IS*
ART AND ITS HISTORIES: A RFADF^
section three     gender and art
>5?
Nietzsche co Adorno), Grcenberg posited a dichotomous model of culture thai defined deki^ unsuccessful, <ir orherwise 'kid- arr in feminine terms. .See my discussion of this phenomenon \^ Postmodernism and the EnGendering of Mand Duchamp (New Ymk nnd Camhiidgc: Cambridge ' I Inivcr.siry Pres.%, 1994), t6—iX.
rj See ("arol Duncan, 'When Greatness is a Bojt ol WhcaricV (1975). in The Aesthetics ofPúUfét Essays ifJ Critical Art History(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199^, tir-ii.
t^ On the use of craft to 'feminize' art practice and subvert modernism, sec Norma Broiidc, 'Mir^m Schapim and "Femmnge": Reflections on the OmHicr between Decomtion and Abstraction in Twentieth-Cenmry Art1 liySo), in Feminism and An Hiswty: Questioning the f.itany, td. Norn^ ňrondť and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper and Row, 19K2). its iq; .mil idťm. "The Pattern and Decoration Movement,' in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 197m. History and Impact, ed. Norma Bronde and M.nry D. Ciarrard (New York: Harry N. Abrafns, 191)4)
15 Cited in Lucy lippnrd, "Judy Chicapos "Dinner Party," ' Art hi America fiH (April 19H0); 124. Sec also Chicago's privileging of arc over trafi in 'Judy Chicago,' interview with Dinah Dower (ígtfí). in Visibly Female: Feminism and Art Today, ed. Hilary Robinson (New York: Universe Bonks, igflH), and in Caroline Seebohm,' The Dinner Party: Turning Wnmen's Crafts into Art,' Hansr and dardrn April tgfii. 19'). Diana KeTcham commenrs thai, while Chicago uses traditional crafts, she 'makes a rigid distinction between fine arts and traits, and places her own career on the fine arts side of the fence* ('On the Tabic: Joy nun Celebration,' Village Voice, it June 1979, 49). Laura Mťyer examines Chicago s ambivalence about her use of crafts in 'The "Essential" Judy Chicago: Central Cote Imagery vs. the Language of Perish i sin in Womanhnusc and The Dinner Party fM.A. thesis, University or California. Riverside, 1994); see also her essay in this catiloguc.
fíi |iidy Chicago, The Dinner Party; A Symbol of Our Heritage (Garden City, N.Y.; Doubleday. r«pg) 8—9'
17 For cxampic, sec my critique ol'rhe contradictnry privileging :tnc] hwowáng uf .-mists such as Bftřbtm Kniger for their supposed deconsrructitin oFcnticeptifins ofnrristic genius in my bnnk review, Mml-ernist Logic in Feminist Histories of Art,' Camera Obsetím vj (rnqt-oi): 149—físr
18 Rohm Hughes. 'An Obsessive Feminist Pantheon: Judy Chicago's flitutei1 PďrhfTunu History into Agitprop,' Time, ts December inKo, tfs; Maureen Mullarkey. 'Dishing h Our: Judy Chiton's "Din-net Parry." 1 Círmnwtiwetií 108 (Aprii 19H1): no—TT, interesringly Mull.-irke^, like Hughes, .issociitres the piece with religious imagery (another connection thai implicitly ferniniies jnd, wirhin mnrlernist logic, devalues it): ' Hie combination ol opportunism, evangelical intent, antl etirrepreneurial drive and technique . . . make it as American us Billy .Sunday' (no). One way til"looking at this particular cririque is that it helps rliese crirics explain away the enormous popularity of the piece: dismissing its appeal by linking if tn the hlintl devotion inspired by religious zealots, they dnwnplay quesrirms of (heir own elitism (lor feminists, perhaps especially important questions).
in StlMtinc Muchnic, 'An Intellectual Famine .11 |udy ( !liieago's Feast, Lm Angeles Times, 15 April 1079. For mostly outraged responses to Mtichnic's diatribe, sec the letters to the editor published in the April 19th issue and the unpublished letter by Suzanne Lacy io the Judy Chicago archives.
v)   Linda Nochlin, from 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?' (J975)
Linda Nochlin is the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts. New York University, and her work in feminist art history has had an important influence on the discipline. Nochlin wrote this essay 'during the heady days of the birth of the Womens' Liberation Movement' in 1970, and it first appeared in Art News in January 1971 (Vol. 69) as part of an edition which addressed women and art. It has since come to be seen as a seminal text which helped to form the ideological agenda of feminist art history. In this extract (the first part of the essay) Nochlin argues that the question: 'why have there been no
orp^r wnmpri artists?' is Itsnlf hated nn a spt of nnrrtfiral aecnmntinne ahnut whal
■great art' is. She shows that before we can adequately answer the question we peed to unpick some of the gendered assumptions which underpin it. Later sections of the essay (not reproduced here) go on to explore 'The Question of the Nude', and the idea of art as The Lady's Accomplishment', demonstrating the historical and cultural nature of the idea of the (male) artist, rooted in social, educational and aesthetic conventions. (Notes omitted and re-ordered.) [CP]
Source: Linda Nochlin, 'Why Have There Been No Great Wumen Artists?' (1975). in Linda Nochlin, Women, An, and Power ttnd Other Essays, Thames and Hudson, 1989, pp. 145-58
While the recent upsurge of feminist activity in this country has indeed been a liberating one, its force has been chiefly emotional - personal, psychological, and subjective - centered, like the other radical movements to which it is related, on the present and its immediate needs, rather than on historical analysis of the basic intellectual issues which the feminist attack on the status quo automatically raises.1 Like any revolution, however, the feminist one ultimately must come to grips with the intellectual and ideological basis of the various inrcllccrual or scholarly disciplines - history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, etc. - in the same way that ir questions the ideologies of present social institutions. If, as John Stuart Mill suggested, we tend to accept whatever Mas natural, this is just as true in the realm of academic investigation as it is in our social arrangements. Tn the former, too, 'natural' assumptions must be questioned and the mythic basis ol much so-called fact brought to light. And it is here that the very position of woman as an acknowledged outsider, the maverick 'she' instead of the presumably neutral one' - in reality the whire-male-position-accepted-as-natural, or the hidden 'he' as the subject of all scholarly predicates - is a decided advantage, tather than merely a hindrance or a subjective distortion.
In the field of art history, the white Western male viewpoint, unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian, may - and does - prove to be inadequate not merely on moral and ethical grounds, or because it is elitist, but on purely intellectual ones. In revealing the failure of much academic art history, and a great deal of history in general, to take account of the unacknowledged value system, the very presence of an intruding subject in historical investigation, the feminist critique at the same time lays bare its conceptual smugness, its mcta-histnrical naivete. At a moment when all disciplines are becoming more self-conscious, more aware of the nature of their presuppositions as exhibited in the very languages and structures of the variotis fields of scholarship, such uncritical acceptance of'what is as 'natural' may be intellectually fatal. Just as Mill saw male domination as one of a long series of social injustices that had ro be overcome if a truly just social order were to be created, so we may see the unstated domination of white male subjectivity as one in a series of intellectual distortions which must be corrected in order to achieve a more adequate and accurate view of historical situations.2
It is the engaged feminist intellect (like John Stuart Mill's) that can pierce rlirouo-h   die  oilrnral-ideoWical   limitations  of the  time  and   its specific
t54 art and its histories: a REAntR
'professionalism' to reveal biases and inadequacies not merely in dealing with the question of women, but in I lie very way of formulating the crucial questions of ihc .lis, ipline .1 s ,i whole, rims, the so-called woman question, fin from being ,1 minor peripheral, and laughably provincial sub-issue grafted on to a serious, established discipline, can become a catalyst, an intellectual instrument, probing basic and 'natural' assumptions, providing a paradigm for othct kinds of internal questioning, and in turn providing links with paradigms established by radical approaches in other fields. Even a simple question like 'Why have there been no great women artists?' can, if answered adequately, create a sort of chain reaction, expanding not merely to encompass the accepted assumptions of the single field, but outward to embrace history and the social sciences, or even psychology and literature, and thctchy, from the outset, can challenge the assumption that the traditional divisions of intellectual inquiry are still adequate to deal with the meaningful questions of our time, rather than the merely convenient or self-generated ones. I...]
'Why have there been no great women artists?' The question tolls reproachfully in the backgtound 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.'
1 he assumptions behind such a question are varied in range and sophistical ion, 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.
1'he leminist'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 Berthc 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 i8sS 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 anil asserting, as some contemporary feminists do, that there is a different kind of'greatness' for women's art than for men's, therebv nosrularinp the existence of a disrinc-
I ti
n
section three    gender and art ITS
UV 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. r-    This, on the surface of it, seems reasonable enough: in general, women's'] I experience ana 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 gfoup 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 n()t occurred. While the members of the Danube School, the followers of Car-avaggio, the painters gatheted 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 |. . ,|
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, mure subtle and nuanced in the handling of pigment than Corot? Is Fragonard more or less feminine than Mme Vigce-Lebrun? Or is it not more a question of the whole Rococo style of eighteenth-century France being 'feminine,' il judged in terms of a binary scale of 'masculinity' versus 'femininity'? Certainly, if daintiness, delicacy, and precious-ness are to be counred as earmarks of a feminine style, there is nothing fragile abour Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair, nor dainty and introverted about Helen Frankenthalers giant canvases. If women have turned to scenes of domestic lile, • or of children, so did Jan Steen, Chardin, and the Impressionists - Renoir 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, hut 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, of free from, given temporally defined conventions, schemata, or systems of notation, which have to be learned or worked out, either through leaching, 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 ol male-chauvinist distortion of historv. There art no women
:$6
Aid AND ITS HISTOUIKS: A RKAHIR
equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cezanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even, in very recent times, for clc Kooning or Warhol, any more than there arc black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were large numbers of 'hidden' great women artisrs, 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 arc feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arrs, then the status quo is fine as it is.
But in actuality, as we all know, things as thev 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 to 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.
lr 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 rhe world has been conditioned - and often falsified - by the way the most important questions arc posed. We rend to take it for granted that there really is an Fast 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 ol the Nazis' 'Jewish Problem.') Indeed, in our time of instant communication, 'problems' are rapidly formulated to rationalize the had 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 F.asr 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 Wfiitc Problem into its opposite, a Black Problem; and the same inverse logic turns up in the formulation of our own present stare of affairs as the 'Woman Problem.' [...]
The question 'Why have there been no great women artists?' is simply the top tenth ol an iceberg of misinterpretation and misconception; beneath lies a vast dark bulk ol shaky idees refues about the nature of art and its situational concomitants, about the nature of human abilities in general and of human excellence in particular, and rhe role that the social order plays in all of this. While rhe woman problem' as such may be a pseudo-issue, the misconceptions involved in the question 'Why have there been no greal women artists?' points to major areas of intellectual obfuscation beyond the specific political and ideological issues involved in the subjection of women. Basic ro rhr nuesfion are manv naive. His-
1
SF.CTION THRFF.     nT.NDF.R AN O ART
is;
torted, uncritical assumptions about the milking of art in general, as well as the making of great arc. 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 though: of as an atemporal and mysterious power somehow embedded in the person of the Great Artist.'' Such ideas are related to unquestioned, often unconscious, mcta-historical premises that make 1 lippolyte Taine's race-milieu-mnment lor-mulacion of the dimensions of hiscorical thought seem a model of sophistication. Bui these assumptions are intrinsic to a great deal of art-historical writing. It is no accident that the crucial question ol rhe conditions generally productive ol 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 die 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 birch a mysterious essence, racher 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, rhe 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 hersell - is repeated as late as the nineteenth century by Max Ruchon in his biography of Courbet. The supernatural powers of the artist as imitator, his control of strong, possibly dangerous powers, have functioned historically ro 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 myrhology ever since Vasari immortalized the young Giotto, discovered by the greai Cimabue while the lad was guarding his flocks, drawing sheep on a sione; Cimabue, overcome with admiration for the realism of the drawing, immediately invited the humble youth ro be his pupil." |, . ,|
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 in the Barcelona, and later to the Madrid, Academy ol Art at the age of fifteen in but a single day, a feat of such difficulty that most candidates required a monrh of preparation. But one would like to find out more about similar precocious qualifiers for
r5H art and its histories: A 1<F.A[>er
art academics who then went on to achieve nothing but mediocrity or failure - \n whom, ol course, art historians arc 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, nnndercr-mined, and asocial nature of artistic achievement; this semi-religious conception of the artist's role is elevated to hagiography in the nineteenth century, when art historians, critics, and, nor least, sonic 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 ninereenrh-century Saints' I-egend, 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 existentiaJ gesture to pursue his calling in the tropics; or Toulouse-Lautrec, dwarfed, crippled, and alcoholic, sacrificing his aristocratic birthrighr 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 ii.s concomitants which forms the unconscious or unquestioned assumptions of scholars, no matter how many crumbs are thrown to social influences, ideas of rhc rimes, 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 an may be formularcd as a syllogism: If women had the golden nugget of artistic genius rhen it would reveal itself. But it has never revealed itself. Q.E.D. Women do not have the golden nugget of artistic genius. If Giotto, the obscure shepherd boy, and van Gogh with his fits could make it, why nor 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 tange of its social and institutional structures throughout history, one finds that ihe very questions which are I mil fill or relevant tor the historian to ask shape up rarher differently. One wouli 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. Whai 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
«i) Artemisia Gentileschi, Srlf-Porrrail as Iji Prmira. oil on canvas. The Royal Collection © Her Majesty the Queen.
,60 ART AND ITS HISTORIES: A READER
points our in his discussion of the French Academy in die seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the transmission of the artistic profession from father to son was considered a matrer of course (as it was with the Coypcls, the Coustous, the Van Loos, etc.); indeed, sons of academicians were exempted Irani the customary fees for lessons." Despite the noteworthy and dramatically satisfying cases of the great father-rejecting revokes of the nineteenth century, one might he 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 tank of major artists, the names of Holhein and Diirer, Raphael and Rernini, immediately spring to mind; even in our own times, one can cire the names of Picasso, Calder, Giacometti, and Wyeth as members of artist-families.
As far as the relationship ol artistic occupation and social class is concerned, an interesting paradigm for die question 'Why have there heen no great women artists?' might well be provided by trying to answer the question 'Why have there been no grear 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 he 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 wcalrh 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 ofren encouraged to dabble in the arts and even develop into tespectable amateurs, like Napoleon Til'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?
Wien the right questions are asked about the conditions lor 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 arristic genius. Piager and others have stressed in their genetic epistemol-ogy that in the developmeni 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, (rom infancy onward, and the
section three    gender and art l6l
patterns <rf adaptation-accommodation may be established so early within the sub-ject-in-an-cnvironmeiu that they may indeed ttppearw 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 an is not a free, autonomous activity of a super-endowed individual, 'influenced' by previous artists, and, more vaguely and superficially, by 'social forces,' hut rather, that the total sittiation 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 arc 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.
NOTES
i    Kate Milieu's Sexual Polities New York, 1970, and Mary Ellmans Thinking Ahom Wnmrti. Nev/ Ynrk,
1968, provide notable exceptions. 2.   John Stuart Mill. I he Subjection of Women (jHfiy) in Three Essayi by John Stuart Mill World's Gfa&fcs
Stints, London, [966.
1 'Wointn AttlstS.1 Review of Die Fraucn in d'tt Ktinstgescbrchiehy Ernst G-uhl in I he Westminster Review 1 American Edition), I.XX, July i8^fiT pp- 91-104* I am grarcfoJ to lilainc Shnwalter for having broughl this review to my attention.
4 See, for example, Peter S. Watch's excellent studies of Angelica KaufTmaiin or his unpublished doctoral dissertation, Angelica KaufTmann,' Princeton University. 1968, on The subject; for Artemisia Qtti-rilesclii, see fC Ward Bissell. 'Artemisia Gentileschi - A Nc-w Documented Chronology.* Art bulletin. I [June 1968): 153-68.
f l*or the relatively recent genesis of rhc emphasis on the ai rise as the nexus of esthetic experience, see M. H. Ahrarm, The Mirror and the Limp. Romantic Theory and the Critical I radititm, Nc-w York. lyjl. and Man rice Z. Shroder, learns: The Image of the Artist in French Romanticism, GwnbHdge. Massnchiwerrs, igfir.
fi A comparison wirh the parallel myih for women, the CindereJU story, is revealing: Cinderella gains higher status on the basis of a passive, 'sex-object1 attribute - small feet - whereas the Boy Wonder always proves himself through active accomplish mem. For a ihmough study of myths about artists, see L'.msr Kris and Otto Kurz. Die Legend? vain Kiitistter: Tin (trscbicdicber Versueh, Vienna, 1914.
7   NikoUus Pevsner, Academies af Art, Past and Present. Cambridge, 1940, p. pifij,
R Contemporary directions - earthworks, conceptual art. art as information, etc. - certainly point away from emphasis on the individual genius and his salable products: in art history, Harrison C. and Cynthia A. White's Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting Wnrld. New York. [965, opens up a fruitful new direction of investigation, as did Niknlaus Pevsner s pioneering Academies of Art. Ernst Gombricb and Pierre Fr.inca.stel, in their very different ways, always have tended CO virw art ami ibearti.si as part ol 1 mtal situation raiher than in lofty isolation.
vi)   Griselda Pollock, 'Differencing, Feminism and the Canon, from Differencing the Canon; Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art s Histories (1999)
Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art. and the Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, at the University of Leeds. Professor Pollock
Art and its Histories: A Reader
Edited by Steve Edwards at The Open Universi
Richterova knihovna FF Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci
Signatura:   f\ jKONVIKT
Yale University Press New Haven and London