Carol Duncan

Duncan's well known 1989 essay "The MoMA's Hot Mamas" explores the social implications of representations of women in paintings arguing that two renowned paintings of women by men in the Museum of Modern Art, de Kooning's Woman I and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, emphasize the 'monstrosity' of the female, creating a gender based cultural division that parallels the division of pornography, in which the woman is made into a vision/object by the male creator. She can only view a version of woman that is defined by the male creator, but is denied the role of creator and thus denied entry to "the central arena of high culture".

Her 1975 essay, "When Greatness is a Box of Wheaties" is considered a key text of feminist art history, articulating the feminist critique of genius in art.

Her 1973 essay “Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting" proposed a study of modernist male painters and the women they painted: Duncan questions the freedom of the models portrayed, examining closely their body language and insertion in the artist’s world (frequently, his studio). By providing examples of paintings of women’s’ bodies brutally depicted she is able to justify her criticism of the supposed “originality” of the modernist nude.

Carol Duncan served as a faculty member in the Ramapo College School of Contemporary Arts from 1972 until she retired in 2005. She is Professor Emerita at Ramapo College.

In the 1970s Duncan and fellow feminist art historians, Linda Nochlin and Lise Vogel, first questioned formerly hallowed principals such as the idea of quality in art, the canon of great artists and art and artistic genius.

Carol Duncan earned a BA from University of Chicago in 1958, a MA from the University of Chicago in 1960, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, where she wrote on “the survival and the full re-emergence of the Rococo tradition in French painting during the late 18th and 19th centuries.”