Gender
roles and views have had an enormous effect on art throughout history. Today it
may seem as though the majority of artists are women, however most of the
greatest artists in the past have been men, specifically white men. There are
several well-know women artists, but in terms of “great” artists of the past,
art history books are mostly filled with male artists. What is meant by “great”
artists is artists such as Picasso, Van Gogh, Michelangelo and other artists
whose names are known by everyone worldwide. In Linda Nochlin’s essay “Why Have
There Been No Great Women Artists?” as well as in Griselda Pollock’s essay
“Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” reasons are discussed as to why the
art world has been traditionally male dominated. Both Nochlin and Pollock come
up with similar reasons for why this has been the case and why women have
struggled to claim their place in the art world throughout history, however
they each have a very different way of coming up with this conclusion.
In the first part
of Linda Nochlin’s essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists,” she asks
several questions in order to come up with a reason as to why there are no
great women artists. Nochlin states that far too many people do not question
that past and simply take the fact that all the great artists of the past are
men as being only natural. She first asks the question “Well, if women really are equal to men, why have there never
been any great women artists (or composers, or mathematicians, or philosophers,
or so few of the same)?” (Nochlin, 147). By asking this question many could
assume that women are simply not as talented as men, which is just not true.
She then discusses how many feminists have tried to prove that there have been
great women artists who have just not yet been discovered, but unfortunately,
after much looking, it can be concluded that there were no women artists that
can compare to the great male artists of the past. She then asks if there is
possibly a different type of greatness for women that has been overlooked. This
question then leads to the question of whether the art of women artists is
different enough from that of male artists that it could not be compared and
would need its own definition of greatness. However, again after much looking
Nochlin states that the style of female artists of the past does not drastically
differ from that of male artists of the same time periods so there could not be
a different category of greatness.
According to
Nochlin, it is not until you realize that women are not the only group excluded
from being great artists that you are able to find the answer as to why there
are no great women artists. In her own words, “But in actually, as we all know,
things are 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 good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and, above
all, male.” (Nochlin, 150). Therefore, according to Nochlin, it is society, and
not the skill of women artists, that has prevented women from becoming “great”
artists. In the past, women have simply lacked the opportunity to become great
artists since, as she discusses later in her essay, great artists are taught to
become great and not just born that way as was previously believed.
Likewise in the
essay “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” Griselda Pollock also comes to
the conclusion that is it the views of society at the time that had prevented the
women artists of the past from becoming great artists. The difference between Nochlin’s essay and Pollock’s
is that Pollock focuses on the spaces in which man and women were allowed to occupy
and shows how these spaces have limited what women artists of the past were
able to accomplish. She states that the spaces and subjects that women were
able to paint were much more limited than that of artists who were men. She
uses the artwork of Mary Cassatt as an example when discussing the spaces, or
locations, in which women artists worked. She explains how most of these spaces
are very private spaces, such as in the home or in gardens. Women were expected
to stay in very domestic spaces and were not allowed in the public, social
areas in which men frequented. If they did enter these male spaces they were
considered masculine and looked down upon. This was the case with all women,
not just women artists, but it had a huge affect on the artwork that was
created by women artists since they were limited to what they could show in
their artwork. This is why so much of the artwork created by women in the past
is about other women in domestic scenes or about mothers and children.
Pollock then goes
on to explain a different type of space beyond the physical location. She
states that “The spaces of femininity operated not only at the level of what is
represented, the drawing room or sewing room. The spaces of femininity are
those from which femininity is lived as a positionality in discourse and social
practice.”(Pollock, 66) This refers to what was expected and not allowed in
terms of behavior of women of these times. Men were allowed so much more
freedom to show the world in ways that women were not allowed to experience. Pollock
also discusses “the gaze” which is about how men would view women in ways which
women were not allowed to view anyone. To men, women were considered the object
of the gaze, and because of this they were often shown as “objects” in male
artwork. Women, however, were not allowed to gaze upon a man in this way, which
is why, Pollock claims that there is a very different feeling bought forth when
a figurative work of art was made by a women rather than a man. All of these
reasons together are why, Pollock argues, the artwork of women is so different
from that of men. This is where yet another difference between these two essays
lies. While both women come to the conclusion that society is the reason why
women have not been able to achieve the level of greatness that men have been
able to achieve, unlike Nochlin, Pollock believes that there is a clear
distinction between the type of art created by men and women.
As previously
stated, Nochlin claims that society prevented women from becoming great artists
by denying them opportunities to learn to become great. She also discusses how women
were not able to have these opportunities because they had different demands of
their time that did not leave time to take a career in the arts seriously, even
if they did have access to these opportunities. These demands included taking
care of the house, being a dedicated wife and raising children. These demands
were of a domestic nature, which is in agreement with Pollock’s statement that
women were expected to stay in domestic spaces. Another area where Nochlin and
Pollock’s essays are in agreement is with a specific denied opportunity. This
was the opportunity to draw from nude models. In Nochlin’s words, “Needless to
say, central to the training programs of academies since their inception late
in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, was life drawing from the
nude, generally mole, model.”(Nochlin, 159) Both essays discuss how men were
allowed this essential opportunity, but women were not allowed to even view
nude models because it was not considered proper for the time. This was one of
the denied opportunities that Nochlin discusses, as well as one of the “spaces”
that Pollock would say women were not allowed to be part of. Since this
practice is still such an essential part of artistic training today, it is no
wonder that without it women in the past were not able to achieve the level of
greatness reached by men.
These reading were
of interest to me, not only because I am a woman and an artist, but also because
of how these views of the past relate to my own artwork now. I have had all of
these opportunities that were previously denied to women and yet the themes of
my artwork are very similar to the artwork that was created by women who had
far fewer choices than myself. In Pollock’s essay she talks about how Mary
Cassatt, as well as other women artists during that time, would paint mainly
women and children since they were limited to those private, domestic spaces in
which proper women were expected to remain. I now choose to paint these same themes;
however I do so because I chose to and not because it is expected. This then
causes me to question how many of these women artists would have painted
differently if they had more options, and which would have continued to work
from these so called “ domestic” scenes with children that I currently find to
be my largest source of inspiration.
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