On page 219 of Representing Women there is a reproduction of Georges Seurat’s Poseuse (1886‐1888), which shows three young women hanging around in the artist’s studio in various states of undress. You might expect a feminist to take a dim view of a work like this; Linda Nochlin argues that the artist’s treatment of the subject actually tends to criticise and subvert “the objectifying regime of the male gaze”, by “calling both its naturalness and unhistoric approach into question”. She finds it hard to believe that Seurat took the Three Graces or Judgment of Paris theme wholly seriously: “not enough has been said about the role of humor and a kind of dry, acerbic caricature” in his work as a whole.
Linda Nochlin is Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and author of Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (1989). In a memoir that introduces this book she describes her love of art, paradox, and the essay form, how she had a baby and was converted to the Women’s Liberation movement in 1969, and how she became what she is (an “ad hoc art historian”). Her “argumentative spirit” may have been affected by an “atavistic memory of generations of disputatious rabbis”.
Representing Women collects seven of her scholarly essays, which explore various aspects of the representation of women in works of art produced between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among artists discussed are Delacroix, David, Géricault, Millet, Courbet, Cassatt, Degas, Seurat, and Kollwitz. The starting point of the essay on Géricault is the marked lack of representations of women in the artist’s oeuvre. Degas’s portrayals of the bourgeois family are “chilly”; an atmosphere of familial “warmth” pervades his brothel scenes. In “Mary Cassatt’s Modernity” Professor Nochlin notes the artist’s “delight in the luscious tactility of baby flesh”, and suggests that “we are living through an age of almost unparalleled repressiveness and prudery where the child’s body and its visual representation is concerned”.
There are 170 monochrome illustrations. A lithograph by Honoré Daumier on page 55 is entitled As Mother Is in the Throes of Creative Fervor, Baby Tumbles Head First into the Bathtub (1844). At the back of the book are 22 pages of notes and an index. In the opening essay (“The Myth of the Woman Warrior”) Professor Nochlin writes that “woman” is “a complex, mercurial and problematic signifier, mixed in its messages, resisting fixed interpretation or positioning”.
