Linda Nochlin, who has died aged 86, was one of art history’s great troublemakers. Her article Why Have There Been No Great Woman Artists?, published in Art News in 1971, is credited as a founding text of feminist art history. Mischievous, provocative and iconoclastic, Nochlin took on the powerful institutions of the art world, especially as they impacted on women.

Nothing was sacred for her: not the canonical adulation of “great” men inscribed in art history’s grand narratives, nor the category of “genius” confined to the male of the species; not the historical limitation of women to the roles of model or muse, nor the impoverished image of female sexuality corralled to the service of society. For her there was no level playing field. Art happened in the world, shot through by power and politics.

Nochlin’s feminism was formed in the women’s movement of the 1960s. The only child of Jules Weinberg, a newspaper distributor, and Elka Heller, she was born in New York, and grew up in the liberal enclaves of Brooklyn’s secular Jewish intelligentsia. Her mother encouraged Linda to surpass the reigning expectations of girlhood and to turn her precocious passion for reading, art and music into a lifelong commitment to writing.

Her radical awakening happened in 1969, and as a young professor at Vassar College (her alma mater) she began teaching the first course in Women and Art. By then she had been widowed (her first husband, Philip Nochlin, died in 1960) and remarried (in 1968, to the architectural historian Richard Pommer). She had earned a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts of NYU where, in 1963, she submitted a dissertation on realism in the work of Gustave Courbet.

Her two great professional commitments were already in place: an attachment to 19th-century French painting, its realist aesthetics and political engagement; and a lifelong exploration of what it is to think, write and view as a woman.

Though she remained devoted to modernist “masters” – to Courbet she added Manet, Degas and Seurat, among others – she was passionately concerned with the relationship between beauty and social justice. For her the two were intertwined. The challenge of avant-garde art was its capacity to destabilise conventional wisdom, to trouble representation itself. But what complicated the picture was sexual politics. For enmeshed in the project of modernity were misogyny and misanthropy on a large scale.

Nothing excited Nochlin more than to unravel and reveal these contradictions. Where feminists rounded on Renoir as an oppressive purveyor of the “natural”, she revelled in his late nudes as celebrations of flesh in a world which restricted women into corsets. She saw in Degas’ brothel monotypes a sanctuary from stifling bourgeois norms rather than simply a manifestation of misogyny. Art, at its best, provoked pleasure and pain. And criticism, to be worth its salt, needed, in the words of Charles Baudelaire, to be “partial, passionate, political”.

Painted bodies interested Nochlin most of all. In a series of essays, anthologised as Women, Art and Power (1988), The Politics of Vision (1989) and Representing Women (1999), she took on all genres and norms. Drawing on Edward Said’s 1978 work Orientalism, for example, she analysed the operations of race and colonial mastery that promoted cliches of indolent natives and sultry women. In Seurat’s Poseuses, a pointillist confection of semi-clad women in a studio, she saw the working-class origins of the models as a corrective to the classical nude. In her study of Berthe Morisot’s The Wet Nurse Angele, which depicts Morisot’s daughter Julie being breastfed by her nurse, Nochlin examined the desiring gaze of the mother-artist, captured in a fury of brushwork, and demystified the role of the nurse as a hired labourer.

Nochlin did not confine her writing to the historical. She wrote scores of essays and reviews on contemporaries, championing figures from Alice Neel to Sarah Lucas as well as friends such as Sylvia Sleigh and Deborah Kass. Her capacity for friendship was enormous. Among her intimates, she counted many former students, drawn from years of teaching at Vassar, CUNY Graduate Center and the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU.

With Richard (known as Dick), she created a home in Manhattan that was infused with warmth and filled with photographs and art – her favourite was a realist portrait by Phillip Pearlstein of the young couple in 60s fashion and style. As she grew older, Nochlin wrote about ageing, notably in relation to the French sculptor Louise Bourgeois, from whose defiance and engagement with a feminised eroticism and subversive sexuality she drew personal strength and political punch.

Nochlin was still writing in the last year of her life, turning again to her love for the 19th century in her last book, Misère, a study of social misery as portrayed in 19th-century art and literature, to be published next year.

Richard died in 1992. She is survived by their daughter, Daisy, and her daughter, Jessica, from her first marriage, and grandchildren, Julia and Nick.

• Linda Nochlin, art historian, born 30 January 1931; died 29 October 2017