num_pages: 34
description: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? is a 1971 essay by American art historian Linda Nochlin. It is considered a pioneering essay for both feminist art history and feminist art theory.In this essay Nochlin explores the institutional  as opposed to the individual  obstacles that have prevented women in the West from succeeding in the arts. She divides her argument into several sections the first of which takes on the assumptions implicit in the essay's title followed by The Question of the Nude The Lady's Accomplishment Successes and Rosa Bonheur. In her introduction she acknowledges the recent upsurge of feminist activity in America as a condition for her interrogation of the ideological foundations of art history while also invoking John Stuart Mill's suggestion that we tend to accept whatever is as natural. In her conclusion she states: I have tried to deal with one of the perennial questions used to challenge women's demand for true rather than token equality by examining the whole erroneous intellectual substructure upon which the question Why have there been no great women artists? is based; by questioning the validity of the formulation of so-called problems in general and the problem of women specifically; and then by probing some of the limitations of the discipline of art history itself.
language: English
title: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?
publisher: ARTnews