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Feminist Art History and the Academy Norma Braude and Mary Garrard

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Feminist Art History and the Academy Norma Braude and Mary Garrard WOMEN'S STUDIES QUARTERLY EDITORIAL Publisher Florence Howe Editor Nancy Porter, Portland State University Transformations Associate Editors: "Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic Jo Baird , The Feminist Press and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size" Virginia Susannah Driver, The Feminist Press Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own. Woolf was writing about women and fiction , Dorothy Helly , Hunter College but her statement has a special resonance for the visual arts. For, as Ernst Gombrich Nancy Hoffman , University of Massachusetts has observed, "works of art ... share with mirrors that elusive magic of transfor­ Nellie McKay , University of Wisconsin Hanna Papanek, Boston University mation which is so hard to put into words." Though not a mirror, literally, the visual Domna Stanton, University of Michigan arts act as a looking-glass in which we look for and find transformed aspects of ourselves. Men have been in control of this transformation both in the history of art Guest Editors: (that is , in art during the course of its creation) and in Art History, the twentieth­ Thalia Gouma-Peterson, College of Wooster: century discipline that has imposed its own interpretation on the art of the past. Women and Art Nancy Schneidewind, SUNY! New Paltz and Art History is one of the most tradition-bound and conservative disciplines because Frances Maher, Wheaton College: Feminist art, at least since ca. 3000 B.C., has been used to reinforce the beliefs, wishes, and Pedagogy intents of the dominant male culture. Furthermore, the history of art (prior to the Nancy Cott, Yale University : Women and nineteenth century) as commonly taught by art historians is a history of the major History Emily Abel, UCLA : Women and Aging monuments, that is , the art created for and by those in power. More generally art, both public and private, has been created primarily by and for men and has rein­ Contributing Editors: forced the political and social ideologies current at the time of production. It has Anne Chapman, Western Reserve Academy, expressed the taste and beliefs of the political majority, the wealthy elite, or a pow­ Hudson, Ohio erful group of patrons. Therefore the discipline of Art History also has been elitist Barbara Christian, University of California / Berkeley and hence very slow to respond to new critical perspectives. Nancy Cott, Yale University The kingly , the heroic, the mythic, and the divine have been the most frequent Darlene Clark Hine, Purdue University subjects of official Western art from the pyramids, the Parthenon, the Hagia Sophia, Estella Lauter, University of Wisconsin/ Green and the Gothic cathedrals to Versailles, the Louvre, and the Metropolitan Museum Bay of Art. Woman has been introduced into this pantheon in the guise of the "other," Tobe Levin, University of Maryland/ European Division whether virgin , allegory, mother, monster, mistress, wife , daughter, or temptress. Peggy Mclntosh, Wellesley College Center for Her otherness is dramatically expressed when she becomes the exotic and fierce Research on Women Amazon, to be defeated by the male hero. Toni McNaron , University of Minnesota The heroic remains a male prerogative and woman, when in control of man's fate , Betty Schmitz, Montana State University Cynthia Secor, HERS/ Mid-Atlantic becomes a monster-the Gorgon who turned men into stone and whom Perseus Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Morgan State University heroically decapitated (a favorite theme in art). Significantly, Perseus achieved this Mary Helen Washington, University of feat by looking into a mirror and not at the Gorgon herself. The monstrous woman Massachusetts/ Boston can be defeated only through gazing at her reflected image. It is this image that we need to transform by putting it into the context of female experience and woman's Advertising: Display ads are accepted for the Women's view of herself. Studies Quarterly. For information on sizes, The transformations presented in this issue range from theoretical approaches to rates, and schedules, please write to: more pragmatic ones. The former are based on a systematic reconsideration of gen­ Advertising Manager, Women's Studies der as a factor in the production and interpretation of art; on the questioning of the Quarterly, The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 311 East 94 Street, objective voice of scholarship and one's own preconceptions; on the use of imagery New York, NY 10128. to document historical attitudes toward women; and on eliminating the hierarchical stratification of the arts. The more pragmatic approaches incorporate active student Circulation Manager: Pamela Barbell (continued on page 67) Production Manager I Computer Operations: Paula Martinac CALL FOR ESSAYS AND ORIGINAL SOURCES for 1988-89 WSQ issue on Cover design and layout by: recent developments in the theory and practice of teaching women's nontraditional Lucinda Geist literature-diaries, letters, oral histories, newly discovered writers, and other written or oral forms of women's expression. Essays should be about 12 manuscript pages, Typesetting by: Creative Graphics, Inc. theoretical essays somewhat longer. Bibliographies, book reviews, course descrip­ tions and syllabi are also solicited. Contributions international in focus or that use materials developed by third world women are welcome. Please mail submissions to Jo Gillikin, 380 Riverside Drive, 3F, New York, NY 10025 by March 19, 1988. Copyright e> 1987 by The Feminist Press at The The Women's Studies Quarterly acknowledges with gratitude a grant from The Col­ City University of New York lege of Wooster's Henry Luce Ill Fund for Distinguished Scholarship to support the ISSN: 0732-1562 publication of this issue on teaching about women in the visual arts. CONTENTS Editorial IN THIS ISSUE 2 Women, Art, and Ideology: Questions for Feminist Art Historians Griselda Pollock 10 Feminist Art History and the Academy Norma Braude and Mary Garrard IN THE CLASSROOM 17 Teaching about Women in the Visual Arts: The Art History Survey Transfigured Christine Hauice 21 Teaching Modern Art History from a Feminist Perspective: Challenging Conventions, My Own and Others Moira Roth 25 Recalling Womanhouse Miriam Schapiro 31 Being My Own Woman Faith Ringgold 35 Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar, and Sage Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith 42 The Artist Teaching Art l:' Ill Ruth Weisberg ..c ~ 45 Women in Art: Two Approaches to Teaching ..c:: Evelyn Tartan Beck and Josephine Withers :; '=./ 1'~, t .." a:: 51 Strategies for "Women in Art" "Independence Day" of the Future from Puck Joan Marter 54 Woman Perceived: On Teaching the Imagery of Women in Art Annie Shauer-Crande/1 56 Woman Image Now: Arizona State University Muriel Magenta 58 Women in Design-Will They Find Their Place in History? Sigrid W. Weltge RESOURCES 62 Women and the Visual Arts: A Bibliographical Essay Ferris Olin and Barbara B . Miller 67 Newsbriefs Women's Studies Quarterly XV : 1 & 2 (Spring/ Summer 1987) Feminist Art History and the Academy: Where Are We Now? Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard The purpose of this article is to describe the achievements or Rembrandt, Nochlin pointed out that women had lacked and concerns of feminist art history. It is meant to be an the educational experiences essential to the creation of art: informal, personal, and somewhat discursive retrospective early encouragement and apprenticeship, classical studies, look at the development of feminist theory in our discipline, and access to the nude model, which from the sixteenth as expressed in some important writings of the past fifteen through the early twentieth centuries was the foundation of years, set next to major landmarks in other disciplines, es­ the artist's development. Women's past exclusion from the pecially literature and history. We conclude with a consid­ hallowed circles of Great Art was thus a result of institu­ eration of the special characteristics of art history that both tional bias, and not of gender deficiency. complement and distinguish it from other disciplinary ap­ Nochlin went on to challenge the myth of the Great Artist proaches, and with an assessment of where we are now who is endowed with Genius, the golden nugget that, when and where, in our view , we ought to be going. found even in "Giotto, the obscure shepherd boy, and van Because ours has been a conservative discipline, art his­ Gogh with his fits, " would invariably surface and drive its torical feminist scholarship has yet to receive the kind of possessor to creative achievement and fame. The question acceptance and recognition that feminist scholarship has of artistic genius has loomed somewhat larger as a sine qua been accorded in other fields. In contrast to both history non in art and music than in literature, and Genius has and literature, for example, where lively dialogues between invariably gone hand in hand with Quality, as the twin blud­ feminists and others in the field are commonplace, feminist geons with which any artistic achievement may be elevated work in art history is rarely reviewed , rebutted, or even or dismissed . If the issue of quality, or value, has been more acknowledged in print. The field of literature is additive, pressing in the visual arts than in literature or music, it is tolerant: The traditional literary canon may be hotly de­ surely because the financial appraisal of the unique object, fended, but the MLA admits all comers to its plethora of created for or sold to a single paying patron, is inextricably sessions, whose numbers are multiplied to accommodate a entwined with its "pure" assessment. In any event, one of variety of points of view . A smaller discipline, art history the most significant ideas of feminist art history appeared in has been monolithic, slower to accept sweeping new ideas its Ur-text: the revelation that artistic geniuses were not born and methods, perhaps because it fears it can be trans­ but made, and that their makers were men, the direct be­ formed totally.
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