Art Historian and Critic Linda Nochlin to give Rudin Lecture at MMC

The lecture, entitled “Real Beauty: The Body in Realism” will take place in the College’s Theresa Lang Theatre. 

Dr. Linda Nochlin is currently the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts/New York University, where she earned her doctorate in Art History in 1963. Prior to assuming this position, Nochlin served as Professor of Art History and Humanities at Yale University, as Distinguished Professor of Art History at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York and as the Mary Conover Mellon Professor of Art History at Vassar College, her undergraduate alma mater. She is known widely for her work on Gustave Courbet – a painter of interest to her since embarking on her doctoral dissertation, as well as for her seminal publications on Realism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and, of course, for her ground-breaking work to advance the cause of women artists, beginning as early as 1971 with her article, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Sparking a major development in art history and criticism, that early work led to the 1976 exhibition, Women Artists: 1550-1950, which Nochlin curated with Anne Sutherland Harris for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the show was accompanied by the catalogue of the same title co-authored by both scholars. 

Nochlin has written numerous books and articles focusing our attention on social and political issues revealed in the work of artists, both male and female, from the modernist period to the present day. Her books:Representing Women, The Body in Pieces, Women, Art, and Power, and The Politics of Vision have directed and expanded the dialogue among art historians on the nature of viewing and have broadened the scope of our interpretation of the role of art and artists in society. Throughout her distinguished career, Nochlin has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the Frank Jewett Mather Prize for Critical Writing, given by the College Art Association (1977). In 1984-85, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has also received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and was named Scholar of the Year by the New York State Council on the Humanities (1997). Dr. Nochlin has received honorary doctorates from Colgate University, the Massachusetts College of Art, the Parsons School of Design and Harvard University. In 1999, she was granted a Resident Fellowship at the Rockefeller Study and Conference Center, Bellagio, Italy. That year, she delivered the Oxford Lectures at Wellesley College on modern portraiture. 

Thirty years after raising the question, Nochlin returned to the issue of women artists when she presented her paper, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Thirty Years Later” as part of a conference at Princeton University “Women Artists at the Millennium.” In 2002, she conducted a seminar on “Realism, Then and Now” at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. In the spring of 2004, Nochlin delivered the Norton Lectures at Harvard University and gave the keynote address, “Speaking of Pictures” at the American Academy of Arts and Letters Annual Induction and Award Ceremony.

Linda Nochlin’s renown within the intellectual, art historical community is international in scope. She has been invited to address scholarly audiences in Amsterdam, Paris, London, Berlin, Ottawa and Hong Kong; her writings have been published in numerous languages; she has presented lectures at universities and museums throughout the country and the world on a wide range of artists and subjects spanning the Modernist period and reaching into the present. Nochlin has engaged and collaborated with students, as well as her fellow scholars in the field. “Self and History: A Symposium in Honor of Linda Nochlin” was presented at New York University in April of 1999 to acknowledge her contributions to her students and to the scholarship on modern art history.

Dr. Nochlin is a Contributing Editor of Art in America. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and of New York University’s Institute for the Humanities as well as the American Philosophical Society.

She is now curating, with Maura Reilly, an exhibition for the Brooklyn Museum entitled “NeoFeminism”, which will consist of work by contemporary women artists from around the world.

About The Jack and Lewis Rudin Distinguished Visiting Scholars Program 
The Jack and Lewis Rudin Distinguished Visiting Scholars Program was established at Marymount Manhattan in 2000 through a grant from the Rudin Family Foundation. Both Jack and the late Lewis Rudin have been well known throughout the New York community for the contributions they have made to living and working in New York and for their generous support of education, health, the arts and numerous other civic, religious and cultural organizations. Marymount Manhattan is honored to be the recipient of this special grant. This lecture builds upon the College’s commitment to academic excellence, community outreach and its distinctive undergraduate program in the liberal arts.

Because seating is limited, reservations are required for the lecture at 6:30pm in the Theresa Lang Theatre. To RSVP please call (212) 517-0473.

Published: October 25, 2004