In 1971, the art historian Linda Nochlin wrote an essay called “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” She — like me — is doing a bit of a bait and switch with the title. A little light trolling, perhaps.
She says that despite the sincere wishes of her feminist colleagues to say it ain’t so, it is obvious there are no women equivalents for “Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cezanne, Picasso or Matisse.”
Then, she answers why.
Spoiler: she doesn’t think women of the past lacked innate creative talent or ability.
Her answers are instead — to use the parlance of today — entirely systemic. She takes great pains to illustrate the myriad ways we have sorted men and women into categories (such as Great Artist and Talented Amateur, for example), and enforced the boundaries between them. How all of this became so normal we don’t even notice anymore… how it all just ends up seeming natural.
She takes on the myth of the Great (Male) Artist, too:
unique, godlike — bearing within his person since birth a mysterious essence, rather like the golden nugget in Mrs. Grass’s chicken soup, called Genius or Talent, which, like murder, must always out, no matter how unlikely or unpromising the circumstances.
I’d forgotten Nochlin’s essay is pretty fun to read. I chuckled at “like murder” — but I did not get the golden nugget reference, so I looked it up. Turns out the “golden nugget” — which resembles nothing so much as a perfect golden egg — delivered Mrs. Grass’s special bouillon.
I find this apt, because I have often pictured the Great Artist treating his every creative idea as his most special golden egg, to be carried around and fawned over and worshipped and taken very, very seriously. My pwecious.
But good news! Mrs. Grass’s discontinued the golden egg in 2016.
Does that mean the era of the Great (Male) Artist is over, too??!?
Nah!
There’s a lot of Great (Male) Artist discourse going around in film and especially in documentary these days. And I’ve noticed I have some feelings about it. Admiration and inspiration, yes. But also jealousy, irritation, and a lot of confusion and uncomfortable questions.
To be clear: I am a documentary filmmaker in the 21st century, and Linda Nochlin’s argument was written 50 years ago, and concerned thousands of years of art history, not the current historical landscape. However, recent discourse about a boy genius director who is proud that he doesn’t make shot lists made me think about the myth of the Great (Male) Artist, and how it does not seem to be dying anytime soon.
It’s got me asking myself questions I don’t want to answer. Questions like:
How did I learn to recognize greatness?
How do I decide what is worth striving for creatively?
And how much of what I aim for with my art is not — as I want to believe — a product of my unique snowflake little soul, but is more a predictable result of the things I was taught about how to be a woman artist?