By Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal and Sue Scott
Foreword by Linda Nochlin
Prestel Publishing
$39.95

Once upon a time the art historian Linda Nochlin pondered the question, “Why have there been no great women artists?” That was 1971. In 2007, as Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal and Sue Scott—prominent critics and curators who happen to be women—attest, this question is no longer relevant. Over the past 35 years, due in no small part to the feminist movement, women have become a significant presence in the contemporary art world. Posner tells us that Louise Bourgeois, with her psychosexually charged work, can be considered the “feminist foremother” of these women, whose mediums are as varied as their backgrounds. Among her “children” are Kiki Smith, with her sometimes clinical, sometimes fantasy-ridden, nature-inspired work, Nancy Spero, whose glass and ceramic mosaic panels adorn New York City subway platforms, and Judy Pfaff and Ann Hamilton, both trailblazers in installation art. While reading this illuminating catalog of essays and photographs, one quickly realizes the significant influence the 12 women whose careers are discussed here had not just on the art world in general, but on each other. Revisiting her famous 1971 question in the foreword, Nochlin asserts that whether these artists are “great” or not is beside the point. For the women artists in this book, “it is vitality, originality, malleability, an incisive relationship to the present and all it implies, and an ability to deal with darkness and negativity and ambiguity that is at stake, not some mythic status that would confine them to fixed eternal truth.”