploring the
limitations of some of its potential answers. As Nochlin points out, an initial feminist

response to the question was to attempt to prove it wrong by retrieving evidence of the

existence of women artists from the archives and re-inserting them visibly back into the

existing canon of ‘great’ painters and sculptors. During the 1970s in particular, a number of

women artists benefited immeasurably from this gesture including Artemisia Gentileschi,

Angelica Kauffmann, Rosa Bonheur, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Käthe Kollwitz and

Georgia O’Keefe amongst others. However, as Nochlin comments, these acts of retrieval did

nothing to interrogate the underlying negative assumptions behind the question (Nochlin,

1971, p.148).

A second and alternative response to the question might be to assert that women’s art

is different from men’s in its formal and expressive qualities since it is ‘based on the special

character of women’s situation and experience’ (Nochlin, 1971, p.148). During the 1970s

women’s essential qualities were identified by essentialist feminists as focused around their

bodies as sensuous, feminine, multiple, caressing, fluid, liminal, natural etc. Georgia O’Keefe

was celebrated for her essential femininity; Judy Chicago created The Dinner Party (1974-

1979) and body artists such as Carolee Schneeman used their own bodies as vehicles for

feminist praxis in performances such as Interior Scroll (1975). Nochlin suggests that whilst

this might be a valid proposal for a self-conscious group of contemporary feminist artists

seeking to challenge patriarchal social structures within the context of 1970s feminism, it

cannot retrospectively be applied to art historical examples conditioned by very different

historical, social and institutional circumstances. She also categorically refutes the

essentialism at the heart of such claims. An ‘essentialist’ feminist position might argue that

women’s lives, experiences, sexuality and gender are different from men’s and that women

therefore require a different set of values in order to properly celebrate their essential

qualities. The most obvious problem with this is that it crudely homogenizes all women
together, smoothes out differences between them and leaves questions of social inequality

intact. What is the point of replacing a patriarchal system with a matriarchal one? It changes

nothing; it simply suggests the oppression of men instead of women. Thus, as Nochlin states,

there is ‘no subtle essence of femininity,’ nothing that connects the works of women artists

across different historical periods and geographical terrains (Nochlin, 1971, p.148).

An alternative reason as to why one should not judge women’s work by male

standards proposed by Nochlin, is that the context in which women artists were trained, had

access to art education, patronage and exhibition space was not the same as that of canonical

male artists like Michelangelo or Delacroix, for example, even though this is rarely recorded

within standard art historical accounts. Furthermore she notes that academic art history is

predominantly written by white western men who have colluded in the construction of a

canon of ‘great white male artists’ measured against standards of ‘genius’ determined by

them. It is against these standards that women artists are also judged and found wanting. In

those rare art historical accounts where women do feature, usually as products of their artist-

father’s training and influence, the assumption is frequently reiterated that they are simply not

great artists since they are confined by their biology as procreative rather than creative.

Thus, the central premise of Nochlin’s argument was that women’s exclusion from

the narratives of art history was founded on the institutional obstacles to training, exhibition

and patronage and on the patriarchal bias of art historical discourse, rather than on the quality

of their artwork. Nevertheless, she also cautioned against ‘puffing mediocrity’ on the basis of

gender imbalance (Nochlin, 1978, p.176). Instead, she exhorted women artists and academics

to challenge institutional and intellectual weakness, destroy false consciousness and construct

a more positive future in which women were granted the same opportunities to participate in

public life, the same rights to education, enfranchisement and employment progression as

men. However the ‘equal rights’ feminism inherent in Nochlin’s argument was explicitly
challenged a decade later by Rosika Parker and Griselda Pollock in Old Mistresses: Women,

Art and Ideology (1981).

For Parker and Pollock, Nochlin’s position - that if women were granted the same

opportunities as men then sexism could be eliminated - was untenable (Parker and Pollock,

1981, p.49). They argued that even if women were given the same legislative rights as men,

sexism would still persist and patriarchy would still be intact. Women’s art would still be

judged as inferior and men would still control meaning. For Parker and Pollock, society is

founded on ideological structures that discriminate against women and however much

institutions change, the ideological structures that produce sexism will remain. Instead, then,

they focus on a theory of ideology in order to uncover the structures of sexism within social

formations. They note that ‘ideology is not a conscious process, its effects are manifest but it

works unconsciously, reproducing the values and systems of belief of the dominant group it

serves’ (Parker and Pollock, 1981, p.80). Furthermore, they comment that ‘art is not a

mirror’; it does not simply reflect the world but is itself implicated as a system of signs which

produce different meanings dependent upon the interpretative positions of the viewers

(p.119). If this is the case then, they can ask a number of leading questions including, what

kinds of representation are at stake in specific works of art; what kinds of stereotypes are

constructed in works of art; and how is art active within the formation of patriarchal culture?

They also argue that is not enough to explore how woman herself is positioned within

culture; one must do this within a broader system of sexual differentiation – what are the

differences between how male and female artists are structured within the history of art and

what can those constructs tell us about sexism, exclusion, patriarchy, ideology etc. For

Parker and Pollock, ‘art history is not the exercise of neutral ‘objective’ scholarship, but an

ideological practice’ (p.xvii); there is no fixed Archimidean point of view or single God-like
value-free perspective since all knowledge is ideologically conceived. The task of the

feminist art historian is to deconstruct it.

A further divergence they have from Nochlin concerns the treatment of history. They

insist that feminism must be very precise in writing histories of women or histories of culture

informed through gender analysis. They claim that to talk of ‘women artists’ en masse as an

excluded group suggests historical stasis. As they amply demonstrate in Old Mistresses, the

conditions in which women artists have lived and operated have differed greatly historically,

culturally and geographically, at specific times in specific places; it is the responsibility of the

feminist scholar to be alert and sensitive to those differences and to eradicate unhelpful myths

of group similarity erroneously based on shared characteristics of gender. One of the logical

outcomes of Parker and Pollock’s rigorous critique of feminist methodology is that it also

opened the doors to other forms of visual analysis that focused not only on the ideological

structuring of women within representation but also constructions of masculinity, of

sexuality, of race, of ethnicity and of age.

A year after the publication of Old Mistresses, Norma Broude and Mary Garrard

published an edited collection of seventeen essays under the title Feminism and Art History:

Questioning the Litany (1982). The anthology brought together a series of previously

published articles from the preceding decade with newly commissioned ones that best

encapsulated ‘the full scope’ of the feminist challenge to art history across the major

historical periods (p.viii). The text was not ‘about women artists’, a common and wilful

misconception from conservative detractors of feminism but rather a collective challenge to

the ‘reading of history’ through an analysis of gendered representation in a range of cultural

artefacts from Egyptian tomb sculpture, Medieval illuminated manuscripts, nineteenth

century quilts to modernist painting. Analyses of the gendered biases of art history and of the

significance of women as artists but also as subjects, models, patrons, dealers and collectors,
signalled a vital contribution to the on-going relevance of art history for new generations of

researchers who were responding to the shift in epistemological frameworks suggested by the

intense early work of Nochlin and others. Notwithstanding the contentiousness surrounding

the over-determined visual readings of some of the artworks within the anthology, the generic

issues around the gendering of the practices of art history and of the avant-garde in particular,

became extremely pertinent for subsequent art history. Svetlana Alpers’ cogent critique of the

differences between art historical receptions of Northern art versus Italian art was a revealing

account of the gendered biases of the historiography of the discipline; the gendering of

discourses on Expressionism proposed in Alessandra Comini’s and Carol Duncan’s

contributions were also amongst some of the key critical manoeuvres in a by then long

overdue interrogation of the masculinist biases of art history as a discipline and also of avant-

garde modernism. In her essay, ‘Gender or Genius?’ Comini argued for an expanded field of

enquiry within the field of Expressionism that would account for the contribution of women

expressionists including Kollwitz, Münter and Modersohn-Becker; Duncan argued that the

objectification of the female nude within Fauvism and Expressionism in particular, via a

series of paintings produced at the height of the historical demand for women’s rights,

contradicted the socially radical claims of a masculine avant-garde (Duncan in Broude and

Garrard, (eds.)1982, p.311). Both essays were very early attempts at reformulating the

parameters of modernist art history in terms of feminist discourse.

In 1988 Lisa Tickner picked up the baton in her extremely trenchant account of

‘Feminism, Art History and Sexual Difference’ (published in Genders number 3, Fall 1988).

Tickner asserted that feminist art history had ‘to be interdisciplinary.’ As she astutely

observed, the study of art objects as autonomous examples of smooth evolutionary stylistic

change within modernism was simply not adequate to the task of politicizing the discipline,

interrogating its ideological blind-spots and expanding its field of enquiry. When confronted
with the work of art for analysis, there were no inherently fixed meanings simply waiting to

be ‘correctly’ decoded by the well-armed viewer. Tickner argued cogently for a new kind of

art history that examined the peculiarities of the art object together with its signifying

potential within the wider field of cultural representation. One of the principal terms of her

analysis was centred on the various understandings of ‘sexual difference.’ Borrowing from

feminist philosopher Michèle Barrett, she identified three concepts of sexual difference:

‘experiential difference, positional difference in discourse and sexual difference as accounted

for by psychoanalysis’ (Tickner, 1988, p.99). It is through a combination of all three that ‘a

more complex, mobile and historically specific account of subjectivity’ might be constructed,

one that could ‘cope with the unconscious and with the splintering identifications of gender,

desire, class and race’ within accounts of art historical meaning (p.104).

Griselda Pollock also focused on the importance of ‘difference’ for an understanding

of the operations of visual culture in the production of gendered meaning in her

groundbreaking account of ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’ published in Vision and

Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (1988). If the key to thinking about

how to practice feminist art history was to be found in an understanding of the conditions of

historically, socially, psychoanalytically and ideologically situated positions of sexual

difference, then Pollock’s essay served as a practical case study of feminist art history in

action. Opening her essay with three images ranging from the front cover of Alfred Barr’s

Cubism and Abstract Art,(1936) to Caillebotte’s Paris, a rainy day (1877) and Edouard

Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1881-1882) designed to demonstrate the conditions of

modernist art history as conditions of both gendered viewing and gendered constructions of

the discipline in which modernism is constructed as a neutral stylistic lineage of progression

presided over by male modernists like Van Gogh, she proceeds to unpick the dominant

constructions and understandings of modernity and modernism through a feminst intervention

that examines the contributions of women artists, in particular Berthe Morisot and Mary

Cassatt, to the construction of the ‘spaces’ of modernity’. Rather than simply re-inserting

Morisot and Cassatt into canonical accounts of French Impressionism, she systematically

deconstructs the paradigms of those accounts as inadequate for the explanation of Cassatt and

Morisot’s gendered experiences of modernity. Whilst standard masculinist representations of

the experiences of modernity are largely structured around the public spaces of leisure and

entertainment, cafés, bars, dance halls, parks, Pollock clearly demonstrates a gendered

difference in the spaces of modernity as experienced by Morisot and Cassatt based on the

subject matter of a majority of their works as depicting dining-rooms, drawing-rooms,

bedrooms, balconies / verandas and private gardens. She also discusses the compression of

space in their work in which the female protagonists are often ‘bounded’ by delineations in

the spaces that they occupy but also as a marker of the different kinds of viewing position

structured by them in relation to their male peers. Nevertheless she also acknowledges the

interior domestic scenes painted by male artists as well as the public spaces of leisure and

entertainment painted by women, highlighting differences of viewpoint and socio-historical

circumstances as co-determinants in how the works should be read. She comments that ‘the

space of the look at the point of production will to some extent determine the viewing

position of the spectator at the point of consumption’ and further that ‘this point of view is

ideologically and historically constructed’ (p.66). She asserts therefore that it is the job of the

art historian to reconstruct this space since its recognition cannot be assured outside its

historical moment. She is also very clear to stress that she is not ‘considering the paintings as

documents’ of the conditions of femininity but rather that ‘the practice of painting is itself a

site for the inscription of sexual difference’ (p.81).

Within all of the accounts of feminist art history considered so far as foundational to

the ways in which the discipline has been transformed since the early 1970s, the issue of the
nude has been a frequent source of discussion and debate perhaps most cogently considered

in Lynda Nead’s powerful feminist critique The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality

(1992). Having already provided a trenchant account of Victorian images of women in Myths

of Sexuality (1988), Nead continued her contribution to the remaking of art’s histories at the

level of theory, historiography and practice in The Female Nude. Dividing the text into three

sections , ‘Theorizing the Female Nude’, ‘Redrawing the Lines’ and ‘Cultural Distinctions’

Nead re-examined the variety of discourses that accrue to the female body in western culture

as epitomised in the representations of the female nude. Her analysis of the historical

traditions of producing, viewing, desiring, consuming and containing the female nude was the

first feminist survey of a subject that is central to both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and which did

not attempt to blur the lines between the two. The politics of representation were nowhere as

acutely observed as in the contested terrain of the female body within history. For feminist art

histories, the female nude operated as the site of multiple possibilities of deconstruction: of

the discourses of art history itself; of the historical role of the female artist without access to

the nude; of the role of the male artist for whom the female nude on canvas was the only

legitimate mode of controlling unruly corporeal female flesh and creating ideal spaces of

masculine desire; of the expectations of the viewer for an encounter with ideal beauty; and,

crucially, with what happens when those expectations are not met, an issue frequently

confronted by feminist artists from the 1970s, reclaiming their own bodies for cultural

intervention.

Whilst many of the key debates that set the agenda for the complete feminist re-

writing of art’s histories occurred in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the legacies and impacts of

those histories are still being felt. The feminist revisions of art’s histories are far from over or

complete. Rather they are constantly under review and subject to regular challenges and

renegotiations. The transformations in the understandings of fluid, gendered, contingent,

performative and mobile subjectivities encouraged by Judith Butler’s incisive accounts of

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Donna Haraway’s

Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991) combined with more recent

sensitivities towards the inequities engendered by globalization, are producing a new

generation of feminist scholars and artists looking beyond the confines of western discourse

for an expanded understanding of the political operations of the visual field in the production

and dissemination of cultural meaning.

Bibliography
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Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Broude, Norma and Mary D. Garrard (eds.) Feminism and Art History. New York: Harper
Row, 1982.

Broude, Norma and Mary D. Garrard (eds.) Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History
After Postmodernism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Butler , Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New
York: Routledge,1990.

Gouma-Peterson, Thalia and Matthews, Patricia ‘The Feminist Critique of Art History’ The
Art Bulletin, vol.69, no.3 September 1987, pp.326-357.
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York:
Routledge, and London: Free Association Books, 1991.
Hatt, Michael and Klonk, Charlotte (eds.) Art History: A Critical Introduction to its Methods.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.
Meskimmon, Marsha. Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics. London and New
York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2003.

Nead, Lynda Myths of Sexuality. Representations of Women in Victorian Britain. Oxford:

Blackwell, 1988.
Nead, Lynda The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality. London and New York:
Routledge, 1992.
Nochlin, Linda. ‘Why have there been no Great Women Artists?’ Art News 69 (1971), 480-
510.
Parker, Rosika and Pollock, Griselda. Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.
Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art.
London: Routledge, 1988.
Pollock, Griselda. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s
Histories. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
Reilly, Maura (ed.) Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art. London and
New York: Merrell, 2007.
Robinson, Hilary (ed.) Feminism, Art, Theory. An Anthology 1968-2000. Boston and Oxford:
Wiley Blackwell, 2001.
Tickner, Lisa. ‘Feminism, Art History and Sexual Difference’. Genders 3, (1988), 92-128.
Dorothy C. Rowe

(See also see Autonomy, article on Autonomy and Its Feminist Critics; Canon, article on The
Canon in Aesthetics; Contemporary Art, article on Images and Desire; Duchamp, article on
En-Gendering of the Artistic Subject; Feminism, article on Feminisms and Tradition; Critique
of Feminist Aesthetics ; Film, article on Feminist Film Theory; Genius, article on Genius and
Feminism; Irigaray; Kant, article on Feminism and Kantian Aesthetics; Kristeva; Lesbian
Aesthetics; Music, article on Music and Feminism; Performance Art, article on Feminist
Performance Art; Stein; and Sublime, article on Feminine Sublime.)