Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971) is generally considered the first major work of feminist art history. Maura Reilly, a curator, writer, and collaborator of Nochlin’s, described the work as “a dramatic feminist rallying cry.” “This canonical essay precipitated a paradigm shift within the discipline of art history,” Reilly states in her preface to Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader (2015), “and as such her name became inseparable from the phrase, ‘feminist art,’ on a global scale.” A dryly humored analysis of the values by which artists are historicized and discussed, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” posited the first methodological approach for the discipline: that instead of bolstering the reputations of critically neglected or forgotten women artists, the feminist art historian should pick apart, analyze, and question the social and institutional structures that underpin artistic production, the art world, and art history.

In her own words, Nochlin grew up in “a secular, leftist, intellectual Jewish family” in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. In 1951, she graduated with a BA in philosophy and a minor in Greek and art history at Vassar College. Vassar is one of the so-called “Seven Sisters,” a group of historic women’s colleges along the Northeastern US (it became coeducational in 1969). “The good thing about a women’s college…was that women had a chance to do everything,” Nochlin stated in a 2015 interview with Reilly. “We were not pushed to the margins because there were no gendered margins…we were all there was.” In 1952, Nochlin obtained a masters in English literature at Columbia before undertaking her PhD in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she wrote her doctorate on the work of Gustave Courbet. Aside from “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” Nochlin is perhaps best known for her 1971 book, Realism, a landmark study on the 19th-century movement.

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