Nanette Salomon 'The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission'

"The art historical canon is the most Virulent" p222. Salomon begins her assessment of the standard 'college text' by studying the work of Vasari and his 'Lives of the Artists'. She criticises his omission of women from his canon, and how he "invented the myth of the artist, and builds him as a constructed genius". p223 She points out how the art historian (Vasari) has created himself through the creation of the artist and through this he has the "licence and authority to proclaim what has quality and is valuable.

She looks at how the artist is the product of a patriarchal perpetual reinvention. Meaning that traditionally artist became artists because there fathers were, father/son. On the rare occasion that a woman entered the profession, it was because there was no one else to follow in the footsteps of the father. Women artists were not classed as geniuses, but rather 'exceptions', maintaining the myth of the artist. She quotes Janson, the contemporary Janson, who when asked why his text did not include any women artists replied: "no woman artist had been important enough to go into a one volume history of art." p225

Vasari and Janson maintain there canon through the consistency of a standard or norm. The function of this norm, she points out, is to create and maintain a hierarchy of insiders and outsiders. Their standard is judge by how close the artist comes to accepting classicism as the paradigm.

She analyses the traditinal use of the male nude and through this she critiques the conception of the female nude as being a site of male bonding and homoeroticism. "There is a historical relationship between the homoeroticism and artistic production of the idealized male nude." p231 The production of the female nude is the result of the oppression and stigma of public homosexuality. "Historically the two forms were created within the framework of creating two male desires, the homosexual and the hheterosexual"

Her juncture, as with most feminist scholars is through analysis of the existing Canon that it is not enough to insert the lost names back into the history books, because it does not challenge the traditional prejudiced tropes. She continues to argue that the hisotry offered by Vasari and Janson does not offer ways of analysis of the nude and art. "Vasari's invention of the artist, the critic, and the canon is tied to the economic and social conditions of his moment in history. While these conditions have changed, the deeper stratifications of gender race and class continue to operate within the culturally expressed power relationships that he articulated."