Women, Art, And Power And Other Essays

"One of the most exciting things that’s happened in the last 50 years has been the feminist interpretation of everything, but not least the feminist interpretation of art. Along with Griselda Pollock , Linda Nochlin was the great pioneer of this. “Why Have There Been no Great Women Artists?” is her most famous initial essay, which was a question actually put to her by a gallery owner. She went away and said, ‘God damn! It’s not that there aren’t great women artists—the point is they’ve been excluded by society. They haven’t been given a chance.’ And she brilliantly went through all the social and economic constraints—the two are of course linked—which kept women artists out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (There’s the famous campaign, ‘ Do Women Have to be Naked to Get into the Met ?’) She’s humane and witty in a way that we appreciate and admire. She’s brilliantly well-read, and I’d also like to recommend her last, posthumous book which is coming out this year. It’s called Representing Women and it’s a wonderful summary of her most important essays. She deals very well with French art, particularly the role of women there and in America (she was American). She broadens perspective in a way that Honour and Fleming would have loved to do if they’d had the chance, but David Watkin would have detested. She’s an outstanding writer. It has. She goes a little bit off-track when she follows Edward Said’s Orientalism , a book which, in my opinion, has stood the test of time much less well. It’s a great, challenging book, an important one in its time, but some scholars have shown that Edward Said was biased in his use of examples. In particular, he gives no attention at all to homosexuality and queer theory, whereas she’s prepared to do that. The portions of her book that have stood the test of time deal with how women artists have been constrained and held back, and how some women were able to surpass constraining social conventions. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It helped to be wealthy. Berthe Morisot, for example, as a wealthy woman, could be an artist and successful in her own right in the 1860s, 70s and 80s. She married Manet’s brother and was a very good artist. In that same period there was Mary Cassatt, who was American. It’s a bit like the novelist Edith Wharton: she could be a great novelist because she was a very intelligent writer and because she married a millionaire and was rich herself. She could have the kind of confidence and financial security that was out of the question for wonderful women artists who might have been very good—like Rodin’s mistress, or the young girl posing as Olympia in the painting by Manet, Victorine Meurent. We know her name; we know she wanted to be an artist; and we know that she essentially was destroyed, or failed to get anywhere because she wasn’t rich."