i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

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Notes / 205which had refused to participate in the annual College Art Association in New Orleans,La., a state that had not ratiƒed the ERA. The majority of WCA memberschose to attend the CAA, where they held a major protest march. Garrard, “FeministPolitics,” 99.32. Cindy Nemser, “Alice Neel—Teller of Truth,” in Alice Neel: The Woman and HerWork (Athens, Ga.: The Georgia Museum of Art, 1975), n.p.33. Quoted in Garrard, “Feminist Politics,” 93.34. Nemser, Art Talk, 121.35. Douglas Davis, “Women, Women, Women,” Newsweek, January 29, 1973, 77.36. Among Blum’s exhibitions are: “Unmanly Art,” in the fall of 1972, and “ThreeRealist Painters (Neel, Flack and Blum),” in Valencia in February 1978.37. The three artists had been included in Cindy Nemser’s exhibition “In Her OwnImage” at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia that spring.38. Judith Vivell, “Talking About Pictures,” Feminist Art Journal 3/2 (summer 1974), 14.39. Published in Heresies in 1978; reprinted in Arlene Raven, Cassandra C. Langer,and Joanna Frueh, eds., Feminist Art Criticism (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,1988), 71–86.40. In his essay on the women’s art network, Lawrence Alloway provided an apt analogybetween the great goddess trend and the 1940s mythmakers: “The mythologies ofGottlieb and Mark Rothko were a patchwork of ideas from Frazer, Freud, Jung, andNietzsche. Portentousness lurked behind the poetic symbols of these artists becausetheir access to myth rested on the idea of the artist as seer, gifted beyond other people.What has feminism to gain from the revival of these affected attitudes? . . . Tocompare the improvised myths of the seventies with the male equivalents of the fortiesshows that the mother-goddess is as intellectually disreputable as the heroking.”Alloway, “Women’s Art in the Seventies,” 283.41. “Newsmakers,” Newsweek, February 12, 1979.42. Her concern was justiƒed, for Abzug, who had been elected to Congress in 1970,would become a victim of the backlash of the 1980s. When she ƒrst got to Washington,Abzug requested a seat on the House Armed Services Committee, offering asher rationale: “Do you realize there are 42,000 women in the military? do you realizethat about half the civilian employees of the Defense Department are women,290,000 of them at last count? And, as if that isn’t enough, there are one and a halfmillion wives of military personnel.” June Sochen, Herstory: A Woman’s View ofAmerican History, vol. 2 (New York: Alfred Publishing Co., 1974), 404.43. Laurie Johnson, “The ‘Sister Chapel’: A Feminist View of Creation,” New YorkTimes, January 30, 1978. The exhibition was held from Jan. 15 to Feb. 19, 1978, atP.S. 1, Long Island City.44. In 1968, on the occasion of their wedding, Nochlin and her husband, the late architecturalhistorian Richard Pommer, commissioned Philip Pearlstein to paint theirportrait. The constrast between Pearlstein’s image and Neel’s provides a sort of proofof one postulate of Nochlin’s writings: that realism in art is never simple verism.Neel’s Linda Nochlin and Daisy and Pearlstein’s Portrait of Linda Nochlin andRichard Pommer occupy opposite ends of the spectrum of realist portraiture in this

206 / Notesperiod, a spectrum that ranged from formalism to expressionism. See Linda Nochlin,“Portrait of Linda Nochlin and Richard Pommer,” Artforum 32/1 (September1993), 142, 204.45. Linda Nochlin, “The Realist Criminal and the Abstract Law, Part II,” Art in America61/6 (November-December 1973), 98. The quote is from J. P. Stern, “Re„ectionson Realism,” Journal of European Studies 7 (March 1971).46. Nochlin, “The Realist Criminal and the Abstract Law, Part II,” 102–103.47. Nochlin, “Introduction,” Women, Art and Power, xiv.48. Linda Nochlin, “Some Women Realists,” Arts (April-May 1974), reprinted inWomen, Art and Power, 98–99.49. It was precisely this historical perspective that Nemser’s writings on Neel, by concentratingon her biography and her sitters’ biographies, had ignored. The potentialof biography for commercial exploitation by the artworld celebrity system was soonrecognized by other feminist art historians. Carol Duncan’s review of Nemser’s ArtTalk, which she titled, borrowing a phrase from Neel, “When Success Is a Box ofWheaties,” pointed out that Nemser’s interviews framed the work of women artistsaccording to traditional male criteria of greatness—originality, for instance—ratherthan taking into account the artists’ own, quite different criteria as developed intheir work. The result, in her opinion, was not criticism but publicity. “Artists asprofessionals must compete, but they must not appear to compete. They need publicity,but must seek it in a form that is not publicity . . . Publicity alone—or, as inArt Talk—barely disguised publicity—distorts their seriousness and renders themexploited objects.” Carol Duncan, “When Success Is a Box of Wheaties,” Artforum(October 1975), reprinted in Carol Duncan, The Aesthetics of Power (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1993), 121ff.50. The ceremony, accompanied by a small exhibit of her work, was held on May 19.51. Joanna Frueh, “The Body Through Women’s Eyes,” in Broude and Garrard, ThePower of Feminist Art, 207.52. June Singer, Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality (Garden City, N.Y.:Doubleday, 1977), 278.53. An incisive summary of this debate is provided in Kari Weil, Androgyny and the Denialof Difference (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992),ch. 6: “Androgyny, Feminism, and the Critical Difference.”54. Ibid., 152. As the concept of androgyny began to be detached by feminist writersfrom its origins in the Platonic ideal of unity, it continued nevertheless to representa way beyond binary male-female oppositions. Summarizing Toril Moi, Kari Weilhas argued that in Woolf’s Orlando (1928), the story of a man who, over the courseof three centuries of life, becomes a woman: “sexual identity loses its claim as agiven, appearing, rather, as an effect of the cultural codes of desire and of changingrelations to ‘others’ . . .” Ibid., 157.55. Johnson, in her autobiography, Fragments Recalled At Eighty: The Art Memoirs ofEllen H. Johnson (North Vancouver, B.C.: Gallerie, 1993), 145–50, wrote a wittyaccount of sitting for Neel.56. Fat became a feminist issue in the 1980s. see Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls:The History of Anorexia Nervosa (1988); Kim Chernin, The Hungry Self: Women,

206 / Notesperiod, a spectrum that ranged from formalism to expressionism. See Linda Nochlin,“Portrait of Linda Nochlin and Richard Pommer,” Artforum 32/1 (September1993), 142, 204.45. Linda Nochlin, “The Realist Criminal and the Abstract Law, Part II,” Art in America61/6 (November-December 1973), 98. The quote is from J. P. Stern, “Re„ectionson Realism,” Journal of European Studies 7 (March 1971).46. Nochlin, “The Realist Criminal and the Abstract Law, Part II,” 102–103.47. Nochlin, “Introduction,” Women, Art and Power, xiv.48. Linda Nochlin, “Some Women Realists,” Arts (April-May 1974), reprinted inWomen, Art and Power, 98–99.49. It was precisely this historical perspective that Nemser’s writings on Neel, by concentratingon her biography and her sitters’ biographies, had ignored. The potentialof biography for commercial exploitation by the artworld celebrity system was soonrecognized by other feminist art historians. Carol Duncan’s review of Nemser’s ArtTalk, which she titled, borrowing a phrase from Neel, “When Success Is a Box ofWheaties,” pointed out that Nemser’s interviews framed the work of women artistsaccording to traditional male criteria of greatness—originality, for instance—ratherthan taking into account the artists’ own, quite different criteria as developed intheir work. The result, in her opinion, was not criticism but publicity. “Artists asprofessionals must compete, but they must not appear to compete. They need publicity,but must seek it in a form that is not publicity . . . Publicity alone—or, as inArt Talk—barely disguised publicity—distorts their seriousness and renders themexploited objects.” Carol Duncan, “When Success Is a Box of Wheaties,” Artforum(October 1975), reprinted in Carol Duncan, The Aesthetics of Power (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1993), 121ff.50. The ceremony, accompanied by a small exhibit of her work, was held on May 19.51. Joanna Frueh, “The Body Through Women’s Eyes,” in Broude and Garrard, ThePower of Feminist Art, 207.52. June Singer, Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality (Garden City, N.Y.:Doubleday, 1977), 278.53. An incisive summary of this debate is provided in Kari Weil, Androgyny and the Denialof Difference (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992),ch. 6: “Androgyny, Feminism, and the Critical Difference.”54. Ibid., 152. As the concept of androgyny began to be detached by feminist writersfrom its origins in the Platonic ideal of unity, it continued nevertheless to representa way beyond binary male-female oppositions. Summarizing Toril Moi, Kari Weilhas argued that in Woolf’s Orlando (1928), the story of a man who, over the courseof three centuries of life, becomes a woman: “sexual identity loses its claim as agiven, appearing, rather, as an effect of the cultural codes of desire and of changingrelations to ‘others’ . . .” Ibid., 157.55. Johnson, in her autobiography, Fragments Recalled At Eighty: The Art Memoirs ofEllen H. Johnson (North Vancouver, B.C.: Gallerie, 1993), 145–50, wrote a wittyaccount of sitting for Neel.56. Fat became a feminist issue in the 1980s. see Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls:The History of Anorexia Nervosa (1988); Kim Chernin, The Hungry Self: Women,

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