Linda Nochlin

Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

My earliest memory: about 75 years ago, in Miami Beach. I am crouching on the grass, looking at, or rather, through, my cousin’s stout, Cuban-heeled shoes. I tell her that I too want shoes you can “see the ground under.” What I mean is I want shoes with heels instead of my flat sandals. She doesn’t understand; I keep insisting. It ends in tears.

We are at a rally for the Spanish Republic. There are lots of people. A little girl, only slightly older than I am, is singing. I want to sing too but no one will let me. I am highly dissatisfied but I keep it to myself.

My mother is trying to teach me to read using some system where you draw lines and connect them up to make letters. I can make absolutely no sense of this—I look at the “letters” and they mean nothing. I remember vividly not being able to read. (I remember just as vividly a few months later, when I am five and a half, they suddenly mean something.)

I have the grippe. I am in bed. My mother is reading to me the beginning of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where for some reason there are a lot of animal noises. I am about eight and enjoying it.

I am about twenty-nine. I am seeing Grünewald’s Isenheim Altar for the first time. What I remember is the profile head of one of the musical angels—intelligent and concentrated with spun-gold hair.