琳达•诺奇林（Linda Nochlin）撰写的关于女性艺术家的开创性文章被公认为是第一次真正尝试从女权主义的角度探讨艺术史。为什么没有 "伟大的女艺术家 "这个问题本身所使用的术语已经被破坏，所以她拒绝用这些术语来讨论这个问题。相反，她对 "伟大 "这个概念本身进行了拆解，解开了在艺术研究中以男性编码的 "天才 "为中心的基本假设。

诺奇林提到了琼•米切尔、路易丝•布尔乔亚、辛迪•谢尔曼等许多女性艺术家，她以无与伦比的精确性和魄力诊断了女性和艺术的状态。

Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay on women artists is widely acknowledged as the first real attempt at a feminist history of art. Nochlin refused to handle the question of why there had been no ‘great women artists’ on its own, corrupted, terms. Instead, she dismantled the very concept of ‘greatness’, unravelling the basic assumptions that had centred a male-

coded ‘genius’ in the study of art. With unparalleled insight and startling wit, Nochlin laid bare the acceptance of a white male viewpoint in art historical thought as not merely a moral failure, but an intellectual one. Freedom, as she sees it, requires women to risk entirely demolishing the art world’s institutions, and rebuilding them anew – in other words, to leap into the unknown.

In this stand-

alone anniversary edition, Nochlin’s essay is published alongside its reappraisal, ‘Thirty Years After’. Written in an era of thriving feminist theory, as well as queer theory, race and postcolonial studies, ‘Thirty Years After’ is a striking reflection on the emergence of a whole new canon. With reference to Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman and many more, Nochlin diagnoses the state of women and art with unmatched precision and verve. ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ has become a slogan and rallying cry that resonates across culture and society; Dior even adopted it in their 2018 collections. In the 2020s, at a time when ‘certain patriarchal values are making a comeback’, Nochlin's message could not be more urgent: as she herself put it in 2015, ‘there is still a long way to go’.