The Feminist Critique of Art History 01

The Feminist Critique of Art History
Author(s): Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews
Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Sep., 1987), pp. 326-357 Published by: CAA
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3051059
Accessed: 29-10-2018 14:09 UTC

Page 327 -

"The concept of greatness as something toward which artists aspire is too deeply ingrained to be easily divested. Reactions to Nochlin's argument were immediate and specific. Most extravagant was Cindy Nemser's riposte (1975), in which she unwittingly reasserted the patriarchal model as the relevant one to evaluate art by women. Her heroic conception of genius, and her assertion that "women can do it all,'" set women against men and against each other, a position that many feminists were then trying to move beyond; more important, she ignored the need to explore why women have been repressed, and to work to change those conditions, institutions, and ideologies, goals that are central to some of the feminist critics to be discussed below. As Carol Duncan pointed out in her review essay of Nemser's book, by insisting that art and greatness are universal, Nemser rejected any possibility for women's art "to grow out of a consciousness and experience that is typically female."

Page 329 -

"The feminist movement in art began in the late 1960s, under the impetus of the more general feminist movement and political activism of the mid-1960s.21 From the beginning, the emphasis of artists on the East and West Coasts was different. New York artists sought economic parity and equal representation in exhibitions, through a critique of institutional sexism, whereas their West Coast counterparts were more concerned with exploring issues of aesthetics and female consciousness."

"The first women's art organisation, Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), began in NY in 1969 as a splinter group of the Art Workers Coalition, which was politically radical but indifferent to women's issues. The following year, the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists was organised by Lucy Lippard to protest the near-total exclusion of women artists from galleries and museum exhibitions."

"Their protest against the number of women artists in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Annual "raised the Whitney's consciousness", so that instead of the usual five to ten percent of representation, in 1970 it showed twenty five percent. This figure remains almost the same today, despite continuing feminist activism.

"Women in the Arts (WIA) was founded in 1971, and two years later organised a major show of one hundred and nine contemporary women artists, "Women Choose Women," at the New York Cultural Centre. It was the first of many such shows that culminated in the exhibition, Women Artists 1550-1950, organised by Harris and Nochlin. About the same time, feminist artists picketed the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972, and again in 1984, to protest the number of women artists exhibited there."

Page 330 -

"On the West Coast, Judy Chicago organised the first feminist art program in 1970 at Fresno State College. The following year she collaborated with Miriam Shapiro in the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts. The result was the celebrated "Womanhouse" exhibition, in which the group took over an entire house to express their particular definition of women's lives as shaped by their new feminist consciousness. These ranged from outrage, to irony, to humour."

"Womanspace Journal, edited by Ruth Iskin, begun in 1973 but lasting only three issues, contained a number of important early feminist statements on art."

"The longer-lived Feminist Art Journal, based on the East Coast and guided by Cindy and Chuck Nemser, was founded by former staff members of Women and Art in 1972, and added a feminist perspective to contemporary art criticism."

"In 1975, Women Artists Newsletter was founded (titled Women Artists News since 1978), and it still serves as a major outlet for news of activities, conferences, and exhibitions specifically of women artists."

"Elsa Honig Fine's Woman's Art Journal began publication in 1980, and has maintained a reputation for publishing scholarly articles on women artists from all historical periods, with a variety of viewpoints."

"Outside the United States, feminist art movements have also flourished. In Britain, feminist activity began in the early 1970s, about the same time as in the US. Arising from a Marxist ideology, British feminists have been politically active since the beginning of the movement. Magazine collective 'Spare Rib' began publication in 1972 and is still in print. That same year the Women's Art History Collective was established. The magazine 'Block' has published significant feminist articles since its inception in 1979 and the scholarly journal Art History continues to publish much feminist research.

Page 332 -

"As a result of the feminist movement in art and art history in America, an older generation of women artists have been recognised for their talents. Lee Krasner has been credited as a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism. Louise Bourgeois, who had had only six one-artists exhibition between 1950 and 1978, had seven from 1978 and 1981, and was given a major retrospective at the MoMA in 1982."

"Miriam Schapiro, thinking back over her involvement with the early phase of feminist art, aptly describes the "jubilant" mood of women artists:

"We had discovered the gold of sisterhood and it was a unique and precious find. It gave us the moral support that our previous isolation had prevented. Out of our consciousness-raising groups and our political action meetings we emerged as a vigorous art body. . . . The position papers . . . written by the first wave of liberationists . . . stressed the gathering of one's forces for freedom from the intellectual and emotional dependence on men."

"The first decade of feminist art thus was buoyed not only by anger, but by a new sense of community, the attempts to develop a new art to express a new sensibility, and an optimistic faith in the ability of art to promote and even engender a feminist consciousness."

Art Versus Craft

"The first generation of women artists and art critics recognised that women were underrepresented in exhibitions and galleries, and, more important, that female experience was neither validated nor even addressed in mainstream art. The Modernist myth of the artist assumes that s/he stands outside social structures and is therefore free to express universal experience without prejudice or limitations. In Europe and this country, however, "universal vision" is too often equivalent to white, middle-class, male perception. "Omission is one of the mechanisms by which fine art reinforces the values and beliefs of the powerful and suppresses the experience of others".

"A large part of traditional female creative output that conveyed a female experience had been invalidated as art and relegated to the category of 'craft' through the creation of an aesthetic hierarchy qualitatively differentiating 'high' from 'low' art.  As Broude makes clear in her article on Miriam Schapiro, until recently, 'decorative art and decorative impulses... acted as important liberating catalysts' for male artists, whereas traditional decorative art created by women was considered 'women's work'.