Skip to content

Broude, Norma

    Image Credit: American University

    Full Name: Broude, Norma

    Other Names:

    • Norma Broude

    Gender: female

    Date Born: 01 May 1941

    Place Born: New York, NY, USA

    Home Country/ies: United States

    Subject Area(s): feminism and nineteenth century (dates CE)


    Overview

    Feminist art historian of nineteenth-century art. Broude’s parents were Jack Freedman and Cecile Goldman (Freedman). Freedman graduated from Hunter College, City University of New York in 1962 with an A. B. The same year she married Ronald Broude. Freedman, now Broude, continued on to Columbia University, using a Woodrow Wilson fellowship for the 1962-1963 year to write her M.A. in 1964. She wrote her dissertation under Theodore Reff on the proto-impressionist painters of Italy, the Macchiailoli, in 1967. After a year teaching as an instructor at Connecticut College, New London, CT, 1966-1967, Broude held a visiting assistant professorship at Oberlin College, Ohio, 1969-1970 and taught one semester at Vassar College, 1971, before returning to Columbia University as an assistant professor of art history in 1972. She joined the American University, Washgington, D. C., as an assistant professor in 1975. During this time Broude was elected to the Board of the College Art Association for the 1974-1978 term. She rose to associate professor of art history in 1977 and divorced in 1978. She was voted to a second term on the CAA board 1980-1983. American University appointed her full professor in 1978. During this time, Broude continued to be an outspoken voice for feminism. In 1980 when the conservative art critic Hilton Kramer (b. 1928) suggested that feminism eroded standards of greatness in art, Broude defiantly (and famously) wrote that the standards needed to change. Broude received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for the 1981-1982 year. Beginning in 1982, she collaborated with American University Renaissance art professor Mary D. Garrard (b. 1937), on a group of edited the collection of feminist essays, the first Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany. The book collected the pioneering feminist essays of the 1970s, including Broude’s, canonizng (for better and worse) these essays into the core statements on feminist art history. A revised version of her dissertation appeared in 1987. In 1991 Broude issued Impressionism: A Feminist Reading: The Gendering of Art, Science, and Nature in the Nineteenth Century. A second set of essays co-edited with Garrard, The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History was published in 1992. As a series editor for Rizzoli books, she personally wrote volumes on Georges Seurat and Edgar Degas in 1992 and 1993 respectively. A third co-edited work with Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact was issued in 1994. Broude was a leading and vocal exponent of feminism. Feminism and Art History became a textbook for the teaching of an art history which incorporated women. She frequently found herself arguing this position on the pages of various scholar art publications, most often the Art Bulletin. Other feminists, for example Eunice Lipton, lamented her categories of masculine/feminine for art interpretation have been heavy handed. Indeed, Broude was characterized in 1987 as part of the “first generation” feminist art historian who worked within existing methodologies rather than adopting newer deconstructive ones (Gouma-Peterson and Mathews), an assertaion Broude disputed in a rejoinder. Broude held celebrated disagreements with the nineteenth-century-subject scholar Albert Boime.


    Selected Bibliography

    [dissertation:] The Macchiailoli: Academcism and Modernism in Nineteenth Century Italian Painting. Columbia, 1967, published, Yale University Press, 1987; edited. Seurat in Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978; and Garrard, Mary, and Gouma-Peterson, Thalia, and Mathews, Patricia. “An Exchange on the Feminist Critique of Art History.” Art Bulletin 71 (March 1989):124-127; edited, with Garrard, Mary. Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany. New York: Harper & Row, 1982; Impressionism: a Feminist Reading: the Gendering of Art, Science, and Nature in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Rizzoli, 1991; edited, with Garrard, Mary. The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History. New York: IconEditions, 1992;


    Sources

    Gouma-Peterson, Thalia, and Mathews, Patricia. “The Feminist Critique of Art History.” Art Bulletin 69, no. 3 (September 1987): ; and Garrard, Mary, and Gouma-Peterson, Thalia, and Mathews, Patricia. “An Exchange on the Feminist Critique of Art History.” Art Bulletin 71 (March 1989):124-127; McCauley, Anne. “Review: State of the Art History.” Women’s Review of Books 10, no. 5 (February 1993): 8-9; Lipton, Eunice. “Feminism and Impressionism.” Art Journal 51, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 99-101, 103;


    Archives


    Contributors: Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen


    Citation

    Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen. "Broude, Norma." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/brouden/.


    More Resources

    Search for materials by & about this art historian: