Review by New York Times Review
NEXT TIME you visit the Whitney Museum of American Art, once you've wended your way through the galleries and pulled out your phone on the city-side balconies, make a point of peeking through Renzo Piano's glass walls into the museum's staff quarters. Half visible to the public, on the walls of various conference rooms and a staff lounge, is a series of dry-transferred quotations with a distinguished feminist bite. "What if Picasso had been born a girl?" begins one. Another, looking deceptively like an official museum wall text, asks as bluntly as possible: "Why have there been no great women artists?" Both questions are from a landmark 1971 essay by the late art historian Linda Nochlin, and her insights into the institutional construction of artistic greatness, now reproduced in stark black type on five floors of the Whitney by the artist Zoe Leonard, remain both uncommonly muscular and dismally relevant. In such books as "Realism" (1971) and "The Politics of Vision" (1989), Nochlin, who died last October at the age of 86, pioneered a more socially engaged history of art, grounded in her study of 19th-century French painting even as she shuttled from past to present. Her final book, "Misère," returns to the 19th-century realist tradition, and examines artistic depictions of extreme poverty in industrializing Europe through the paintings and prints of Courbet, Géricault, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as newspaper illustrations, early photographs and contemporary memorials. Industrial capitalism produced not just great wealth but great poverty, and writers and artists, especially in the decades before photography left the studio, struggled to represent the extent of social misère in post-revolutionary Paris or mechanized Manchester. (Nochlin's use of the French noun, and of miserables for its sufferers, signifies poverty as "a human condition," beyond mere economic deprivation.) An iconography of misère may have first appeared among illustrators in faminestricken Ireland, which became, for British and French social reformers, "the very paradigm of misery in the 19th century." Unlike the twee genre paintings of the era, engravings in illustrated newspapers depicted starving Irishwomen as abject Madonnas, their pathos augmented by the medium's "coarse network of cross-hatchings ... its lack of nuance or subtlety." When French artists represented contemporary misère, they did so with divergent techniques for men and women. Lautrec depicted lower-class prostitutes without glamour, "lifting the folds of their chemises to reveal their meaty thighs and buttocks" for the health inspector. (Nochlin acidly adds that, while many French artists contracted syphilis, none ever depicted "male figures dropping their drawers" in the doctor's cabinet.) Géricault favored "isolated and dispossessed" beggars and tramps, ignored by passersby. Courbet - Nochlin's enduring hero, whom she once called with some justification "the Mick Jagger of the 19 th century" - concentrated on rural poverty, whether in his now-lost "The Stonebreakers" or his giant "The Painter's Studio," which features an Irish beggar woman slumped beside Courbet's painting-in-the-painting. In the book's most interesting chapter, Nochlin assesses the lesser-known naturalistic painter Fernand Pelez, whose bewildering "Grimaces and Misery: The Saltimbanques" depicts tired, underfed children performing in a Paris sideshow, a spectacle of misère that stands in for the impoverished city. (It hangs in the Petit Palais, and traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year.) THIS IS A SHORT BOOK, and rushed in places. Nochlin pans a "farcical" exhibition on prostitution at Paris's Musée d'Orsay in just a few sentences, without much detail, and her assessment of four Irish hunger memorials is also slim - she concedes that she could not travel to see most of them. What endures in this final book, though, is a fixation with the past as a portal to present misères, whether persistent gender inequalities or economic disparities as extreme as those of the industrial age. Images, she taught us over decades, have a unique capacity to indict those wrongs, and, as artists' representations of others' misfortunes have lately occasioned protests and even calls for destruction, Nochlin reminds us that there is nothing ethical in closing your eyes. "Are we willing to give up on visual documentation of human beings without a murmur?" she asks in "Misère." Or can we encourage an art as keenly engaged with society as Nochlin's own writing? JASON FARAGO is an art critic for The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 20, 2018]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Nochlin (Women, Art, and Power) illuminates the largely unexplored field of what are called in film studies "proto-documentary," or the calculatedly unrefined 19th-century drawings, paintings, and photography created to call attention to social and economic injustice. Examining pathos-laden images ranging from simple illustrations that ran in newspapers to paintings by such artists as Goya, Degas, and Van Gogh, Nochlin shows how many of these works succeeded in their aim of redressing societal ills; for example, the woodcuts that documented a British 1842 inquiry into mining conditions brought to light the exploitation of children in the pits, resulting in laws prohibiting child labor, and the unsentimental photography of Jacob Riis advanced the case for better living conditions for impoverished immigrants on New York's Lower East Side. Nochlin deepens her study by asking how accurately and convincingly one can document the lived realities of the poor and wonders at the moral implications of such visual representations. Specifically, she points to often-demeaning portrayals of the victims of the Irish Potato Famine-including those of crouching and half-naked women-to question the ability of documentary art to convey the objective reality of a situation. Inspired in part by the broadening gap between rich and poor in the U.S., this succinct and insightful book makes 19th-century social injustice uncannily relevant today. 80 illus. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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