Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?
Linda Nochlin

Excerpts:

But like so many other so-called questions involved in the feminist "controversy," it falsifies the nature of the issue at the same time that it insidiously supplies its own answer: "There are no great women artists because women are incapable of greatness."

. . . to dig up examples of worthy or insufficiently appreciated women artists throughout history; to rehabilitate rather modest, if interesting and productive careers; to"rediscover" forgotten flower painters. . .

to posit a different kind of "greatness" for women's art than that for men's, thereby postulating the existence of a distinctive and recognizable feminine style, different both in its formal and its expressive qualities and based on the special character of women's situation and experience.

The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or out empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education . . .

. . . to create a world in which equal achievement will be not only made possible but actively encouraged by social institutions.

. . . the conditions generally productive of great art have so rarely been investigated . . .

. . . the choice for women seems always to be marriage or a career, i.e., solitude as the price of success or sex and companionship at the price of professional renunciation.

[Male artists never had to] conceive that they had sacrificed their manhood or their sexual role on account of their singlemindedness in achieving professional fulfillment.

Investigate historical conditions that affect artmaking: i.e., expectations for women and men, education of each sex, and ideas about the artist.

Historical conditions made being an artist exceedingly difficult for most women. During the Renaissance, women were excluded from artists' workshops and from conventional forms of training. Most female artists in the Renaissance were of nobility, a class where artmaking in a woman was considered a mark of finesse and acculturation.

"The great majority of women artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," Parker and Pollock (1981) tell us, "came from families of painters in which the absence of sons or the availability of materials and free teaching gave daughters an entry to an artistic career that would otherwise have been far less accessible to them" (p. 20). Artemesia Gentileschi's father was an artist, as were the fathers of seventeenth century painters Clara Peeters and Lavinia Fontana.

During the nineteenth century, when femininity was an exceedingly important characteristic for women to have, femininity was associated with child-bearing and family. As Parker and Pollock note, artists also became associated with everything that was anti-domestic, outsiderness, anti-social behaviour, isolation... disorder and the sublime forces of untamed nature. As femininity was to be lived out in the fulfillment of socially ordained domestic and reproductive roles, a profound contradiction was established between the identities of artist and woman. (p. 99).

Women were not allowed to study drawing from the nude figure in the nineteenth century, where such exclusion meant a lack of skill prerequisites for making "great" art. They painted mothers and children and flowers -people and objects accessible to them - rather than "history paintings" of battles and so-called "worldly deeds."

Many art historians have been engaged in a re-interpretation of art that examines the social relevance of artworks to their historical contexts. These studies provide pertinent background information for teaching a socially relevant curriculum. Eunice Lipton (1986) in a study of Edgar Degas titled Looking Into Degas, for instance, examines how Degas' representations of middle and lower-class Parsian women (the laundresses, the ballet dancers, the bathers, the racetrack spectators) convey the incipient democratization of turn-of-the-century Paris.

Linda Nochlin, in her 1989 collection of essays Women, Art, and Power, considers how the representation of women in art has reproduced societal assumptions of gender difference concerning women's weakness, passivity, and sexuality, and their associations with nature and the body instead of with culture and the intellect. Her point is that the traits of gender differences are learned, not innate.