ABSTRACT
Habitual term of highest praise reserved for what are regarded as the greatest artworks. Now, however, the term is often used with an ironic intent because masterpiece reveals – according to feminist^ critics – the reactionary values and assumptions of a traditional^ art^ history obsessed with (1) establishing the authorship of artworks and (2) pronouncing upon their relative degrees of aesthetic^ quality. The term masterpiece, along with others closely related to it – such as old master – became subject to intense attack (‘critique’ cannot really do justice to the hostility sometimes involved) particularly from feminist scholars and some women artists during the 1970s and 1980s. For instance, it was pointed out, in the title of a book by Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker called Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (1981), that the terms masterpiece and old master had no meaningful equivalent when the feminine gender was introduced: there could be no (serious) ‘mistress-piece’ or ‘old mistress’. These terms were simply absurd. ‘Mistress’, in fact, specifies in its commonest sense a woman ‘attending upon a man sexually’. The term ‘mistress’ therefore was simply not available, historically, as a positive adjective – and there had been no tradition in art history of valuing artistic work by women in this way. Pollock and Parker’s aim, however, was not to suggest that a fem-
inist history of art should merely go on to introduce this, or another term, and then find artworks to which it could reasonably be applied. Instead, they set about attacking the variety of ways in which men and women art historians had focused their interest on what Pollock and Parker claimed were purely ideological (in this sense, spurious) notions of artistic^ creativity, individuality, authorship, and meaning. To attempt merely to steal these categories from traditional art history and art historians in order to apply them to their own canon of women artists and artworks would simply be to reproduce the orthodox discourse and thereby perpetuate what they argued were these highly dubious founding principles. However, many other women art historians, some also calling themselves feminist – such as Linda Nochlin – did just that in books and catalogues published in the 1970s and 80s, and Pollock and Parker entered into sometimes acrimonious exchanges with them too. This debate, however, usually took place within and between different feminist camps rather than between feminists and traditional scholars: productive dialogue was virtually impossible between these groups given the huge social, political, and intellectual differences between them.
