Art 364b
November 25, 1969
I am changing the subject of the Art 364b seminar to: The Image of Women in the 19th and 20th Centuries. I have become more and more involved in the problem of the position of women during the course of this year and think it would make a most interesting and innovative seminar topic, involving materials from a variety of fields not generally included in art historical research. This would be a pioneering study in an untouched field. Among fields and areas to be included might be:
1. Woman as angel and devil in 19th century art
2. The concept of the nude through history with special emphasis on 19th and 20th century (anatomy; must a nude be a female? What is shown and what is not shown)
3. Pornography and sexual imagery
4. The social significance of costume
5. Social realities and artistic myths (i.e. women working in factories and the Birth of Venus in the Salons)
6. Advertising imagery of women
7. The theme of the prostitute
8. The Holy Family and the joys of domesticity (imagery of the secular family as nexus of value in bourgeois art in the 19th century)
9. Socially conscious representations of lower class women (almost always in “low” art rather than “high”)
10. Freudian mythology in modern art; Picasso and surrealism
11. Matisse and the “harem” concept of women
12. Women as artists
13. The Vampire woman in art and literature (in relation to social, psychological and economic factors)
14. Women in Pre-Raphaelite painting and Victorian Literature
Most of this territory – and a great deal more – has never been touched. It would involve work in history, sociology, psychology, literature, etc.
Linda Nochlin Pommer
Looking back from the vantage point of almost a quarter of a century, I am struck by the remarkable combination of ambition and naiveté characterizing the project. Did I really think I could cover all those topics in the course of a single semester? Why did I confine “women as artists” to a single class? (Actually, there were several sessions on women artists in the class as it was taught.) And why was I so fixated on the Vampire woman? Alas, since I have never kept a diary and only minimal evidences of that first seminar remain in my keeping, I cannot answer specific questions about what I had in mind. My fuzziness about these issues is a poignant reminder to historians about the unreliability of witness accounts, especially when the witness is identical with the historian in question. Nevertheless, I am struck by the fact that many of these topics have continued to be of major importance to feminist art historians and critics, and, equally, that they have served as the basis for much of my own work in years to come.
[Linda Nochlin, Starting from Scratch: The Beginning of Feminist Art History, 1994]
