It would be fair to say that she was a performance art historian. One who never personally encountered Nochlin and read only her eye-opening books (for example, Realism, and her monograph, Courbet) might not know that she was a performative lecturer and cutup.
Who knew before that women were part of an international artistic tradition? For years after that exhibition, women came up to Nochlin and described how the show changed their lives. That show was the gift that kept on giving, inspiring historians to explore the work by other neglected artists (for instance, Frida Kahlo and Meret Oppenheim) and to reattribute works originally thought to be by men to their female students. And the kick of it was Nochlin showed everyone that yes, indeed, there had been great women artists. The experience was as life-affirming as it was life changing. They introduced me to Rosa Bonheur, Sonia Delaunay, Alexandra Exter, Artemisia Gentileschi, Berthe Morisot, and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, and 35 other important female painters. Nochlin changed that when she co-curated, along with Ann Sutherland Harris, the landmark Women Artists: 1550–1950 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum.
In the 1970s I could name maybe three historic female artists: Mary Cassatt, Kathe Kollwitz, and Georgia O’Keeffe. What rocked my world was how Nochlin literally excavated the basements and archives of museums around the globe to rescue female artists from oblivion. Though both were transformative, it was neither Nochlin’s writing nor her pedagogy that had the most profound effect on me. (This led to another of her great essays, “Issues of Gender in Cassatt and Eakins.”) In 1969, she introduced a course at Vassar College (where she herself had received her BA in 1951) titled “The Image of Women in 19 th and 20 th Century Art,” which explored - among other topics - how male and female artists depicted women differently. If the academies and art institutions were hermetically sealed and needed their doors and windows to open to fresh thinking, then she would make that happen by educating generations of future art historians and curators with an expanded, some would say radical, curriculum. Yet that was not enough for this systematic thinker.
Had Nochlin written only “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” she would still be a seminal figure in the history of art.
“Linda Leading the People” (image by Benjamin Sutton for Hyperallergic)
0 kommentar(er)
