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Woman's Art, Inc.

On Griselda Pollock, "Women, Art and Ideology: Questions for Feminist Art Historians"
Author(s): Griselda Pollock and Ann Sutherland Harris
Source: Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn, 1983 - Winter, 1984), pp. 53-54
Published by: Woman's Art, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1357954 .
Accessed: 08/06/2011 09:04
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letters
ii

To the Editor:
Griselda Pollock's essay, "Women,Art
and Ideology: Questions for Feminist Art
Historians"(WAJ, Spring/Summer, 1983),
was submitted as a response to Lawrence
Alloway's critical review (WAJ, Fall
1982/Winter 1983) of the book, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (Pantheon, 1981), that she wrote with Rozsika
Parker. It is apuzzling reaction for she
addresses none of his points but merely reiterates some of her favorite arguments from
the book in a more polemical tone. While
there are many points that should be challenged in this essay, I will limit myself to
those sections prefaced by quotations from
my section of the exhibition catalogue,
Women Artists, 1550-1950 (New York:
Knopf, 1976). Pollock misrepresents mymethods and my positions and I would like
to set the record straight.
The first quotation chosen by Pollock in
her essay as exemplifying the kind of attitudes of which she disapproves comes from
the concluding paragraph of my share of
the catalogue introduction where I outlined
the most essential points about the contribution of women artists before 1800 to the
history of art to beincluded in future survey
course texts. I was addressing authors such
as H. W. Janson, who believed that no
woman had changed the history of art in
any fundamental way and therefore none
deserved a place in his book, History of Art.
In that context. my statement (". .. even if
Sofonisba Anguissola's contribution to
Renaissance portraiture does not earn her a
place in a Renaissance chapter, herhistorical impact as the first woman artist to
become a celebrity and thereby to open up
these professions to women certainly does")
is, I think, perfectly valid. "Celebrity,
novelty, exceptionalness" (sic) are not
"myths made up by a masculine dominated
culture to 'frame' the facts of women's
unbroken participation in artistic production," as Pollock asserts, but factors of historicalsignificance that affect both sexes.
(Far more people can name the first man to
walk on the moon than any of his successors
and now Sally Ride is, for the time being, as
famous as Neil Armstrong.) The fact that
the next generation of Italian women artists
emerged in cities near Cremona substantiates my position that Anguissola influenced historical developments more by
being a famous woman...