ABSTRACT
Most accounts of feminist art history begin in 1971 when Linda Nochlin asked ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ in the pages of Art News.2 A professor at Vassar, then a women’s college, she formulated the question during a period of personal consciousness-raising.3 Nochlin made a feminist critique of the arthistorical discipline, attacking the largely unexamined principles underpinning the canon of masterpieces as illustrated in textbooks such as Janson’s magisterial and influential History of Art. Published in 1962, his sweeping narrative of Western art history lacked anything made by women.4 Although she focused on the nineteenth century, what Nochlin identified as preventing women from achieving ‘greatness’ has its roots in the Renaissance (if not earlier): that women are naturally inferior to men and therefore lack their capacity for genius; that women’s nature colours everything they do; that women artists depend upon direct visual and emotional experience and unlike men cannot mediate their production through study; that social and institutional structures impeded women’s training and achieving prominence; and that the myth of the artist promulgated by Vasari remains fundamental to the discipline.
