But do the words within still make for stimulating reading? With bright, bold text pasted over a centuries-old painting, it recalls contemporary fiction such as Amina Cain’s Indelicacy and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. There is a pithy introduction by Catherine Grant, a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and more than a dozen illustrations-including a reproduction of Marie Denise Villers’s Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes (1801) on the cover. To celebrate the essay’s 50th anniversary this year, Thames & Hudson is publishing Nochlin’s rallying cry alongside its reappraisal, “Thirty Years After”, in a standalone edition. The essay was preceded by the strapline: “Implications of the Women’s Lib movement for art history and for the contemporary art scene-or, silly questions deserve long answers.” In roughly 4,000 words, Nochlin dismantled the question to reveal the assumptions that lie behind it, as well as the answer it surreptitiously supplies: “There are no great women artists because women are incapable of greatness.” She responded with a passionate and provocative essay published in 1971 as part of a controversial issue on “Women’s Liberation, Women Artists and Art History” in the journal ARTnews. “Why have there been no great women artists?” It is a silly question, really, and the art historian Linda Nochlin (1931-2017) certainly thought so when a male gallerist put it to her.
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