Linda Nochlin

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  passages March 2007

  Robert Rosenblum

  A pioneering critic of the past fifty years and a revisionist scholar of the preceding two hundred, Artforum contributing editor Robert Rosenblum will be remembered for the stunning breadth of his erudition and taste. In the issue, a trio of his colleagues—and, above all, his friends—recall a protean figure whose love of art was matched only by his joie de vivre.

  LINDA NOCHLIN

  IT IS HARD not to be lighthearted when remembering Robert Rosenblum. Bob was himself one of those rare people who, though deeply serious, was never ponderous or solemn. His was a quintessentially blithe spirit. From the very

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  print May 2004

  “Turner, Whistler, Monet”

  WITH ITS AMBITIOUS “TURNER, WHISTLER, Monet: Impressionist Visions” opening next month, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, in conjunction with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux and Tate Britain, joins recent curatorial attempts to reshuffle the deck of nineteenth-century art. Rather than conform to the monographic blockbuster or utilize neat categories like Romanticism, realism, Impressionism, or symbolism to provide shape and substance, these exhibitions seek out new relationships among works and artists that bridge temporal or national boundaries. Such was the case, for example, with “Crossing

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  print October 2003

  FEMINISM & ART: NINE VIEWS

  HOW MIGHT WE ASSESS FEMINISM’S INITIAL IMPACTS ON ART, ITS SUBSEQUENT HISTORICIZATION, AND ITS CONTINUING INFLUENCE? ARTFORUM ASKED LINDA NOCHLIN, ANDREA FRASER, AMELIA JONES, DAN CAMERON, COLLIER SCHORR, JAN AVGIKOS, CATHERINE DE ZEGHER, ADRIAN PIPER, AND PEGGY PHELAN TO CONSIDER THIS QUESTION IN AN ONLINE ROUNDTABLE ASSEMBLED IN AUGUST. THEIR RESPONSES—REFINED BY THE PARTICIPANTS AND PRESENTED IN THE FOLLOWING PAGES—SUGGEST THAT FEMINISM AND FEMINIST DISCOURSES AS THEY HAVE FOUND EXPRESSION IN CONTEMPORARY ART ARE AMBIVALENT (“IN THE FULLEST SENSE OF THAT TERM,” AS PHELAN PUTS IT), MULTIFACETED, AND EVER EVOLVING.

  LINDA NOCHLIN

  As a participant in the women’s art movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s, I have decidedly mixed feelings about the historicization of feminism. It is difficult to see lived experience transformed into historical text. Things that seemed open and dynamic are now pinned down and displayed like butterflies in a case. Of course, there is also the tendency to idealize the past, to see the women’s art movement as totally united. This was not the case: Although all of us were for justice, equity, and a fair shake for women artists, critics, and academics, our views were extremely

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  print September 2003

  PICTURES OF AN EXHIBITION: THE 50th VENICE BIENNALE

  Francesco Bonami’s 50th edition of the Venice Biennale—”Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer”—delegated responsibility to nearly a dozen curators and, ultimately, to the viewers themselves, pointedly bringing an end to the monolithic “Grand Show” of yesteryear, for better or (as the consensus seemingly would have it) for worse. And the unseasonable weather didn’t help. At June’s heat wave–plagued vernissage, many openly wondered whether it was the lack of inspiration or rather the perspiration that was dampening their enthusiasm. We invited three regular contributors—art historian

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  print Summer 2003

  Christian Schad

  Christian Schad’s self-portrait of 1927, included in curators Jill Lloyd and Michael Peppiatt’s large retrospective of the artist’s work at the Neue Galerie in New York, is a haunting image that—partly because of the picture surface’s seductive smoothness and partly due to the subject matter’s dreamlike perversity—persists in the mind’s eye long after the actual experience of viewing the painting. The artist sits in the foreground with uneasy authority. Behind him lies one of the century’s scariest female nudes, in harsh profile, dark-haired, hawk-nosed, her facial scar providing a kind of slant

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  print December 2002

  the best books of the year

  Linda Nochlin

  Two books very different in approach and subject matter stand out this year: Richard Meyer’s Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford University Press) and Georges Didi-Huberman’s L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Editions de Minuit). Meyer deftly combines a close reading of individual works and intelligent social and political synthesis. Outlaw Representation not only sheds light on such important figures as Paul Cadmus, Andy Warhol, and Robert Mapplethorpe but demonstrates the remarkable

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  print September 2002

  PLATFORM MUSE: Documenta11

  Every five years the contemporary-art community descends on the small Hessian city of Kassel to experience Documenta, the exhibition whose art-world weight is often matched by its propensity for the big statement. This summer’s installment, directed by Okwui Enwezor, has proved global in ambition—and globalist in contention. Artforum asked four contributors where Documenta11 succeeds and where it comes up short.

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  print September 2002

  Linda Nochlin

  THE MOST STRIKING ASPECT OF DOCUMENTA11 IS THE PREDOMINANCE OF THE documentary mode, for want of a better word. The work of Bernd and Hilla Becher occupies a central place in the genealogy of this sensibility—and in the space of the Kulturbahnhof itself. Their photographs constitute some of the earliest “documentation” (pace August Sander, the father of them all) that aspires to something beyond or different from conventional documentary, something which inevitably calls forth the idiom of art, conceptual or otherwise. In a recent Art in America interview with the Bechers, the crucial

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  print Summer 2002

  “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art”

  Despite the barrage of negative criticism that greeted “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art” when it opened in mid-March—from hysterical outrage to self-satisfied dismissals of both the art and the ideas put forward—it is an uncommonly thoughtful if profoundly disturbing show. Like two other important recent exhibitions on the East Coast—the Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Barnett Newman retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, both of which in their own manner touched on questions raised in “Mirroring Evil”—the Jewish Museum exhibition

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  print November 2001

  Reading 9-11-01

  IN THE DAYS immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, titles that promised answers in the face of the disaster threatened to keep retired General Electric CEO Jack Welch's straight-talking memoir out of the top slot on best-seller lists. Studies of the Taliban movement, Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization Al-Qaeda, and the ill-fated twin towers themselves predictably climbed the charts, but according to the New York Times, king of the hill was Nostradamus: At the online bookshop Amazon.com, three editions of the prophesies of the sixteenth-century mystic, into whose

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  books December 2000

  The best books of 2000

  Linda Nochlin

  Molly Nesbit’s Their Common Sense (Black Dog Press) isn’t exactly an art book—it’s not exactly a book even, in the usual sense. But in the unusual sense, Nesbit’s tome is a marvelous document, swinging briskly between the teaching of mechanical drawing in French schools and the arcanery of Duchamp & Co. It begins in very big print with Antonin Proust’s proposal that all French schoolchildren learn to draw and ends with a memorable still from Pabst’s Joyless Streets. In between? Children’s drawings (not the cute, creative ones, but disciplined, drafting lesson productions), some

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  print December 1999

  BEST OF THE ’90s: BOOKS

  Homi K. Bhabha: The times are out of joint, perhaps never more so than when we are seduced by that decade-end desire to say, One last time, what was the great work of the ’90s? The ’90s began in the late late ’80s with the big bang of The Satanic Verses, and the decade dribbles on with small arms sniping around an elephant-dung madonna. In between times, we realize how powerful is the appeal to religious orthodoxy; how insecure our sense of the secular; how fragile any idea of global cultural understanding; how the politics of art rarely lies in the artifice itself, but all around it, in the