Tag Archives: Linda Nochlin—The Maverick She

LINDA NOCHLIN — THE MAVERICK SHE

Linda Nochlin had a towering, completely ferocious, revolutionary intellect. The magnitude of her intelligence—well, there are very, very few people like that. She literally changed everything. I think that with her essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in 1971, she made women’s and queer studies possible because of how she reformulated the question. She shifted the focus from subjective experience toward an interrogation of the material aspects of culture: What were the conditions that make things the way they are? By restructuring cultural history, she also gave those of us who were marginalized by it a new way to look at literature and other disciplines. — Deborah Kass

Nochlin—the late scholar, critic, and curator—is the subject of an exhibition at NMWA. See link below for details.

LINDA NOCHLIN—THE MAVERICK SHE

Through October 8.

National Museum of Women in the Arts

1250 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, DC.

From top: Linda Nochlin in front of Philip Pearlstein, Richard Pommer and Linda Nochlin, 1968, photograph by Adam Husted, image courtesy and © the artist and the photographer; Deborah Kass, Orange Disaster (Linda Nochlin), 1997, image courtesy and © the artist; Artnews, January 1971, Women’s Liberation, Women Artists and Art History: A Special Issue, cover painting is Marie Denise Villers, Young Woman Drawing, 1801, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, cover image courtesy and © the publisher; 1959 art history class at Vassar with Professor Nochlin, Class of 1951, image courtesy and © Vassar College; Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader (2015), edited by Maura Reilly, cover image courtesy and © Thames & Hudson; Nochlin in Paris in 1978, photograph by Marion Kalter, image courtesy and © the photographer.