Linda Nochlin

A celebrated art historian who through her ideas questioned and forever transformed her academic field, the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor Emerita of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University (NYU), where she taught until 2013, Linda Nochlin died in Manhattan on October 29. She completed a B.A. in Philosophy from Vassar College (1951), an M.A. in English Literature from Columbia University (1952), and a Ph.D. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU (1963). Nochlin will be remembered and respected in the historiography of art for her innovative article—published in 1971 by ARTnews—announcing the failure of art history. Titled "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?," it is a groundbreaking essay of feminism in the social history of art written by a woman who questioned the absence of female artists in history books, museums and in art history. Her findings were complex as her inquiries led her to the role played by institutions in mitigating the visibility of women in the history of art: "The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education." She listed all the social conditions that have worked against women succeeding in the arts and discredited that which she called innate "genius," arguing that great artists depend on the interest of academics and the volume of monographies that these write about their works. Her inquiries always focused on gender studies, Realism (Courbet), and the literary and artistic production during the 19th and 20th centuries in France. Some of her works include: "Realism" (1971), "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists" (1971), "Women, Art, and Power, and Other Essays" (1988); "Representing Women" (1999); "Issues of Gender In Cassatt and Eakins (2007); and "Courbet" (2007). Her last text, titled "Misère: Representations of Misery in 19th-Century Art," will be published in March of 2018. "All of this is good; feminist art history is there to make trouble, to call into question, to ruffle feathers in the patriarchal dovecotes. It should not be mistaken for just another variant of or supplement to mainstream art history. At its strongest, a feminist art history is a transgressive and antiestablishment practice meant to call many of the major precepts of the discipline into question." She did not have to die like most famous artists in order to understand her important contribution to history. Thirty years after writing that devastating essay, she understood that she had sparked a transformation and opened new doors of knowledge. Lind Nochlin will be undoubtedly remembered and studied by those who aspire to become art historians and by anyone who upon discovering her wonderful writing is somehow able to reconsider the deep-rooted perceptions that she compellingly dispelled.