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her principal respondent. Nochlin’s feminism was formed in the political context of the US equal-rights movement, according to which, women constituted the oppressed half of a binary seeking equality under the existing system of liberal democracy. She has described her project as ‘thinking art history Otherly’ (‘The Politics of Vision’, 1989). Critics of Nochlin have claimed that without a more systematic (i.e. Marxist) model for political change, the discipline of art history and the position of women more generally can only be reformed, not transformed. Nochlin’s interrelated research areas may be categorized as follows: (i) realism as an aesthetic category; (ii) nineteenthcentury art; (iii) women’s artistic practice; (iv) the female body in visual representation; (v) the representation of ethnic identity. Principally an essayist, her major work has been published in a series of collections (Women, Art and Power, 1988; The Politics of Vision, 1989; Representing Women, 1999) demonstrating the development of her ideas on the politics of representation over four decades. A number of these interests originated in Nochlin’s influential writings of 1971–72: (i) Realism, 1971; (ii) ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, 1971; (iii) ‘Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art’, 1972. Though aimed at a general reader, Realism (text i) was a historical analysis of the dominant mid-nineteenth-century pictorial idiom that demonstrated Nochlin’s philosophical engagement with the nature of mimetic representation, informed by Roman Jakobson’s structural linguistics. Balancing its claims to objective empiricism with reference to pictorial conventions, including metonymic devices (chains of contiguous meaning generated by the smallest pictorial detail – Jakobson had identified metonymy as typical of all realist literature), Nochlin championed realism (particularly Courbet’s ‘materialist’ and ‘democratic’ realism), for its commitment, if not ability, to represent
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the social conditions of contemporary experience. In a discursive context still dominated by the modernist aesthetics and formalist orthodoxy identified with CLEMENT GREENBERG, Nochlin argued for both the political significance of art objects (their formal properties in particular) and a pictorial mode that included experience rather than abstracting it. Ultimately, for Nochlin, realism signalled democracy: the representation of the under-represented. In the same year Nochlin produced her most significant contribution to the history of art history (text ii). ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ was an insistent question demanding a methodologically credible feminist response. For Nochlin, there had been no great women artists and all attempts to claim otherwise would fail by ultimately reinforcing the dominant perception of women’s inferiority. In the contemporary climate of emergent feminist art history this seemed like a terrible betrayal. Contemporary feminism was committed either to (i) reintroducing forgotten women artists to the Western canon or (ii) claiming a different kind of greatness for women. (Nochlin enacted a reversal of her position on (i) when in 1976 she co-produced an exhibition and book cataloguing the biography and work of ‘Women Artists: 1550–1950’.) Nochlin answered her own question by locating in social repression the historical causes of women’s lack: institutional discriminations, cultural prejudices and psychological formations. Nochlin’s call to substitute mythic constructions of artistic creation for sociological analysis linked her work to that of contemporaries ROLAND BARTHES, MICHEL FOUCAULT and PIERRE BOURDIEU. Nochlin insisted that ‘the woman question’ must not remain on the academic margins; it must become paradigmatic for disciplinary change: ‘a catalyst, a potent intellectual instrument, probing the most basic and “natural” assumptions of all intellectual inquiry’. As a result, she