Pioneer in feminist art history to present annual Cuninggim Lecture

Linda Nochlin, the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, will present the 1995 Margaret Cuninggim Lecture at Vanderbilt University.

Nochlin, considered by some to be the founder of feminist art history in the United States, will speak Wednesday, Oct. 18, at 7:30 p.m. in 126 Wilson Hall. The title of her lecture is "Mary Cassatt: An American Woman Artist and Her Contemporaries." It is free and open to the public.

Nochlin specializes in the art of the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing particularly on the work of Gustave Courbet, the Impressionists and issues concerning the representation of women and the work of women artists. She was the first art historian to deal with women's issues in the discipline of art history, an interest which developed through her course on "Women and Art," which she taught at Vassar College in 1969, and an essay published in 1972 entitled "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"

Among her numerous publications are "Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848-1900: Sources and Documents," "Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874-1904: Sources and Documents," "Realism," "Women Artists: 1550 to 1950" and "Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays." She has also written many articles on modern art and artists, including studies of Degas, Manet, Morisot, Seurat, Matisse and Picasso.

She has received various fellowships and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for the best article published in the "Art Bulletin" in 1967 by a scholar under 40 and the Frank Jewett Mather Prize for Critical Writing, given by the College Art Association in 1977. She has been a fellow of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the New York University Institute for the Humanities and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Her teaching activities have included professorships at Vassar College, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Yale University.

The Margaret Cuninggim Lecture was established by family, friends and the Alumni Association of Van derbilt University. Each year the Margaret Cuninggim Lecture brings to the Vanderbilt campus a distinguished scholar who speaks to the general theme, women in culture and society, from the perspective of her own discipline.