The Feminist Critique of Art History

Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews

Art criticism and art history from a feminist perspective are recent phenomena,
emerging only during the last fifteen years. They have, in their short history, moved
from a first generation in which "the condition and experience of being female"
was emphasized to a second generation1, beginning in the late 1970s, influenced
by feminist criticism in other disciplines and offering a more complex critique of
both art and culture through an investigation of the production and evaluation of
art and the role of the artist. In this survey, we propose, first, to outline the history
of feminist art and art history, then to discuss the interrelated themes in each, and,
finally, in the concluding and pivotal sections (IV and V), to discuss various fem-
inist art-critical and art-historical methodologies.

I. The Emergence of Feminism in Art
and Art History
Art History: Women, History, and Greatness
Feminist inquiry in art history began in 1971 with Linda
Nochlin's article, "Why Are There No Great Women Art-
ists?" In her answer to this question, she stressed that:
Art is not a free autonomous activity of a super-endowed
individual, "influenced" by previous artists and more va-
guely and superficially by "social forces," but rather . . .
occurs in a social situation, is an integral element of so-
cial structure, and is mediated and determined by specific
and definable social institutions, be they art academies,
systems of patronage, mythologies of the divine creator
and artist as he-man or social outcast.2
The potentially radical implications of Nochlin's initial
analysis could not be fully explored until neglected women
artists were identified. That was the main objective of a
series of biographical and expository studies by Eleanor
Tufts (1974), Hugo Munsterberg (1975), and Karen Peter-
son and J.J. Wilson (1976).3
In 1976 Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris published
Women Artists 1550-1950, the catalogue of the momen-
tous exhibition they had organized, which opened in Los
Angeles and traveled to Austin, Pittsburgh, and Brooklyn,
and brought to public attention the achievements of women
artists.4 In the preface to their catalogue, Harris and Noch-
lin stated: "Neither of us believes that this catalog is the
last word on the subject. On the contrary, we both look
forward to reading the many articles, monographs, and
critical responses that we hope this exhibition will gener-
ate."5 Their wish was not entirely fulfilled, for monographs
on women artists are still very few and most of them are
devoted to artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

We are grateful to Oberlin College and the College of Wooster for faculty
grants to support research for this article. We would also like to thank
Lisa Tickner, Griselda Pollock, Beth Irwin Lewis, Linda Nochlin, and Linda
Hults for their willingness to share unpublished materials with us. Finally,
we thank Richard Spear for his encouragement in preparation of this essay.
1
Such a move characterizes other disciplines as well. See Hester Eisen-
stein, "Introduction," The Future of Difference, ed. Hester Eisenstein and
Alice Jardine, New Brunswick, NJ, 1985, xvi-xviii.
2
Linda Nochlin, 'Why Are There No Great Women Artists?" Women in
Sexist Society. Studies in Power and Powerlessness, ed. Vivian Gornick
and Barbara Moran, New York, 1971, 480-510; reprinted in a special issue
of Art News, January, 1971, as "Why Have There Been No Great Women
Artists?" and in the important early collection of essays, -Art and Sexual
Politics, ed. Thomas B. Hess, Elizabeth C. Baker, New York, London,
1971.
3
Eleanor Tufts, Our Hidden Heritage: Five Centuries of Women Artists,
New York, 1974; Hugo Munsterberg, A History of Women Artists, 1975;
Karen Petersen and J.J. Wilson, Women Artists: Recognition and Reap-
praisal from the Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, New York,
1976. For a history of women scholars in the visual arts from 1820 on,
see Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820-1979, ed. Claire Richter
Sherman with Adele M. Holcomb, Westport, CT, and London, 1981.
4
Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists 1550-1950,
New York, 1976.
5
Ibid., 11.

centuries.6
The documentation of women artists' work and lives has
continued in the late 1970s and 1980s primarily in surveys:
books by Elsa Honig Fine (1978), Josephine Withers (1979),
and Wendy Slatkin (1985), which are intended as comple-
ments to the standard art history surveys, which even now
acknowledge the existence of women in only a most cur-
sory way. The documentation also has been carried on in
more extensive compendia: Charlotte Streifer Rubenstein's
American Women Artists (1982) and Chris Petteys' mon-
umental Dictionary of Women Artists (1985).7
Many of those books share to a certain extent the un-
spoken but still apparent objective, to prove that women
have been as accomplished, even if not as "great" as men,
and to try to place women artists within the traditional
historical framework. As will be developed later in this
essay, we believe such an approach is ultimately self-
defeating, for it fixes women within preexisting structures
without questioning the validity of these structures. Fur-
thermore, since many of the same women artists have been
repeatedly discussed, feminist art history has come dan-
gerously close to creating its own canon of white female
artists (primarily painters), a canon that is almost as re-
strictive and exclusionary as its male counterpart.
The debate over "greatness" exemplifies the nature of the
issues raised among the first generation of feminist writers.
By emphasizing the primary role of institutional factors in
determining artistic achievement, Nochlin challenged the
6
For example: Griselda Pollock, Mary Cassatt, London and New York,
1980; Gillian Perry, Paula Modersohn-Becker. Her Life and Work, New
York, 1979; Mina C. Klein and H. Arthur Klein, Käthe Kollwitz. Life in
Art, New York, 1972; Martha Kearns, Käthe Kollwitz. Woman and Artist,
New York, 1976; Barbara Rose, Helen Frankenthaler, New York, 1970;
Patricia Hills, Alice Neel, New York, 1983. Exceptions to this trend in-
clude: Anne Marie Passez, Adélaide Labille-Guiard: Biographie et cata-
logue raisonné de son oeuvre, Paris, 1975; Marianne Roland-Michel, Anne
Vallayer-Coster, 1744-1818, Paris, 1970; and Mary Garrard's forthcoming
monograph on Artemisia Gentileschi to be published by Princeton Uni-
versity Press in 1988. This is a very incomplete listing of recent mono-
graphs, and includes no exhibition catalogues. Most recently, two mono-
graphs on Gwen John were published: Cecily Langdale and David Fraser
Jenkins, Gwen John: An Interior Life, New York, 1986, and Mary Taub-
man, Gwen John: The Artist and Her Work, Ithaca, NY, 1986, but, as
Eunice Lipton and Carol Gemel point out in their review (The Women's
Review of Books, iv, December, 1986, 10-11), "both texts avoid the very
perspectives that would illuminate John's life and work" and "eschew
questions of gender and ideology." Langdale and Fraser do acknowledge
feminism as a critical perspective, but do not let this alter the parameters
of their Modernist discourse.
7
Elsa Honig Fine, Women and Art, A History of Women Painters and
Sculptors from the Renaissance to the 20th Century, Montclair, NJ and
London, 1978; Josephine Withers, Women Artists from Washington Col-
lections, College Park, MD, 1979; Wendy Slatkin, Women Artists in His-
tory from Antiquity to the 20th Century, New York, 1985; Charlotte Strei-
fer Rubenstein, American Women Artists: From Early Indian Times to
the Present, Boston, 1982; Chris Petteys, Dictionary of Women Artists,
an International Dictionary of Women Artists Born Before 1900, Boston,
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ART HISTORY 327
myth of the great artist as one who is endowed with that
mysterious and ineffable quality called genius. However,
as Norma Broude later pointed out, she did not question
the authority or validity of the male-defined notion of
greatness and artistic achievement.8
The concept of greatness as something toward which art-
ists aspire is too deeply ingrained to be easily divested. Re-
actions 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 con-
ception of genius, and her assertion that "women can do
it all,"9 set women against men and against each other, a
position that many feminists were then trying to move be-
yond; 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 cen-
tral to some of the feminist critics to be discussed below.
As Carol Duncan pointed out in her review essay of Nem-
ser'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."10
Germaine Greer passionately reasserted the principle of
greatness in The Obstacle Race, the most extensive survey
of women artists to date, where she declared that one "can-
not make great artists out of egos that have been damaged,
with wills that are defective, with libidos that have been
1985. Also see Lamia Doumato, "The Literature of Women in Art," Ox-
ford Art Journal, iii, April, 1980, 74-77. Bibliographies include Eleanor
Tufts, American Women Artists, Past and Present: A Selected Biblio-
graphical Guide, New York, 1984; Donna G. Bachmann and Sherry Pi-
land, Women Artists: An Historical, Contemporary and Feminist Bibli-
ography, Metuchen, NJ, and London, 1978; and Virginia Watson-Jones,
Contemporary American Women Sculptors, Phoenix, AZ, 1986.
8
Norma Broude, review of Greer, Obstacle Race, Munro, Originals, and
Loeb, Feminist Collage, in Art Journal, XLI, 1981, 180-82. Nochlin (as in
n. 2) only briefly alluded to the issue that there might be a "different kind
of 'greatness' for women's art than for men's art," and concluded that
"women artists and writers would seem to be closer to other artists and
writers of their own period and outlook than they are to each other." In
her essay of 1973, Nochlin altered her position enough to admit that,
although she had said (in 1971) "that simply looking into women artists
of the past would not really change our estimation of their values," she
nevertheless went on to explore "some women artists of the past" and
found her "estimations and values have, in fact, changed," and that in
the process of examining them, her "whole notion of what art is all about
is gradually changing." See Linda Nochlin, "How Feminism in the Arts
Can Implement Cultural Change," Women and the Arts, Arts in Society,
xi, 1974, 81-89, reprinted in Feminist Collage, ed. Judy Loeb, New York,
1974, 3-13, under the title "Toward a Juster Vision. How Feminism Can
Change Our Ways of Looking at Art History."
9
Art Talk. Conversations with 12 Women Artists, New York, 1975, 6.
10
Carol Duncan, "When Greatness is a Box of Wheaties," Artforum, Oct.,
1975, 63.
driven out of reach and energy diverted into neurotic chan-
nels"11 Both Broude and Lisa Tickner took Greer to task
for this attitude.12 Broude pointed out that Greer "measures
the works of women of the past against the standard of
male artistic values and achievements, thereby accepting,
unquestioningly, the patriarchy's definition of artistic
'greatness.'" Greer's position thus ultimately is not very dif-
ferent from that of Nemser. Broude further compared this
position to that of Hilton Kramer, who asked if "the influ-
ence of the Women's Movement" has "contributed to an
erosion of critical standards in art."13 For Broude and most
feminist art historians working today, the question is not
one of immutable, amorphous "standards of greatness," but
rather the nature of the "very values upon which those
standards are based," that is, "the parochial values and
standards of the male culture." Indeed Broude called for a
reexamination of the basis upon which works of art are
judged to be "good" or "bad." "What are [the critics'] val-
ues? Where do these values come from? Whose life expe-
riences do they represent? And, finally, are those life ex-
periences and values necessarily the only ones out of which
art may come?"
Ten years after Nochlin's first article, two British art his-
torians, Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, in Old Mis-
tresses: Women, Art and Ideology, took fundamentally new
directions from earlier surveys by rejecting evaluative crit-
icism altogether. They turned to an analysis of women's
historical and ideological position in relation to art, art pro-
duction, and artistic ideology as a means to question the
assumptions that underlie the traditional historical frame-
work.14 In doing so, they touched upon another of Noch-
11
Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters
and Their Work, New York, 1979. The organization of the book itself is
based on this central thesis and groups the women according to the nature
of the obstacle that destroyed their ego (Family, Love, The Illusion of
Success, etc.). It is unfortunate that Greer could not get beyond the thesis
she had already expounded in The Female Eunuch (New York, 1971),
namely that women have been castrated by a society that programs them
to serve and submit, for her book is substantial, shows evidence of ex-
tensive research in museums, libraries, and archives, and contains inter-
esting and even stimulating material that could be useful for further re-
search, but it goes over questions that had already been asked and is
unable to move beyond them. One has the impression that research for
it was started in the early 1970s, and that the immensity of the project
delayed publication to the point that the book came out too late. In the
context of the late 1970s it is an anachronism.
12
Broude (as in n. 8), 180-83; and Tickner, Woman's Art Journal, 1, Fall,
1980/Winter, 1981, 64-69.
13
Broude (as in n. 8), 181. See Kramer, "Does Feminism Conflict with
Artistic Standards?" New 'York Times, 27 Jan. 1980, section 2, 1, 27. In
lin's major points, that is, "to what extent our very con-
sciousness of how things are in the world has been
conditioned — too often falsified — by the way the most
important questions are posed."15 Pollock and Parker em-
phasized that "the way the history of art has been studied
and evaluated is not the exercise of neutral 'objective' schol-
arship but an ideological practice." They recognized that
"women's relation to artistic and social structures has been
different to that of male artists" and their purpose is to
"analyse women's practice as artists to discover how they
negotiated their particular position."16
Parker and Pollock also posed new questions:
Why has it been necessary to negate so large a part of
the history of art, to dismiss so many artists, to denigrate
so many works of art simply because the artists were
women? What does this reveal about the structures and
ideologies of art history, how it defined what is and what
is not art, to whom it accords the status of artist and
what that status means?
Their book, as they state, is "not a history of women
artists, but an analysis of the relations between women, art
and ideology."17
In asserting and utilizing a deconstructive approach for
feminist art research, Old Mistresses is different from all
of the other surveys of women artists, which tend to re-
cover the lives and works of women, without a conscious
ideological method.18 Using various new approaches such
as the construction of gender and psychoanalytic theory,
Pollock and Parker "deconstruct" the image of the woman
his magazine, The New Criterion, Kramer still upholds his male-defined,
traditional view of greatness as dominated by certain aesthetic criteria.
14
Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, New
York, 1981; also see Pollock, "Women, Art and Ideology: Questions for
Feminist Art Historians," Woman's Art Journal, iv, Spring/Summer, 1983,
42.
15
Nochlin (as in n. 2), 484, who pursued this point further (1974, as in
n. 8).
16
Pollock and Parker (as in n. 14), xviii-xix. They emphasize that "to see
women's history only as a progressive struggle against great odds is to
fall into the trap of unwittingly reasserting the established male standards
as the appropriate norm. If women's history is simply judged against the
norms of male history, women are once again set apart, outside the his-
torical process of which both men and women are indissolubly part."
17
Ibid., 132-33.
18
An exception is Nochlin's essay in Harris and Nochlin (as in n. 4), 45-
67.

artist and the nature of male fascination with the female
body.19
Between the decade of Nochlin's first article and the work
of Pollock and Parker, various art historians have done
significant revisionist work, which will be discussed in sec-
tion II below.
The First Generation of Art and Art Criticism
Because much of the art-historical activity just discussed
was preceded and conditioned by the activities of women
artists and critics, a short history of the feminist movement
in art and art criticism is useful at this point. Women artists
of the first generation were concerned with issues pertain-
ing to the nature, evaluation, and status of female artistic
production, and have been at the forefront in the devel-
opment of feminist art criticism.20
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 begin-
ning, 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 organization, Women Artists in
Revolution (WAR), began in New York 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 or-
19
Parker and Pollock do not want merely to rescue "Old Mistresses" from
undeserved neglect and to reestablish their reputations, and they do not
want to annex them to the mainstream of art history or simply to absorb
them as additions (as in n. 14, 45-46). They believe that the existence and
"activity of women in art throughout history is of itself a sufficient jus-
tification for historical inquiry" (ibid., 47). They quote Nochlin's state-
ment of 1971 that "the so-called woman question, far from being a pe-
ripheral sub-issue, can become a catalyst, a potent intellectual instrument
probing the most basic and 'natural' assumptions, providing a paradigm
for other kinds of internal questioning and providing links with paradigms
in other fields" (Nochlin, as in n. 2), and they argue that "a radical reform
if not a total deconstruction of the present structure of the discipline is
needed in order to arrive at a real understanding of the history of women
and art" (Parker and Pollock, as in n. 14, 47-48). The contemporary gen-
eration of feminists, as well as poststructuralist writers in general, have
deconstructed the myth of greatness and its relation to genius for both
male and female artists.
Roland Barthes' concept of the "death of the author" has permeated
much recent literature in most disciplines concerned with Postmodern cul-
ture, including art and feminism. (Roland Barthes, "The Death of the
Author" [1968], Image Music Text, transl. Stephen Heath, New York,
1977, 142-48. See Deborah Cherry, "Feminist Interventions: Feminist Im-
peratives," review of Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses, in Art History,
v, 1982, 503. Many other examples could be cited. See Janet Wolff's mod-
eration of Barthes' extreme position in The Social Production of Art, New
York, 1984, chap. 6.)
20
See Christine Havice, "The Artist in Her Own Words," Woman's Art
Journal, n, Fall/Winter, 1982, 1-7; and n. 3 above for artists as writers.
21
For a brief history of this phase of feminist activities in the art world,
see Lucy Lippard, "Sexual Politics: Art Style," in From the Center. Fem-
inist Essays in Women's Art, ed. Lucy Lippard, New York, 1976, 28-37
(a longer version of the article first published in Art in America, Sept.,
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ART HISTORY 329
ganized 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 representation, in 1970 it showed twenty-
two percent women artists. This figure remains almost the
same today, despite continuing feminist activism. Women
in the Arts (WIA) was founded in 1971, and two years later
organized a major show of one hundred and nine contem-
porary women artists, "Women Choose Women," at the
New York Cultural Center. It was the first of many such
shows that culminated in the exhibition, Women Artists
1550-1950, organized 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.
Meanwhile, other organizations were created to meet the
needs of the proliferation of art by women and the interest
in women's art. In New York, the Women's Interart Center
opened in 1971; and women's cooperative galleries were
opened, including the A.I.R. Gallery in 1972 and Soho 20
in 1973, both of which are still active. In Chicago, Artem-
isia and Arc Galleries were opened in 1973. Faith Ringgold
and her daughter Michele Wallace organized Women Stu-
dents and Artists for Black Art Liberation to protest the
exclusion of women artists from exhibitions of Black art-
ists, and, in 1971, Black women artists formed their own
organization, Where We At.
On the West Coast, Judy Chicago organized the first
1971); A Documentary Herstory of Women Artists in Revolution, W.A.R.,
New York, May, 1971; Elizabeth Baker, "Pickets on Parnassus,"Art News,
Sept., 1970, 31; Cindy Nemser, "The Women Artists' Movement," The
Feminist Art Journal, v, Winter, 1973/74, 8-10; Judith Hole and Ellen Lev-
ine, Rebirth of Feminism, New York, 1974, 365-68; Gloria Orenstein, "Re-
view Essay: Art History," Signs, i, Winter, 1975, 505-25; and Cynthia
Navaretta, ed., Guide to Women's Art Organizations: Groups, Activities,
Networks, Publications, New York, 1979. Statistical surveys done in the
early years of the feminist movement also played a role in urging action
by pointing out the blatant inequalities in the art world and academia.
See Orenstein (as in this note), and the WCA survey of art departments,
and the Tamarind Lithography Workshop's 1972 study by June Wayne,
et al., Sex Differentials in Art Exhibition Reviews: A Statistical Study,
Los Angeles. For the position of women in academia, see Ann Sutherland
Harris' articles, "Women in College Art Departments and Museums," Art
Journal, xxxii, 1973, 417-18; "The Second Sex in Academe, Fine Arts Di-
vision," Art in America, May-June, 1972, 18-19, and "The Second Sex in
Academe," A.A.U.P. Bulletin, 1970, 283-95. Also see Barbara Ehrlich
White and Leon S. White, "Survey on the Status of Women in College
Art Departments," Art Journal, xxxii, 1973, 420-22. For an overview of
women's studies in art history, see Athena Tacha Spear, "Women's Studies
in Art and Art History," mimeographed booklet, College Art Association,
Detroit, 1974; and Barbara Ehrlich White, "A 1974 Perspective: Why
Women's Studies in Art and Art History?" Art Journal, xxxv, 1976, 340-
44. For the Southern California women artists' movement, see Faith Wild-
ing, By Our Own Rands: The Women Artists Movement, Southern Cal-
ifornia, 1970-1976, Santa Monica, 1977. For a short review of the begin-
ning phases and activities of the women's movement in art, see Lawrence
Alloway, "Women's Art in the '70s," Art in America, May/June, 1976,
64-72. He also talks about early exhibitions of contemporary art by
women. Also see Grace Glueck, "Women Artists '80," Art News, Oct.,
1980, 58-63.
feminist art program in 1970 at Fresno State College. The
following year she collaborated with Miriam Schapiro in
the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the
Arts.22 The result was the celebrated "Womanhouse" ex-
hibition, 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, a Gesamt-
kunstwerk of women's images. These ranged from outrage
to irony and humor.23 This collaboration soon devolved
into two separate workshops: Chicago's performance
group, whose influence on feminist performance art and
the genre in general can still be felt, and Schapiro's journal-
writing class, which also was influential for feminist and
other art.24 After her return to New York in 1975, Schapiro,
along with Nancy Azara and others, founded the on-going
Feminist Art Institute in 1979. Womanspace, a nonprofit
gallery and art center, and the Los Angeles Woman's Build-
ing, with exhibition spaces, workshops, and programs of
study, both opened in 1973, and were important devel-
opments in that explosive beginning of feminist art in Cal-
ifornia.25 In 1972, the Women's Caucus for Art was estab-
lished, with chapters across the country, intended to bring
together and provide a forum for women in all areas of the
arts. Its original purpose was to correct perceived imbal-
ances within the College Art Association, academia, and
the art world. At its conferences, major issues concerning
women and art continue to be presented and debated.
Publications devoted to those new developments were
not long in appearing, though they were often short-lived.26
For example, Womanspace Journal, edited by Ruth Iskin,
22
See Judy Chicago, Through the Flower: My Struggles as a Woman Art-
ist, Garden City, 1973, chaps. 4-6; Arlene Raven, Judy Chicago, and Sheila
de Bretteville, "The Feminist Studio Workshop," Womanspace Journal, i,
Feb./Mar., 1973; and Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, "A Feminist
Art Program," Art Journal, xxxxi, 1971, 48-49.
23
Miriam Schapiro, "The Education of Women as Artists: Project Wom-
anhouse," originally published in Art Journal, xxxi, 1972, 268-70; repr.
in Loeb (as in n. 8), 247-53; and Womanhouse, exh. cat., 1971. Other
collective projects include Chicago's The Dinner Party, completed 1979,
discussed below, her Birth Project, 1985, and the "Sister Chapel," a trav-
eling exhibition, 1978, of eleven painted panels paying homage to female
role models from Bella Abzug to Frida Kahlo, conceived and organized
by Ilise Greenstein. It was perceived as a "counterattack against the pa-
triarchal world view expressed in the Sistine Chapel." See Gloria F. Or-
enstein, "The Sister Chapel, a Traveling Homage to Heroines," Wom-
anart, i, Winter/Spring, 1977, 12.
24
See the two books published by Schapiro with her students, Anony-
mous Was a Woman, Valencia, CA, 1974 (not to be confused with Mirra
Bank's book), and a volume of letters and statements by artists from a
project of the Feminist Art Program, Art: A Woman's Sensibility, ed.
Miriam Schapiro, Valencia, CA, 1975. For a history of the performance
art movement among feminist artists in California, often inspired by Chi-
cago, see Martha Rosier, "The Private and the Public: Feminist Art in
California," Artforum, Sept., 1977, 66-74, and Moira Roth, "Toward a
History of California Performance: Part One and Two," Arts Magazine,
Feb. and June, 1978, and The Amazing Decade. Women and Performance
Art in America, 1970-1980, ed. Moira Roth, Los Angeles, 1983.
25
See Arlene Raven, "Feminist Education: A Vision of Community and
Women's Culture," in Loeb (as in n. 8), 254-59; Lucy Lippard, "The L.A.
Woman's Building," Prom the Center (as in n. 21), 96-100, orig. publ.
1974; and Nancy Manner, "Womanspace, A Creative Battle for Equality
in the Art World," Art News, Summer, 1973, 38-39. From the early 1970s
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.27 In-
terviews (mostly by Nemser) of living artists, and historical
profiles, although mainly biographical rather than critical,
were valuable source material in a field where little infor-
mation had been disseminated at all. However, critical is-
sues were raised in certain articles, such as the question of
"art" versus "craft" and the debate concerning a female sen-
sibility.28 In 1977, the Feminist Art Journal suddenly ceased
publication.
Christine Rom, who has thoroughly studied the history
of this important early journal from its inception to its de-
mise,29 sees its failure as more than monetary, although this
was the immediate cause. It was, she said, "seriously
plagued by obvious contradictions and confusions that
would have eventually threatened its continuance." As an
alternative publication, for example, it never lived up to
the expectations of its audience. "Radical feminist views
were slighted." Its tone became strident after 1974, when
Nemser and her husband became sole editors, and Nemser
began to use the magazine to promote her own point of
view. Finally, its censorship of Chicago, Schapiro, and Lip-
pard, among others, illustrates that it was not, as it was
proposed to be, "open to artists of all persuasions." Never-
theless, it documented the formative years of the women's
art movement, and published a number of important ar-
on, feminist art organizations, women's art centers, collectives, publi-
cations, and galleries have continued to proliferate. In 1971, West-East
Bag (WEB) was founded, a collective international effort to keep various
areas of the movement in touch with each other, which included the de-
velopment of a slide registry of women artists.
26
The critical journal, Women and Art, begun in 1971 by Redstocking
Artists, folded after only one issue in 1972. It was meant to "document
the activities of the women's art movement" (Christine Rom, "One View:
The Feminist Art Journal," in Woman's Art Journal, ii, Fall-Winter, 1981-
82, 20). Womanart was published for two years, from 1976. See Corinne
Robins, "The Women's Art Magazines," Art Criticism, ii, 1980, 84-95,
which documents the decline of women's art journals.
27
Its goal was to represent "women artists' voice in the art world, to
improve the status of all women artists, and to expose sexist exploitation
and discrimination," as well as "encourage women artists of all persua-
sions to discuss and illustrate their work" (Rom [as in n. 26], 20, citing
"Editorial," Feminist Art Journal, Apr., 1972, 2).
28
See Patricia Mainardi's "Quilts: The Great American Art," one of sev-
eral important articles on this issue in the Feminist An Journal, Winter,
1973 (republished in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., Feminism
and Art History: Questioning the Litany, New York, 1982, 331-46), and
her "Feminine Sensibility: An Analysis," again one among several on this
subject in the Feminist Art Journal (Fall, 1972). Through such articles,
particularly by Patricia Mainardi and Cindy Nemser, the magazine be-
came associated with certain stances. In the case of the female aesthetic,
for example, these two writers argued against Judy Chicago's biological
and universal interpretation. They also disagreed with her demand for
separatism. See, for example, Janet Sawyer and Patricia Mainardi, "A
Feminine Sensibility: Two Views," Feminist Art Journal, Apr., 1972.
29
The journal dates from 1972-77; see Rom (as in n. 26), 19-24. Citations
in this section are from Rom.

tides on various significant issues.
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 ex-
hibitions specifically of women artists. From 1977 to 1980,
the Los Angeles Woman's Building published Chrysalis: A
Magazine of Women's Culture. The title referred to the per-
sonal and cultural transformation of women believed to be
underway as a result of feminism. The journal covered a
broad range of cultural issues relevant to feminism, with
a number of articles devoted to feminist art and film. These
included Lippard's important statement on female and male
difference seen in the nature/culture dichotomy and in fe-
male body imagery in art by women;30 Gloria Orenstein's
"Leonora Carrington's Visionary Art for the New Age"
(issue no. 3); Ruth Iskin and Arlene Raven's "Through the
Peephole: Lesbian Sensibility in Art" (no. 4); and an in-
troduction to women artists' books by Lippard (no. 3). It
also contained a number of profiles of women artists such
as Mary Beth Edelson, Betye Saar, Judy Chicago, Suzanne
Lacy, and Eleanor Antin. The editorial board and list of
contributing editors reads like a "Who's Who" in feminist
art studies — from the art historians Arlene Raven, Carol
Duncan, Gloria Orenstein, and Linda Nochlin, to the art-
ists Judy Chicago and Sheila Levant de Bretteville, among
many others, as well as important feminist figures outside
the field, such as Adrienne Rich and Mary Daly. The jour-
nal's failure to continue publication despite the high quality
of its contributions is disheartening. Two valuable later ad-
ditions to feminist art literature still active today are Hel-
icon Nine, A Journal of Women's Art and Letters, begun
in 1979, with articles on women artists past and present,
and Women and Performance.
Two of the most important journals now published, with
very different emphases, are Heresies and the Woman's Art
Journal. The former, initiated ten years ago and published
by the Heresies Collective, describes itself as "an idea-ori-
ented journal devoted to the examination of art and politics
from a feminist perspective." The Collective consists of com-
mitted feminist artists, writers, anthropologists, art his-
torians, architects, filmmakers, photographers, etc. More
consistently than Chrysalis, which was similarly though
less politically oriented, Heresies focuses on a specific theme
30
Chrysalis, no. 2,1977, "Quite Contrary: Body, Nature, Ritual in Wom-
en's Art," 31-47, later reprinted as part of her book, Overlay, New York,
1983.
31
For example: in issue no. 1, Carol Duncan's important article, "The
Esthetics of Power in Modern Erotic Art," Heresies, i, 1977, 46-50; Lucy
Lippard's 'The Pink Glass Swan: Upward and Downward Mobility in the
Art World," reprinted in her anthology, Get the Message? A Decade of
Art for Social Change, New York, 1984; Eva Cockcroft's "Women in the
Community Mural Movement"; as well as works by the artists Martha
Rosier, Mary Beth Edelson, May Stevens, Nancy Spero, and the artist
Harmony Hammond's important contribution to the question of the na-
ture of the feminist sensibility, "Feminist Abstract Art — A Political
Viewpoint."
32
According to Alexis Hunter (Women Artists of the World, ed. Cindy
Lyle, Sylvia Moore, and Cynthia Navaretta, New York, 1984, 91), there
was an early conflict between expressions of political art and individual
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ART HISTORY 331
in each issue. Important topics have included Women and
Violence (issue no. 6), Lesbian Art and Artists (no. 3), Third
World Women (no. 8), Women and Architecture (no. 11),
Feminism and Ecology (no. 13), Women and Music (no. 10),
Film and Video (no. 16), and, on feminist art, Women's
Traditional Arts: The Politics of Aesthetics (no. 4). The
magazine contains much source material — writings by art-
ists or poets — as well as analysis and criticism.31 In its
international, radical perspectives on political, feminist,
class, and racial issues, Heresies has remained vital as an
alternative in the art world to the basically white, male-
dominated art journals. Over the years, it has evolved to-
wards more coverage of politics than art.
Elsa Honig Fine's Woman's Art Journal began publica-
tion in 1980, and has maintained a reputation for publish-
ing scholarly articles on women artists from all historical
periods, with a variety of viewpoints. It is certainly the
most important outlet for art-historical research on women
in America, considering the limited coverage given to the
field in more traditional journals.
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 this country, and
from its inception has been concerned with radical feminist
issues, such as building an audience of women, rather than
issues of equity with men. Arising from a Marxist ideology,
British feminists have been politically active since the be-
ginning of the movement.32 The feminist magazine collec-
tive, 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 signif-
icant feminist articles since its inception in 1979 and the
scholarly journal Art History continues to publish much
feminist research. The early phase of the movement was
influenced by American feminism, especially the work of
Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin, and the Feminist Art
Journal.33
Situations in Germany, Sweden, and Denmark seem very
similar to those in America, with activity beginning in the
early 1970s. Italy's feminist art movement began slightly
later, and is said to be polarized now along the lines of
party politics. In Southern Australia, Lippard's visit in 1975
catalyzed the movement.34 According to Susan Schwalb in
perception, which has now been settled so that both exist contiguously.
33
Griselda Pollock mentions these influences in her article, "What's Wrong
with Images of Women?" Screen Education, xxiv, 1977, 25, but goes on
to say that "the literature highlighted many important problems but was
not on the whole theoretically very rigorous of helpful." For a chronology
of events in the women's movement in Britain, see Margaret Harrison,
"Notes on Feminist Art in Britain 1970-77," Studio International CXLIII,
1977 (an issue on women's art), 212-20. She notes at the time of the article
the following areas "explored by women artists" there: "Examination of
the female psyche; political identification with working women; re-
interpretation of the myths of religion and gods and goddesses; use of
symbols to crystallise content; use of documentary techniques; devel-
opment of new forms and exhibiting structures; the inclusion of feminist
content in the work; and the location of the principles of feminism and
its relationship to the realities of a class society" (p. 220).
34
Women Artists of the World (as in n. 32), 119, 128.
332 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1987 VOLUME LXIX NUMBER 3
Women Artists of the World, the French are far behind
Americans in organizing. Lippard points out that, in France,
"feminist art is more often defined according to American
cultural feminist notions (autobiography, images of self,
performance, traditional arts) than according to the more
universalized psychopolitical theory for which French fem-
inism is known."35
As a result of the feminist movement in art and art his-
tory in America, an older generation of women artists have
been recognized for their talents. Lee Krasner has been
credited as a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism. Louise
Bourgeois, who had had only six one-artist exhibitions be-
tween 1950 and 1978, had seven from 1978 to 1981, and
was given a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern
Art in 1982. Alice Neel, who had been ignored throughout
the 1960s, was critically acclaimed before her death.36 De-
spite these and many other redressings that could be men-
tioned, none of those artists has been studied in as thorough
a manner as their male colleagues. The integration of their
art and their histories into the development of modern art
has not yet been accomplished, and there are even some
feminist historians and critics who have strong doubts
whether that is either possible or desirable.
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 liber-
ationists . . . stressed the gathering of one's forces for
freedom from the intellectual and emotional dependence
on men.37
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.
35
"Issue and Taboo," in Get the Message? (as in n. 31), 132. For a brief
overview of European feminist movements, see Women Artists of the
World (as in n. 32). For a discussion of the early period of feminist art
struggles in the United States, see Jacqueline Skiles, "The United States:
1970-1980," in the section entitled "The Status of Women in the Arts
Worldwide," Women Artists of the World (as in n. 32), 69-76. This book,
in fact, gives an important overview of feminist art movements through-
out the Western world and some third-world countries. The similarity of
conditions and attitudes towards women artists and their work in the 19th
and 20th centuries comes through clearly in these essays.
36
For Lee Krasner, see Marcia Tucker, Lee Krasner, Large Paintings, Whit-
ney Museum of American Art, New York, 1973; Barbara Rose, Lee Kras-
ner: A Retrospective, Houston and New York, 1983 (her first American
retrospective, at age 75); for Louise Bourgeois, see Deborah Wye, Louise
Bourgeois, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1982; for Alice
Neel, see Ellen H. Johnson, "Alice Neel's Fifty Years of Portrait Painting,"
Studio International, cxciii, 1977, 175-79; Ann Sutherland Harris, Alice
As a result of the ferment of activity within the early
years of the feminist movement in art, artists and critics
were engaged by new issues. Feminist artists working in
the first half of the 1970s exposed what may now seem
obvious discordances and fractures in the fabric of our cul-
ture, though their questions are still without resolution.
Typical of the first manifestations were issues of patriarchal
oppression in the work of Nancy Spero and May Stevens;
of female body manipulation and degradation and the cre-
ation of a more positive body sense in the work of Sylvia
Sleigh, Joan Semmel, and Hannah Wilke; the attempt to
break down the false hierarchy from "fine arts" to "crafts"
in the work of Miriam Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff, and Har-
mony Hammond; the investigation of female archetypes
such as the Great Goddess in the work of Mary Beth Edel-
son; and the recuperation of women's history, whether in
the work of Judy Chicago or among feminist art historians.38
These and other issues were debated among feminist art
critics. Art historians, too, were soon engaged in similar
debates.
II. Themes
Art Versus Craft
The first generation of women artists and art critics rec-
ognized 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 ex-
press universal experience without prejudice or limita-
tions.39 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."40
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 crea-
tion of an aesthetic hierarchy qualitatively differentiating
"high" from "low" art. As Broude makes clear in her article
on Miriam Schapiro,41 until recently, "decorative art and
decorative impulses . . . acted as important liberating ca-
Neel: Paintings, 1933-1982, Loyola Marymount University, Malone Art
Gallery, Los Angeles, 1983; and Patricia Hills, Alice Neel, New York,
1983.
37
Response to Alloway's article (as in n. 21), Art in America, Nov./Dec.,
1976, 17.
38
For a brief review of these issues, see Cindy Nemser, "Towards a Fem-
inist Sensibility: Contemporary Trends in Women's Art," Feminist Art
Journal, v, Summer, 1976, 19-23.
39
Harmony Hammond explores this issue in "Class Notes," Heresies, no.
3, Fall, 1977, repr. in Wrappings, Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial
Arts, New York, 1984, 35.
40
"An Anti-catalogue," 1977, quoted by Hammond, ibid., 34.
41
Norma Broude, "Miriam Schapiro and 'Femmage': Reflections on the
Conflict between Decoration and Abstraction in Twentieth-Century Art,"
Arts Magazine, Feb., 1980, repr. in Broude and Garrard (as in n. 28), 315-
29.

talysts" for male artists, whereas traditional decorative art
created by women was considered "women's work." Crafts
were also considered "low" art since they could not tran-
scend utilitarianism. Miriam Schapiro's "femmage" as well
as Faith Ringgold's handmade "Family of Woman" figures
and her more recent narrative quilts challenge this hier-
archical distinction by placing women's "crafts" in a "high"
art context.42 Patricia Mainardi's research on quilts43 and
the art of Harmony Hammond and Joyce Kozloff also res-
urrect decorative art and craft as a viable artistic means to
express female experience, and they point to its political
and subversive potential. Essays abound on the way in
which the definition of craft as a low art form has been
used to keep the female in her powerless place.44
More recently, Joyce Kozloff has moved her work into
the public realm through commissions for installations in
subway and train stations. Such work fulfills the feminist
intention of bringing art to a larger public, and maintains
a feminist purpose for decorative art.45 Miriam Schapiro
has also continued to use decorative motifs, but now in
support of her search for the persona of the creative
woman.46 Charlotte Robinson's seven-year project to bring
together "fine" artists and "craft" quilt-makers is another
important manifestation of the concern to "eliminate the
hierarchical division between fine arts and crafts . . . that
separation between visually distinguished articles created
for aesthetic pleasure and those created for practical use."
Robinson's group also hoped to acknowledge "the chain
connecting contemporary women with generations of their
mothers."47 In her essay for the catalogue, The Artist and
the Quilt, Lippard developed the often asserted statement
that "the quilt has become the prime visual metaphor for
women's lives, for women's culture," relating its aesthetic
to a specifically female style of life, sensibility, and "net-
working" politics.48 The history of the quilt, she points out
42
Thalia Gouma-Peterson, "The Theater of Life and Illusion in Miriam
Schapiro's Recent Work" in "I'm Dancin' As Fast As I Can." New Paintings
By Miriam Schapiro, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, New York, 1986, repr.
from Arts Magazine, Mar., 1986, 3-8; and idem, "Faith Ringgold's Nar-
rative Quilts," Faith Ringgold. Change: Painted Story Quilts, New York,
1987, 9-16, repr. from Arts Magazine, Jan., 1987, 64-69.
43
Maines,
III,
Mainardi
Winter,
"Fancywork:
1974/75,
(as in n.1,28).
The
3. On
Archaeology
the issues of
of Lives,"
craft asFeminist
art, alsoArt
seeJournal,
Rachel
44
See especially Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and
the Making of Femininity, London, 1984. For a less political study, see
Mirra Bank, Anonymous Was a Woman, New York, 1979. Also see Her-
esies, no. 3, Winter, 1978, entitled Women's Traditional Arts. The Politics
of Aesthetics.
45
Joyce Kozloff: Visionary Ornament, ed. Patricia Johnston, with con-
tributions by Hayden Herrera and Thalia Gouma-Peterson, exh. cat., Bos-
ton University Art Gallery, 1986.
46
As Thalia Gouma-Peterson described it in her essay on Schapiro (as in
n. 42).
47
The Artist and the Quilt, ed. Charlotte Robinson, with essays by Jean
Taylor Federico, Miriam Schapiro, Lucy Lippard, Eleanor Munro, and
Bonnie Persinger, New York, 1983, 10. The project was conceived in 1975.
Also see Elaine Hedges, "The Nineteenth-Century Diarist and Her Quilts,"
Feminist Studies, viii, Summer, 1982, 293-99 (abridged from American
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ART HISTORY 333
in her Marxist political analysis, informs the "relationships
among producer, receiver, and object that the art world
rarely acknowledges," since it is the "product both of class
and gender separation, and of the degree of economic sup-
port for the art in question." She finds that this qualitative
dichotomy in class and in gender led to the degraded value
of utilitarian objects.
Such attention to craft arts has resulted in a number of
exhibitions of quilts and other productions traditionally
made by women; it has also no doubt stimulated the dis-
play of work such as that of the Chilean "arpilleras," hand-
sewn patchworks with political intent made by women and
smuggled out of the country, and the interest in and ex-
hibition of Native American art, as well as Afro-American
art, by women.49
The critical responses have varied to the artists' attempt
to sanction female creative expression through craft. Many
art historians and critics have supported these artists, oth-
ers have not. Donald Kuspit proclaimed that art based on
decoration betrayed the critical potential and intention of
feminist art. He considered decorative art to belong to that
now authoritarian Modernist mainstream, and criticized it
on that basis.50
Tamar Garb critiqued Broude's position on Miriam
Schapiro's decorative art,51 which Broude attempted to leg-
itimize by linking Schapiro to the male tradition of abstract
artists such as Matisse and Kandinsky, who also were in-
spired by decorative art. Broude maintained that the main
difference between these artists and Schapiro's "femmage"
lies in her desire to reveal rather than conceal her sources
as "objects of aesthetic value and expressive significance."
Schapiro not only conveys women's creativity and expe-
rience, but also satisfies "the mainstream's demand for sig-
nificance," according to Broude. Her art is thus "properly
understood" in terms of "a dialogue with an older tradition
Quilts: A Handmade Legacy, exh. cat., Oakland Museum, 1981).
48
"Up, Down, and Across: A New Frame for Quilts" (as in n. 47), 32,
36.
49
See, for example, the exhibition catalogue (with essays) curated by Har-
mony Hammond and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith for the Gallery of the
American Indian Community House, Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar and
Sage, New York, 1985; "Connections Project/Conexus," a collaborative
exhibition on women artists from Brazil and the U.S., organized by Josely
Carvalho and Sabra Moore, at The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic
Art, Jan.-Feb., 1987; Forever Free: Art by African American Women, 1862-
1980, ed. Arna Alexander Bontemps, catalogue for a traveling exhibition
beginning at Illinois State University, curated by Jacqueline Fonvielle-
Bontemps and David C. Driskell, Alexandria, VA, 1980; and Samella
Lewis, The Art of Elizabeth Catlett, Claremont, CA, 1984. Also see Her-
esies, no. 15, Winter, 1982, devoted to the topic of racism ("Racism is the
Issue"). These are important resources, but more research needs to be done
by feminists on Black, Chicana, and Asian artists, among others.
50
Donald Kuspit, "Betraying the Feminist Intention: The Case Against
Feminist Decorative Art," Arts Magazine, Nov., 1979,124-26. Many fem-
inists find this essay very problematic. Harmony Hammond, for example,
criticizes Kuspit's "authoritarian" criticism in "Horseblinders," in Wrap-
pings (as in n. 39), 100.
51
Tamar Garb, "Engaging Embroidery," a review of Parker, The Sub-
versive Stitch in Art History, ix, 1986, 131-33.
 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1987 VOLUME LXIX NUMBER 3
of modernism."52 To this Garb responded that, admirable
as her defense of Schapiro was, Broude's attempt to "es-
tablish Schapiro's significance 'in the language of the main-
stream'" was self-defeating. "The problem of negotiating
Modernism with its range of phallocentric metaphors" is
that "the mainstream is strong enough and entrenched
enough to appropriate all subtle subversions." Feminists
must not, as Broude does, accept "the divisive construction
of 'Art' and 'Craft' produced through mainstream art his-
tory" in which "embroidery is seen as mindless and dec-
orative." Garb suggested exploring the decorative arts, as
Parker does with embroidery in The Subversive Stitch, as
"a cultural practice, and a site of ideological struggle."53
Parker and Pollock, too, asserted that, to celebrate the sep-
aration of art and craft is to lose sight of craft as the center
of the development of the nineteenth-century "ideology of
femininity."54 Thus the political implications of the history
of women's crafts go far beyond the nature of a female
sensibility, to encompass the discourse on power and pow-
erlessness, radical impulses in female creativity, the history
of art-making, and the ideology of repression as well. Craft
also is implicated in the debate between a celebration of
women's cultural signs and the dismantling of them.
The Female Sensibility and Images by Women
One of the most heated debates during the first decade
of feminism, which seemed to demand a position from most
writers and artists, was the possibility of a female sensi-
bility and aesthetic expressed in contemporary art. Gloria
Orenstein considered it a "central theoretical question."
Noncommital concerning the nature of its existence, but
indicating that the concept of the female sensibility pro-
duced a "new liberating tendency in art for many women,"
Orenstein pointed to the self-conscious investigation of fe-
52
Broude, "Schapiro" (as in n. 41), 315, 322, 326.
53
Garb (as in n. 51), 132, 133. Also see Parker (as in n. 44). Kuspit also
links the female sensibility, or the "feminine sensibility" as he calls it, with
Modernism throughout his article (as in n. 50).
54
Pollock and Parker (as in n. 14), 58ff.
55
Orenstein (as in n. 21), 519-21. The first exhibition to "illustrate and
validate the theory" was held at the Long Beach Museum of Art, Spring,
1972, "21 Artists Invisible Visible," with a catalogue by Judy Chicago and
Destra Frankel.
56
Schapiro, 'The Education of Women as Artists: Project Womanhouse"
(as in n. 23).
57
Although some did not, such as Agnes Martin, who said that the "con-
cept of a female sensibility is our greatest burden as women artists" (cited
by Renee Sandell, "Female Aesthetics: The Women's Movement and Its
Aesthetic Split," Journal of Aesthetic Education, xiv, Oct., 1980, 109).
58
Vivian Gornick, "Toward a Definition of Female Sensibility" (1973),
Essays in Feminism, New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London, 1978,
112. Such investigations in the first decade of feminism inevitably raised
the issue of separatism. Both Judy Chicago (Through the Flower [as in n.
22)], 72, et passim) and Lucy Lippard considered it necessary, in order that
women artists feel themselves to be "as at home in the world as men are."
Yet Lippard recognized the danger of separatism — that it "become not
a training ground, but a protective womb." She ultimately would like to
see a "trialectic between the female world, the art world, and the real
world" (Lippard, "Changing Since Changing," From the Center [as in n.
21], 11). However, she further noted that "it is crucial that art by women
male body imagery, and of female experience generally, as
well as the new audience of females that it addressed.55
Womanhouse (1972), the project that grew out of Chicago's
and Schapiro's Feminist Art Program at the California In-
stitute of the Arts, was one of the first manifestations of
the female aesthetic. In reference to that project, Schapiro
speaks of West Coast women bringing a "new subject mat-
ter into their art — the subject matter was the content of
their own life experiences, and the aesthetic form was to
be dictated by this new content. . . . What formerly was
considered trivial was heightened to the level of serious art-
making. . . ."56 Most feminist artists and critics not only
seemed to accept the existence of such an aesthetic on some
level,57 but also the need to explore it, as Vivian Gornick
pointed out in 1973:
To achieve wholeness, [women]. . . must break through
to the center of their experience, and hold that experience
up to the light of consciousness if their lives are to be
transformed. They must struggle to "see" more clearly,
to remember more accurately, to describe more fully who
and what they have always been. . . .
For centuries the cultural record of our experience has
been a record of male experience. It is the male sensibility
that has apprehended and described our life. It is the
maleness of experience that has been a metaphor for hu-
man existence.58
A whole body of recent research in psychology, litera-
ture, art, music, sociology, and education indicates that
women perceive reality differently than men, for whatever
reasons, and therefore have different expectations of and
responses to human experience.59 Carol Gilligan's psycho-
logical study presents the view of many of these revisionist
not be sucked into the establishment and absorbed by it" (ibid., "The
Women Artist's Movement - What Next?" p. 141). Harmony Hammond
also considered separatism necessary in order to "acknowledge our dif-
ferences" and "learn about, support, and work with each other" (Ham-
mond, as in n. 39). This issue is of less concern today, although many
art historians still feel the need to study women artists as a separate cat-
egory, and many artists still make art out of that position.
59
A bibliography of such ideas is extensive, including: Elaine Showalter,
"Toward a Feminist Poetics" (1978), The New Feminist Criticism, ed. E.
Showalter, New York, 1985, 125-43; also see other articles in this an-
thology; Silvia Bovenschen, "Is There a Female Aesthetic?" New German
Critique, x, Winter, 1977, 111-39 (repr. in Female Aesthetics, ed. Gisela
Ecker, transl. Harriet Anderson, Boston, 1985, 23-50); Adrienne Rich, Of
Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, New York, 1976;
Michelle Citron, et al., "Women and Film: A Discussion of Feminist Aes-
thetics," New German Critique, XIII, Winter, 1978, 83-107; Critical In-
quiry, VIII, Winter, 1981 (Special Issue on Writing and Sexual Difference);
Mary Jacobus, ed., Women Writing and Writing about Women, New York,
1979; Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination, New York, 1972;
Janet Todd, ed., Gender and Literary Voice, New York, 1980; Joan Sem-
mel and April Kingsley, "Sexual Imagery in Women's Art," Woman's Art
Journal, I, Spring/Summer, 1980,1-6; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gu-
bar, The Madwoman in the Attic, New Haven and London, 1979; Eisen-
stein and Jardine (as in n. 1); Julia Penelope Stanley and Susan J. Wolfe
(Robbins), "Toward a Feminist Aesthetic," Chrysalis, no. 6,1978, 57-71;
Patricia Mathews, "What Is Female Imagery?" Women Artists News, x,
Nov., 1984, 5-7, and catalogue essay, Virginia Women Artists: Female
Experience in Art, Blacksburg, VA, 1985. Many others could be cited.

texts with the following thesis: "Given the differences in
women's conceptions of self and morality, women bring to
the life cycle a different point of view and order human
experience in terms of different priorities."60
The question was first formulated with respect to the
sources and the nature of the female sensibility. Was it bi-
ologically determined? Or was it purely a social construct?
Chicago, Schapiro, and, soon after, Lippard claimed to be
able to recognize female sexual or body imagery in art by
women.61 However, such "central core" imagery or "va-
ginal iconology," as it is sometimes called,62 was as much
a political as an essentialist or erotic statement, as Tickner
pointed out,63 an attempt to challenge the notion of female
inferiority and "penis envy," as well as to establish and
reclaim a sense of female power. Miriam Schapiro, too,
said that "our discovery of the 'central core image' was a
way of making ideological statements for ourselves, a kind
of subject matter that was surfacing in the art of other
women and finally an explication of how that subject mat-
ter can be disguised."64
Elaine Showalter's astute and balanced study of what she
calls feminist bio-criticism concludes that it is "useful and
important" to study "biological imagery," but "there can
be no expression of the body which is unmediated by lin-
guistic, social, and literary structures." Her ideal model
centers on a theory of women's culture that "incorporates
ideas about women's body, language, and psyche but in-
terprets them in relation to the social contexts in which they
occur."65
Many artists and art critics now see the female sensibility
as a totally constructed one. Yet even with the rise of the
study of "gender difference" as opposed to "female sensi-
60
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Wom-
en's Development, Cambridge, 1982, 22.
61
Lucy Lippard, "Judy Chicago, Talking to Lucy R. Lippard," From the
Center (as in n. 21), 228. Also see Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago,
"Female Imagery," Womanspace Journal, i, Summer, 1973, 11-14; Judy
Chicago, Through the Flower (as in n. 22), 142-44; Arlene Raven, "Wom-
en's Art: The Development of a Theoretical Perspective," Womanspace
Journal, i, Feb.-Mar., 1973, 14-20; Ruth Iskin, in "Sexual and Self-Imagery
in Art," Womanspace Journal, i, Summer, 1973, speaks of the central
cavity and inner space imagery; "Interview with Miriam Schapiro by
Moira Roth," Miriam Schapiro: The Shrine, the Computer and the Doll-
house, exh. cat., Mandeville Art Gallery, University of California, San
Diego, 1975,12-13; Lucy Lippard, "A Note on the Politics and Aesthetics
of a Woman's Show," Women Choose Women, exh. cat., New York Cul-
tural Center, 1973; "The Women Artists Movement — What Next?," 143-
44, and "What Is Female Imagery?", 80-89, both in From the Center (as
in n. 21); and Deena Metzger, "In Her Image," Heresies, no. 2, 1977, 9.
Alloway, in his article on women's art (as in n. 21), is not convinced by
any of these arguments. "No reason," he says, "has been advanced to
prove that central configurations are inherently female" (p. 70). For the
view that the female sensibility derives from experience alone, and not
from body, see Cindy Nemser, et al., discussed by Rom (as in n. 26), 22;
n. 28 above; and "In Her Own Image — Exhibition Catalogue," The Fem-
inist Art Journal, Spring, 1974, 11-18. Lippard later modified her position
on central core imagery (as did most of those who were involved with
the issue early on). See "Issue and Taboo," in Get the Message? (as in n.
31), 125-26.
62
For a discussion of such imagery and these terms, see Barbara Rose,
"Vaginal Iconology," New York Magazine, vii, 11 Feb. 1974, and Dorothy
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ART HISTORY 335
bility," the concept of the specifically female voice, whether
understood as essentialist or as ideologically constructed,
still imbues much feminist thought. This is especially true
among French feminists. Julia Kristeva, for example, writes
with regard to the way woman's different viewpoint con-
ditions her place in the world:
Sexual difference — which is at once biological, phys-
iological, and relative to reproduction — is translated by
and translates a difference in the relationship of subjects
to the symbolic contract which is the social contract: a
difference, then, in the relationship to power, language,
and meaning.66
Many contemporary feminists now focus on the question
of representation and gender difference rather than on a
specific female sensibility. Those Postmodernist artists and
writers believe that representation is at the very root of the
difference between male and female in our society. Both
feminists and Postmodern cultural philosophers under-
stand representation n o t a s a mimesis o f some ultimate
itself. Representation thus legitimizes culture's dominant
ideology, and is therefore inevitably politically motivated.
It constructs difference through a re-presentation of pre-
conditioned concepts about gender that inform all of our
institutions and that are at the very foundation of our ide-
ology and system of beliefs. The same is true about our
cultural definitions for male and female identity. Stephen
Heath claims that there is not an "immediate, given fact of
'male' and 'female' identity but a whole process of differ-
entiation"; Tickner notes that this differentiation is "pro-
Seiberling, "The Female View of Erotica," New York Magazine, vii, 11
Feb. 1974.
63
Tickner, "The Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Women Artists Since
1970," Art History, i, 1978, 241-42.
64
Schapiro, 1976, in response to Alloway (as in n. 37), 21. Donald Kuspit
speaks of a change in attitude towards central or vaginal imagery (as in
n. 50, 126).
At the time of their first appearance, these strong, upfront — blatant
— patterns seemed to function like the clenched fist of a rebellious
military salute. . . . Such imagery was emphatic about the new feminist
sense of determination and self-determination. Its idealistic abstraction
. . . perfectly suited feminism's sense of new expectation, new poten-
tiality, new energy, and new clarity of purpose. . . . Now, retrospec-
tively, the central image seems to have a different meaning . . . based
on a traditional sense of femininity — that was now to be dominant
where it was once submissive.
The issue of the relation between nature and women's bodies has been
explored by many, including Susan Griffith, Woman and Nature: The
Roaring Inside Her, New York, 1978; Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating,
New York, 1974, chaps. 8-9; and Sherry Ortner, 'Is Female to Male as
Nature is to Culture?" Feminist Studies, i, 1972, repr. in Women, Culture
and Society, ed. M.A. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere, 1974, 67-87. Also see
Estella Lauter, Women as Mythmakers. Poetry and Visual Art by Twen-
tieth-Century Women, Bloomington, IN, 1984.
65
"Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," The New Feminist Criticism (as
in n. 59), 252, 259.
66
Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time," Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ide-
ology, ed. Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Barbara C.
Gelpi, Chicago, 1982, 39.
duced and reproduced in the representation of a range of
discourses (medicine, law, education, art and the mass me-
dia)."67 The artist Mary Kelly agrees that there is: ". . . no
preexisting sexuality, no essential femininity; and . . . to
look at the processes of their construction is also to see the
possibility of deconstructing the dominant forms of rep-
resenting difference and justifying subordination in our so-
cial order."68
Art historians, too, have explored the specific nature of
female creativity, and subsequently moved from a consid-
eration of the female sensibility to the study of gender con-
struction. As they discovered and examined the work of
women artists, they first faced the vexing question of
whether there is a women's imagery that can be distin-
guished from that of men. H. Diane Russell observed that
"most art historians have answered the question with a
terse, resounding 'no' or have ignored it."69 This she con-
trasted with the willingness of feminist art historians to
"discuss, examine, and support contemporary feminist art."
Regarding a specifically female imagery, Nochlin claimed
that women artists are closer to those artists of their own
period and outlook than to women artists in history. Later,
after rejecting "the essentialist theories about women's 'nat-
ural' directions in art," she recognized a socially con-
structed female sensibility and accepted that "the fact a
given artist happens to be a woman rather than a man
counts for something."70 Norma Broude and Mary Garrard
went one step further, taking the position that, since
"women perceive reality through a uniquely female sen-
sibility, this sensibility must also affect the creative pro-
cess," and that "the definitive assignment of sex roles in
history has created fundamental differences between the
sexes in their perception, experience, and expectations of
the world." They concluded that these differences "cannot
help but have been carried over into the creative process
where they have sometimes left their tracks."71
The rather hesitant position regarding a specifically fe-
male imagery held by most American art historians during
the 1970s differs significantly from that taken by a group
67
Heath, The Sexual Fix, New York, 1982, 144; Tickner, "Sexuality and/
in Representation: Five British Artists," Difference. On Representation
and Sexuality, exh. cat., New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York,
1984, 23.
68
Mary Kelly, "No Essential Femininity: A Conversation between Mary
Kelly and Paul Smith," Parachute, no, 26, Spring, 1982, 35. Also see her
essay, "Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism," in Art after Modernism: Re-
thinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis, New York, 1984, 87-103, and
Jo-Anna Isaak, "Our Mother Tongue, The Post-Partum Document," Van-
guard, n, April, 1982,14-17; and in the Difference catalogue (as in n. 67),
passim.
69
H. Diane Russell, "Review Essay: Art History," Signs, v, 1980, 473-78.
70
Harris and Nochlin (as in n. 4), 58-59.
71
Broude and Garrard (as in n. 28), 1. This position is substantiated by
a number of the articles they included in their anthology, most of which
were originally published during the 1970s.
72
Adrienne Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision," On
Lies, Secrets and Silence, New York, 1979, 35. Also see In Her Own Image,
of literary critics during the same decade. Those critics have
focused on texts by women as the primary source for a
radical critique of literature. Their position was first artic-
ulated by Adrienne Rich in 1971:
. . . A radical critique of literature, feminist in its im-
pulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how
we live, how we have been living, how we have been led
to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as
well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been
till now a male prerogative and how we can begin to see
and name — and therefore live — afresh.72
Sandra Gilbert made an even more comprehensive case for
a "revisionist imperative." According to her, feminist crit-
icism "wants to decode and demystify all the disguised
questions and answers that have always shadowed the con-
nections between textuality, sexuality, genre and gender,
psychosexual identity and cultural authority."73
Elaine Showalter suggested that women speak in two
voices, that of the "dominant group" that generates the
dominant social structure, and that of the "muted" or sub-
ordinate group. She considered women's writing to be "a
double-voice discourse" that always embodies the social,
literary, artistic, and cultural heritages of both the muted
and the dominant group.74 The study of images by women
can be a significant source of insight into women's practice
as artists if read as such multilayered visual texts.
Inquiry into the female sensibility was undertaken by a
small number of American art historians in the 1970s. Glo-
ria Orenstein discussed the character of the female imagery
created by women artists of the Surrealist group and by
Frida Kahlo.75 Frima Fox Hofrichter pointed out that Judith
Leyster's attitude as a woman towards the themes of prop-
osition and prostitution differed substantially from that of
her male contemporaries, such as Frans Hals or the Utrecht
Caravaggisti. The central figure in one of Leyster's paint-
ings, a woman sewing, is not the temptress-instigator of
the sexual proposition — but the "embarrassed victim" and
Women Working in the Arts, ed. Elaine Hedges, Ingrid Wendt, Old West-
bury, NY, 1980.
73
Elaine Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," Critical In-
quiry, vm, Winter, 1981, 179-205, esp. 183; repr. in The New Feminist
Criticism (as in n. 59), 243-70.
74
These terms have been used by anthropologists Shirley and Edwin Ar-
dener. Shirley Ardener, ed., Perceiving Women, New York, 1977, 20-36;
Edwin Ardener, "Belief and the Problem of Women," in Perceiving Women,
3; and Elaine Showalter (as in n. 73), 200-01.
75
Gloria Orenstein, "Women of Surrealism," The Feminist Art Journal,
n, Spring, 1973,15-21, Orenstein observed that Leonor Fini, Leonora Car-
rington, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedies Varos, among others, repre-
sented women as alchemists, inventors, scientists, goddesses, visionaries,
and ancient wisdom figures, and not as the stereotypical woman-child or
femme fatale created and propagated by the male Surrealist artists. In
"Frida Kahlo: Painting of Miracles," The Feminist Art Journal, ii, Fall,
1973, 7-9, she showed Kahlo to be one of the first women to portray in
painting the drama of woman's biological experience.

''embodiment of domestic virtue" who resists the unwel-
come offer.76 Garrard suggested that Artemisia Gentileschi,
in her Self-Portrait as 'La Pittura,' combined two artistic
traditions, that of the self-portrait and that of the person-
ification of the arts as female; but unlike the usual self-
portrait or the female personification, she depicted herself
in the act of painting, energized by creativity.77 In her study
"Artemisia and Susanna," Garrard took the difference in
gender experience and acculturation as her point of de-
parture in order to argue that Gentileschi's painting of Su-
sanna and the Elders in Pommersfelden, sometimes attrib-
uted to Orazio, her father, presents a unique interpretation
of the subject. Susanna's seduction by the elders is per-
ceived from a woman's point of view; "the expressive core
of the picture is the heroine's plight, not the villain's an-
ticipated pleasure."78 Through the use of stylistic, icono-
graphic, and biographical evidence, Garrard uncovered the
personal voice and female perceptions that transformed a
traditional theme.
The distinctiveness of the female voice was discussed by
Alessandra Comini in a comparative study of grief as ex-
pressed in the art of Käthe Kollwitz and Edvard Munch.79
According to Comini, the usual stereotypes were reversed
and Kollwitz' expression of emotion was more profoundly
universal than Munch's, which was more subjective and
personal ("Munch grieved for himself . . . Kollwitz grieved
for humanity"). She added that Kollwitz' art, excluded from
most of the histories of the art of her time, is as represen-
tative of German Expressionism as that of her male con-
temporaries.80 All of these studies conclude in their differ-
ent ways that gender is a factor in how women create and
interpret images, not for biological reasons, but because
their experiences of the world are different from those of
76
Frima Fox Hofrichter, "Judith Leyster's Proposition — Between Virtue
and Vice," The Feminist Art Journal, IV, Fall, 1975, 22-26; repr. in Broude
and Garrard (as in n. 28), 173-81.
77
Mary D. Garrard, "Artemisia Gentileschi's Self-Portrait as the Allegory
of Painting," Art Bulletin, vxii, 1980, 97-112.
78
Mary D. Garrard, "Artemisia and Susanna," in Broude and Garrard
(as in n. 28), 147-71.
79
Alessandra Comini, "For Whom the Bell Tolls: Private versus Universal
Grief in the Work of Edvard Munch and Bathe Kollwitz," Arts Magazine,
Mar., 1977, 142. Reprinted in Broude and Garrard (as in n. 28), 271-91,
as part of a longer article entitled "Gender or Genius? The Women Artists
of German Expressionism."
80
Comini pursued her two-fold study of the woman's different interpre-
tation of a particular theme and her exclusion from the historical assess-
ment of her times in a comparative study of Paula Modersohn-Becker and
Otto Modersohn, and of Gabrielle Münter and Wassily Kandinsky, in
"State of the Field 1980: The Women Artists of German Expressionism,"
Arts Magazine, Nov., 1980, 147-53.
81
Showalter (as in n. 73), 186. This was pointed out by both Virginia
Woolf and Hélène Cixous. Parker and Pollock (as in n. 14), 121-23, discuss
some of these complexities, especially as they pertain to women's self-
portraits.
82
Ibid.
83
Griselda Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity," was pre-
sented at the meetings of the British Association of Art Historians held
at Brighton Polytechnic, April, 1986, and will appear this year in her
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ART HISTORY 337
men.
The job of defining the specific difference of women's art
presents, as literary critics have warned, "a slippery and
demanding task."81 Patricia Meyer Spacks has described
such difference as a "delicate divergence" and this, as
Showalter observed, "challenges us to respond with equal
delicacy and precision to the small but crucial deviations"
that have marked the history of women's art.82 It is pre-
cisely "the cumulative weightings of experience and exclu-
sion" that form the basis of Pollock's recent discussion of
the work of Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot in contrast
to that of their male contemporaries. Her project is to show
"how the socially contrived orders of sexual difference
structure the lives of Cassatt and Morisot" and how that,
in turn, structures their art.83 She deals with the profound
differences in men's and women's art in late nineteenth-
century Paris. The difference, "the product of the social
structure of sexual difference and not any imaginary bio-
logical distinction," structured both what and how men and
women painted. Such studies make it possible to "defend
the specificity of woman's experience while refuting the
meanings given them as features of woman's natural and
inevitable condition."84 Pollock's investigation of gender
construction aligns her art-historical approach with more
radical interdisciplinary methodologies.85
Female Sexuality in Art
A related concern in feminist art and theory is the ex-
ploration of female sexuality. Since the feminist art move-
ment began in 1970, feminist artists have been "getting in
touch with and reclaiming their bodies, their sexual feelings
and expressing those in art."86 In the mid-1970s, feminist
artists such as Joan Semmel and Hannah Wilke attempted
collected essays. Also see the intelligent and sensitive study by Albert
Boime, "The Case of Rosa Bonheur: Why Should a Woman Want to be
More Like a Man?" Art History, iv, 1981, 384-409, who discusses the
importance of gender construction (or, in his words, "sex typing") for
Rosa Bonheur in major decisions she made both about her life and her
art.
84
Pollock, Ibid.
85
Although a sophisticated analysis of the various differences between
the work produced by men and women exists in literature, it has only
begun to be touched upon in art, art criticism, and art history. Perhaps
because such differences are less tangible in art than in literature, feminist
critics and art historians have shied away from intensive, analytical study
of its visual manifestation, except of course in Postmodern feminist studies
of "gender and difference" through representation. Janet Wolff notes the
"growing body of literature on women's art" and literature, concerning
this difference, and sees it as "an important analytical development in
cultural studies, and one which must be made increasingly central to the
sociology of art" (as in n. 19, 43).
86
Hammond, "A Sense of Touch," first publ. in New Art Examiner, Sum-
mer, 1979, and in Wrappings (as in n. 39), 77. Lippard discusses female
body art generally in her article, "The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth:
European and American Women's Body Art," From the Center (as in n.
21), 121-38. Also see Lippard's "Quite Contrary: Body, Nature, Ritual in
Women's Art" (as in n. 30), 31-47, and her "Binding/Bonding," Art in
America, Apr., 1982, 112-18, on the abstract, political, and female art of
Harmony Hammond.
338 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1987 VOLUME LXIX NUMBER 3
to generate new expressions of female sexuality that denied
what they saw as the passivity and idealization of past im-
ages of women represented through the male gaze. Ham-
mond states that in such "women-centered" art, women
present themselves as "strong, healthy, active, comfortable
with their bodies, in contrast to the misogynist attitudes
toward women's bodies and bodily functions that we ob-
serve throughout the history of western art."87 She refers
to her own rubberized, wrapped rag sculptures, Wilke's
latex and eraser works, Bourgeois' latex sculptures, and
many others.
Tickner indicates the problem with such an attempt to
express female sexuality in art when she questions the basic
assumption that women "will find a cultural voice to ex-
press their own sexuality." Like Heath and Kelly, she ex-
presses reservations about any static definition of sexuality:
The fallacy here exists in the implication that there is a
definitely defined male sexuality that can simply find
expression and an already existent female sexuality that
simply lacks it. Women's social and cultural relations
have been located within patriarchal culture, and their
identities have been moulded in accordance with the roles
and images which that ideology has sanctioned.88
Women have no language with which to express their sex-
uality except the male one, and it is difficult to determine
even what that sexuality is in "women-centered" terms.
"The question is how, against this inherited framework,
women are to construct new meanings which can also be
understood." Tickner thus maintains that "the most sig-
nificant area of women and erotic art today [1978] is that
of the de-eroticizing, the de-colonizing of the female body;
the challenging of its taboos; and the celebration of its
rhythms and pains, of fertility and childbirth."89
A second generation of feminists has abandoned the issue
of female sexuality, and of female sensibility, in favor of
an investigation of the workings and interactions of gender
differences rather than the nature of the specifically female.
Instead of restructuring the "'colonized' and alienated fe-
male body" as Tickner saw many first-generation feminist
artists doing,90 from Sylvia Sleigh to Hannah Wilke, art-
ists such as Barbara Kruger and Mary Kelly are decon-
structing it.
87
"A Sense of Touch" (as in n. 86), 78.
88
"The Body Politic" (as in n. 63), 238.
89
Ibid., 239.
90
Ibid., 247.
91
Duncan, "Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Van-
guard Painting," Artforum, Dec., 1973, 30-39 (repr. in Broude and Gar-
rard [as in n. 28], 292-393).
92
Larry Silver, "The State of Research in Northern European Art of the
Renaissance Era," Art Bulletin, LXVIII, 1986, 527-31.
93
Henry Kraus, The Living Theater of Medieval Art, Bloomington, IN,
1967, 41-62; this is his chapter on "Eve and Mary. Conflicting Images of
Although images of female sexuality have not been of
major art-historical concern because the subject was so
rarely treated in the past, it has been briefly explored by
Carol Duncan in her discussion of Paula Modersohn-
Becker. Duncan suggested that, in her nude Self-Portrait
(1906), Modersohn-Becker was able to express a whole-
some sense of her own sexuality without becoming objec-
tified or commodified.91
Historical Studies of Female Imagery as Prescriptive and
Proscriptive Agents
The nature of female imagery in art has been an impor-
tant issue for feminist art history. As art historians began
to think of art as "a purposeful, active, and vital shaper of
culture," in Larry Silver's words, images of women in art
were seen to embody different and more complex mean-
ings.92 The great variety of female stereotypes, ranging from
virgin, mother, and muse to whore, monster, and witch,
have been shown to be signifiers for a male-dominated cul-
ture, signifying what is desirable (virgins and mothers) and
what needs to be repressed and civilized (harlots, monsters,
and witches). Such images are thus seen as playing a pos-
itive-prescriptive and a negative-proscriptive role. Virginia
Woolf has aptly described the relation between female im-
age and cultural sign as woman's "delicious power of re-
flecting the figure of man at twice its natural size" (A Room
of One's Own).
The negative function of images of women as "cultural
symptoms" (Panofsky) has been discussed by Henry Kraus,
on images of women in Romanesque and Gothic sculpture
(1967),93 Madlyn Milner Kahr, on the theme of Delilah in
the course of six centuries (1972),94 and Linda Hults, on
images of witches in the art of Hans Baldung Grien and his
circle (1982).95 Those studies demonstrate that the concept
of woman as "the original cause of all evil" (Bernard of
Clairvaux) was firmly rooted in Western culture from the
early Middle Ages onward, and remind us, as Silver ob-
serves, "of the normative hierarchy of male domination."96
We believe that applying Panofsky's iconological analysis
(or iconographical synthesis) to these images of women can
provide insights into the manner in which "under varying
historical conditions, essential tendencies of the human
mind were expressed by specific themes and concepts."97
The issue of woman's presence in art as an embodiment
Medieval Women," repr. in Broude and Garrard (as in n. 28), 79-99.
94
Madlyn Milner Kahr, "Delilah," Art Bulletin, LIV, 1972, 282-99, repr.
in Broude and Garrard (as in n. 28), 119-145. Also see Madlyn Milner
Kahr, "Rembrandt and Delilah," Art Bulletin, LV, 1973, 240-59.
95
Linda C. Hults, "Hans Baldung Grien's Weather Witches' in Frankfurt,"
Pantheon, XL, 1982, 124-30, and her forthcoming "Baldung and the Witches
of Freiburg: The Evidence of Images," Journal of Interdisciplinary History,
xviii, 1987. Also see Silver (as in n. 92), 529-30.
96
Ibid., 529.
97
Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, Humanistic Themes in the Art
of the Renaissance, New York, 1967, 14-15.

of male fears and desires was incisively discussed by John
Berger.98 He used the personification of Vanitas as an ex-
ample of men's moralizing through the female nude: "You
painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at
her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the paint-
ing Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose
nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure." The
real function of the mirror, the symbol of woman's vanity,
is to make her "connive in treating herself as, first and
foremost, a sight."99
Berger raised three significant issues in this passage: first,
the use of the female nude for the purpose of hypocritical
moralizing in an androcentric society; second, the moral
condemnation of the woman whose nakedness the male
artist liked to paint and the male patron liked to own; and,
third, the use of the mirror to make woman an accomplice
in her own objectification as "sight." Countless other sub-
jects exemplify this form of moralizing (e.g., Susanna, De-
lilah, the Three Graces, odalisques and prostitutes). Cen-
tral to these and most other treatments of the female nude
is the notion that "men act and women appear. Men look
at women. Women watch themselves being looked at."100
None of these issues was raised by the scholars who con-
tributed to Woman as Sex Object. Studies in Erotic Art
1730-1970.101 Indeed, that uneven collection of articles is
striking for its traditional approaches and paucity of new
questions. As Lise Vogel observed, the focus is on the erotic
experiences of men as presented by male artists through the
image of woman.102 She described the traditional range of
approaches used there, from bland Freudianism103 to con-
ventional iconographic analysis,104 reaching a level of cov-
ert misogynism in David Kunzle's long essay, "The Corset
as Erotic Alchemy: From Rococo Galanterie to Montaut's
Physiologies."105 A number of other contributions do ex-.
plore the dialectic between high art and popular imagery106
98
John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London, 1972, 45-64. This introductory
book, addressed to a general audience and based on the BBC television
series of 1971, contains one of the most astute analyses of the topic at the
time. For a recent treatment of the topic, see Marina Warner, Monuments
and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, New York, 1985.
99
Ibid.,17.
100
Ibid.
101
Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin, Woman as Sex Object. Studies
in Erotic Art 1730-1970, New York, 1972. Based in large part on papers
presented at the College Art Association meetings in 1972 in a session
entitled "Eroticism and Female Imagery in the Art of the 19th Century,"
chaired by Nochlin, the book was advertised with overtones of high-class
voyeurism. The process of its advertising, beginning in the fall of 1972,
has been chronicled by Lise Vogel in "Fine Arts and Feminism: The Awak-
ening Consciousness," Feminist Studies, ii, 1974, 3-37, republished in a
shortened version in Art Journal, xxxv, 1976, 378-85, under the title "Erot-
ica, the Academy and Art Publishing: A Review of Woman as Sex Object."
102
Ibid., 379.
103
Marcia Allentuck, "Henry Fuseli's 'Nightmare': Eroticism or Pornog-
raphy," and Gert Schiff, "Study of 'Picasso's Suite 347'" (as in n. 101),
33-41, 238-53.
104
Robert Rosenblum, "Caritas Romana after 1760: Some Romantic Lac-
tations" (as in n. 101), 42-63. Rosenblum seems hardly to be aware of the
more provocative erotic, social, psychological, and political implications
of the motif.
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ART HISTORY 339
and the way in which lowbrow erotic imagery was incor-
porated into high art by late nineteenth-century painters.107
However, as Vogel further observed, even essays with fem-
inist intentions were inhibited "by the heavy heritage of
traditional art-historical approaches."
The two most challenging articles in the anthology are
also the shortest. Alessandra Comini in "Vampires, Vir-
gins, and Voyeurs in Imperial Vienna" discussed the changes
in the imagery of women and sexuality in turn-of-the-cen-
tury Vienna as reflections of social phenomena. Comini is
very conscious that the beholders of these images were pre-
sumed to be male.108 Nochlin, in "Eroticism and Female Im-
agery in Nineteenth-Century Art," demonstrated that the
meaning of the term "erotic" is confined to "erotic for men."
She observed that "the imagery of sexual delight or prov-
ocation has always been created about women for men's
enjoyment, by men," and added that the equivalent sexual
imagery created by women has been blocked by "woman's
lack of her own erotic territory on the map of nineteenth-
century reality." This, she believes, happened because
"women have no imagery available . . . with which to ex-
press their particular view-point."109 One wishes that Noch-
lin had pursued her astute observations in greater depth.
However, her attempt to create an intentionally ludicrous,
male equivalent to the female breast-as-apple metaphor,
through a photograph of a bearded male nude in athletic
socks and moccasins holding a tray of bananas, failed at
the time not only because the "food-penis metaphor has no
upward mobility" (Nochlin), but also because, as Vogel ob-
served, the "politics of contemporary sexual relations are
such that a mechanical reversal, in which the man becomes
a sex-object available at a price cannot be made."110 Pollock
further discussed the basic asymmetry inscribed into the
language of representation that such reversals serve to ex-
pose.111 The image of the bearded man does not suggest the
105
As in n. 101, 90-165. Kunzle is primarily concerned with the fasci-
nation the corseted woman held for certain men rather than with its im-
plications as a cultural manifestation and the actual effect of corsetry and
its images on women. Also see his Fashion and Fetishism: A Social History
of the Corset, Tight-Lacing and Other Forms of Body-Sculpture in the
West, Los Angeles, 1982.
106
Beatrice Farwell, "Courbet's Baigneuses and the Rhetorical Feminine
Image," and Gerald Needham, "Manet, 'Olympia' and Pornographic Pho-
tography" (as in n. 101), 64-79, 80-89.
107
Martha Kingsbury, "The Femme Fatale and Her Sisters" (as in n. 101),
182-205, pursues this topos as it existed in high art, popular culture, and
real life, but does not recognize its role as an artistic social shaping of
experience.
108
As in n. 101, 206-21.
109
As in n. 101, 8-15.
110
Vogel (as in n. 101), 384. In fact, in recent images this objectifying
reversal is becoming more successful without altering any of the precon-
ceptions concerning the female nude. Indeed, it gives them a new life.
111
Griselda Pollock, "What's Wrong with Images of Women?" (as in n.
33), 26-33. Pollock acknowledges that many of the points she raises in
this essay were developed by the Women's Art History Collective over a
long period. The group collected images and experimented in different
teaching situations. This stresses that significant new ideas can be pro-
duced by a collective effort and as a part of the teaching process.
340 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1987 VOLUME LXIX NUMBER 3
same thing as the sickly smile of the booted and black-
stockinged woman holding the apples in Nochlin's exam-
ple, not simply because there is no comparable tradition
of erotic imagery addressed to women, but rather because
of the particular signification of woman as body and as
sexual object, and a commodity for sale, for which there
is no exact male equivalent.
A different approach to an analysis of images of women
was taken by Carol Duncan, who, in two path-breaking
articles (1973), discussed the effect of images of women on
the viewer, and their role as shapers of culture and ideol-
ogy. In "Happy Mothers and Other New Ideas in Eigh-
teenth-Century French Art," Duncan situated the increas-
ing popularity of such secular themes as happy motherhood
and marital bliss in French art and literature within the
complex social, cultural, and economic parameters of the
growing campaign in eighteenth-century France to con-
vince women that motherhood was their natural and joyful
role. She concluded that both art and literature were part
of a campaign, at a time of social and political transition,
to convince women of their "proper" roles within the
emerging modern bourgeois state.112
In "Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century
Vanguard Painting," Duncan discussed the power of art to
position and control those it represents, in this case the
female nude as used by the Fauves, Cubists, German
Expressionists, and other vanguard artists before World
War I. She asserted that their images of powerless, often
faceless nudes, and "passive available flesh," are witnesses
to the artist's sexual virility. These women are represented
as ''the other," a race apart, "in total opposition to all that
is civilized and human."113 According to Duncan, such im-
ages reflect the male need to demonstrate cultural suprem-
acy at a time when the struggle for women's rights was at
its height.
In a third article, Duncan, similarly but more specifically
than Nochlin, redefined the basic meaning of the term
"erotic," not as "a self-evident universal category, but as a
culturally defined concept that is ideological in nature."114
She demonstrated that female nudes by artists as stylisti-
cally diverse as Delacroix, Ingres, Munch, Miró, Picasso,
and Willem de Kooning are conditioned by the same "per-
sonal psychology and Weltanschauung," to use Panofsky's
terms. They also have the same effect, to teach women to
see themselves "in terms of dominating male interests." The
obsession with the confrontation between the submissive
female nude and the sexual-artistic will of the male artist
in these paintings, in which the male "I" prevails on the
112
Carol Duncan, "Happy Mothers and Other New Ideas in Eighteenth-
Century French Art," Art Bulletin, LV, 1973, 570-83 (repr. in Broude and
Garrard, as in n. 28, 200-19).
113
"Virility" (as in n. 91).
114
Duncan (as in n. 31), 46-50.
115
Ibid., 47.
116
Panofsky (as in n. 97), 15.
117
Duncan (as in n. 31), 50.
118
Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-
fundamental instinctual level of experience,115 can be seen
as an expression of "cultural symptoms" (Panofsky).116
Duncan noted as well that the male nude is treated fun-
damentally differently than the female nude. Matisse's Boy
with Butterfly Net (1907), for example, is shown as a highly
individualized and dynamic being, acting against nature
and engaged in a culturally defined recreation. Duncan in-
sisted on the importance of these different treatments of
the male and female nudes, because they embody and foster
different values. Since we consider "our received notions
of art as the repository of our highest, most enduring val-
ues," the covert meanings of such images affect the way
we perceive male and female in our culture. She concludes
with two significant points: first, that most of us have been
taught to believe that art is never "bad" for anyone, nor
does it ever have anything to do with oppression, and, sec-
ond, that the sanctified concept of art as "True, Good, and
Beautiful is born of the aspirations of those who are em-
powered to shape culture."117
Her article and Pollock's "What's Wrong with Images of
Women," both published in 1977, were major break-
throughs in recognizing and articulating the ideological
construct of the female in art and the asymmetry of mean-
ings carried by male and female images. Both also provided
a methodology, iconological and contextual, to be used as
an analytical tool in further studies of the subject.
The interdisciplinary nature of much scholarship today
has encouraged many scholars outside the field of art his-
tory to explore images as a source for their investigations.
Two such studies that reiterate Duncan's position on the
misogynistic nature of images of women in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries should be mentioned.
Bram Dijkstra, a professor of comparative literature, traced
"the evolution of images of women from the nuns, ma-
donnas, and invalids of the mid-Victorian period to the
vampires and man-eaters of the 1890s," from sentimentality
to virulence, and cited works by such "modern" artists as
Degas, Manet, and Renoir.118
The "veritable iconography of misogyny"119 that Dijkstra
uncovered for the 1890s also appeared in the first decades
of the twentieth century, as attested by the interdisciplinary
study by the historian Beth Irwin Lewis. In her research on
Lustmord, images of ravished and murdered women cre-
ated in the period from 1910 to 1925,120 Lewis collected a
large number of examples by artists in Weimar Germany
who identified themselves with the avant-garde and were
perceived by critics and historians as left-leaning. She also
found images by other German and Belgian artists, some
de-Siècle Culture, New York, 1986. See the reviews by Elaine Showalter,
in The New Republic, 16 Mar. 1987, 38-40, and Alessandra Comini, in
The New York Times Book Review, 1 Feb. 1987, 13-14. Also see Reinhold
Heller, The Earthly Chimera and the Femme Fatale: Fear of Women in
Nineteenth Century Art, exh. cat., Smart Gallery, University of Chicago,
1981; and Susan Casteras, The Substance or the Shadow: Images of Vic-
torian Womanhood, New Haven, 1982.
119
Dijkstra (as in n. 118), viii.
120
Beth Irwin Lewis will publish this material in a forthcoming article.

of whom were much older, with the same violent themes.
Lewis considers these images as responses to the gathering
demands of women for sexual as well as political equality,
as did Duncan, and to the challenge to established, clearly
defined sexual roles. Her thesis is that the Lustmord images
of that generation of artists constitute a turn from por-
traying women as exotic and dangerous to portraying the
death and destruction of those women.
Such negative images of women persist today. The art
of Eric Fischl and David Salle, for example, supposedly
employing the discourse of pornography in order to expose
it, legitimizes the objectification of women through im-
agery and gives such objectification a renewed authority.
Historical Studies of Images of Women as Sources of
Woman's History
Feminist art historians have consistently looked beyond
the object itself (without abandoning it) at issues that point
to the status or role of women in society. In this way, they
have been in the forefront of revisionist art history. Chris-
tine Mitchell Havelock and Natalie Boymel Kampen used
images in certain groups of objects to document women's
roles in Greek and Roman society. Havelock, on the basis
of evidence provided by ancient Greek vase painting, dis-
cussed the roles played by women in rituals of birth and
death in Greek society.121 Kampen focused on reliefs that
depict working-class life and especially saleswomen where
female and male figures were given parallel and equal treat-
ment. Her consideration of images is based on a study of
Roman legal and social values, and the relation of stylistic
modes to gender and social status.122
A similar approach was taken by Claire Richter Sherman
in studies of French queens. She analyzed the depictions of
queens in official documents of the late medieval period,
and especially the extensive cycle of miniatures in the Cor-
onation Book of Charles V of France pertaining to Jeanne
de Bourbon (1338-78), consort of Charles V, who, highly
regarded by her husband, exercised significant influence at
121
Christine Mitchell Havelock, "Mourners on Greek Vases: Remarks on
the Social History of Women," The Greek Vase: Papers Based on Lectures
Presented to a Symposium Held at Hudson Valley Community College
at Troy, New York (1979), ed. Stephen L. Hyatt, New York, 1981, 101-
18 (repr. in Broude and Garrard [as in n. 28], 44-61).
122
Natalie Boymel Kampen, "Status and Gender in Roman Art: The Case
of the Saleswoman," presented at the College Art Association Annual
Meeting, Detroit, 1976, and published in Broude and Garrard (as in n.
28), 62-77, and idem, Image and Status: Working Women in Ostia, Basel,
1981. Also see the review by Christine Havice in Woman's Art Journal,
vi, Fall, 1985-Winter, 1986, 56.
123
Claire Richter Sherman, "The Queen in Charles V's Coronation Book:
Jeanne de Bourbon and the Ordo ad reginam benedicendam," Viator, viii,
1977, 255-98, and idem, "Taking a Second Look: Observations on the
Iconography of a French Queen, Jeanne de Bourbon (1338-1378)," in
Broude and Garrard (as in n. 28), 100-17.
124
Margaret Miles, Image as Insight. Visual Understanding in Western
Christianity and Secular Culture, Boston, 1985. Also see her article, "The
Virgin's One Bare Breast: Female Nudity and Religious Meaning in Tuscan
Early Renaissance Culture," in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed.
Susan Rubin Suleiman, Cambridge, MA, 1986, 193-207, where Miles in-
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ART HISTORY 341
court. Through this study, Sherman demonstrated the im-
portant role of the queen in the public life of the
monarchy.123
By using art as historical evidence and in terms of both
content and style, Havelock, Kampen, and Sherman iden-
tified the significant roles of women within patriarchal so-
cieties. The works they discussed also raise questions about
the patronage, audience, and function of groups of works,
issues that art historians are increasingly considering a sig-
nificant component in the study of art.
In another interdisciplinary investigation, the theologian
Margaret Miles studied images of women as a source of
information about women's lives during the Middle Ages.124
As opposed to the currently popular deconstructive ap-
proach, Miles's method can be called reconstructive. She
claims that a relatively small group of theological texts
written primarily by secluded communities of monks have
been used too exclusively and authoritatively to under-
stand the experiences and lives of women in the Middle
Ages. Both verbal and visual texts, she argues, "must be
used to illuminate, correct, and supplement the impressions
we get from each . . . only then will we be able to under-
stand how the lives of human beings were organized psy-
chologically, spiritually, and intellectually — how, that is,
their lives were formed, informed, and supported by words
and images." Miles believes that the use of visual images
as historical evidence "promises to provide a range and
depth of material for women's history that is simply un-
available in verbal texts."125
Noting that imagery during this period was used to "for-
mulate and reflect a culture designed by men for the benefit
of men,"126 Miles observes that the meaning received from
images was not the same for men as for women. She thus
poses the important questions: "How did women make use
of images? Is it possible that women could have received
positive and fruitful messages from images of women that
were 'figures in the men's drama'?" The information about
women's lives contained in images of women is an area of
vestigates the meaning of this iconographic type of the Virgin in the socio-
religious context of 14th-century Tuscany.
125 Miles (Image as Insight, as in n. 124), 9,10. She observes that in Chris-
tian images there is a continuous depiction of women and the development
of subjects and themes based on the experience of women. She suggests
that "for a woman whose daily life centered around the worship of a
Christian community, these images may have been powerfully affirming
in a way that twentieth-century women find difficult to imagine, flooded
as we are with exploitative commercial images of women." Miles examines
the visual evidence provided by 4th-century Roman churches (pp. 41-62)
and by the images of women in 14th-century "Tuscan painting (pp. 63-94).
Her approach, however, could be applied fruitfully to any period of the
Middle Ages and antiquity and is, in fact, analogous to the approaches
taken by Havelock, Kampen, and Sherman.
126
Ibid., 64. In the last part of her discussion of women in 14th-century
Tuscan painting, Miles explores the idea "that images of women repre-
sented a way by which men could deal with women by relegating them
to visual objectivity. Simplified thus, the strong and sometimes threat-
ening women of fourteenth-century culture became manageable for men,
and hot just manageable but inspirational; a danger and threat had been
converted to an advantage."
investigation that needs to be pursued much further.
Reinterpretation of History
Not only in the field of art history, but also in art, women
have sought to recover and reinterpret the lost histories of
women of the past. None of these attempts is more famous
— or infamous — than Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, a five-
year (1973-79) collaborative effort intended to represent
both women's oppression and achievement. With that
room-sized work, Chicago hoped to promote social change
through creating respect for women and women's art, forg-
ing a new art to express women's experience, and making
that art accessible to a large audience. The project was a
major undertaking, involving formidable research on
women in history, and on ceramic and needlework tech-
niques of the past.127 It has never been wholeheartedly ac-
claimed a success, however, and it remains without an in-
stitutional home. Indeed, it has been exhibited relatively
little, considering its position as one of the most important
monuments of the first decade of feminist art. Because its
exhibition has been such a problem, Chicago, who has been
responsible for storing it and for related expenses, divided
her next major collaborative work, The Birth Project (1980-
85), into a number of smaller exhibitions rather than show-
ing it as a whole.128
The Dinner Party has been criticized on a number of lev-
els, generally in reaction to its blatant female imagery. Hil-
ton Kramer called it "an outrageous libel on the female
imagination."129 When it was shown in Montreal in 1982,
Ferdinand Saint-Martin implied that Chicago was more in-
terested in vaginas than in female history.130 Garb objected
to what she termed its Modernism, claiming that it "aims
to beat the 'modernist grande machine' at its own game."
. . . its ostensible significance in terms of conjuring a spu-
rious cumulative progress which culminates in the
achievements of the Great Western Woman (at the pin-
nacle of which is Chicago herself) is painfully obvious,
and, most importantly of all, its use of . . . traditionally
female ritual like table setting to impinge upon the ex-
clusivity of male history through positing an alternative
female tradition, is ostensibly subversive at the same ti-
127
See Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage, Gar-
den City, NY, 1979, which is important for its documentation of the proj-
ect as well as for her accompanying journal entries; and Judy Chicago
and Susan Hill, Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needle-
work, Garden City, NY, 1980.
128
Judy Chicago, The Birth Project, Garden City, NY, 1985.
129
Hilton Kramer, "Review of Dinner Party," New York Times, 17 Oct.
1980, Section in, and 18 Oct. 1980, 52.
130
"Lettre de Montréal," Art International xxv, Sept.-Oct., 1982, 52. "Est-
ce la fascination de découvrir l' 'héritage féminin' ou l'attrait d'objects
paraphrasant 1'organe sexuel de la femme?" Also see Carrie Rickey's re-
view of the Dinner Party, in Artforum, Jan., 1981, 72-73, in which she
presents both positive and negative issues; and the positive review of the
show by Lucy Lippard, "Setting a New Place: Judy Chicago's Dinner
Party," in Get The Message? (as in n. 31), 109-13; orig. publ. in Seven
Days, 27 Apr. 1979, and her longer piece on the work in Art in America,
Apr., 1980, 114-26. Chicago's Birth Project incurs similar criticism. See
Josephine Withers, "Judy Chicago's 'Birth Project': A Feminist Muddle?"
meas satisfying Modernism's hunger for innovation.131
The Modernist paradigm and its exclusive history cannot
accommodate women's production, according to Garb, no
matter how feminists may try to "harness women's craft
production into an arena of significance" for Modernism,
because the "very vocabulary of modernism is exclusive of
the conditions of production, reception, and distribution
and the incumbent meanings of the majority of women's
made images /objects in the past."
Tickner evaluated the Dinner Party on similar grounds.
After pointing out its importance with respect to "scale and
ambition, its (controversially) collaborative production,
and its audience," she indicated the problematic status of
its use of "fixed signs of femininity" as opposed to the later,
Postmodern feminist investigation of "unfixed
femininity."132
Elizabeth Goodman gave perhaps the most balanced ac-
count of the work:
The Dinner Party is both clumsy and pathbreaking, as
befits a work that asks the viewer to look at the world
in a different way. . . . The Dinner Party is right on time.
It comes in the wake of modernism, in loud colors and
emotional, high-pitched tone; it rides on the wave of
feminist study and insight; it takes seriously both the
truths and excesses of female consciousness; it fills a large
room; it engaged some 400 workers in something bigger
than anyone; it cannot be ignored; and it should not go
away.133
III. First-Generation Feminist Art
Criticism
Because traditional art criticism was ill-suited to deal with
the issues and imagery of first-generation feminist art, fem-
inist critics sought an alternative.134 Lucy Lippard was the
most important figure in the early investigation of a sep-
aratist art criticism. She radically revised her thinking and
came out publicly in support of feminist art, thereby jeop-
ardizing her well-established reputation in the more tra-
ditional art world.135
New Art Examiner, xiii, Jan., 1986, 28-30.
131
Garb (as in n. 51), 132.
132
Tickner, "Sexuality" (as in n. 67), 28-29.
133
Elizabeth Goodman, "The Dinner Party: A Matter of Taste," Women
Artists News, Feb. /Mar., 1981, 22-23.
134
Lawrence Alloway, in his article "Women's Art and the Failure of Art
Criticism," Art Criticism, i, Winter, 1980, 55, discusses the critical estab-
lishment's failure to acknowledge and critique fairly the art of the women's
movement. He blames the art patronage structure "centered on the com-
mercial art galleries" in which feminist art does not play a role, and the
subsequent lack of a market for women's art (pp. 56-57).
135
Lippard had already published a number of books on various topics,
including Dada, Surrealism, and Pop art, and was a contributor to major
art magazines. Her further radicalization into an even more political stance
since has "debarred" her almost entirely, even from supposedly anti-
establishment publications such as The Village Voice.

Lippard was the first writer to attempt to devise a spe-
cifically feminist art criticism. Her critical methodology,
however, has been to "have no critical system" because she
sees theory and system as authoritarian, limiting, and pa-
triarchal. She also wants to remain open to "contradiction
and change," and to maintain a constant dialogue with her-
self.136 Therefore, Lippard's fundamental contribution to
feminist art, and to political art in general, has been her
devotion to ferreting out and writing about art outside the
"establishment," and its rapidly coopted fringes, such as
the East Village. She is an alternative institution in herself,
a critical voice raised against the politics of the art world
as well as the treatment of women artists.
Despite her anti-theoretical stance, her conception of a
new feminist criticism involved the "establishment of new
criteria by which to evaluate not only the esthetic effect,
but the communicative effectiveness of art attempting to
avoid becoming a new establishment in itself."137 In her ef-
fort to define the feminist contribution to art, she deline-
ated "structures or social collages" that represent the mod-
els that she saw feminism offering to art: "The three models
of such interaction are (1) group and/or public ritual; (2)
public consciousness-raising and interaction through visual
images, environments, and performances; and (3) co-
operative/collaborative/collective or anonymous art-
making."138
Lippard's work is often imbued with a Marxist or so-
cialist slant. Her essay, "The Pink Glass Swan: Upward and
Downward Mobility in the Art World,"139 is exemplary of
her class analysis and her skeptical position towards the
fashions of the market and the stereotypes into which art-
ists play.
Toward 1980, Lippard began to focus on political, ac-
tivist art. She successfully merged this interest with her
feminism in the exhibition she selected for the Institute for
Contemporary Art in London, "Issue: Social Strategies by
Women Artists" (1980), and her essay for its catalogue,
"Issue and Taboo." The exhibition included both American
and British political art, by May Stevens, Jenny Holzer,
Nancy Spero, Mary Kelly, and Marie Yates, as well as by
artists of other nationalities. In her essay, she noted the
differences among feminist artists according to their na-
tionalities. This distinction is important for understanding
the varieties of feminist art and criticism today.
136
"Changing," in Changing: Essays in Art Criticism, New York, 1971.
This position never really changes. Most important for her critical theory
are: "Prefatory Notes," 11-13, and "Change and Criticism: Consistency
and Small Minds," 23-34; and for her turn to feminist criticism, "Intro-
duction: Changing Since Changing," 1-11, and "Freelancing the Dragon,"
15-27, in From the Center (as in n. 21). Her most recent collection of
essays, Get the Message? (as in n. 31), which outlines her attempt to
integrate art, feminism, and left-wing politics, contains important essays
specifically on feminist art as well (p. 34).
137
"Changing" (as in n. 136), 10.
138
"Sweeping Exchanges: The Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the
1970s," Art Journal XL, 1980, repr. in Get the Message? (as in n. 31), 149-
50.
139
As in n. 31.
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ART HISTORY 343
The state of British art is not the state of American art.
. . . In mainstream America, social art is basically ig-
nored; in England, it enjoys the attention of a small but
vocal (and often divided) group with a certain amount
of visibility and media access. In America, artist-orga-
nized tentatives toward a socialist art movement are
marginal and temporary, waxing and waning every five
years or so. . . . In England, there are actually Left po-
litical parties that artists can join and even work with —
and the more advanced level of theoretical discussion
reflects this availability of practice.140
Lippard observed that feminist art in England is concerned
with the position of women in culture (quoting the British
art historian Roszika Parker), whereas in America, "the
popular notion of feminist art is more oriented toward im-
ages than toward ideologies." This apt comparison may be
made for feminist art history as well.
By 1980, Lippard understood the goal of feminism to be
"to change the character of art."
. . . if our only contribution is to be the incorporation
on a broader scale of women's traditions of crafts, au-
tobiography, narrative, overall collage, or any other
technical or stylistic innovation — then we shall have
failed.
Feminism is an ideology, a value system, a revolu-
tionary strategy, a way of life. (And for me it is insep-
arable from socialism. . . .)141
Nicole Dubreuil-Blondin briefly outlines the evolution of
Lippard's thought in "Feminism and Modernism: Para-
doxes" (1983). Despite her criticism, she acknowledges
Lippard's "astounding lucidity and her capacity for self-
analysis," which "allowed her to understand fully the po-
sition of her own discourse at its every stage."142
The question of a feminist art criticism is inextricably
bound up with the nature of a truly feminist art.143 This
issue has also been sporadically treated in the literature.
Moira Roth, an American feminist art historian and critic,
delineated two strains in American feminist art and theory
in 1980: the overtly political and the spiritual, the latter
including goddess imagery as well as the mystical and emo-
tional bonds among women.144 Within these two strains,
140
"Issue and Taboo," 131, reprinted in Get the Message? (as in n. 31),
125-48. Lippard is by no means claiming political art as the only feminist
art, as she makes clear in the introduction to her essay. Also see "Trojan
Horses: Activist Art and Power," in Wallis (as in n. 68), 341-58.
141
"Sweeping Exchanges" (as in n. 138), 149-50.
142
In Modernism and Modernity, ed. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Serge Guil-
baut, and David Solkin, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1983, 195-212. For a cri-
tique of both Lippard and Donald Kuspit, see Clara Weyergraf, "The Holy
Alliance: Populism and Feminism," October, no. 16, Spring, 1981, 23-24.
143
"Changing since Changing," in From the Center (as in n. 21), 7ff.
144 "Vision and Re-Visions: Rosa Luxemburg and the Artist's Mother,"
Artforum, Nov., 1980, 37.
344 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1987 VOLUME LXIX NUMBER 3
she saw a multitude of other issues and divisions. Roth's
article is important for the development and understanding
of a feminist criticism as well. She first describes the tasks
of earlier feminist critics and historians, specifically men-
tioning Lippard and Nochlin. The tasks were, "1. the dis-
covery and presentation of art by women, past and present.
2. the development 0f a new language for writing about
this art — often polemic and poetic, always anti-formalist.
3. the creation of a history of and theories about the forms
and meanings of this rapidly growing, astonishing quantity
of art by women." After noting that these tasks still remain
unfinished, she asked and attempted to answer the vital
question, "What constitutes effective feminist art criticism
now?" For her, the task must be to undertake "a far more
critical mode of writing about this art." Roth began this
task herself by defining the feminist artist as "a woman who
believes in and practices feminism outside her studio and
thus comes to her work with a developed feminist sensi-
bility; however, that does not mean inevitably that her
work should be called 'feminist.'" She thus made an im-
portant distinction between feminist art and feminist art-
ists, thereby allowing finer distinctions to be developed for
feminist criticism. She insisted that "a commitment both to
political ideologies and to a spiritual kinship between
women . . . must provide the underpinnings to virtually
all feminist art in 1980." Her article focused on the two
artists that she sees "combining and balancing" these two
strains, May Stevens and Suzanne Lacy. Today those artists
continue to merge both themes.145 Further, she understood
the priorities of the first generation of feminist artists, in
the early 1970s, to be "to make art about women from the
woman's point of view," and "to teach others about the
conditions of women in a way that would lead to changing
those conditions." Roth believed that feminist objectives in
art "must be redefined to encompass the collective, inter-
active character of women's political and spiritual
strengths," and she listed specific tasks that she believed
would accomplish this.146 It is indeed the pragmatic and
specific aspect of her attempt to redefine feminist art and
145
See Moira Roth, "Visions and Re-Visions: A Conversation with Su-
zanne Lacy," Artforum, Nov., 1980, 42-45.
146
Roth (as in n. 144), 36-38.
147
Others, such as Sandra Langer, Joanna Frueh, and Arlene Raven, have
remained faithful to a "woman-centered" criticism, what Langer calls "gyn-
aesthetic" art criticism, based on women's "own feelings and thoughts,
centered in their own experience in society and culture." Beyond this gen-
eral characteristic, "gyn-aesthetic" criticism "defies definition" for Langer.
However, it seems to be concerned with women's spirituality and the fe-
male body. Joanna Frueh called for "new myths, new masks that wed
creativity, intellect and sexuality." She compared male to female intellect
based on their different sexualities: "The phallic mind . . . must make a
stab at knowledge . . . the vaginal mind embraces." Such methodologies
have been criticized for their essentialism and their re-stereotyping of
woman as body; see Section IV below. (Sandra Langer, "Is There a New
Feminist Criticism," 5, and Joanna Frueh, "The Dangerous Sex: Art Lan-
guage and Male Power," 6-7, both in Women Artists News, x, Sept., 1985.
Also see Joanna Frueh, "Re-vamping the Vamp," Arts Magazine, LVII,
Oct., 1982, 98-103.)
148
1979; cited in Roth (as in n. 144).
criticism that makes her article so valuable.
Artists have also been very vocal in the debate over the
nature of feminist art and criticism. Suzanne Lacy, a per-
formance artist from California, offered her own political
description:
At first we defined feminist art as all art which reflects
a woman's consciousness, but as our politics evolved
some of us chose stronger definitions.147 For me, now,
feminist art must show a consciousness of women's social
and economic position in the world. I also believe it dem-
onstrates forms and perceptions that are drawn from a
sense of spiritual kinship between women.148
Harmony Hammond defined a feminist artist as one who
makes art "that reflects a political consciousness of what
it means to be a woman in patriarchal culture," and insisted
that feminist art is not a style since the "visual form this
consciousness takes varies from artist to artist."149 Feminist
art symbolized to her as well "the confronting and gaining
control of one's own life, as opposed to control over the
lives of others through art." She, too, sought a feminist
criticism that would "bring art and politics together" to
help women understand and develop the relationship be-
tween the two. Such criticism must be "integrated into the
artmaking process," and evolve "as our art evolves."150
Throughout her writing, she has insisted that women crit-
ically evaluate each other's art so that the best possible work
emerges.151
The video and performance artist Martha Rosier, in a
well-known article from 1977,152 noted the importance of
"renewed theoretical activity" after the period of "unity and
high energy" that carried the feminist art movement on its
optimistic wave in the early 1970s. She also pointed out
the need to distinguish between "women's art" and "fem-
inist art," the latter-committed to a feminism that she de-
fined for herself as "a principled criticism of economic and
social power relations and some commitment to collective
action." In her highly sophisticated and analytical critique
149
Harmony Hammond, "Horseblinders," in Wrappings (as in n. 39), 99.
She criticized the current state of feminist art as seen by insiders and
150
"Creating
. Feminist Works," 13, first publ. 1978, Barnard Women's
outsiders
Center, New York, and "Horseblinders," 104 (both in Wrappings as in n.
39). Similarly, in opposition to Alloway's limited definition of feminist
art as collaboration (see the discussion below), Saribenne Stone defines
it as "that art which grows out of a feminist consciousness," and notes
that a feminist woman artist may not necessarily make art concerned with
feminism (response to Alloway [as in n. 37], 1976, 21). Cindy Nemser
claims that any art that reflects "a woman's immediate personal experi-
ence" has the right to be called feminist ('Towards a Feminist Sensibility"
[as in n. 38]), 21.
151
See Wrappings (as in n. 39), 18 and 104, for example.
152 "The private and the Public: Feminist Art in California" (as in n. 24),
66. Rosier has written a number of good critical pieces, but this is the
major one on feminist art. On her work, see Martha Gever, "An Interview
with Martha Rosier," Afterimage, ix, Oct., 1981, 10-17; Martha Rosier:
Three Works, Halifax, 1981; and Jane Weinstock, "Interview with Martha
Rosier," October, xvii, Summer, 1981, 77-98.

of feminist art practice versus theory in California, she ac-
knowledged her preference for feminist art that contained
a "comprehensive critique of society."153 This is one of the
first statements of a second-generation feminist art criti-
cism, whether here or in Europe, although it concerns first-
generation feminist art. Because she moved beyond de-
scription and intention to critique, Rosier provided the best
early model available to feminist critics, and a still useful
one, for dealing with feminist art. It is worthy of note that,
in the same year (1977), two other significant articles with
similar points were published by Carol Duncan and Gri-
selda Pollock.154
Several anthologies on contemporary women artists, in-
cluding Eleanor Munro's Originals: American Women Art-
ists (New York, 1979) and Cindy Nemser's Art Talk (New
York, 1975), have contributed important information as
well. Both rely on interviews. The latter, however, al-
though containing some valuable statements, is overbur-
dened by Nemser's leading questions and opinionated en-
gagement with the artists.155 Munro also employed an
intrusive approach, that of "psychoesthetics" (psycholog-
ical biography), through which to view the artists. She also
rejected a feminist perspective. Nevertheless, her inter-
views are sensitive and intelligent. A more recent collection
of interviews with fewer preconceptions is that edited by
Lynn F. Miller and Sally S. Swenson, Lives and Works.
Talks with Women Artists (Metuchen, NJ, 1981).
One other critic must be noted. In 1976, Lawrence Al-
loway published his overview of the women's art move-
ment, 'Women's Art in the '70s." It is important not only
as an attempt by an "authoritative" male voice to sum-
marize events, problems, and necessary goals for feminist
art, but also for the responses it elicited. He simplistically
maintained that collaboration is the most important cri-
terion for a working definition of a feminist: "a woman
who is willing to work with other women to reduce ine-
quality in the long run or to achieve a specific short-term
reform."156 The many responses to his ideas ranged from
153
Ibid., "Private," 66, 69.
154
Pollock, "What's Wrong With Images of Women?" (as in n. 33), and
Duncan, "The Esthetics of Power in Modern Erotic Art" (as in n. 31).
Duncan, of course, was writing such articles much earlier (see nn. 91 and
112 above).
155
See Duncan's biting review of Art Talk in "When Greatness is a Box
of Wheaties" (as in n. 10), discussed above.
156
Alloway (as in n. 21), 64.
157
Response to Alloway (as in n. 37), 11-23.
158
Alloway (as in n. 21). Beside this article, Alloway has written an im-
portant essay on women's art criticism (as in n. 134), an early article on
Nancy Spero, Artforum, May, 1976, 52-53; a review of Pollock and Par-
ker (as in n. 14) in Woman's Art Journal, iii, Fall. 1982/Winter. 1983. 60-
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ART HISTORY 345
appreciation to critique of his authoritarian, "patronizing
'progress report,'" as Harmony Hammond termed it.157 Al-
loway has consistently shown an unprecedented interest in
feminist art among male critics of the first generation, an
interest approached only by that of Donald Kuspit.158 Al-
loway's position, however supportive, has not been a rad-
ical feminist one, although he does insist that art by women
has an ideological rather than simply formal import.
Despite the proliferation of information about feminist
art, theory, and the organizations supporting feminist art,
very few statistically measurable gains have been made —
in the numbers of women exhibiting in major galleries and
in major museums, or in the numbers of grants received
by women artists.159 While a few female artists have been
elevated to the status of art-world "stars," and are now
considered "safe" investments, there is still little conscious-
ness of the status of women in art. More important, fem-
inist and women artists in general are still at odds over what
should be done about their status. Lippard's early demand
that women create an alternative to their existing small
share of the art world has not yet materialized, and in gen-
eral women artists in America still seek simple equity with
their male colleagues. Jane Gallop reveals the inadequacy
of the strategies for "equal rights" or "gender equity" that
informed cultural politics of the 1970s. Those strategies,
based on the elimination of discrimination and on equal
access to institutional power, in no way attempt to take
into account "the ideological structures of which discrim-
ination is but a symptom."160 They aim to bring woman
into the standard masculine order, leaving untouched "the
integrated value system through which feminine oppres-
sion is enacted." Both feminist art historians and art critics
agree that a critique of the institutions themselves is in
order.
On the other hand, a handful of committed feminist crit-
ics and a growing number of feminist art historians have
created a body of material on women artists past and pres-
ent, to present an alternative vision to that of the status
61; and a proposal for an exhibition of women artists at The Museum of
Modern Art, New York, "Post-Masculine Art: Women Artists 1970-1980,"
Art Journal xxxix, 1980, 295-97.
See Kuspit's articles on Nancy Spero in particular: "Nancy Spero at
A.I.R.," Art in America, July/Aug., 1975, 101-02; "Nancy Spero at AIR
and Miriam Schapiro at André Emmerich Downtown," Art Journal xxxvi,
1976, 144-46; "Spero's Apocalypse," Artforum, Apr., 1980, 34-35, and his
article on decorative art and feminist intention (as in n. 50).
159
Statistics of articles on women in major art magazines are still dismal,
as seen in the Guerilla Girls' advertisements in the Jan., 1987 issue of Arts
Magazine, 104, 128.
160
Kate Linker, "Representation and Sexuality" (Parachute, no. 32, Fall,
1983, 12-23), repr. in Wallis (as in n. 68), 394, with reference to Gallop.
346 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1987 VOLUME LXIX NUMBER 3
quo.161 As Jacqueline Skiles put it,
The women artists' movement [in the United States] has
been basically reformist, primarily seeking the inclusion
of women in the existing recognition-and-reward system
of the art world. And yet they have been forced, by vir-
tue of the barriers to those rewards, to alter the structure
of that world by adding to it a parallel set of alternative
institutions, publications, and organizations. . . . Ten-
sion has existed between women who set their sights on
the rewards of the art world as is and those who seek to
restructure it, to alter its values and criteria for art as a
condition for wanting in. . . . The conditions of the art
world are such, however, that both those who merely
want in and those who maintain a more critical stance
are engaged in the process of transformation. The issue,
then, is to become more conscious of this process. . . .162
Skiles's discussion holds true for art history as well as art.
The transformation she described has already begun. Both
first- and second-generation feminist art has encouraged
political practices that Deborah Cherry describes as having
redefined art on both theoretical and practical levels: "To
make their own meanings, feminist artists have challenged
the art establishment's views on the nature and function of
art, rebutted beliefs that art is neutral and value free, punc-
tured modernist fallacies that it is apolitical."163 The work
of the artists Nancy Spero, Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz,
and May Stevens and of the art historians Carol Duncan
and Griselda Pollock might be cited as exemplary of these
issues; others could be named as well.
First-generation artists, critics, and art historians have
been generally successful in exposing discrimination in the
art world, advocating reforms, and giving contemporary
and historical women artists wider exposure. Second-gen-
eration feminists, instead of developing these issues, have
taken a different perspective towards them, one that is often
allied to issues important to critical Postmodernism. Their
analysis has become more interdisciplinary, utilizing stud-
ies in literary poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and se-
miotics, as well as political philosophies such as Marxism.
IV. Second-Generation Art Criticism
and Methodology
A more consistently radical critique of traditional meth-
161
See, for example, Thalia Gouma-Peterson, "Icons of Healing Energy:
The Recent Work of Audrey Flack," Arts Magazine, LVIII, Nov., 1983,
136-41; "Faith Ringgold's Journey: From Greek Busts to Jemima Blakey,"
Faith Ringgold: Painting, Sculpture, Performance, ed. Thalaia Gouma-
Peterson and Kathleen McManus Zurko, The College of Wooster, OH,
1985, 5-7; Faith Ringgold (as in n. 42), 64-69; "The House as Private and
Public Image In Miriam Schapiro's Art," Miriam Schapiro. A Retrospec-
tive: 1953-1980, ed. Thalia Gouma-Peterson, The College of Wooster, OH,
1980, 10-18; "Theater of Life" (as in n. 42); "Decorated Walls for Public
Spaces: Joyce Kozloff's Architectural Installations," Joyce Kozloff: Vi-
sionary Ornament, Boston University Art Gallery, Boston, 1986, 45-57;
also see Roth on performance (as in n. 24). Josephine Withers has written
a number of short articles on women artists as well. See Section IV here
for second-generation feminist art critics.
odologies exists among second-generation feminist art crit-
ics than among art historians. Critics have been quick to
adopt new approaches. This may be the result of the lack
of a strong tradition in art criticism that would foster in-
tegration of new ideas rather than a radical appropriation
of a totally new methodology. In art history, such tradi-
tions sometimes result in a resistance to new ideas. In fem-
inist literary theory and criticism, on the other hand, the
reception of deconstructive and psychoanalytic methodol-
ogies has been tempered by their preexisting tradition and
thus more fully incorporated into earlier studies of female
experience and sensibility in literature.
Two basic positions coexist in feminist art criticism to-
day, each with a number of variations. One has existed
from the beginning of the women's movement in art, while
the other is not yet a decade old. The transformations in
both critical and artistic concerns between first- and sec-
ond-generation feminism are not necessarily to be distin-
guished qualitatively.
These two positions in other disciplines are described in
the anthology, The Future of Difference: "early states of
feminist thought" emphasized the "condition and experi-
ence of being female," and attempted to "diminish and min-
imize the importance of differences" because "difference
from men meant inequality and continued oppression."
Women thus "set out to document the worlds of women"
and their experience, previously excluded from analysis.
The "shift in emphasis" for second-generation feminists has
been not to "minimize difference" but to "assert its impor-
tance as a crucial focus of study."164
Lippard designates the polarities in these positions in art
as cultural versus socialist feminism.165 The terms are ar-
ticulated through the notions of the category "Woman."
The first position, sometimes termed essentialist, conceives
of woman as a fixed category determined through societal
and cultural institutions, and less often through the concept
of an inherent and biological female nature. Its advocates
often attempt to characterize or celebrate specifically fe-
male attributes, within a separatist mode, or to reveal the
history and the nature of the repressions of woman within
those categories. The second sees woman as an unfixed cat-
egory, constantly in process, examined through her rep-
resentations and ideological constructions within a male
system. Rather than a definition of gender per se, of
woman, the issue becomes, as Tickner puts it, "the prob-
lematic of culture itself, in which definitions of femininity
162
Skiles, "The United States: 1970-1980" (as in n. 35), 75.
163
Deborah Cherry (as in n. 19), 505.
164
Eisenstein (as in n. 1).
165
Lucy Lippard, "Issue and Taboo," Get the Message? (as in n. 31), 147;
also see Tickner, "Sexuality" (as in n. 67), 19, 28-29; the debate between
Spero and Weinstock discussed below; and Elaine Showalter, "Feminist
Criticism in the Wilderness," The New Feminist Criticism (as in n. 59),
255. She notes that these different approaches produce "the tensions in
the women's movement." Showalter describes two similar groups of fem-
inists in the women's movement generally: "Those who would stay outside
the academic establishments and the institutions of criticism and those
who would enter and even conquer them."

are produced and contested and in which cultural practices
cannot be derived from or mapped directly onto a biolog-
ical gender." Second-generation artists and critics are con-
cerned rather with "an interrogation of an unfixed femi-
ninity produced in specific systems of signification." The
work of such artists as Mary Kelly, Yve Lomax, and Marie
Yates, which Tickner discusses in her article for the exhi-
bition "Difference: On Representation and Sexuality" at the
New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (1985),
are concerned, as she says, with "sexuality in process which
Luce Irigaray described as 'woman as the not-yet' — a con-
tinued countering of cultural hegemony in its ceaseless and
otherwise unquestioned production of meanings and of
subject positions for those meanings."
The most important contribution of the feminism under
consideration here is the recognition of the relations be-
tween representation and sexed subjectivity in process,
and of the need to intervene productively within them.
The artists considered here hold the common aim of "un-
fixing" the feminine, unmasking the relations of specu-
larity that determine its appearance in representation,
and undoing its position as a "marked term" which en-
sures the category of the masculine as something central
and secure.
Tickner links the development of the later position to the
understanding of the "psycho-social construction of sexual
difference."
The result was a shift in emphasis from equal rights
struggles in the sexual division of labor and a cultural
feminism founded on the revaluation of an existing bi-
ological or social femininity to a recognition of the pro-
cesses of sexual differentiation, the instability of gender
positions, and the hopelessness of excavating a free or
original femininity beneath the layers of patriarchal
oppression.166
Exemplifying these two positions, The Post-Partum Doc-
ument, 1973-79, by Mary Kelly, an American artist living
in London, might profitably be compared to Judy Chica-
go's Birth Project, 1985, since both are concerned with the
166
Tickner, "Sexuality" (as in n. 67), 28, 19.
167
These differences also relate to the difference between British and
American feminism. In fact, both British and French thought has had an
enormous influence on the second group of American feminists (see the
discussion below).
168
Cherry (as in n. 19), 502, citing Sheila Rowbotham. Cherry also points
to the "appropriation" of psychoanalytic theory by feminists, 'especially
of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, in order to "understand how
femininity is socially constructed." For feminist interpretations of psy-
choanalytic theory, see Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, New
York, 1974; Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality:
Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, London, 1982; and Jane Gallop,
The Daughter's Seduction, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Ithaca, 1982.
Also see Jane Gallop, "Psychoanalytic Criticism: Some Intimate Ques-
tions," Art in America, Nov., 1984, 9-15.
For a similar debate with a different slant, see Carol Ockman's response
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ART HISTORY 347
female experience of giving birth and child-rearing. Beyond
the obvious differences of emphasis, one on birth and the
other on the mother/child relationship, the two approach
their subjects from totally opposite viewpoints. Kelly's
work is theoretical and ideologically oriented, based on the
concept of a socially constructed motherhood and includ-
ing a psychoanalytic perspective, while Chicago's is myth-
ical, historical, and experiential, based on a celebration of
the female.167
A debate concerning methodology has recently erupted
in art-critical circles between these two groups, which fur-
ther illustrates their different positions. Unfortunately, it
has been antagonistically conceived and simplistically dis-
torted from both sides. Deborah Cherry, clearly a second-
generation feminist, in her review of Pollock and Parker's
Old Mistresses, counsels against "perpetuating unificatory
stereotypes" such as the "isolated, frozen category" of
"Woman."168 She further pushes first-generation feminists
into a biologically deterministic camp, which they by no
means all occupy, by defining sex as a reference to biolog-
ical differences and gender as a matter of culture, and by
assuming that all artists and critics who are not concerned
with "gender" adhere to an essentialist, unchanging view
of woman throughout history. On the contrary, although
first-generation feminists often investigate specific traits
that belong to the female, such traits are generally seen as
culturally determined and changing through history as
those determinants change. This group of feminists looks
at both the continuities and the changes, through the "fixed
signs of femininity," as in work such as Chicago's Dinner
Party, whose "political/aesthetic strategy" is based "on the
same terms in which 'difference' has already been laid
down." Second-generation feminists seek to "unfix" the
feminine rather than reveal its determinants based in male
institutions and structures.169
Concerns of first-generation feminist artists have been
more specifically criticized by the filmmaker and film critic
Jane Weinstock. She characterizes much first-generation
feminist art, in particular that of Nancy Spero, as the "cel-
ebration of Otherness." Like many other Postmodern fem-
inists, she disdains the "celebration of difference" and the
"myth of Otherness," and prefers artists who, she says,
"expose myths rather than create them," such as Ilona Gra-
(Art in America, Dec., 1986, 11) to Anne M. Wagner's review of The
Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan
Rubin Suleiman (Art in America, Oct., 1986,17 ,19), and Wagner's reply,
11, 13.
Lucy Lippard, too, moved away from a biological investigation of fe-
male sensibility in her later work. She says in the catalogue essay, "Issue
and Taboo" (in Get the Message?, as in n. 31), 125-26, that "I still hold
the opinion that women's art differs from that of men, but I have moved
away from my earlier attempt to analyze these differences in formal terms
alone."
169
Tickner, "Sexuality" (as in n. 67), 29. The legitimation of craft through
its integration into "high" art as the celebration of the female sensibility
might also be seen as concerned with the "fixed" signs of the feminine.
Such celebration has been called "the singing of the slaves." However, it
is important to note that oppressed peoples, and "outsiders" generally,
have a special vantage point that makes their voices worth hearing. •
348 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1987 VOLUME LXIX NUMBER 3
net, Jenny Holzer, Mary Kelly, and Barbara Kruger.170
Those artists analyze "how meaning is produced and or-
ganized" and therefore undermine "the structures of dom-
ination."171 This attitude expresses the shift that has oc-
curred in feminist art and criticism over the last decade.
Nancy Spero responds to this criticism172 by citing Si-
mone de Beauvoir: "Otherness is a fundamental category
of human thought. . . . If the woman question seems triv-
ial, it is because masculine arrogance has made of it a 'quar-
rel'" (The Second Sex). Spero condemns this second gen-
eration of feminist criticism as it is manifested in
Weinstock's article as "a new wave of phallocentrism, un-
der the guise of 'difference'" She aggressively defends the
legitimacy of art such as her own "Let the Priests tremble
. . ." as a "new representation on the subject of sexuality,
on being female," and she insinuates that the alternative
chosen by Weinstock and others amounts only to "playing
pet or merely 'subversive' to male symmetries and privi-
lege." She cites Hélène Cixous to support her interest in
female sexuality as opposed to male, just as Weinstock cited
the same writer to refute "traditional male /female oppo-
sition" as she sees it in the art of Spero.173
Weinstock's response to Spero's letter is to question what
she calls Spero's "search for a female essence," once again
distorting the notion of representation of sexuality into es-
sentialism. Many feminists of Spero's camp consider that
very sexuality to be socially constructed. The difference
between Spero and Weinstock, as representatives of the two
concomitant phases of feminist thought on art, reduces to
the difference between the understanding of the female as
somehow existent, fixed, and thus excavatable, at least
within a moment in history, synchronically, and the alter-
native investigation of the unstable process of gender con-
struction. Although sexuality may not exist except as a con-
struction, women do have common shared experiences, and
the constructs of gender themselves result from repeated
experiences, whether one takes Spero's view of sexuality
or Mary Kelly's. Spero grounds her work in the condition
of being female, in what woman is in relation to herself,
and to other women, while Kelly considers how that self
is constructed in relation to social, ideological, and psy-
chological structures. Spero wants to take a moment of that
fixed position and examine and/or celebrate it; Weinstock
and others want to unfix the position entirely. They are
mutually exclusive concepts, yet both are operable. The
level at which constructions are encoded is the level of com-
mon, shared experiences. One reveals the continuities be-
170
Jane Weinstock, "A Lass, A Laugh and a Lad," Art in America, Sum-
mer, 1983, 7-10.
171
Cited by Weinstock, ibid., 8, from Jo-Anna Isaak's essay on the ex-
hibition, "The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter," at Protetch
McNeil Gallery, New York, 1983. Weinstock's essay is a critique of the
exhibition. Citing Lyotard in support of her statement, Weinstock says
that the "Goddess" and the "Body," both exalted by many feminist artists,
"have become victims of the capital letter" (p. 7). In opposition to Wein-
stock, Donald Kuspit claims that Spero "demythologizes" woman as pas-
sive victim, rather than creating myths. See his essay, "Symptoms of Cri-
tique: Nancy Spero and Francesc Torres," Art and Ideology, exh. cat.,
tween, the other exposes the discontinuities and disjunc-
tions within.
Tickner does not see the two generations in such nega-
tive, dichotomous terms. Not only has she written some
of the most trenchant and penetrating analyses of second-
generation concerns, but she is also sympathetic to first-
generation feminist art as an ongoing project, as can be seen
in her recent article on Nancy Spero. Tickner disagrees with
Weinstock that Spero is celebrating "difference," and claims
instead that her intent is to create "la peinture féminine"
related to "l´écriture féminine" of which the French feminist
theorists speak.174 In her article, Tickner offers not only a
substantial model of scholarship and methodology for fem-
inist criticism, but she also rescues first-generation art from
exile and re-establishes it as a viable enterprise.
Lippard also has refused to give up the one position in
her move towards the more deconstructive one. In the de-
bate between "socialist feminism and radical or cultural
feminism," she takes both sides. She included both Mary
Kelly and Nancy Spero in her exhibition in London at the
Institute for Contemporary Arts (1980), "Issue: Social
Strategies by Women Artists." Lippard observes:
Some of the artists in "Issue" . . . refuse to separate their
social activism and their involvement in the myths and
energies of women's distant histories and earth
connections.
It seems to me that to reject all of these aspects of
women's experience as dangerous stereotypes often
means simultaneous rejection of some of the more val-
uable aspects of our female identities. Though used
against us now, their final disappearance would serve the
dominant culture all too well.175
Griselda Pollock also assumes a more encompassing
perspective:
To avoid the embrace of the feminine stereotype which
homogenizes women's work determined by natural gen-
der, we must stress the heterogeneity of women's art
work, the specificity of individual producers and prod-
ucts. Yet we have to recognize what women share — as
a result of nurture not nature, i.e., the historically var-
iable social systems which produce sexual differen-
tiation.176
This exchange effectively represents the different ideo-
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1984, 21-22.
172
In a letter to Art in America, Nov., 1983, 7.
173 Weinstock (as in n. 170), 7.
174
Tickner, "Nancy Spero: Images and la peinture féminine" (in press).
Her art-historical work also employs new methodologies in its attempt
to situate women within their own space. See her work on the suffragists
(also in press).
175
"Issue and Taboo" (in Get the Message?, as in n. 31), 147.
176
Pollock (as in n. 83).

logical positions of the two feminist groups. Both positions
have potential worth, despite the fact that it is in the nature
of the committed to deny it. (The move toward revisionist
psychoanalytic feminist thought as a link between the con-
structed self and the constructed category "Woman" makes
sense in this impasse.) The recent art of May Stevens, for
example, has managed to negotiate both positions, through
her Postmodern vocabulary of disjunction and fragment,
which both critiques patriarchal institutions and addresses
specifically female concerns.177 Weinstock's accusation that
Cherry's definition of "sex" difference is only biological,
that it posits a "female essence," and many other such im-
plications in recent feminist literature are in danger of
simplistically "colonizing" first-generation feminism into
an essentialist camp. Such categorical closure is certainly
in opposition to the proclaimed aims of a dismantling and
deconstructing Postmodern feminism.178
Contemporary art critics among this second generation
bring a feminist perspective to their use of new Postmodern
methodologies of poststructuralism, semiotics, and psy-
choanalytic criticism. Such critics are growing in number
and include Craig Owens, particularly with his essay, "The
Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism."179 and
a number of women, often artist themselves, such as Mar-
tha Rosier, Silvia Kolbowski, Jane Weinstock, Kate Linker,
Tickner, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, among many oth-
ers. Feminist Postmodern criticism has even entered the
mainstream art magazines, although it is still under-rep-
resented.180 Such criticism generally deals with a particular
artistic content that, not surprisingly, is concerned with po-
litical, Postmodern theoretical issues, such as political de-
constructive tactics, or psychoanalytically structured works
that are concerned with desire, and the way women are
imaged and ideologically constructed. Such art is quite
prevalent and growing at a rapid pace, as is its criticism.
The situation at the moment seems to favor the new meth-
odological criticism and thus the art it supports, while leav-
177
See especially the large paintings from her work, Ordinary/Extraor-
dinary, 1977-1986, reproduced in the catalogue May Stevens: Ordinary/
Extraordinary: A Summation, 1977-1984, Boston University Gallery, 1984.
For a discussion of these aspects of the work, see Patricia Mathews, "A
Dialogue of Silence: May Stevens's Ordinary/Extraordinary, 1977-1986,"
forthcoming in Art Criticism.
178
In her introduction to the Difference catalogue, Kate Linker once again
points to a distinction between "sexuality as a cultural construction" and
the "opposing . . . perspective based on a natural or biological 'truth'"
(p. 5). The latter may refer to the 19th-century concept of inherent fem-
ininity, but certainly also refers to the dichotomy within feminism today
that writers take advantage of to infer a totally new perspective. First-
generation feminism is not so simply categorized, and the differences are
more subtle and more important. This antagonistic position is not the
only position taken by second-generation feminists, of course.
179
Published in the widely read anthology of Postmodern thought, The
Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed, Hal Foster, Port
Townsend, WA, 1983, 57-82.
180
For several among many examples, see the feminist critiques of the
collaboration of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and the body-
builder and artist Lisa Lyons by the artist Silvia Kolbowski, "Covering
Mapplethorpe's 'Lady,'" Art in America, Summer, 1983, 10-11; of the col-
laboration of David Salle and Karole Armitage, by Jill Johnston, "The
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ART HISTORY 349
ing a whole range of art by active first-generation feminist
artists working in a different though still important arena
of feminism without enough solid criticism. It thus falls on
critics who, from the beginning, dealt with women's art in
its social contexts to carry the entire burden of all other
criticism of women's art.
The exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary
Art in New York, "Difference: On Representation and Sex-
uality," exemplifies many of the new tendencies in meth-
odology and art. Since it was curated by both an art critic,
Kate Linker, and a film critic, Jane Weinstock, it included
film and video along with more "traditional" art; such a
breakdown of categories is characteristic of current ten-
dencies. Through both the art works and the catalogue, the
exhibition represented poststructuralist, psychoanalyti-
cally informed thinking on both art and film.181 Catalogue
essays were written by members of the same "radical es-
tablishment," including Owens and Tickner. As its title as-
serts, the exhibition was concerned with sexuality and rep-
resentation, emphasizing the female gender. The show was
composed mostly of feminist artists and critics, including
deconstructionist artists such as Barbara Kruger, Martha
Rosier, Sherrie Levine, Silvia Kolbowski, and Hans Haacke
from America, and Mary Kelly, Yve Lomax, Marie Yates,
and Victor Burgin, residents of Great Britain. Typical of
the new methodological focus of feminism on difference
and gender rather than the female per se, the exhibition
was not separatist. Not only were both male artists and
critics represented, but Tickner, among others, brought a
discussion of male sexuality into her feminist discourse on
representation and sexuality.182
Despite its rising influence, a critique of these new meth-
odologies in relation to feminism has been undertaken, al-
though it is still inadequately developed. In his assessment
of them, Owens first noted a point of conjunction between
"the feminist critique of patriarchy and the postmodernist
critique of representation," in that both reject a totalizing
Punk Princess and the Postmodern Prince," Art in America, Oct., 1986,
23-25; and a critique of art and the media's depiction of violence against
women, by Leslie Labowitz and Suzanne Lacy, "Mass Media, Popular
Culture, and Fine Art," Social Works, exh. cat., Los Angeles Institute of
Contemporary Art, 1979, repr. in Richard Hertz, Theories of Contem-
porary Art, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1985, 171-78.
181
Feminist film theory and criticism is highly developed, especially in its
use of psychoanalytic theory, as seen in the work of Laura Mulvey, "Vi-
sual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen, xvi, Autumn, 1975, 6-18
(repr. in Wallis, as in n. 68, 361-73); Annette Kuhn, Women's Pictures,
Feminism and Cinema, London, Boston, Melbourne, and Henley, 1982,
and The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality,
London, Boston, Melbourne, and Henley, 1985; and E. Ann Kaplan,
Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera, New York, 1983, "among
many others. Photography criticism, too, incorporates a sophisticated
feminist perspective. For example, see the writings of the British artist
Victor Burgin, such as Thinking Photography, London, 1982. Several
magazines support such research, and publish a number of feminist anal-
yses of film and photography, including Screen and Afterimage.
182
Tickner, "Sexuality" (as in n. 67), 24ff. For a critique of this show, see
Paul Smith, "Difference in America," Art in America, Apr., 1985, 190-
99. Although he generally praises the exhibition, he also criticizes its "the-
oretical passivity" (p. 194).
350 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1987 VOLUME LXIX NUMBER 3
theoretical construct. However, as Owens observed, it is
not "theory per se that women repudiate, nor simply, as
Lyotard has suggested, the priority men have granted to it.
. . . Rather. . . , they challenge . . . the distance it main-
tains between itself and its objects — a distance that ob-
jectifies and masters." Indeed, Postmodern and poststruc-
turalist methodologies often refer to feminism and the
female in their rejection of an authoritarian discourse of
mastery. Despite the importance of the "feminist voice" as
a model for breaking down a discourse of mastery in Post-
modern culture, theories of it have "tended either to neglect
or to repress that voice," as Owens said. He suggested,
therefore, that "Postmodernism may be another masculine
invention engineered to exclude women."183
Tickner questions the very use of "feminine metaphors"
to refer to the Postmodern refusal of authority and "master
discourses" by writers such as Jameson and Derrida. She
asks if this is not just another cliche of the female.
Are these intellectual abdications on one level the
flirtation of male philosophers with the place of the
Other . . . ? . . . Is the embrace of the feminine a fash-
ionable flirtation which avoids the consequences of psy-
choanalytic and feminist theories of subjectivity for men?
. . . When the masters who are demonstrating their ul-
timate mastery by refusing the discourse of mastery . . .
make fashionable reference to feminism it remains a lum-
pen category without reference to names, dates or texts
to be argued with.184
In such discourse, there is the danger that women will once
again be positioned as the weaker, essentialist voice of "na-
ture" and "experience" in opposition to culture, theory, and
intellect.
In spite of such dangers, the feminist Postmodern en-
gagement with theory has been quite rich and fruitful. If,
as Tickner believes, "feminism is a politics, not a meth-
odology,"185 it is legitimate to utilize and transform what-
ever methodological tools are available, including "male"
theory. Unfortunately, such feminist, Postmodern posi-
tioning can often take the form of authoritarianism itself.
V. Methodology: Art History
Feminist art-historical methodologies, like those of feminist
scholarship in all disciplines, have become increasingly so-
phisticated, moving from a desire to integrate feminism into
the traditional methods of the discipline to a deconstruction
and critique of the discipline itself. Just as with art-critical
183
"Discourse" in The Anti-Aesthetic (as in n. 179), 59, 64, 63, 61.
184
From "Feminism and Art History," a paper given in April, 1986, at the
meetings of the British Association of Art Historians, held at Brighton
Polytechnic.
185
Ibid.
186
Elaine Showalter, "The Feminist Critical Revolution," intro. to The
New Feminist Criticism (as in n. 59), 8. She cites Olive Banks, Faces of
Feminism: A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement, New York, 1981.
Banks also indicates a "deep rift between radical men and women that
occurred" in the United States but not in England.
methodologies, so feminist art-historical methodologies
differ according to one's ideological position, which in itself
is often conditioned by nationality. Showalter designates
the "English contributions to international feminist criti-
cism" as "an analysis of the connection between gender and
class, an emphasis on popular culture, and a feminist cri-
tique of Marxist literary theory." She cites the sociologist
Olive Banks, who observes a "closer link in Britain between
socialism or Marxism and feminism" than in the United
States.186
Tickner lucidly describes the difference in method be-
tween Europeans and American critics (not necessarily all
feminists, but rather Postmodernists speaking on issues of
sexuality and/in representation as she defines it):
These questions have been rehearsed by American crit-
ics, largely under the diverse influences of Walter Ben-
jamin, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and the Frankfurt
School. A comparable body of writing in England has
drawn more pointedly on the work of Bertolt Brecht,
Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and tendencies in Eu-
ropean Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, and
psychoanalysis.
The crucial European component in the debate has
been the theorization of the gendered subject in ideology
[based on Althusser and Lacan in particular].187
Although the influence of radical thought from Europe
has dramatically altered the discipline of American art crit-
icism generally, including feminist art criticism as we have
seen, in American feminist art history this has only just
begun to occur. Indeed, as illustrated in Larry Silver's State
of Research essay for this journal,188 the new methodologies
have affected the conservative discipline of American art
history to a greater extent than they have American fem-
inist art history until quite recently.
The reasons for this are many. First, most American art
historians are not given an academic foundation in radical
theory and methodology as are the British, in Marxism for
example, and are therefore not so quick to respond with
feminist transformations of that theory. In fact, American
art historians are not encouraged to use any particular
methodology, except a "traditional," i.e., empirical one,
whatever that may encompass. The problem has been a
fear and mistrust of theory and lack of interest in meth-
odology in art history generally.189
Second, from the beginning, first-generation American
feminist art historians turned to social history for their in-
187
"Sexuality" (as in n. 67), 19.
188
Silver (as in n. 92).
189 This ambivalence is not so obvious in the work of American male and
non-feminist female art historians, only because they are encouraged to
pursue traditional methodologies — that is, the formal, empirical, or icon-
ographic analysis of white middle-class male art of genius, in which women
and feminist issues have no place because there is no structure with which
to study them. Other methodological models in art history, such as the
Marxism of Meyer Schapiro or T.J. Clark, have a place in the canon,
though only a minimal one.

vestigations, and since such a method appeared radical
within the context of traditional art history, they have been
content to remain within its boundaries, rather than ex-
plore the newer methodologies. Finally, there is a certain
distrust of European methodologies in the United States,
which causes hesitancy on the part of those considering
them as tools for study. It is also the case that some Amer-
icans who embrace European theory mimic it unselectively,
rather than transforming it to suit their purposes. These
unsynthesized models tend to turn away potential advo-
cates as well.
For these and other reasons, American feminist art his-
tory, in conjunction with the traditional boundaries of the
discipline itself, has largely remained locked within more
conservative methodologies, rather than extending and
making their own, sometimes inconsistently conceived
methods more consistent.190 With the adoption by feminist
art critics of models from other disciplines, as well as the
greater influence of European models in art history gen-
erally, a new generation of American feminist art historians
is beginning to appropriate new methodologies for its own
purposes.
The contribution of the first generation of American fem-
inists has been important as groundwork, despite its lim-
itations. Feminist art historians were first interested in re-
covering the lost history of women artists and in
reinterpreting images from a female viewpoint in order to
reveal and critically analyze the roles women have been
assigned in history.191 They also have criticized the canon
of art history seen as a linear progression of male geniuses,
based on a hierarchy of art still embodied in art history
textbooks: Italian Renaissance over the North, nineteenth-
century French art over nineteenth-century American,
"high" art over crafts, and male over female.192 As it be-
came clear that these judgments were arbitrary at best, and
not universal absolutes, women artists and critics and even-
tually art historians began to question the nature of the
discipline that promulgated them.
One of the major differences between American and Brit-
ish art historians and critics, as well as between the two
generations of feminism, is the way in which these ques-
190
It is worth pointing out the recent popularity of British artists, art
critics, and art historians in America. Tickner, for example, wrote for the
catalogue Difference (as in n. 67) and was on Natalie Kampen's panel on
gender at the meetings of the College Art Association, 1987 (Pollock was
also invited, but unable to attend). It is also worth noting the enthusiastic
turn to deconstructive theory by Americans, especially among art critics
— a philosophy/theory to serve as structure.
191
Broude and Garrard ask, "Is killing and dying heroically necessarily
a greater human attainment than mourning the dead and comforting the
living?" (as in n. 28), 4.
192
Natalie Kampen and Elizabeth G. Grossman, "Feminism and Meth-
odology: Dynamics of Change in the History of Art and Architecture,"
Working Paper No. 122, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women,
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ART HISTORY 351
tions were formulated as goals and tasks for feminist re-
search. In 1975, after providing a barrage of statistics point-
ing out the inequalities within the art world, Gloria
Orenstein described the work to be done. Women artists
and feminist critics must, she said, pressure museums and
galleries, and feminist art historians must document wom-
en's art history. "When the names of important women art-
ists are included in art history books and courses, we will
know that women have made a significant revolution in
intellectual and cultural history."193
Broude goes much further in her call for feminists to ed-
ucate both men and women "to question the universal va-
lidity of those very myths and values and cultural as-
sumptions that, in the past, have automatically excluded
from the domain of Art the experiences of half of our pop-
ulation."194 This is a viable and valuable goal, but many
would claim that education, even "encouraging institu-
tional change in art education," is useless until the ideo-
logical underpinnings that support female repression are
understood and exposed.
More recently, and in large part due to the early ques-
tioning of the traditional categories and standards of the
discipline of art history, feminists have begun to doubt the
possibility of working within these categories at all. Many
feminist art historians today think that there is more than
just a "lack of appropriate consciousness" that would allow
a study of women artists within the discipline after a period
of consciousness-raising education. Indeed, they believe
that the field of art history is "based on assumptions which
make it impossible for women's roles and images ever to
be interpreted correctly."195 As Duncan put it in her dis-
cussion of feminist art criticism: "More and better criticism
within established modes — old art history with women
added — these are not real solutions. The value of estab-
lished art thinking and how it functions as ideology must
be critically analyzed, not promoted anew."196
Pollock and Parker agreed with Duncan in Old Mis-
tresses, and even more forcefully in later articles. They,
too, conceived the task of feminism in art very differently
from the simple legitimation of women within a male es-
tablishment or attempts to educate new attitudes.
1983, 2-6. Also see that essay for statistics of each area covered in text-
books, and the number of women artists included, as of 1983.
193
Orenstein (as in n. 21), 525. Eleanor Tufts, "Beyond Gardner, Gom-
brich, and Janson: Towards a Total History of Art," Arts Magazine, LV,
Apr., 1981, 150-54, also calls for an integration of women artists into
traditional texts.
194
Broude, "Review" (as in n. 8), 182.
195
Kampen and Grossman (as in n. 192), 1-2.
196
"When Greatness is a Box of Wheaties" (as in n. 10), 64. Also see Carol
Duncan and Alan Wallach, "MOMA: Ordeal and Triumph on 53rd Street,"
Studio International cxciv, No. 1, 1978, 48-57.
352 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1987 VOLUME LXIX NUMBER 3
. . . Women's exclusion from the academies did not only
mean reduced access to exhibition, professional status
and recognition. It signified their exclusion from power
to participate in and determine differently the production
of the languages of art, the meanings, ideologies, and
views of the world and social relations of the dominant
culture.197
Rather than "struggle to gain entry into and recognition
from the existing male-dominated field of art,"198 the task
of feminist art history is to "critique art history itself . . .
as an institutionalized ideological practice which contrib-
utes to the reproduction of the social system by its offered
images and interpretations of the world."199 Tickner also
indicated that feminist art must not only make "ideology
explicit" but actually "rework it."200 Svetlana Alpers also
called for rewriting art history, especially through a re-
thinking of "what art history has been alert to and what it
has not."201
Nevertheless, despite these sentiments, the first genera-
tion of American art historians has rarely consistently car-
ried out this critique. An exchange between Pollock and
Ann Sutherland Harris is germane to a discussion of the
condition of feminist art history in America and to the dis-
tinction between first- and second-generation feminism.
Harris' discussion in Women Artists: 1550-1950 of the Ren-
aissance painter Sofonisba Anguissola in terms of "celeb-
rity, novelty, exceptionalness," was questioned by Pollock
through her own discussion of the same artist in social and
class terms.202 The concepts cited above, Harris said, are
not male-originated "myths," as Pollock claimed, but "fac-
tors of historical significance that affect both sexes." Ce-
lebrity is relevant in Harris' criteria of evaluation, whereas
for Pollock it is irrelevant, or, rather, the product of a social
structure that must itself be exposed in order to discover
the way in which women are placed within it. Harris' cat-
alogue essay is indeed filled with valuable information,
plundered, as she noted, by many, including perhaps Pol-
lock.203 However, as Pollock implied, Harris did not com-
197
Cited by Cherry (as in n. 19), 505, from Old Mistresses (as in n. 14).
Beyond her appreciation of their method, Frances Spalding claims in her
review of Old Mistresses (Burlington Magazine, cxxv, 1983, 43-44) that
such "political motivation leads them to undervalue visual impulse and
over-direct their interpretations. . . . Intent on investigating the relations
between women, art and ideology, Parker and Pollock tend to reduce
women's art to a commentary on women's position in society." Spalding
perhaps rightly points out that they are thus at their best when dealing
with work such as that of Mary Kelly, "where the consciousness informing
the work embraces political understanding." It is also worth noting, how-
ever, that Spalding's critique is informed by a distaste for such work as
Kelly's, which she sees as "tedious and sterile." The content thus deter-
mines criticism to some degree. See the discussion below of Pollock's re-
liance on imagery in her work.
198
Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses (as in n. 14), 169.
199
Pollock, "Women, Art and Ideology" (as in n. 14), 40.
200
"The Body Politic" (as in n. 63), 247. Tickner's suggestions for this
reworking, such as "a close attention to cultural history and the precise
analysis of selected examples," appear in her review of Greer's Obstacle
Race (as in n. 12), 68. Cherry (as in n. 19), 507, also outlined the work
of feminist art historians as "not only to centre art made by women, but
mit herself to an ideological feminism beyond the "addi-
tive," descriptive kind, with which she aligned herself in
the conclusion of her otherwise important essay. The ten-
tative and hesitant nature of the following passage from
that conclusion stands in opposition to Pollock's commit-
ted feminist Marxism, and this is the real point of difference
between the two — not the information generated, but the
use to which it is put.
Given that the choice of monuments and artists touched
on in introductory survey courses and in more detailed
period surveys is inevitably arbitrary and personal to
some degree, the inclusion of a few women can easily be
defended. . . . Slowly these artists must be integrated
into their art historical context. For too long they have
either been omitted altogether, or isolated, as even in this
exhibition, and discussed only as women artists, and not
simply as artists, as if in some strange way they were
not a part of their culture at all. This exhibition will be
a success if it helps to remove once and for all the jus-
tification for any future exhibitions with this theme.204
Granted, this essay was written much earlier than Pol-
lock's; still, Harris did not modify her position in respond-
ing to Pollock's article. She only claimed that Pollock's ap-
proaches "would not have been appropriate" to her
catalogue essay.205 One constantly hears such repudiations
of methodology in the otherwise often powerful voice of
first-generation American feminist art history.
The conservative state of first-generation American fem-
inist art-historical studies is evident as well in a series of
articles exploring the state of its research.206 Diane Russell's
review of feminist scholarship in art history calls for com-
mitment and rigor. She identifies two currents in scholar-
ship: the information-seeking and the conceptual or idea
oriented; and she laments the traditional nature of this
scholarship. However, she does not deal with any of the
new methodologies, nor methodology per se, or with Brit
ish scholarship. She does note that feminist art historian:
to transform our understanding of it, not to extend the categories
knowledge but restructure them. Our project is not to add to art history
as we know it, but to change it."
201 "Art History and Its Exclusions: The Example of Dutch Art," in Broude
and Garrard (as in n. 28), 183-99, especially 183-84. This article, com-
paring the different world views of the Dutch and the Italians in the 17th
century, put her own model into practice.
202
Pollock, "Women, Art and Ideology" (as in n. 14), 44ff.
203
Ann Sutherland Harris' letter responding to Pollock's essay, Woman
Art Journal iv, Fall 1983/Winter, 1984, 53.
204
Harris, Women Artists (as in n. 4), 44.
205
Harris (as in n. 203), 54.
206
Lise Vogel's early evaluation of feminist art-historical scholarship
among the most astute. In "Fine Arts and Feminism: The Awakening Con-
sciousness" (as in n. 101), she reviews the image of women in the an-
thology Woman as Sex Object, and raises issues of the relation of gender
race, and class, rarely treated in American feminist art-historical studies
at the time. Also see her article written with Lillian S. Robinson, "Mod-
ernism and History," New Literary History, iii, 1971, 177-99, for a review
of gender, race, and social issues denied in Modernism.

lag behind the feminist literary historians in utilizing meth-
ods outside the field, and she particularly praises Duncan
for being both a feminist and a scholar. Based on a ster-
eotypical conception of feminist scholarship as too emo-
tional, Russell admonishes those who drown their "fertile
ideas" in a "storm of feelings," an issue no longer relevant
in 1980. She fears that feminist art historians speak only
"to each other," and regrets what she considers an often
"timorous" revisionism. "Few are willing, or perhaps able,
to raise questions engendered by looking afresh at the dis-
cipline of the history of art, and fewer have offered insights
or ideas contrary to traditional ones."207 Russell aptly de-
scribes the state of American feminist art-historical studies,
but ignores other work. The English by that time (1980)
already had published several more radical essays, such as
Pollock's "What's Wrong With Images of Women" (1977)
and Tickner's scholarly, psychological study of women's
sexuality expressed in art, "The Body Politic" (1978), in a
major scholarly journal, Art History. Anthea Callen's book
Women Artists of the Art and Crafts Movement, 1870-1914
was published in 1979. Russell's article was written at the
beginning of a flood of scholarly work and at the juncture
of a change of direction, which excuses many of her omis-
sions, but it also reflects how little attention was paid to
studies other than American by American scholars until
recently.
In a more conservative overview of the feminist art-his-
torical situation, "Feminism: Has It Changed Art History?"
Mary Garrard calls for the integration of women artists
into the "regular art historical curriculum" and into stan-
dard art history textbooks, in order to avoid what she fears
may become "a great cultural ghetto of our own devising."
She points to two methods so far used to write about
women artists. The first, a "lament from the ghetto," is to
"compensate for the lack of scholarly attention to women
artists' achievements by writing as apologists." The second,
yet unexplored way, is "to approach the historic fact of
discrimination against women from the other end – what
has this politics of exclusion meant for male art?"208 Her
approach thus looks at art by women in light of its place
in a male culture, as in her essay on Artemisia Gentileschi
(1982). Garrard investigates the importance of the artist as
an innovator in the tradition of a linear, male-oriented art
history of successive and progressive innovations. Broude's
207
Russell (as in n. 69), 476, 481, 478.
208
Garrard, Heresies, no. 4, 1978, 59.
209
Broude, "Miriam Schapiro" (as in n. 41); Garb's response (as in n. 51);
"Degas's 'Misogyny'," Art Bulletin, LIX, 1977, 97-107 (repr. in Broude and
Garrard, as in n. 28, 247-69); "Feminist Art History and the Academy:
Where Are We Now?" Women's Studies Quarterly (an issue on women
and the visual arts), written with Garrard, xv, Spring/Summer, 1987, also
to appear in Critical Issues in Feminist Inquiry, Joan E. Hartmann and
Ellen Messer-Davidow, eds., New York, Modern Language Association,
1987.
210
"Toward a Feminist Poetics," from a 1978 paper, in The New Feminist
Criticism (as in n. 59), 140, cited by Broude and Garrard, "Feminist Art
History" (as in n.209). Showalter notes in the introduction to The New
Feminist Criticism, 12, that her article was written at a point when "fem-
inist criticism seemed to be at an impasse," and offered her own theory
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ART HISTORY 353
work on feminist art, along the same lines, has been im-
portant, as testified by the numerous citations of her in this
essay. Yet her similarly conservative bias appears period-
ically, as in her article on Miriam Schapiro, in which she
attempted to legitimize the artist's position within a male,
Modernist tradition; in her article on Degas, in which she
rescued the artist from the accusation of misogynistic at-
titudes by positioning him as an outsider; and in her recent
article on methodology written with Garrard, which pro-
poses a return to the study of quality over social history.209
Although more radical than many, a still somewhat am-
biguous and imprecise methodology is employed in the col-
laborative work of Garrard and Broude. Their anthology,
Feminism and Art History, remains the fundamental schol-
arly compendium of some of the best work done in Amer-
ica in the field. Yet their underlying reservations and half-
concealed assumptions reveal the problems of American
feminist art historians more clearly because of the other-
wise powerful exegesis of their argument.
Although Garrard and others have raised very important
issues about women's repression in art and society, they
are content to see art by women instated in the traditional
discipline of art history, along with a new consciousness
of feminist issues. Their position is "centrist" rather than
"radical" or "separatist." In their recent article on feminist
art history cited above, Broude and Garrard show little
knowledge of the new methodologies, condemning what
they refer to as structuralism and semiotics. They claim
that such methods "may not be congenial to many feminist
art historians," ignoring those who do use deconstructive
methodologies. They cite Pollock and Parker's Old Mis-
tresses in only the most superficial ways, seeing it as Marx-
ist-socialist, without realizing its deconstructive thrust. Re-
lying on the ideas of Elaine Showalter, who spoke of new
methodologies in literature concerned with "'scientific'
problems of form and structure,"210 they equate new meth-
odologies with "a formalist disregard for content," not rec-
ognizing that Postmodern feminist methodologies are con-
cerned specifically with content.211
Broude and Garrard most clearly reveal their method-
ology in a passage cited from an earlier article. The Marxist
approach, they allege, is a limited one, leading ultimately
to the conflation of art history with historical studies. They
cite Pollock in the context of such Marxist "cynical anal-
of "gynocritics" in the place of what she then perceived as a dependency
on male theory. Broude and Garrard, however, do not adhere to her rich,
alternative model either.
In her later article, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," The New
Feminist Criticism (as in n. 59), 247, Showalter shows herself to be more
amenable to the new methodologies: "I do not mean to endorse the sep-
aratist fantasies of radical feminist visionaries of to exclude from our crit-
ical practice a variety of intellectual tools." Here she acknowledges the
model of psychoanalysis and poststructuralism rather than just structur-
alism as in Broude and Garrard's interpretation of her position. However,
she does not endorse a criticism that is based on male discourses, such as
poststructuralism, but instead seeks a "genuinely women centered feminist
criticism" that she calls "gynocritics," a "theory of women's culture" (247-
48ff., et passim).
211
Broude and Garrard, "Feminist Art History" (as in n. 209).
354 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1987 VOLUME LXIX NUMBER 3
ysis." In place of the more revisionist and radical metho-
dologies that they reject, they call for a return to the de-
liberation of "quality": "to see how art works in history
. . . but more . . . how well it works." Such a method as-
serts once again the hegemony of historical definitions of
"great" art rather than exploring the ramifications and the
new issues raised-by truly revisionist art history.212 Citing
positively Pollock's statement that "art is constitutive of
ideology, it does not merely illustrate it,"213 they neverthe-
less claim that such critiques as hers ignore the formal as-
pects of art to become only history. Pollock's whole point
implies the opposite. Her most recent work, like that of
most deconstructive feminist art history, studies ideological
issues in art through its formal aspects as well as its content.
In their plea for a return to the study of art as "special
and different," Broude and Garrard use the metaphor of a
watch: "when one takes a watch apart to see how it works,
one eventually puts it back together again so that it might
keep on working."214 Their choice of metaphor is quite re-
vealing: one could have chosen a different one for another
purpose. For example, one might relate art history to a set
of old clothes that must be used to create a new gown.
Instead of the static, fixed mechanism of a watch, in which
all the pieces must be replaced in the same order, an old
garment must be recut and rebuilt to create something new.
The metaphor defines the model significantly: the watch
leads to the reestablishment of fixed ideas, the clothes to a
new model.
Despite their importance as foremothers of feminist art
history and their contributions to it, in their most recent
articles Broude and Garrard adopt a more conservative
stance. They themselves take up the position they scorn,
as apologists for women artists, because they seek the "ex-
ceptions" such as Artemisia Gentileschi, that is, those who
exist within a "high" art context. They use terms and cri-
212
Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, "Review of Hugh Honour and
John Fleming, The Visual Arts: A History," in Woman's Art Journal, iv,
Fall, 1983/Winter, 1984, 43-44. Cherry (as in n. 19) claims that feminist
art historians must do exactly the opposite: "We need to dispense with
value judgments, with any notion that there is innate value or meaning
in the work of art . . . with any critical strategies which propose men as
the norm, women as aberrant, deviant, defective" (p. 507). Pollock also
rejects evaluative criticism (see "Women, Art and Ideology," as in n. 14,
42).
213
Broude and Garrard, "Review" (as in n. 212), 43.
214
Ibid., 44.
215
Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists of the Surrealist Movement, Lon-
don and Boston, 1984. See the review by Lawrence Alloway, Art in Amer-
ica, Mar., 1986, 1, 5, and also Whitney Chadwick "Leonora Carrington:
Evolution of a Feminist Consciousness," Woman's Art Journal, vii, Spring/
Summer, 1986, 37-42, which goes beyond her earlier book in identifying
the artist's struggle to achieve autonomous, creative activity.
216
Compared to feminist architectural history, the contribution of Amer-
ican feminist art history is formidable, despite its inability to date really
to transform the discipline. Whereas Kampen and Grossman in their study
of feminist methodology optimistically claim that feminist art history in-
deed has changed the discipline, they also make it clear that in architecture
this is not at all the case, despite the fact that feminist architectural practice
is relatively advanced. In fact, feminist architectural history and theory
is far behind even that of art history, precisely because architectural his-
torians did not enter the fray as art historians did. (See Kampen and
teria deriving from male art history, and at the same time
reject any attempts to find new ones through their dismissal
of both feminist Marxist and newer methodologies.
The best trained and most thoughtful American feminist
art historians often suffer the burden of ideological am-
bivalence. Whitney Chadwick, for example, addressed the
inferior position of women Surrealists in the Surrealist
movement in her book Women Artists and the Surrealist
Movement, and discussed the conflicting and contradictory
concept of "woman" among the Surrealists as revealed in
their supposedly liberated attitude towards women and the
reality of the roles the women artists played in the group.
As a result of her study, these women become visible as
strong individual artists and personalities in their own right.
However, Chadwick does not explore the ways in which
the women artists either renegotiated or willingly colluded
with their repressive positioning. Her book fills an impor-
tant gap in the literature on women artists, but is limited
by her traditional approach. It also lacks the theoretical
framework to question more profoundly the more oppres-
sive structure of Surrealism.215 This does not imply that
American feminist art historians have not made important
and lasting contributions to feminist thought. On the con-
trary, they have pioneered such thought. It is only to sug-
gest that some rigorous analysis of method is in order, when
a book of this quality lacks the methodological precision
and consistency it promises.216
A handful of feminist art historians are questioning the
structures and values of the discipline itself, and, beyond
that, developing new ways of examining the place in which
women artists were/are situated.217 Americans representing
more radical strategies, like Duncan, immediately come to
mind. Her methodologically rigorous work dealt with the
male power structure as it images and controls women.218
Nochlin's latest work also deconstructs images of women.
Grossman, as in n. 192, 10ff; their report gives a very good review of the
literature on and practice of a feminist architecture, as well as a useful
bibliography.)
217
The gap between "additive" feminism and new, more critical and an-
alytic research on women's art has widened considerably in the current
debate over the nature of a museum for women's art. Wilhelmina Hol-
laday has led the effort to bring such a museum into existence, based on
her collection of art by women, but feminists are distressed by her refusal
to develop a feminist agenda for it. She wants only to represent the "great
work by women as a balance to that represented everywhere else by men
As Linda Nochlin points out,
A women's museum of art that is not a strongly feminist project
can only have a negative and conservative impact . . . I am for
such an ideal only if it is a feminist project and constitutes the intend
to change the position of women artists rather than affirm it b
ghettoization. Mrs. Holladay is using the goodwill of the women'
movement for a project that is totally apart from the goals an
spirit of progressive feminism. This museum, instead of being for
the people and run by competent professionals, without hindrance
is a social battlefield and pleasuring ground for the socially
prominent.
(Quoted by Sara Day, "A Museum for Women," Art News, Summer:
1986, 115).
218
Use Vogel (as in n. 101), 29, on the other hand, noted the importance
of the study of "how male sexuality as a point of view is embodied i
art."

mostly in the art of males, especially during the nineteenth
century. Her focus specifically concerns the nature of
power, ideology, and gender difference.219
Eunice Lipton's book on Degas takes an important step
towards a sociological model of art history, in her very fine
analysis of the changing position of women, particularly
prostitutes, in the nineteenth century as explicated through
Degas' art.220 However, her discussion of his images of
women never allows us to see them through the viewpoint
of the women of the time (perhaps the topic for a book in
itself). More important in light of feminist content, Lipton
does not really address Degas' own attitude towards his
images. Many questions are never answered: why did De-
gas for a large part of his life paint prostitutes almost ex-
clusively? For whom did he paint those works? If contem-
porary women saw them, how were they affected and were
attitudes toward women altered? Dijkstra, on the other
hand, relates Degas' females directly to the fin-de-siècle
context of the femme fatale.221
Anthea Callen, in her study of the Arts and Crafts move-
ment, avoids the traditional approach of focusing on cen-
tral figures and major works, and discusses such issues as
the significance of education for women in the crafts, the
position of Arts and Crafts activities in the contemporary
view of Victorian womanhood, and cultural restrictions on
women's activities within the Arts and Crafts movement.
She concludes that, by adhering to the sexual division of
labor, the movement helped "maintain and perpetuate" the
cultural stereotypes that restricted women.222
The figure who now most comprehensively and consis-
tently illustrates the most radical position in feminist art
history is the British art historian, Griselda Pollock. Broude
and Garrard's implication that new approaches have noth-
ing to offer the field is aptly exploded in Pollock's work.
Her ideology and methodology, a synthesis of Marxism
with psychoanalytic and deconstructive theory, are set out
in a series of articles, among the most relevant of which is
"Women, Art and Ideology: Questions for Feminist Art
Historians" (1983). There she first defined and put into
practice her "conceptual framework" for a study of wom-
en's art and history. At the outset of the article, she char-
acterized her position as "obliquely placed" within "Marx-
219
As expressed in her talk for the College Art Association Annual Meet-
ing in Boston, 1987, in the session on gender, and in her talk, "Women,
Art, and Power," given at Princeton, Mar., 1985.
220
Eunice Lipton, Looking Into Degas. Uneasy Images of Women and
Modern life, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1987. Also see Carol M.
Armstrong, "Edgar Degas and the Representation of the Female Body,"
The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Cam-
bridge and London, 1986, 223-42; and Hollis Clayson, "Prostitution and
the Art of Later Nineteenth-Century France: On Some Differences Be-
tween the Work of Degas and Duez," Arts Magazine, Dec., 1985, 40-45.
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ART HISTORY 355
ist cultural theory and historical practice." The "nature of
the societies in which art has been produced has not only
been, for instance, feudal or capitalist, but in historically
varied ways, patriarchal and sexist." Defying Marxist
priorities, she stated that "domination and exploitation in
gender relations are not just a supplement to the most fun-
damental conflicts between the classes. . . ."She concluded:
. . . the relationship of Marxism and feminism in art his-
tory cannot be a cobbling together. It must be the fruitful
raiding of Marxism for its explanatory instruments, for
its analysis of the operations of bourgeois society and its
ideologies in order to identify the specific configurations
of bourgeois femininity and forms of mystification which
mask the reality of social and sexual antagonisms.223
Pollock's feminist methodology goes beyond the decon-
struction of the discipline of art history and the rejection
of an evaluative criticism. Her suggested methodology
would "concentrate instead on historical forms of expla-
nation of women's artistic production." Her researches are
informed by contemporary philosophical and critical no-
tions of society, class, gender, and ideology, understood as
historical processes rather than static and "manageable
block[s] of information" to be applied to art works, or that
artworks might be used to illustrate. Her methodology is
thus more than social history using works of art to doc-
ument events; it concerns the complex nature of the works
themselves. Stressing the specific and the heterogeneous,
she understands history (defined as an amalgam of all these
disciplines) as a "complex of processes and relationships."
Rather than study "art and society" or art and anything,
we instead have to deal with the interplay of multiple
histories, of the codes of art, the ideologies of the art
world, the forms of production, the social classes, the
family and sexual practices whose mutual determina-
tions and interdependences have to be mapped together
in precise but heterogeneous configuration.
. . . art is constitutive of ideology, it does not merely
illustrate it. . . .
The relations between women, art and ideology have
221
Dijkstra (as in n. 118), 129, 180-181, 286-88.
222
Anthea Callen, Women Artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement, 1870-
1914, London and New York, 1979, 47. See the review of Callen's book
by Lynne Walker in Woman's Art Journal, I, Fall, 1980/Winter, 1981, 69-
71.
223
"Women, Art and Ideology" (as in n. 14),-39, 46. Also see Griselda
Pollock, "Art, Artschool, Culture: Individualism After the Death of the
Author," Block, no. 11, 1985/86, 8-18; and Roszika Parker and Griselda
Pollock, Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement 1970-85,
London (in press).
 to be studied as a set of varying and unpredictable
relationships.224
Pollock's most recent article, "Modernity and the Spaces
of Femininity," is an excellent example of the application
of her methodology to works of art. Here she seeks a "de-
construction of the masculinist myths of modernism." These
Modernist myths are being dismantled in many quarters,
but Pollock does it particularly from a feminist stance. The
assumption that sexual difference is socially constructed
underlies the paper. Pollock began by describing her con-
ception of the feminist project for art history: first, the his-
torical recovery of data about women artists to refute the
misconceptions about them, and a concomitant decon-
struction of the discipline of art history; second, to create
a "theorised framework" with which to study art by
women, in her case during the Modern era, as well as the
"theorisation and historical analysis of sexual difference."
Sexuality, Modernism or modernity cannot function as
given categories to which we add women, for that only
identifies a partial and masculine viewpoint with the
norm and confirms women as other and subsidiary. Sex-
uality, Modernism and modernity are organised by and
organisations of sexual difference. To perceive women's
specificity is to analyse historically a particular config-
uration of difference.
She then particularized this analysis in terms of her topic,
which is to use the "matrix" of space to determine how
"socially contrived orders of sexual difference structure the
lives of Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot," and how that
structured what they produced. Her article offers a model
of feminist art history, which examines not the positions
in which women have been placed through male stereo-
types (still a valid undertaking, especially as carried out by
224
"Women, Art and Ideology" (as in n. 14), 42, 43, 44. This stance is
reminiscent of Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt's model for literary
criticism, which has important resonances for feminist art history. Their
methodology entails:
. . . work on the power relations implied by gender and simul-
taneously on those implied by class, race and sexual identification;
an analysis of literature and an analysis of history and society; an
analysis of the circumstances of cultural production and an analy-
sis of the complexities with which at a given moment in history
they are inscribed in the text ("Introduction: Toward a Materialist-
Feminist Criticism," Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex,
Class and Race in Literature and Culture, ed. J. Newton and D.
Rosenfelt, New York, 1985, xix).
Duncan and others), but rather a map of the territory that
was available to them and that they occupied as women,
outside of the male world. Her evidence is drawn first from
the works of art themselves. She concluded that, although
Cassatt and Morisot did not "escape their historical for-
mation as sexed and classed subjects," their position as
women (versus their gender per se) gave them a different
perspective. Their works, rather than reflecting this con-
dition, are structured by it. She designated the problems
with studying art by women as only a product of their
femininity, or as only a reflection of the constructed female:
"There is no doubt that femininity is an oppressive con-
dition yet women live it to different purposes and feminist
analyses are currently concerned to explore not only its
limits but the concrete ways women negotiate and refash-
ion that position."225 Pollock's ideological stance towards
the nature of feminist research thus stands in opposition to
the methodologies of feminist writers of the 1970s who
sought to discover, uncover, and assert the importance of
women artists either within a male structure or separate
from it.
It is necessary that monographs on women artists past
and present continue to be published, since we need to know
more fully about the lives and works of women artists, and
how they negotiated their conditions and situations. How-
ever, if they follow the model of the "great artist" mono-
graphs, even with a feminist perspective, they will only
reinforce the circumscribed, Romantic concept of greatness
and genius. To force the art of women into a male tradition
can result only in an uneasy fit at best.
The extent to which feminism has altered art-historical
studies is difficult to determine, largely due to the concur-
rent influence of Postmodern and deconstructive thought
in which second-generation feminism is also involved.
However, as we have seen, since feminism is not a self-
contained methodology, but a world view, its impact is at
Many feminists already are working within the range of their model, which
has obvious affinities to Postmodern feminist studies, and to Marxism,
particularly in the relation of analysis to ideology.
225
Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity" (as in n. 83). A
similar approach, though not perhaps so sharply defined, has been taken
by Tamar Garb in Women Impressionists (Oxford, 1986), in the new edi-
tion of The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot (London, 1986), and in
Berthe Morisot (Oxford, 1987), the latter two with Kathleen Adler. Also
see her review of Charlotte Yeldham, Women Artists in 19th-Century in
France and England, in Woman's Art Journal, viii, Spring/Summer, 1987
43-48.

once harder to trace and ultimately more significant. It does
not impose itself on art and history as a canonic manifesto
or a closed system, which pretends to delineate the validity
and invalidity of the art of the past and the present, but
instead offers a vibrant and ongoing critique of art and
culture. It goes beyond attention to women's issues to em-
brace a totally new consideration of the production and
evaluation of art and the role of the artist.
Thalia Gouma-Petersoris research and writing have been
concentrated in two distinct fields: Byzantine icons and
frescoes (she is trained as a medievalist), and contemporary
art. She has published in the Art Bulletin, Gesta, and Dum-
barton Oaks Papers, and has organized exhibitions of the
work of Miriam Schapiro and Faith Ringgold. She has also
THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF ART HISTORY 357
written on Joyce Kozloff and Elizabeth Catlett, and cur-
rently is guest curator for a retrospective of the work of
Audrey Flack. [Department of Art, The College of Woos-
terf Wooster, OH 44691]
As indicated by her recent publications on Aurier and Van
Gogh in the Art Bulletin (LXVIII, 1986) and her book on
Aurier (UMI Research Press, 1986), Patricia Mathews stud-
ies the relationships between art, theory, and criticism. She
organized an exhibition of Virginia women artists (1985),
has written criticism on May Stevens, Joyce Kozloff, and
the question of what is female imagery, and currently is
co-editing an interdisciplinary anthology, Female Sensibil-
ity. [Department of Art, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH
44074]