Linda Nochlin was one of the most accessible, provocative, and innovative art historians of our time. In 1971, she published “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”—a dramatic feminist call to arms that questioned traditional art historical practices and led to a major revision of the discipline.
Now available in paperback, Women Artists brings together twenty-nine essential essays from throughout Nochlin’s career. Included are her major thematic texts “Women Artists After the French Revolution” and “Starting from Scratch: The Beginnings of Feminist Art History,” as well as her landmark 1971 essay and its rejoinder, ” ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ Thirty Years After.” These appear alongside monographic entries focusing on a selection of major women artists, including Mary Cassatt, Louise Bourgeois, Cecily Brown, Kiki Smith, Miwa Yanagi, and Sophie Calle.
Reviews
“Nochlin writes with a dazzling mix of erudition and candor.”
— New York Times Book Review
“Readers will be delighted by this opportunity to watch Nochlin’s ideas advance over the decades.”
— Publishers Weekly
Contributors
Linda Nochlin
Author
Linda Nochlin was the Lila Acheson Wallace professor of modern art emerita at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. Her publications include The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity; Women, Art and Power and Other Essays; The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society; Courbet; Mise`re: The Visual Representation of Misery in the 19th Century; and Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader. Her essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” is considered one of the most in influential texts in modern art history.
Maura Reilly
Edited By
Maura Reilly is a curator and arts writer, and executive director of the National Academy of Design in New York. As the founding curator of the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, she launched the first exhibition and public programming space in the USA devoted entirely to feminist art, where she organized multiple exhibitions, including the permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party and the blockbuster Global Feminisms (co-curated with Linda Nochlin.) Reilly has authored and edited many books and articles on contemporary art, including most recently Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader (Thames & Hudson, 2015). She is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art, and in 2015 was voted one of the 50 most powerful people in the art world by both Blouin Art Info and Art+Auction. She received her MA and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.