ABSTRACT
The feminist approach to art history is predicated on the idea that gender is an essential element in understanding the creation, content, and evaluation of art. Like the art historians who have been influenced by Marxism, feminist art historians object to formalism on the grounds that works of art, as well as artists, reflect their cultural context. Neither art nor artists, according to the feminist view, can be understood apart from that context. Questioning Clive Bell’s eulogy of “significant form,” one feminist critic asks, “To whom must the form be significant to count as art?”1 This question challenges certain assumptions of traditional art history about the nature of art and the criteria by which it has been judged.
