ABSTRACT
The discipline of art history has been slow in keeping up with other branches of historical methodologies and their scholarship. Approaching any subject of cultural production was, until the 1970s, largely confined to a history of style and an almost obsessive search for an iconographic prehistory; that is, a family of images that would justify the appearance of a particular motif or set of motifs in the next generation of art objects. A peculiar and confined kind of history this was. Just decades ago, art historians fought hard to legitimize an art historical practice that could consider the art object as a product and part of a process of the social and political conditions of its surroundings—whether national or localized. Although the need to include women artists in the discipline was recognized in 1971, a feminist history of art was not under full swing until 1980. Accompanying broader issues of gender then followed. Thus this essay has a life that reflects the much-needed expansion of a discipline that not so long ago was fixed in a conservative ideology of art and an insulated scholarly practice.1
