Author(s): Linda Nochlin

Art | Women's Histories

Women--as warriors, workers, mothers, lovers--haunt nineteenth and twentieth-century Western painting. This republication of Representing Women brings together the late Linda Nochlin's most important and pioneering writings on the representation of women in art as she considers works by Jean-Francois Millet, Eugene Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, Mary Cassatt, and Kathe Kollwitz, among many others.

In a riveting, partly autobiographical introduction, Nochlin argues for the honest virtues of an art history that rejects methodological presuppositions and for art historians to investigate the work before their eyes while focusing on its subject matter, informed by a sensitivity to its feminist spirit.

Review: 'Fascinating ... Nochlin is a woman of learning and accomplishment' - Andrea Dworkin
'A joy to read ... blunt, funny, mischievous, learned, anything but dull and dogmatic' - London Review of Books
'Outstanding ... rich and methodologically sophisticated' - Art in America
'Invaluable' - Art Journal
'If you care about the representation of women, you need to read this ... Nochlin's direct, provocative and personal tone is a radical rewriting of women in art history' - Elephant

Contents: Introduction: Memoirs of an Ad Hoc Art Historian * 1. The Myth of the Woman Warrior * 2. Gericault: The Absence of Women * 3. The Image of the Working Woman * 4. Courbet's Real Allegory: Rereading The Painter's Studio * 5. A House Is Not a Home: Degas and the Subversion of the Family * 6. Mary Cassatt's Modernity * 7. Body Politics: Seurat's Poseuses

Author Biography: Linda Nochlin (1931-2017) was Lila Acheson Wallace Professor Emerita of Modern Art at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. She wrote extensively on issues of gender in art history and on 19th-century Realism. Her numerous publications include Women, Art and Power, Representing Women and Courbet, as well as the pioneering essay from 1971: 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?'