Linda Nochlin - Böcker

Renowned art historian and pioneering feminist Linda Nochlin explores how, from the late 18th century, fragmented, mutilated and fetishized representations of the human body came to constitute a distinctively modern view of the world. Surprising, questioning, challenging, enriching: the Pocket Perspectives series celebrates writers and thinkers who have helped shape the conversation across the arts. Mixing classic and contemporary texts, reissues and abridgements, these are bite-sized, fully illustrated reads in an attractive, affordable and highly collectable package.

Women, Art, and Power?seven landmark essays on women artists and women in art history?brings together the work of almost twenty years of scholarship and speculation.

A leading critic and historian of nineteenth-century art and society explores in nine essays the interaction of art, society, ideas, and politics.

Women, Art, and Power?seven landmark essays on women artists and women in art history?brings together the work of almost twenty years of scholarship and speculation.

A leading critic and historian of nineteenth-century art and society explores in nine essays the interaction of art, society, ideas, and politics.

Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay on women artists is widely acknowledged as the first real attempt at a feminist history of art. Nochlin refused to handle the question of why there had been no ‘great women artists’ on its own, corrupted, terms. Instead, she dismantled the very concept of ‘greatness’, unravelling the basic assumptions that had centred a male-coded ‘genius’ in the study of art. With unparalleled insight and startling wit, Nochlin laid bare the acceptance of a white male viewpoint in art historical thought as not merely a moral failure, but an intellectual one. Freedom, as she sees it, requires women to risk entirely demolishing the art world’s institutions, and rebuilding them anew – in other words, to leap into the unknown. In this stand-alone anniversary edition, Nochlin’s essay is published alongside its reappraisal, ‘Thirty Years After’. Written in an era of thriving feminist theory, as well as queer theory, race and postcolonial studies, ‘Thirty Years After’ is a striking reflection on the emergence of a whole new canon. With reference to Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman and many more, Nochlin diagnoses the state of women and art with unmatched precision and verve. ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ has become a slogan and rallying cry that resonates across culture and society; Dior even adopted it in their 2018 collections. In the 2020s, at a time when ‘certain patriarchal values are making a comeback’, Nochlin's message could not be more urgent: as she herself put it in 2015, ‘there is still a long way to go’.With 14 illustrations

The coming of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century witnessed unprecedented changes in society: rapid economic progress went hand-in-hand with appalling working conditions, displacement, squalor and destitution for those at the bottom of the social scale. These new circumstances presented a challenge to contemporary image-makers, who wished to capture the effects of hunger, poverty and alienation in Britain, Ireland and France in the era before documentary photography. In this groundbreaking book, the eminent art historian Linda Nochlin examines the styles and expressive strategies that were used by artists and illustrators to capture this misère, roughly characterized as poverty that afflicts both body and soul. She investigates images of the Irish Famine in the period 1846–51; the gendered representation of misery, particularly of poor women and prostitutes; and the work of three very different artists: Théodore Géricault, Gustave Courbet and the less wellknown Fernand Pelez. The artists’ desire to depict the poor and the outcast accurately and convincingly is still a pertinent issue, though now, as Nochlin observes, the question has a moral and ethical dimension – does the documentary style belittle its subjects and degrade their condition?

A selection of key essays by one of the most influential voices in art history, including seven previously unpublished pieces. This illustrated, edited collection of essays brings together for the first time some of the pioneering art historian Linda Nochlin’s most important writings on modernism and modernity from across her six-decade career. Before the publication of her seminal tract on feminism in art, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, Nochlin had already firmly established herself as a major practitioner of a politically sophisticated and class-conscious social art history, with her writings on modernism being transformative to the discipline. Nochlin embraced Charles Baudelaire’s conviction that modernity meant to be of one’s time - and that the role of an art historian was to understand the art of the past not only in its own historical context, but according to the urgencies of the contemporary world. From academic debates about the nude in the 18th century to the work of Robert Gober in the 21st, whatever she turned her analytic eye to was very much conceived as the art of the now - the art we need to look at to navigate the complexities and contradictions of the present.

Women – as warriors, workers, mothers, sensual women,even absent women – haunt 19th- and 20th-century Western painting: their representation is one of its most common subjects. Representing Women brings together Linda Nochlin’s most important writings on the subject, as she considers work by Miller, Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Seurat, Cassatt and Kollwitz, among many others. In her riveting, partly autobiographical, extended introduction, Nochlin documents her own pioneering approach to art history; throughout the seven essays in this book, she argues for the honest virtues of an art history that rejects methodological assumptions, and for art historians who investigate the work before their eyes while focusing on its subject matter, informed by a sensitivity to its feminist spirit.

Linda Nochlin (1931–2017) was one of the most pioneering and provocative art historians of our time. In 1971 she published her groundbreaking article, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, an impassioned feminist rallying cry that called traditional art historical practices into question and led to a major revision of the discipline. Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader brings together thirty essential essays from throughout Nochlin’s career, including two written specially for this collection. The book opens with an interview with Nochlin, in which she looks back on her life’s work and reflects on the position of women artists today. Her major thematic texts, such as ‘Women Artists After the French Revolution’ and ‘Starting from Scratch: The Beginnings of Feminist Art History’ appear alongside the landmark 1971 essay and its rejoinder, ‘“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”: Thirty Years After.’ Also included are entries focusing on a selection of major women artists, such as Mary Cassatt, Louise Bourgeois, Cecily Brown, Kiki Smith, Miwa Yanagi and Sophie Calle, as well as concise biographies of all the artists discussed in the book and a complete bibliography of Nochlin’s publications.