State of the Art: Women have broken countless barriers in the art world

A Y chromosome is apparently a hot commodity on the art market. While this is far from a revelation, it’s an unfortunate fact that bears repeating.

In one of my art history classes the other week, we were assigned to read feminist art historian Linda Nochlin’s monumental essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, and it got me thinking. With her article, Nochlin essentially threw down a gauntlet and tossed a smoldering glove into the centuries-old art history hegemony. Even the title, provocative in its own right, implies that to engage with the query Nochlin posits, we must first accept that there are no women artists who deserve to be seen as great.

Her answer to the question examined how the very idea of greatness is often defined to apply exclusively to men — in what she calls the myth of innate genius — and how a history of institutional conventions and social misconceptions has systematically squandered women’s success in the arts. (Just your everyday feminist stuff but decades ahead of her time.)

“The arts, as in a hundred other areas,” she wrote, “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.”  

Art historians — the bulk of whom did have the good fortune to be born white, middle class and male — would like to have us believe women artists haven’t risen to the top of the art world because they are inherently lesser.

But, Nochlin says, “the fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles or our empty internal spaces but in our institutions and our education.”

Evidently, nearly every line of her seminal piece reads like it should be followed by a metaphorical mic drop.

Her extensive feminist critiques, impelled by a missionary-like zeal, helped initiate new conversations and introduce new frameworks for gender and identity in art. Today, we are still collectively working toward rewriting art history based on the first edits Nochlin made.

Forty years later, I, a young woman of color, can critically engage with these issues in a personal column. So, because Nochlin started the conversation and set it up so that I could have a voice, I’m going to close out Women’s History Month with a reflection on female artists who have changed the game and hazard a guess at what Nochlin’s titular inquiry means in the context of today’s art world.

Georgia O’Keeffe was dubbed the first female American modernist and is notable for vulvar imagery in her paintings of flowers and landscapes. She was famously coy, however, about the confines of traditional feminine identity and denied not only that her flowers bore any resemblance to female genitalia but also that she was a feminist artist at all. But perhaps her refusal to engage directly with her womanhood is exactly what made her well-suited to spark the feminist fire that began brewing in the 1970s. As a woman artist who didn’t champion herself as such, she demanded attention from the men in charge and made them indisputably recognize her greatness, independent of aspects of her identity that would have made her easy to dismiss. Thank you, Georgia, for opening the floodgates for motifs celebrating femininity in art made by and for women and for vagina paintings galore.

I also have to mention Yoko Ono, whose legacy as a pioneering Fluxus artist is often overshadowed by her relationship with John Lennon. Her performance “Cut Piece” — in which she invited audience members to cut her clothes off with scissors while she sat motionless and expressionless — was an intersectional meditation on the passivity of the female body and the aggressive act of forcibly unclothing it. Thank you, Yoko, for your genius and unabashed confrontation of the power of femininity.  

If anything, women artists are more daring and provocative than men have ever attempted to be.

Thank you, Judy Chicago, for engaging with the role women play in birth and creation. Thank you, Cindy Sherman, for pointing out how female beauty is constructed by the male gaze in photography. Thank you, Marina Abramovic, for testing the limits of women’s minds and bodies and showing the world what we’re capable of.

In the end, I have come to realize that greatness is a relative concept. These women may be deemed great in my eyes because I can understand and relate to their works, while someone else — namely the white, middle class, male decision-makers of the art world — may dismiss the same works as worthless. Ultimately, this harkens back to the structural and institutional challenges Nochlin pointed out that prevent women artists from receiving the same access to education or resources as men.

Jenny Saville, who holds the title for highest-paid living female artist with a self-portrait that sold for $12.4 million, still lags light years behind the highest-paid living male artist, David Hockney, and his whopping $90.3 million sale. A recent National Museum of Women in the Arts survey of the permanent collections of 18 prominent art museums in the U.S. found that 87 percent of the over 10,000 artists represented are male. The art world must reexamine its leadership and consider how it still systematically stifles women by never even giving them the opportunity to display their greatness.

Now as much as 40 years ago, these vast discrepancies prove that there are still strides to be made. It’s a slow, painstaking fight erupting across industries, and the art world needs to remember to credit the woman who laid the foundation. Thank you, Linda Nochlin, for making sure there is more space in the art world for women to be greater today than ever before.

Catherine Yang is a senior writing about art and visual culture. She is also the digital managing editor of the Daily Trojan. Her column, “State of the Art,” runs every other Wednesday.