1« all right for somebody like Montaigne at end of long, fruitful career, to look back at end of life. But in people of my age, or college age, much results are negative on the whole. What seems on the surface honest [self] introspection more often than not self-deceptive, self-indulgent and self-destructive », Nochlin Linda, « Self-knowledge at Vassar College » [1957], mss, Linda Nochlin papers, 1937-2017, LN-AAA 17.14. (Les crochets dans la citation indiquent des passages raturés dans le document d’origine.)
2« a kind of by-product of knowledge and of interaction with the outside world, not something to be sought after in its own right. », ibid.
3« The primary function of the college is to provide knowledge of subjects, and training in the disciplines and techniques of learning. When this is not felt to be the primary function of the college, result which tend to blur the boundaries between the subject matter and the self. A student who asks of an academic discipline [like art history]: “what does it do for me? What do I get out of it? How does this enrich my personality?” is simply asking the wrong questions and should ask rather: “How do I get to it? What more can I discover? How can I attack this problem?” What I am getting at is the often forgotten fact that knowledge, thought and understanding of a certain body of facts, theories or ideas is a valid and important activity for its own sake and not for any other reason, self-knowledge included, and unless one believes this is the very core of one’s being, one has no business being at an institution of higher learning like Vassar. », ibid.
4« The self-knowledge I am speaking about at this point is what I would call external or sociological self-knowledge, which I consider far more important, though far less self-flattering and delightful than the introspective kind. It is less delightful simply because this sort of self-knowledge instead of giving us proof of the unique and cherished individuality, each of our tenderly nurtured psyches, on the contrary brings us face to face with the stark truth that we are all much more like each other than we are different. », ibid.
5« The very fact that we are so anxious to discuss self-knowledge is in itself significant: it is an extremely privileged topic indeed. », ibid.
6« The fact that most of us come from a certain privileged social class and are significantly above the average – the cashmere sweaters, cod liver oil, debut parties, the best schools, dancing lessons, trips to museums, summer camps, trip to Europe, parental encouragement, have been lavished on us in varying degrees since the days of our birth already – tells us a great deal about the way we are going to think and react. », ibid.
7« And Vassar can incidentally of course help us become aware and knowledgeable about this essential aspect of ourselves, although if you are anything like who I was as a student, most of you will resist this kind of self-revelation violently. I myself remember [with what self-righteous indignation I] my reaction to the faculty member who really started me on this kind of self-examination by revealing the existence in myself of what I call the “little man” syndrome. By this I mean the fact that most Vassar girls refer to janitors, cleaning men, waiters, shop owners, train conductors when they don’t know their names as “that little man”. The faculty member pointed out the fact that the students father’s business acquaintances or family friends, doctors or lawyers or even professors, regardless of size [ajout dans la marge : “symbolic size”, Note de l’auteure], were never referred to as “little men”, whereas the gateman or clerk in question might actually be six feet or over. In other words, the phrase referred to what we call in our study of art history symbolic scale, in sociology status differentiating students, and what we mean by the phrase was insignificant, menial or “not our sort of people”. In other words I had effortlessly and unconsciously assimilated a bit of “ruling class mentality” if you want to call it this, without as much as batting an eyelash. The “little man syndrome” is of course only an example of the sort of thing one can be made to become aware of in oneself: the list of possible topics for examination is endless. Among the most important: accepted ideas about what it means to be a woman, to be married, to obey the law might well be examined, what is work and what is play or fun could bear looking into and even more specifically, the values of “niceness” and “politeness” could be ruthlessly questioned. », ibid.
8« What I am getting at is the fact that it is a different matter to join a group or feel a member of it consciously and because we agree wholeheartedly with its ideals or its way of life and, on the other hand, to be a mere unconscious member of a group, assimilating its values through birth and breeding. And what I am further trying to get across is the fact that this kind of external knowledge of ourselves, which fortunately or unfortunately cannot be built into any kind of curriculum – is the only really valid kind as far as I am concerned. The darkened room and inner eye kind is utterly meaningless, a kind of self-flattering peering into a vacuum unless we are constantly aware of and on guard about these basic social, economic and ideological factors which have made us what we are, in the very core of our beings, for better or for worse – almost automatic and unconscious reactions and attitudes which have been created by social economic and ideological factors which were in many cases beyond our own control. », ibid.
9« I wasn’t always a feminist. I always acted like a woman who was very much determined by the world of ideas and by her intellect. I always saw myself as an intellectual. I always felt that my intellectual work came first. That was not even a conscious feeling. […] Insofar as I was a woman, you could say that that was kind of incipient feminism. But on the other hand, I think it was a very conflicted view which I didn’t want to bring too much to consciousness, because it was really too painful to think about before the women’s movement. » Nochlin Linda, « An Interview with Linda Nochlin », art. cité, p. 84-85.
10« What does it mean to the future self to be, on the whole, so rooted, so protected, so cherished and supported as a child, so – seemingly, at any rate – at home in the world? The flip side of rootedness is complacency, a kind of existential smugness that denies to others – the exiled, the alienated, the uprooted, the disenfranchised, the majority of the human race – their right not merely to angst or estrangement, but to a place at the table alongside the more fortunate. », Nochlin Linda, A Life of Learning, op. cit., p. 19.
11. « the growing sense at once of alienation and difference, that realization of identity which one gets only when one has left the shelter of familiar scenes and ways and is cast out into the wilderness of an uncaring world. […] I was not English, despite my immersion in Anglo-American culture; I was a Jew from Brooklyn. » Nochlin Linda, « Memoirs of an Ad Hoc Art Historian », dans Nochlin Linda, Representing Women, op. cit., p. 9.
12. « By Merton’s darkening walls I sat
Brushed by the fall of summer’s rain
Feeling the Eternal Jew
Homunculus, starting in my veins. », ibid.
13« Here was another topic that has haunted my later work: the issue of identity, of ethnicity, and of their representation, be it of women, of “Orientals” or of blacks. » ; « my awakening to these issues », ibid.
14« I was also drawn to Aby because he was a Jew, like me, a Jew but a cosmopolitan: as he himself put it, “a Jew by blood, a Hamburger by heart and a Florentine in his soul”. », Nochlin Linda, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty, op. cit., p. 301. La citation originale, en italien, « ebreo di sangue, Amburghese di cuore, d’anima Fiorentino », se trouve dans Bing Gertrud, « Aby M. Warburg », Rivista storica italiana, no 71, 1960, p. 100-113, ici p. 113.
15« Although he did not seem to be particularly concerned with anti-Semitism during the greater part of his life, he was, nevertheless, as a Jew in Germany, well aware of its presence. One may speculate, indeed, that part of the motivation impelling him, consciously or not, to grapple with the history of culture and its relation to the social order historically was to extinguish the bases for superstition and prejudice, and along with them, anti-Semitism, prejudice at its most painfully exacerbated. » Nochlin Linda, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty, op. cit., p. 301.
16Nochlin Linda, « Degas et l’affaire Dreyfus : portrait de l’artiste en antisémite », dans Les Politiques de la vision, op. cit., p. 201-239.
17« “Why do they hate us so much?” This is not merely an anguished cry torn from the heart – although, of course, it is that, too – but rather a perfectly rational question to ask in the face of the plethora of hostile, denigrating, and debasing representations of Jews – the Jew, Jewishness – collected and analyzed in the texts of this volume », Nochlin Linda, « Starting with the Self: Jewish Identity and its Representation », dans Nochlin Linda, Garb Tamar (dir.), The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, Londres, Thames & Hudson, 1995, p. 7 (à partir de cette page, cette référence est citée sous le titre raccourci : The Jew in the Text).
18« we are and we have been so hated that only mutually exclusive categories would seem large enough to encompass the totality of our iniquity. A language of excess seems the natural vehicle for such vileness. Sometimes, reading these texts and the myriad others detailing the dark face of anti-Semitic representation, I have actually felt compelled to run to the mirror. To what extent do I conform to the Jewish stereotypes reiterated time after time in these pages […]. While it is true that my ears do not stick out, my nose is far from hooked, and my lips are thin rather than thick and coarse, I do have flat feet and rounded shoulders. […] While I had always associated my red hair and freckles with the Gentile world – Irish, perhaps, or Scottish – I learned that these were particularly ascribed to the diabolic or demonic aspects of Jewishness. », ibid. Linda Nochlin souligne.
19« The terrible thing about the voluminous literature representing the Jew as excessive is the way it sticks in the mind, seeps into the unconscious, embeds itself in the deepest levels of my being even if I detest its assertions and, on the rational level, I realize its total irrationality. But I am irrational, too, or not merely rational. I am ashamed of myself for subscribing to these hateful, phantasmagorical pseudo-identities for even an instant; but something deep inside me cannot be gainsaid. », ibid., p. 8.
20« We are forced to take into account the role played by both intentionality and contextuality in the construction of Jewish representation. To what else can we resort when the criteria of judgment are themselves ambiguous or even suspect? It seems to me that in such cases, the intention of the arts, suspect though it has been held in sophisticated critical discourse, as well as the context within which the work was created, must then be called into play. », ibid., p. 18.
21Rancière Jacques, Le partage du sensible, op. cit., p. 12.
22. « You don’t get a grip on your own culture and see what it is until you see other cultures which don’t take for granted what your own culture does. That’s what wakes you up to the fact that you’re taking things for granted about art in general just based on your own experience, whereas there are other ways of looking at it. […] I think there’s nothing like being immersed in the art or the thinking of a very different culture to make your own stand out, as though it’s dipped in a photographic bath and suddenly everything about your culture comes out as something specific to it, not something about human beings in general. » Nochlin Linda, entretien avec James McElhinney, op. cit.
23« I liked my beliefs and convictions to be at one with my work. », ibid.
24« Why would a woman, born to every privilege, dedicate her life to socialism and eventually become a convinced communist? », Nochlin Linda, « Memoirs of an Ad Hoc Art Historian », dans Nochlin Linda, Representing Women, op. cit., p. 8.
25« I would never have been an art historian or a critic unless I was profoundly engaged with the world of art and the work of art. », Nochlin Linda, « The Goals of Art Criticism », The Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art/USA, the second annual Lecture, Vera List Center for Arts and Politics, New York, 10 novembre 2008, URL (chaine : The New School) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j1X7WEB47Q (consulté le 7 mars 2024).
26« I am enough of an old leftist to still believe that part of the mission of the critic is to bring art, or rather the issues raised by art, to a wider audience rather than a small elite, to democratize the critical project itself. », ibid.
27« I am a contrarian. », ibid.
28« she was determined to reject the standard art-historical line if it didn’t conform to her larger sense of urgency around questions of class, gender, and less often but no less importantly, racial equality. », D’Souza Aruna, « How Linda Nochlin made it modern », dans Nochlin Linda, Making it Modern, op. cit., p. 13.
29Voir Deepwell Katy, « Défier l’indifférence à la différence : les paradoxes de la critique d’art féministe », dans Frangne Pierre-Henry, Poinsot Jean-Marc (dir.), L’invention de la critique d’art : actes du colloque international tenu à l’université Rennes 2, les 24 et 25 juin 1999, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2002, p. 191-205 (à partir de cette page, cette référence est citée sous le titre raccourci : L’invention de la critique d’art).
30David Catherine, citée dans Griffin Tim, « Global Tendencies : Globalism and the large-scale Exhibition », Artforum, vol. 42, no 3, novembre 2003, p. 152-176, p. 154-155. Traduction de Marie-laure Bonilla et Meena Wolf Zabunyan.
31« Everyone has accused me of colonialism if they dared look at or interpret or think about the art of former colonies. It’s inevitable. […] And I think, you know, to some degree, it’s probably right. But I also like to look at the other side of it, which people like Homi Bhabha and so on have been exploring, which is: What do the colonialized do with the culture of the oppressor? How do they manage it? How do they transform it? How do they use it to their own purposes? Is there just a one-way street? And I think many of the ex-colonized themselves, the intellectuals, understand this without forgiving or excusing or whatever. They understand this reciprocity that isn’t simply one culture imposing on the other and eradicating it, but that a shift takes place within the oppressed culture itself, which transforms it into something quite different. », Nochlin Linda, entretien avec James McElhinney, op. cit.
32« The demand, voiced by advanced artists, ex-artists and new-left radicals, that art “come out of the museums”, cease to consist of valuable, market-oriented objects, merge with life – is in many ways an admirable one, and one can, of course, only applaud efforts to get art into the streets and into the lives of ordinary people in the form of community-controlled art projects, wall paintings and workshops. Yet, on the other hand, such demands may simply be the ultimate act of avant-garde, elitist hubris. Once more, the art world tends to overestimate the power and range of its productions and its actions by imagining the drastic effect that the disappearance of all those canvas rectangles could have on the social system. The death of art? The destruction of culture? The demise of the museum? These phrases tend to ring hollow: for the vast majority of people throughout the world, struggling against poverty, decimated by war and hunger or crushed by demeaning life-styles, neither art nor culture nor the museums themselves have ever really been alive. », Nochlin Linda, « Museums and Radicals: a History of Emergencies » [1971], dans Nochlin Linda, Making it Modern, op. cit., p. 239-257, ici p. 257.
33« What values are being upheld, or reinstated, in this uninterrupted paean to the old master of modernism that makes Matisse and the Matisse discourse so especially significant at the moment? Right now, I don’t want to engage the issue of quality (or “quality”) – a slippery and politically fraught term – of the work in the show […]. What I want to talk about is what the show meant: to critics, to art historians, to museumgoers who lined up in astonishing numbers to enjoy the experience of real art. », Nochlin Linda, « Matisse and its Other » [1993], dans Nochlin Linda, Making it Modern, op. cit., p. 273-285, ici p. 273. Linda Nochlin souligne.
34« It is a happy accident that these two exhibitions should have taken place at the same time in the same city, for together they served as object lessons in the polarities of modern art production and ideology in the early twentieth century. », ibid.
35« Yes, there was something of a collective sigh of relief in the reaction to the Matisse show, as though the whole tradition of Western modernism as pure aesthetic delight, uncontaminated by a political or ideological agenda, had been redeemed by this single master. What a relief! No feminism, no social critique, no ambiguity – no ideas, in short: just beauty, pure line and color on canvas at their richest, fullest and most satisfying. », ibid.
37« Somehow, the notion that art might be concerned with representation, stereotype, truth and justice while at the same time maintaining a highly inventive formal and aesthetic standard has, in recent years, been pushed aside by the flood of cheap anti-“political correctness” rhetoric spewed out by the popular media. This flood has now apparently crept up to higher levels of criticism as well. Whatever one makes of the current jihad against political art, the fact remains that the great Western tradition of art has always included questions of identity, of ethnicity, of national and ethnic representation, and, indeed, of outright political debate within its capacious embrace. Only very recently has Western art been distilled – or reduced – to an essence of pure form, in which any tincture of social comment is considered a taint. », Nochlin Linda, « Learning from Black Male » [1995], dans Nochlin Linda, Making it Modern, op. cit., p. 134-139, ici p. 134.
38« Seeing Poussin with the Black Male show still on my mind made me look at this brilliant, classical, but quirky artist differently. I was struck by how preternaturally white all of Poussin’s figures are – obvious of course, but for that very reason, unnoticed before […]. But the shifts in my perception of Poussin weren’t limited to the matters of skin color. The Black Male show also emphasizes the role of gender – the ambiguous status of maleness itself – and it made me realise the remarkable extent to which Poussin’s work involved gender issues. », ibid., p. 135. Linda Nochlin souligne.
39Fend Mechthild, Hyde Melissa, Lafont Anne (dir.), Plumes et Pinceaux : Discours de femmes sur l’art en Europe (1750-1850), Paris, presses du réel, 2012, p. 5.
40« how does a critic authenticate the work of art when the author is sexed and “his” truth no longer universal? », Kelly Mary, « Reviewing Modernist Criticism », Screen, no 22, 1981, p. 41-62, p. 56.
41« closed definition of art criticism as writing that produces objects of interest, and contains a type of looking which determines values, or reaffirms a critic’s judgements as a point of view », Deepwell Katy, « Art Criticism and the State of feminist Art Criticism », arts, vol. 9, no1, 2020, DOI : 10.3390/arts9010028 (consulté le 7 mars 2024).
42« Critics (including art historians) writing about contemporary art often have the privilege of putting into print for the first time ideas, evaluations, judgements as well as prejudices about art and artworks. No one can ever anticipate or be certain that their own viewpoints will stand the test of time and enter art history in this manner as a proper object, the correct lasting judgement, a momentary reflection of contemporary taste or the privileged first statement on a new genre, movement or tendency in art. These gambits may be central to the critic’s investment but in art history, it leaves art criticism only as a first-order discourse to be rearranged or judged by the art historian’s second-order sensibilities and preferences. The long-standing prejudice of a necessary time-lag for art objects to become “history of art” has meant that the many collective or sole-authored anthologies of art criticism post-1945, and on every tendency within it, now act as sourcebooks for any art history of contemporary art. », ibid.
43Deepwell Katy, « Défier l’indifférence à la différence », L’invention de la critique d’art, op. cit., p. 192.
44« Yes, I am a believer in multiculturalism; yes, I feel that politics and social issues play an important role in both art and criticism. […] I believe in inclusiveness – in openness to other visions and articulations besides the mainstream ones approved by the purity police. But I am also totally immersed in the great historical tradition of Western high art. », Nochlin Linda, « Learning from Black Male », dans Nochlin Linda, Making it Modern, op. cit., p. 134-135.
45« The Black Male show could not have come into being outside the Western tradition, which of course includes within it, as part of its very nature, a legacy of protest and violent negation of its own values. », ibid., p. 135.
46« we who have inherited that tradition must constantly revise, deconstruct and reconsider it in the light of present-day concerns and passions. […] Without this force of critical, often excessive, renewal – a renewal, it seems to me now best accomplished by formerly marginalized groups and individuals – the Western tradition is not a source of vital cultural life at all but a ritualized entombment, the burial celebration of dead artifacts by ossified sensibilities. », ibid., p. 139.
47« writing criticism, if you take it seriously, is hard work. It demands both engagement and fairness, a difficult combination to achieve. », Nochlin Linda, « The Goals of Art Criticism », op. cit.
48« a sense of moral and ethical commitment », ibid., p. 10.
49« scholarship as a form of social action », Harpham Geoffrey, Scholarship and Freedom, op. cit., p. 126.
50Voir Nochlin Linda, entretien avec Anne Lafont et Todd Porterfield, art. cité.
51« I think one has to be aware of one’s own position. […] I think self-consciousness about what you’re doing and what you think is essential. And I’m empiricist. You know, I work close to the object. », Nochlin Linda, entretien avec James McElhinney, op. cit.
52« Linda thought of herself as an art historian engagée and understood art history as a practice of making the social and political meaning of art manifest. », Lajer-Burcharth Ewa, « Passages: Linda Nochlin », Artforum International, janvier 2018, URL : https://www.artforum.com/print/201801/linda-nochlin-73172 (consulté le 6 mars 2024).
53« representation itself is an ideological formation, corrupted from the start », Nochlin Linda, Misère: The visual Representation of Misery in the 19th Century, Londres, Thames & Hudson, 2018, p. 25.
54« Whereas the issue in the nineteenth century was how accurately and how convincingly one could document misery and outrage […], the question in the twenty-first century seems to lie in the moral and ethical dimension of documentary representation itself », ibid.
55Sontag Susan, Devant la douleur des autres, traduction de Fabienne Durand-Bogaert, Paris, Christian Bourgois, 2003, p. 100.
56Didi-Huberman Georges, Images malgré tout, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 2004, p. 61. Georges Didi-Huberman souligne.
57« it is visual representation rather than verbal that takes the worst beating: to report verbally on starvation is understood to be less nefarious and self-aggrandizing than to photograph starving people, which is held to “aestheticize” them and make them available for delectation. Why is it always the visual representation of misery that bears the brunt of moral opprobrium? Much visual documentation is far from “aesthetic”, unless one begs the question by asserting that all images are, sui generis, aesthetic; a questionable position indeed. », Nochlin Linda, Misère, op. cit., p. 25. Linda Nochlin souligne.
58Bourdieu Pierre, « L’espace des points de vue », dans Bourdieu Pierre (dir.), La Misère du monde, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2007, p. 13-17, p. 16. Pierre Bourdieu souligne.
59Bourdieu Pierre, « Au lecteur », ibid., p. 9-12, p. 10.
61Haraway Donna, « Savoirs situés : la question de la science dans le féminisme et le privilège de la perspective partielle », dans Manifeste Cyborg et autres essais : Sciences – Fictions – Féminisme, anthologie établie par Laurence Allard, Delphine Gardey et Nathalie Magnan, Paris, Exils, 2007, p. 107-144, p. 123 (à partir de cette page, cette référence est citée sous le titre raccourci : « Savoirs situés », dans Manifeste Cyborg et autres essais).
64Bourdieu Pierre, « Au lecteur », dans La Misère du monde, op. cit., p. 11.
65Voir Pollock Griselda, « Des canons et des guerres culturelles », Cahiers du Genre, vol. 43, no 2, 2007, p. 45-69, p. 51-52.
66« Are more subtle definitions and differentiations than those generally employed by art historians necessary to determine the precise political context within which certain works came into being? Are the traditional methods of art history adequate for a discussion of the deeper relations existing between artworks and ideology generally, artworks and political ideology specifically, or do those traditional methods tend to veil such connections with a kind of softening neutralism which is itself an ideological position? », Nochlin Linda, Millon Henry A. (dir.), Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press, 1980, p. ix.
67« In order to specify the possibilities for genuine knowledge in a field, we must be able to specify not only what that knowledge is or might be but where it might be inscribed, what it might do with reference to everything that has preceded it (revise it, confirm it, modify it), what is contemporary with it, what is related to it in other fields, what its relationship would be to what comes after it (will it enable further discovery, inhibit it, close the field down, create a new field?), how it will be transmitted or preserved, how it will be taught, how institutions will accept or reject it […]. », Saïd Edward W., The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 181-182.
68« It is the professed aim of certain present-day art historians to “let the age speak of itself” and hence to accept the evaluations of an artist’s contemporaries as inherently more valuable than the judgments of later students of his work. Such a notion has a certain spurious attractiveness, an aura of scholarly objectivity, which conveniently obscures the more pedestrian fact that what these historians are engaged in is not really history at all but an up-to-date version of antiquarianism. The theoretical discourses of a period, or its heartfelt diatribes, are no more nor less raw material for the art historian than its artefacts or its statistics, important though they may be as raw material. An age no more “speak for itself”, in the sense of explaining itself, than does the painting or the poem produced in it. », Nochlin Linda, Realism, Londres, Penguin, 2e édition, 1990 [1971], p. 52. Linda Nochlin souligne.
69« In a work of modern scholarship, the source is treated not as an unimpeachable authority, but as a contribution to an account that includes and exceeds it. The scholar is always in the ambivalent position of both presenting and diverging from the evidence. », Harpham Geoffrey, Scholarship and Freedom, op. cit., p. 105.
70Haraway Donna, « Savoirs situés », Manifeste Cyborg et autres essais, op. cit., p. 131.
71« At the present time, when the artist’s biography is introduced more and more to explain the work of art, it is interesting – if not particularly original – to consider how the artist’s biography, or rather the texts that set forth the artist, are no more privileged as empirical givens – as a species of raw data – than the art works themselves that such texts are called on to explain. Rather, they are complex constructions. Artists’ biographies must be considered as artistic creations, mediating the various ideological and psychological positions of those who created them. », Nochlin Linda, Courbet, op. cit., p. 127.
72« This constitution of art history as biography occludes an analysis of works of art as material objects and understanding of their formulative role in the dynamics of ideological constructs. », Salomon Nanette, « The Art Historical Canon », dans Hartmann Joan, Messer-Davidow Ellen (dir.), (En)gendering Knowledge : Feminism in Academe, op. cit., p. 223.
73« Vasari invents/produces the critic, or art historian. He does so by giving individual works particular validity through his assertion of value judgments bearing the weight of his authority. », ibid.
74« Establishing through research and analysis the connections between Courbet’s style and the ideas of 1848, Nochlin proceeded in the spirit of critical realism she was analyzing, bringing to light a revolutionary political program that actually determined what might have seemed a mere obedient recording of material fact. », Harpham Geoffrey, Scholarship and Freedom, op. cit., p. 120-121.
75Courbet Gustave, « Le précurseur d’Anvers », Le Courrier du Dimanche, 1er septembre 1861.
76« the attempt to apply the implications of such a statement systematically to specific works of the artist (e.g. to specify in exactly what way democracy, socialism, a sympathy for the rural proletariat or petty bourgeoisie effect the composition, the figure style or the technique of a given painting. », Nochlin Linda, Gustave Courbet : A Study of Style and Society, op. cit., p. 4. Linda Nochlin souligne.
77Voir D’Souza Aruna, « How Linda Nochlin made it modern », dans Nochlin Linda, Making it Modern, op. cit., p. 9. La fréquentation des écrits de ses pairs est un fil rouge au même titre que le peintre Courbet lui-même, comme l’illustre son intervention au colloque Courbet à neuf ! en 2007, intitulée « Living with Courbet : Fifty Years of My Life as an Art Historian » [« Vivre avec Courbet : Cinquante ans de ma vie d’historienne de l’art »]. Arnoux Mathilde, Beyer Andreas (dir.), Courbet à neuf ! Actes du colloque international organisé par le Musée d’Orsay et le Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art à Paris, les 6 et 7 décembre 2007, Paris, Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2010, p. 11-22 (à partir de cette page, cette référence est citée sous le titre raccourci : Courbet à neuf !).
78Voir Clark Timothy James, Le Bourgeois absolu. Les artistes et la politique en France de 1848 à 1851, traduction de Carole Iacovella, Paris, Art édition, 1992 [1973 ; 1981] ; Une image du peuple : Gustave Courbet et la Révolution de 1848, traduction de Anne-Marie Bony et Françoise Jaouën, Paris, presses du réel, 2007 [1973] ; voir aussi Herbert Robert T., From Millet to Léger : Essays in Social Art History, New Haven (CT), Yale University Press, 2002.
79« a self-conscious and highly sophisticated one […] conditioned […] by the alternatives to conventional empirical, positivistic and naïvely “neutral history” », Nochlin Linda, [Compte rendu de Clark T. J., The Absolute Bourgeois et Image of the People], Art in America, vol. 62, no5, septembre-octobre 1974, p. 15.
80« The commonplace notion that Realism is a “styleless” or transparent style, a mere simulacrum or mirror image of visual reality, is another barrier to its understanding as an historical and stylistic phenomenon. », Nochlin Linda, Realism, op. cit., p. 14.
81« A philosopher would distinguish more sharply than I have done here between the various meanings that have been given to the term “realism” even in the discussion of art », ibid., note.
82« I really emphasize the need for people to know history, the history of art, what it helped make for. Because I think without it, you’re just floating in a kind of vacuum. », Nochlin Linda, entretien avec James McElhinney, op. cit.
83« Reading sanctions for one’s own cherished beliefs into the historical process is an ongoing phenomenon, particularly in the arts, where, unlike the realms of politics or economics, there seems to be little justification in actual praxis for the exclusive domination of any one position. To interpret particular styles or outlooks as inevitable expressions of particular world views, to see the hand of destiny, the demands of the Kunstwollen or of internal consistency at work in any given form of artistic expression is sadly to misread, overinterpret and oversimplify the infinitely more open, complex and chancy process of history. Many of the predictions and manifestations of the more articulate prophets and supporters of new styles tend to be self-fulfilling. This is not the result of some sort of in-group confidence trick, but rather, especially in recent years, of a natural interaction of theoretical and creative efforts struggling for existence and then gaining supremacy at given moments. But there is nothing “inevitable” about the triumph of any given style or group in the sense that, say, death is inevitable. Nor is there ever a single style which absolutely captures the spirit of the age – whatever that may be – to the exclusion of other possibilities, any more than there is a single “correct” direction to be predicated by any art medium. Such an interpretation of art history is a case of misplaced intentionality – seeing the particular decisions, needs, desires and inventions of particular persons or groups as predestined expressions of historical will. », Nochlin Linda, « The realist Criminal and the abstract Law » [1973], dans Nochlin Linda, Making it Modern, op. cit., p. 175-198, ici p. 196.
84« Realism, of course, is a mode of artistic discourse, a style in the largest sense, not, as its enemies would have it, a “discovery” of preexisting objects out there or a simple “translation” of ready-made reality into art. », ibid., p. 175.
85« It is human beings in specific situations who make decisions and choices. », ibid., p. 197.
86« the politics of art » ; « the ability, determination and power to convince and convert, and the susceptibility to this message of artists and public », ibid.
87Nochlin Linda, Les Politiques de la vision, op. cit., p. 5.
88« Institutional and discursive constraints shape the writing of art historical scholarship no less than ideological and professional constraints shape the production of art. », Meyer Richard, « Feminist Art re-covered », dans Robinson Hilary, Buszek Maria Elene (dir.), A Companion to Feminist Art, Chichester, Wiley, 2019, p. 215-224, p. 222.
89« whether every work by a great artist was great by virtue of his being great, or do you have to consider it case by case », Nochlin Linda, The Feminist Turn, op. cit., p. 44.
90« there’s a case to be made not for bad art but for non-great art, other kinds of art, interesting art », ibid., p. 97.
91Nochlin Linda, Les Politiques de la vision, op. cit., p. 92-93.
92« his rejection of either metaphysical cant or formalist empiricism as ways of dealing with modern art; his insistence that formal choices are always rooted in larger systems of value which in turn are historically conditioned; his refusal to accept coarse historical determinism or simple alternation theories that purport to explain the genesis of modern styles; and his vision of modernism, beginning with Impressionism, as an assertion of personal freedom in the face of the increasing oppressiveness and depersonalization of individual life brought about by capitalist institutions. », Nochlin Linda, « Meyer Schapiro’s Modernism », dans Nochlin Linda, Making it Modern, op. cit., p. 30.
93« a kind of mediation between democratic involvement and the styles of high culture », Nochlin Linda, « An Interview with Linda Nochlin », art. cité, p. 82.
94« Schapiro’s vision is inexorably and inevitably “high” and “straight”. Not for him the quirky, the offbeat, the minor, the interestingly marginal or the peripheral. », Nochlin Linda, « Meyer Schapiro’s Modernism », dans Nochlin Linda, Making it Modern, op. cit., p. 33.
95Nochlin Linda, Les Politiques de la vision, op. cit., p. 8.
97« “thinking art history otherly” », ibid., p. 9. Linda Nochlin souligne.
99« designed to absorb and rationalize self-contradiction », Nochlin Linda, « The Image of the Working Women », dans Nochlin Linda, Representing Women, op. cit., p. 80-106, ici p. 86.
100Nochlin Linda, Femmes, Art et pouvoir, op. cit., p. 15.
101« we find the emphasis shifting from a focus on institutional structures and social context to a preoccupation with relations of power as central to the production and circulation of meaning. », Chadwick Whitney, [Compte rendu de Nochlin Linda, Women, Art and Power and Other Essays], Woman's Art Journal, vol. 11, no 2, automne 1990-hiver 1991, p. 37-38, ici p. 37.
102Nochlin Linda, Les Politiques de la vision, op. cit., p. 46.
106Saïd Edward W., L’Orientalisme : l’Orient créé par l’Occident [1978], traduction de Catherine Malamoud et Claude Wauthier, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2015.
107. Nochlin Linda, Les Politiques de la vision, op. cit., p. 68.
109« how the body becomes a discursive visual sign, and how it is constructed as an exotic object of desire that addresses the viewer’s body in specific ways », Jørgensen Ulla Angkjær, Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices, Leyde, Brill, 2019, p. 184.
110. Nochlin Linda, Les Politiques de la vision, op. cit., p. 68.
112. « Women are the colonials of patriarchy; colonial peoples are the women of their colonial masters. » Attribué à Edward Saïd. Nochlin Linda, « Sex and the “Sepoy Mutiny”: the Intersection of Race and Gender in the colonial Imagery » [1982-1987], dans Nochlin Linda, Making it Modern, op. cit., p. 125-133, ici p. 125.
113Spivak Gayatri, Les subalternes peuvent-elles parler ?, traduction de Jérôme Vidal, Paris, Amsterdam, 2009 [1988].
114« “to commemorate the Christian Heroism of the British Ladies in India during the Mutiny of 1857” », Nochlin Linda, « Sex and the “Sepoy Mutiny” », dans Nochlin Linda, Making it Modern, op. cit., p. 127.
115« The only figure who is overtly and actively terrified », ibid., p. 128.
116« to be comforted by her white superiors. », ibid., p. 128.
117Spivak Gayatri, Les subalternes peuvent-elles parler ?, op. cit., p. 38.
118Spivak Gayatri, « Politique(s) d’interprétation », dans En d’autres mondes, en d’autres mots. Essais de politique culturelle, traduction de Françoise Bouillot, Paris, Éditions de Rivages et Payot, 2009 [1982], p. 219-245, p. 244 (à partir de cette page, cette référence est citée sous le titre raccourci : En d’autres mondes).
119« I’m speaking basically to an educated, specialized audience, and I know that. », Nochlin Linda, The Feminist Turn, op. cit., p. 127.
120« I still say we need a black scholar », ibid., p. 91.
121« history wises you up to the fact that your values, aesthetic or otherwise, are not everybody’s at every time. », Nochlin Linda, entretien avec James McElhinney, op. cit.
122Nochlin Linda, Femmes, Art et pouvoir, op. cit., p. 193-194.
123Beauvoir Simone de, Le Deuxième sexe, t. 1, Paris, Gallimard, 1976 [1949], p. 292.
124Spivak Gayatri, « Politique(s) d’interprétation », dans En d’autres mondes, op. cit., p. 238.
126Nochlin Linda, Pourquoi…, op. cit., p. 22-23.
127« a dynamic icon of the transcendent authority of (male) abstract expressionist creation » ; « the corruption of the ideal » ; « the relegation of high art to the subordinate role of mere backdrop for (shudder!) feminine fashion, with fashion itself functioning as the easy-to-grasp sign of the fleeting and the fickle, high art’s deplorable other. », Nochlin Linda, « A Rage to Paint: Joan Mitchell and the Issue of Femininity » [2002], dans The Linda Nochlin Reader, op. cit., p. 261-273, p. 265 (à partir de cette page, cette référence est citée sous le titre raccourci : « A Rage to Paint »).
128« twice “othered”: once as the female “other” of the male Jackson Pollock, but once again as the female “other” of the elegant and proper female Vogue fashion model. », ibid., p. 266.
129J’adopte ici la proposition de traduction des auteures de Constellations subjectives : « Nous avons choisi d’employer le terme encorporer, traduction de l’anglais to embody, en vue de souligner combien les expériences et les perceptions corporelles informent et influencent la pensée. En ce sens, nous le préférons au mot incorporer qui implique plutôt le fait de donner une forme corporelle à la pensée. », Allain Bonilla Marie-laure, Blanc Émilie, Renard Johanna, Zabunyan Elvan (dir.), « Introduction », Constellations subjectives : pour une histoire féministe de l’art, Paris, éditions iXe, 2020, p. 9-29, note 1 p. 10.
130« This comparison and its implications make me angry and uneasy because it is hard to side with either of these visions of art or fashion. My anger, and my uneasiness, have to do with the fact that although I was involved in contemporary art in 1951, I was a young woman who was highly invested in fashion as well. […] Being elegant, caring about clothes, constituted a form of opposition to what I called “little brown wrenism” », Nochlin Linda, « A Rage to Paint », dans The Linda Nochlin Reader, op. cit., p. 265
131Flügel John Carl, Le Rêveur nu : de la parure vestimentaire, traduction de Jean-Michel Denis, Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1982 [1930], p. 7.
132« Nochlin was taller than I expected, and more girlish. Also less pretty. I assumed that if she was a woman and well-known, she couldn’t be “girlish”; who would take her seriously? But because she was a woman she had to be of short to medium stature and pretty. », Lipton Eunice, Alias Olympia : a Woman’s Search for Manet’s notorious Model and her own Desire, Ithaca (NY), Cornell University Press, 2013, p. 9.
133« Nochlin was none of these; she moved as if she had a right to. », ibid.
134« When male scholars adopt the persona of the neutral “one,” they often delude even themselves into thinking they have surrendered their authority and privilege when they have actually enhanced their already strong position by merging their perspective with that of humanity in general. », Harpham Geoffrey, Scholarship and Freedom, op. cit., p. 126-127.
135La « vision » du titre pourrait être lue au prisme de Haraway, qui écrit : « La vision est toujours une question du pouvoir de voir – et peut-être de la violence implicite de nos pratiques de visualisation. », Haraway Donna, « Savoirs situés », Manifeste Cyborg et autres essais, op. cit., p. 121. Donna Haraway souligne.
136Nochlin Linda, Les Politiques de la vision, op. cit. p. 11-12. Linda Nochlin souligne.
137Sofio Séverine, Yavuz Perin Emel, Molinier Pascale, « Les arts au prisme du genre : la valeur en question. Introduction », Cahiers du Genre, vol. 2, no43, 2007, p. 5-16, p. 10 (à partir de cette page, cette référence est citée sous le titre raccourci : « Les arts au prisme du genre »).
138Nochlin Linda, Pourquoi…, op. cit., p. 81.
139« a threefold phenomenon: a collective producer (the community, institution, or discipline of art history) produces representations (art history texts, picture compendia, etc.) of what is allegedly an actual history of art (or art history) that exists beyond these discursive phenomena. », Karlhom Dan, Art of Illusion: The Representation of Art History in Nineteenth Century Germany and beyond, Berne, Lang, 2006, p. 12. Dan Karlhom souligne.
140Haraway Donna, « Savoirs situés », Manifeste Cyborg et autres essais , op. cit., p. 113. Donna Haraway souligne.
141« a practice of accurate representation that proceeds from definite social and political commitments held by a particular individual. », Harpham Geoffrey, Scholarship and Freedom, op. cit., p. 127.
142« Reality and truth, she seems to argue, are what appear to someone – some subject in a situation – as convincingly real and true. », ibid.
143Haraway Donna, « Savoirs situés », Manifeste Cyborg et autres essais, op. cit., p. 113.
147« interpretation occurs concretely, in specific historical circumstances », Nochlin Linda, « Courbet’s Real Allegory: Rereading The Painter’s Studio », dans Nochlin Linda, Representing Women, op. cit., p. 106-152, ici p. 124.
148« My distress may also be related to the way that the devices of allegory seem to accord so effortlessly with the hermeneutic practices of art history itself, in which the production of meaning is all too often foreclosed by restricting its operations to the field of iconography, and within it, to unequivocal interpretations. Art history in this sense may be understood as an allegory of allegory: a rebus-like translation of elements in the pictorial “program” into verbal equivalents, with an edifying synthesis at the end. Meaning is understood to be finite, the interpretation of meaning restricted for the most part, as in allegory, to deciphering the intentions of the author. I seem to be faced with an open-and-shut case, the end of interpretation rather than the beginning, the suppression of doubt and ambiguity rather than an opening up to them; the death of meaning in the painting rather than its vivification.
This sort of interpretation, based on the assumed authority of the One Who Knows, while necessary from the vantage point of art history, tends not merely to close off the possibility of interpretation rather than opening it, but even more dubiously, militates against coming to terms with the myriad concrete meanings produced by the painting itself, independent of any intentions of the artist and at times in opposition to his intention. », ibid., p. 113.
149Creissels Anne, Zapperi Giovanna, « Questions d’identité sexuée : l’histoire refoulée de l’art », Histoire de l’art, no63, 2008, p. 155-162, p. 161.
150« definite interpretation shuts you out of the house of meaning » ; « enjoying art as a text rather than merely consuming it as a work », Nochlin Linda, « Courbet’s Real Allegory », dans Nochlin Linda, Representing Women, op. cit., p. 116.
151« an allegory of the unfinished, of the impossibility of ever finishing, in the sense of imposing a single, coherent meaning on a work of art », ibid., p. 116-117.
152« If, as I believe, all interpretation is in some sense an allegory, then in rereading Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio, I am in turn really allegorizing the “real allegory”. I am not, however, free to read this figure in any way I choose. Just how I allegorize the beggar-woman depends on who I am and where and when I am doing the interpretation: interpretation occurs concretely, in specific historical circumstances, and, since the figure is a woman and I am a woman quite consciously reading as a woman, gender is a crucial issue here as well. », ibid., p. 124. Linda Nochlin souligne.
153Son ancienne étudiante Karen J. Leader suit les traces de Nochlin dans « Harlot, Housewife, or Heroine? A Recovered Identity for the “Worker’s Wife” in Courbet’s Studio », Rutgers Art Review, no 23, 2007, p. 26-47 et « Issues of Gender in Courbet’s Studio » dans Arnoux Mathilde, Beyer Andreas (dir.), Courbet à neuf !, op. cit., p. 23-40.