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 ImpressionistsRenoir
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 t
o 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 "prohlems " 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 haglography 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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