Why are there no great women artists? -- Linda Nochlin

Wed, 02 May 2007 15:47:12 -0700

Nochlin: Why No Great Women Artists?

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?
by Linda Nochlin

"Why have there been no great women artists?" The question tolls reproachfully in the background of most discussions of the so-called woman problem. 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."

The assumptions behind such a question are varied in range and sophistication, running anywhere from "scientifically proven" demonstrations of the inability of human beings with wombs rather than penises to create anything significant, to relatively open minded wonderment that women, despite so many years of near equality and after all, a lot of men have had their disadvantages too have still not achieved anything of exceptional significance in the visual arts.

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: that is, 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 or David followers and make out a case for them; to demonstrate that Berthe Morisot was really less dependent upon Manet than one had been led to think-in other words, to engage in the normal activity of the specialist scholar who makes a case for the importance of his very own neglected or minor master. Such attempts, whether undertaken from a feminist point of view, like the ambitious article on women artists which appeared in the 1858 Westminster Review, or more recent scholarly studies on such artists as Angelica Kauffmann and Artemisia Gentileschi, are certainly worth the effort, both in adding to our knowledge of women's achievement and of art history generally. But they do nothing to question the assumptions lying behind the question "Why have there been no great women artists?" On the contrary, by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications.

Another attempt to answer the question involves shifting the ground slightly and asserting, as some contemporary feminists do, that there is a different kind of "greatness" for women's art than 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.

This, on the surface of it, seems reasonable enough: in general, women's experience and situation in society, and hence as artists, is different from men's, and certainly the art produced by a group of consciously united and purposefully articulate women intent on bodying forth a group consciousness of feminine experience might indeed be stylistically identifiable as feminist, if not feminine, art. Unfortunately, though this remains within
the realm of possibility it has so far not occurred. While the members of the Danube
School, the followers of Caravaggio, the painters gathered around Gauguin at Pont-Aven,
the Blue Rider, or the Cubists may be recognized by certain clearly defined stylistic or
expressive qualities, no such common qualities of "femininity" would seem to
link the styles of women artists generally, any more than such qualities can be said to
link women writers, a case brilliantly argued, against the most devastating, and mutually
contradictory, masculine critical cliches, by Mary Ellmann in her Thinking about Women. No
subtle essence of femininity would seem to link the work of Artemesia Gentileschi, Mine
Vigee-Lebrun, Angelica Kauffmann, Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morlsot, Suzanne Valadon, Kathe
Kollwitz, Barbara Hepworth, Georgia O'Keeffe, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Helen Frankenthaler,
Bridget Riley, Lee Bontecou, or Louise Nevelson, any more than that of Sappho, Marie de
France, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, George Sand, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude
Stein, Anais Nin, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Susan Sontag. In every instance,
women artists and writers would seem to be closer to other artists and writers of their
own period and outlook than they are to each other.

Women artists are more inward-looking, more delicate and nuanced in their treatment of
their medium, it may be asserted. But which of the women artists cited above is more
inward-turning than Redon, more subtle and nuanced in the handling of pigment than Corot?
Is Fragonard more or less feminine than Mme. Vigee-Lebrun? Or is it not more a question of
the whole Rococo style of eighteenth-century France being "feminine," if judged
in terms of a binary scale of "masculinity" versus "femininity"?
Certainly, if daintiness, delicacy, and preciousness are to be counted as earmarks Of a
feminine style, there is nothing fragile about Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair, nor dainty and
introverted about Helen Frankenthaler's giant canvases. If women have turned to scenes of
domestic life, or of children, so did Jan Steen, Chardin, and the Impressionists Renoir
and Monet as well as Morisot and Cassatt. In any case, the mere choice of a certain realm
of subject matter, or the restriction to certain subjects, is not to be equated with a
style, much less with some sort of quintessentially feminine style.

The problem lies not so much with some feminists' concept of what femininity is, but
rather with their misconception-shared with the public at large-of what art is: with the
naive idea that art is the direct, personal expression of individual emotional experience,
a translation of personal life into visual terms. Art is almost never that, great art
never is. The making of art involves a self-consistent language of form, more or less
dependent upon, or free from, given temporally defined conventions, schemata, or systems
of notation, which have to be learned or worked out, either through teaching,
apprenticeship, or a long period of individual experimentation. The language of art is,
more materially, embodied in paint and line on canvas or paper, in stone or clay or
plastic or metal it is neither a sob story nor a confidential whisper.

The fact of the matter is that there have been no supremely great women artists, as far as
we know, although there have been many interesting and very good ones who remain
insufficiently investigated or appreciated; nor have there been any great Lithuanian jazz
pianists, nor Eskimo tennis players, no matter how much we might wish there had been. That
this should be the case is regrettable, but no amount of manipulating the historical or
critical evidence will alter the situation; nor will accusations of male-chauvinist
distortion of history. There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt,
Delacroix or Cezanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even, in very recent times, for de Kooning or
Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same. If there actually
were large numbers of "hidden" great women artists, or if there really, should
be different standards for women's art as opposed to men's--and one can't have it both
ways--then what are feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status
as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is.

But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as
in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those,
women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle
class and, above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual
cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education-education
understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of
meaningful symbols, signs, and signals. The miracle is, in fact, that given the
overwhelming odds against women, or blacks, that so many of both have managed to achieve
so much sheer excellence, in those bailiwicks of white masculine prerogative like science,
politics, or the arts.

It is when one really starts thinking about the implications of "Why have there been
no great women artists?" that one begins to realize to what extent our consciousness
of how things are in the world has been conditioned-and often falsified-by the way the
most important questions are posed. We tend to take it for granted that there really is an
East Asian Problem, a Poverty Problem, a Black Problem and a Woman Problem. But first we
must ask ourselves who is formulating these "questions," and then, what purposes
such formulations may serve. (We may, of course, refresh our memories with the
connotations of the Nazis' "Jewish Problem.") Indeed, in our time of instant
communication, "problems" are rapidly formulated to rationalize the bad
conscience of those with power: thus the problem posed by Americans in Vietnam and
Cambodia is referred to by Americans as the "East Asian Problem," whereas East
Asians may view it, more realistically, as the "American Problem"; the so-called
Poverty Problem might more directly be viewed as the "Wealth Problem" by
denizens of urban ghettos or rural wastelands; the same irony twists the White Problem
into its opposite, a Black Problem; and the same inverse logic turns up in the formulation
of our own present state of affairs as the "Woman Problem."

Now the "Woman Problem," like all human problems, so-called (and the very idea
of calling anything to do with human beings a "problem" is, of course, a fairly
recent one) is not amenable to "solution" at all, since what human problems
involve is reinterpretation of the nature of the situation, or a radical alteration of
stance or program on the part of the "problems " themselves. Thus women and
their situation in the arts, as in other realms of endeavor, are not a "problem"
to be viewed through the eyes of the dominant male power elite. Instead, women must
conceive of themselves as potentially, if not actually, equal subjects, and must be
willing to look the facts of their situation full in the face, without self-pity, or
cop-outs; at the same time they must view their situation with that high degree of
emotional and intellectual commitment necessary to create a world in which equal
achievement will be not only made possible but actively encouraged by social institutions.

It is certainly not realistic to hope that a majority of men, in the arts or in any other
field, will soon see the light and find that it is in their own self-interest to grant
complete equality to women, as some feminists optimistically assert, or to maintain that
men themselves will soon realize that they are diminished by denying themselves access to
traditionally "feminine" realms and emotional reactions. After all, there are
few areas that are really "denied" to men, if the level of operations demanded
be transcendent, responsible, or rewarding enough: men who have a need for
"feminine" involvement with babies or children gain status as pediatricians or
child psychologists, with a nurse (female) to do the more routine work; those who feel the
urge for kitchen creativity may gain fame as master chefs; and, of course, men who yearn
to fulfill themselves through what are often termed "feminine" artistic
interests can find themselves as painters or sculptors, rather than as volunteer museum
aides or part-time ceramists, as their female counterparts so often end up doing; as far
as scholarship is concerned, how many men would be willing to change their jobs as
teachers and researchers for those of unpaid, part-time research assistants and typists as
well as full-time nannies and domestic workers?

Those who have privileges inevitably hold on to them, and hold tight, no matter how
marginal the advantage involved, until compelled to bow to superior power of one sort or
another.

Thus the question of women's equality--in art as in any other realm--devolves not upon the
relative benevolence or ill-will of individual men, nor the self-confidence or abjectness
of individual women, but rather on the very nature of our institutional structures
themselves and the view of reality which they impose on the human beings who are part of
them. As John Stuart Mill pointed out more than a century ago: "Everything which is
usual appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any
departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural."' Most men, despite lip service
to equality, are reluctant to give up this "natural" order of things in which
their advantages are so great; for women, the case is further complicated by the fact
that, as Mill astutely pointed out, unlike other oppressed groups or castes, men demand of
them not only submission but unqualified affection as well; thus women are often weakened
by the internalized demands of the male-dominated society itself, as well as by a plethora
of material goods and comforts: the middle-class woman has a great deal more to lose than
her chains.

The question "Why have there been no great women artists?" is simply the top
tenth of an iceberg of misinterpretation and misconception; beneath lies a vast dark bulk
of shaky idees recues about the nature of art and its situational concomitants, about the
nature of human abilities in general and of human excellence in particular, and the role
that the social order plays in all of this. While the "woman problem" as such
may be a pseudo-issue, the misconceptions involved in the question "Why have there
been no great women artists?" points to major areas of intellectual obfuscation
beyond the specific political and ideological issues involved in the subjection of women.
Basic to the question are many naive, distorted, uncritical assumptions about the making
of art in general, as well as the making of great art. These assumptions, conscious or
unconscious, link together such unlikely superstars as Michelangelo and van Gogh, Raphael
and Jackson Pollock under the rubric of "Great"-an honorific attested to by the
number of scholarly monographs devoted to the artist in question-and the Great Artist is,
of course, conceived of as one who has "Genius"; Genius, in turn, is thought of
as an atemporal and mysterious power somehow embedded in the person of the Great Artist.'
Such ideas are related to unquestioned, often unconscious, meta-historical premises that
make Hippolyte Taine's race-milieu-moment formulation of the dimensions of historical
thought seem a model of sophistication. But these assumptions are intrinsic to a great
deal of art-historical writing. It is no accident that the crucial question of the
conditions generally productive of great art has so rarely been investigated, or that
attempts to investigate such general problems have, until fairly recently, been dismissed
as unscholarly, too broad, or the province of some other discipline, like sociology. To
encourage a dispassionate, impersonal, sociological, and institutionally oriented approach
would reveal the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing
substructure upon which the profession of art history is based, and which has only
recently been called into question by a group of younger dissidents.

Underlying the question about woman as artist, then, we find the myth of the Great
Artist-subject of a hundred monographs, unique, godlike-bearing within his person since
birth a mysterious essence, rather like the golden nugget in Mrs. Grass's chicken soup,
called Genius or Talent, which, like murder, must always out, no matter how unlikely or
unpromising the circumstances.

The magical aura surrounding the representational arts and their creators has, of course,
given birth to myths since the earliest times. Interestingly enough, the same magical
abilities attributed by Pliny to the Greek sculptor Lysippos in antiquity--the mysterious
inner call in early youth, the lack of any teacher but Nature herself--is repeated as late
as the nineteenth century by Max Buchon in his biography of Courbet. The supernatural
powers of the artist as imitator, his control of strong, possibly dangerous powers, have
functioned historically to set him off from others as a godlike creator, one who creates
Being out of nothing. The fairy tale of the discovery by an older artist or discerning
patron of the Boy Wonder, usually in the guise of a lowly shepherd boy, has been a
stock-in-trade of artistic mythology ever since Vasari immortalized the young Giotto,
discovered by the great Cimabue while the lad was guarding his flocks, drawing sheep on a
stone; Cimabue, overcome with admiration for the realism of the drawing, immediately
invited the humble youth to be his pupil. Through some mysterious coincidence, later
artists including Beccafumi, Andrea Sansovino, Andrea del Castagno, Mantegna, Zurbardn,
and Goya were all discovered in similar pastoral circumstances. Even when the young Great
Artist was not fortunate enough to come equipped with a flock of sheep, his talent always
seems to have manifested itself very early, and independent of any external encouragement:
Filippo Lippi and Poussin, Courbet and Monet are all reported to have drawn caricatures in
the margins of their schoolbooks instead of studying the required subjects-we never, of
course, hear about the youths who neglected their studies and scribbled in the margins of
their notebooks without ever becoming anything more elevated than department-store clerks
or shoe salesmen. The great Michelangelo himself, according to his biographer and pupil,
Vasari, did more drawing than studying as a child. So pronounced was his talent, reports
Vasari, that when his master, Ghirlandalo, absented himself momentarily from his work in
Santa Maria Novella, and the young art student took the opportunity to draw "the
scaffolding, trestles, pots of paint, brushes and the apprentices at their tasks" in
this brief absence, he did it so skillfully that upon his return the master exclaimed:
"This boy knows more than I do."

As is so often the case, such stories, which probably have some truth in them, tend both
to reflect and perpetuate the attitudes they subsume. Even when based on fact, these myths
about the early manifestations of genius are misleading. It is no doubt true, for example,
that the young Picasso passed all the examinations for entrance to the Barcelona, and
later to the Madrid, Academy of Art at the age of fifteen in but a single day, a feat of
such difficulty that most candidates required a month of preparation. But one would like
to find out more about similar precocious qualifiers for art academies who then went on to
achieve nothing but mediocrity or failure--in whom, of course, art historians are
uninterested--or to study in greater detail the role played by Picasso's art-professor
father in the pictorial precocity of his son. What if Picasso had been born a girl? Would
Senor Ruiz have paid as much attention or stimulated as much ambition for achievement in a
little Pablita?

What is stressed in all these stories is the apparently miraculous, nondetermined, and
asocial nature of artistic achievement; this semireligious conception of the artist's role
is elevated to hagiography in the nineteenth century, when art historians, critics, and,
not least, some of the artists themselves tended to elevate the making of art into a
substitute religion, the last bulwark of higher values in a materialistic world. The
artist, in the nineteenth-century Saints' Legend, struggles against the most determined
parental and social opposition, suffering the slings and arrows of social opprobrium like
any Christian martyr, and ultimately succeeds against all odds generally, alas, after his
death-because from deep within himself radiates that mysterious, holy effulgence: Genius.
Here we have the mad van Gogh, spinning out sunflowers despite epileptic seizures and
near-starvation; Cezanne, braving paternal rejection and public scorn in order to
revolutionize painting; Gauguin throwing away respectability and financial security with a
single existential gesture to pursue his calling in the tropics; or Toulouse-Lautrec,
dwarfed, crippled, and alcoholic, sacrificing his aristocratic birthright in favor of the
squalid surroundings that provided him with inspiration.

Now no serious contemporary art historian takes such obvious fairy tales at their face
value. Yet it is this sort of mythology about artistic achievement and its concomitants
which forms the unconscious or unquestioned assumptions of scholars, no matter how many
crumbs are thrown to social influences, ideas of the times, economic crises, and so on.
Behind the most sophisticated investigations of great artists-more specifically, the
art-historical monograph, which accepts the notion of the great artist as primary, and the
social and institutional structures within which he lived and worked as mere secondary
"influences" or "background"-lurks the golden-nugget theory of genius
and the free-enterprise conception of individual achievement. On this basis, women's lack
of major achievement in art may be formulated as a syllogism: If women had the golden
nugget of artistic genius then it would reveal itself. But it has never revealed itself.
O.E.D. Women do not have the golden nugget theory of artistic genius. If Giotto, the
obscure shepherd boy, and van Gogh with his fits could make it, why not women?

Yet as soon as one leaves behind the world of fairy tale and self-fulfilling prophecy and,
instead, casts a dispassionate eye on the actual situations in which important art
production has existed, in the total range of its social and institutional structures
throughout history, one finds that t he very questions which are fruitful or relevant for
the historian to ask shape up rather differently. One would like to ask, for instance,
from what social classes artists were most likely to come at different periods of art
history, from what castes and subgroup. What proportion of painters and sculptors, or more
specifically, of major painters and sculptors, came from families in which their fathers
or other close relatives were painters and sculptors or engaged in related professions? As
Nikolaus Pevsner points out in his discussion of the French Academy in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the transmission of the artistic profession from father to son was
considered a matter of course (as it was with the Coypels, the Coustous, the Van Loos,
etc.); indeed, sons of academicians were exempted from the customary fees for lessons.
Despite the noteworthy and dramatically satisfying cases of the great father-rejecting
revoltes~s of the nineteenth century, one might be forced to admit that a large proportion
of artists, great and not-so-great, in the days when it was normal for sons to follow in
their fathers' footsteps, had artist fathers. In the rank of major artists, the names of
Holbein and Durer, Raphael and Bernim, immediately spring to mind; even in our own times,
one can cite the names of Picasso, Calder, Giacometti, and Wyeth as members of
artist-families.

As far as the relationship of artistic occupation and social class is concerned, an
interesting paradigm for the question "Why have there been no great women
artists?" might well be provided by trying to answer the question "Why have
there been no great artists from the aristocracy?" One can scarcely think, before the
anti traditional nineteenth century at least, of any artist who sprang from the ranks of
any more elevated class than the upper bourgeoisie; even in the nineteenth century, Degas
came from the lower nobility more like the haute bourgeoisie, in fact-and only
Toulouse-Lautrec, metamorphosed into the ranks of the marginal by accidental deformity,
could be said to have come from the loftier reaches of the upper classes. While the
aristocracy has always provided the lion's share of the patronage and the audience for
art-as, indeed, the aristocracy of wealth does even in our more democratic days-it has
contributed little beyond amateurish efforts to the creation of art itself, despite the
fact that aristocrats (like many women) have had more than their share of educational
advantages, plenty of leisure and, indeed, like women, were often encouraged to dabble in
the arts and even develop into respectable amateurs, like Napoleon III's cousin, the
Princess Mathilde, who exhibited at the official Salons, or Queen Victoria, who, with
Prince Albert, studied art with no less a figure than Landseer himself. Could it be that
the little golden nugget-genius-is missing from the aristocratic makeup in the same way
that it is from the feminine psyche? Or rather, is it not that the kinds of demands and
expectations placed before both aristocrats and women-the amount of time necessarily
devoted to social functions, the very kinds of activities demanded-simply made total
devotion to professional art production out of the question, indeed unthinkable, both for
upper-class males and for women generally, rather than its being a question of genius and
talent?

When the right questions are asked about the conditions for producing art, of which the
production of great art is a subtopic, there will no doubt have to be some discussion of
the situational concomitants of intelligence and talent generally, not merely of artistic
genius. Piaget and others have stressed in their genetic epistemology that in the
development of reason and in the unfolding of imagination in young children, intelligence
or, by implication, what we choose to call genius-is a dynamic activity rather than a
static essence, and an activity of a subject in a situation. As further investigations in
the field of child development imply, these abilities, or this intelligence, are built up
minutely, step by step, from infancy onward, and the patterns of adaptation-accommodation
may be established so early within the subject-in-an-environment that they may indeed
appear to be innate to the unsophisticated observer. Such investigations imply that, even
aside from meta-historical reasons, scholars will have to abandon the notion, consciously
articulated or not, of individual genius as innate, and as primary to the creation of
art.'

The question "Why have there been no great women artists?" has led us to the
conclusion, so far, that art is not a free, autonomous activity of a super-endowed
individual, "Influenced" by previous artists, and, more vaguely and
superficially, by "social forces," but rather, that the total situation of art
making, both in terms of the development of the art maker and in the nature and quality of
the work of art itself, occur in a social situation, are integral elements of this social
structure, and are mediated and determined by specific and definable social institutions,
be they art academies, systems of patronage, mythologies of the divine creator, artist as
he-man or social outcast.

Extract from Women, Art and Power and Other Essays, Westview Press, 1988 by Linda
Nochlin, pp.147-158

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