Awards
2006 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Linda Nochlin
Linda Nochlin in front of Philip Pearlstein’s Portrait of Linda Nochlin and Richard Pommer from 1968 (photograph © Matthew Begun)
Linda Nochlin receives the 2006 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art. Her role in introducing feminist analysis into the field is well known; what art historian today does not know the appearance of her 1972 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” as the founding moment of this methodological shift? Perhaps overshadowed by this monumental achievement is the place that writing has always held in her work—writing, not simply as a functional vehicle for the articulation of her thought, but as central to its conception. The fluency of Nochlin’s ideas is in no small part due to the fluency of her prose. To list even some of her books is to identify canonical texts in the history of art; these include Realism (1971); Women Artists, 1550–1950 (1976, with Ann Sutherland Harris); her important compilation of sources and documents in Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848–1900 (1966); and The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor for Modernity (1995).
As a writer on art, Nochlin has brought to bear her interest in language as such, for she is a published poet and an avid and voracious reader of fiction. From the earliest of her publications, she has been willing to imbue her text with her own voice: if “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” reads like a lecture transcript, it is not because the essay lacks form or structure, nor because it abandons the rigor of academic analysis, but, on the contrary, because it articulates form, structure, rigor, and analysis in a fluid prose free of the distant, dry locutions so common in our discipline. The text is in Nochlin’s distinctive voice, and that is no inconsiderable thing. Perhaps the most remarkable instance of this is her essay on Courbet’s Studio, a painting that, just before the appearance of her catalogue text for the Brooklyn Museum’s Courbet exhibition, had been “deciphered” by a French art historian: the figures positively identified and the embedded allegory unraveled. Nochlin did not disagree with the identifications nor, ultimately, with the proposed political allegory; but she objected to the idea that meaning could be closed off so definitively, that a painting as complex as this could be “solved.” Her approach was to read the painting “as a woman,” a task that placed her subjective responses to the painting in the center (quite literally) of her essay, introducing a type of voice into the writing of art history that had rarely been heard before.
Of late, Nochlin’s writing has focused on contemporary art and on poetry. Her recent Norton Lectures at Harvard University will soon be published, giving us another opportunity to appreciate the way she brings her subjective responses to life—to issues of age, death, anxiety, and, simultaneously, joy—to bear on the rigorous analysis of visual culture and its role in shaping knowledge in its cultural moment. This is a perfect moment to honor Nochlin for her contributions to the field, and to recognize her immense contributions to art history and criticism. Few writers in our field have had a greater impact than she.
Jury: Katherine Manthorne, Graduate Center, City University of New York, chair; Suzanne Preston Blier, Harvard University Art Museums; John Beldon Scott, University of Iowa; and Larry Silver, University of Pennsylvania.
