#1 Gallery Gals: The Art of Friendship by gallerygals

01. the art of friendship

To my girls.

contents 5. Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan 11. Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo 17. Celine Marie Tabary and LoĂŻs Mailou Jones 23. Lola Ă lvarez Bravo and Frida Kahlo 29. Eva Hesse and Yayoi Kusama

Grace Hartigan

The Creeks / Grace Hartigan / 1957 ÂŠ Estate of Grace Hartigan

Helen Frankenthaler

Untitled (Helen) / Helen Frankenthaler / 1963 ÂŠ Estate of Helen Frankenthaler

before, and fought hard for the recognition their work deserved. Growing up in a cultured middle-class family on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Frankenthaler had many privileges her fellow female painters did not. She was fascinated with colour from a young age and recalled dribbling nail polish into a sink full of water during her childhood, so that she could watch the colour flow. Her work was notable for developing “colour field painting” characterised by application of a single colour he abstract to large fields of the canvas. expressionists Grace Hartigan’s start Grace Hartigan wasn’t quite so easy. She and Helen married aged just 19, and Frankenthaler worked in a circle dominated planned to move to Alaska with her husband, to start by the narrative of male a simple life as pioneers. It genius. But between them, never happened. When her and a handful of other husband was drafted into artist friends including Lee the army, she moved to New Krasner, they pushed the movement further than ever Jersey to study mechanical engineering and work in an

"YOU’RE JUST A FAIRY PRINCESS WHO HASN’T SEEN THE DRAGON YET"

who had just finished dancing with Diana. As they twirled, she In 1945, Grace moved to New thought to herself, “I’ve waited a York City. There she met Helen lifetime for a dance like this”. His and was blinded by the genius name didn’t mean anything to of her social circle, which her at the time. She later realised included Jackson Pollock, it had been John Travolta. Willem de Kooning and Frank O’Hara. Surrounded by these brilliant men, she decided she would gain more respect under the name “George Hartigan” and did not exhibit as Grace until nine years later. Both women loved to party. Helen’s first marriage to fellow painter Robert Motherwell earned them the nickname, “the golden couple” and they were known for their lavish entertaining. She loved to dance too. In 1985, she was invited to a White House dinner to honour the Prince and Princess of Wales. She was partnered to dance with a man

airplane factory and promptly divorced him. Reflecting on her first years of artistry, she later reflected, “I didn’t choose painting. It chose me. I didn’t have any talent. I just had genius.”

Though they supported each other’s artwork relentlessly, offering support, critique and an exchange of ideas, their friendship wasn’t without drama. The women had learned to be feisty to survive in their extremely critical, male circle. In 1952, during a period of arguments, Grace wrote in her journal, furious that Helen had gone back on her promise to help her hang her upcoming exhibition. Their different starts in the artworld were also a regular source of friction. While Grace had to balance her

art with work and caring for her child, Helen—pretty, slim and clever, with no dependents—was the darling of their circle and had no money worries to distract her from her art. At one party, Grace was angry that nobody had asked her how her painting was going and shouted at Helen that she was nothing but a “fairy princess who hasn’t seen the dragon yet.” Despite fallings out about art, privilege, men and more, the pair always came back to each other, and their friendship lasted until Grace’s death in 2008.

ABOVE Untitled / Grace Hartigan / 1965 LEFT Covent Garden Study / Helen Frankenthaler / 1984 Above: © ACA Galleries, New York Left: © University of Cambridge

Leonora Carrington

Self-Portrait / Leonora Carrington / 1937 ÂŠ Creative commons

Remedios Varo

Ascension at Mount Analogue / Remedios Varo / 1960 ÂŠ Creative commons

eonora Carrington and Remedios Varo had much in common when they first met in Paris during the height of the Surrealist movement. Then in their twenties, they’d both been educated at convent schools, they were both talented and determined artists in a

movement dominated by men, and they were both lovers to much older, and much more famous, male artists— Leonora to Max Ernst, and Remedios to her husband, the poet Benjamin Péret. At the peak of the Second World War, the Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas opened the country’s borders to refugees from Europe. Britishborn Leonora fled to Mexico City following the arrest of Ernst by Nazi forces in France. Spanishborn Remedios fled from Paris having just left prison, where the French government were holding her on account of Péret’s political leanings. Their friendship deepened considerably in Mexico, and the pair saw each other nearly every day. Leonora later said, “Remedios’s presence in Mexico changed my life.” Dr Janet Kaplan, who

"HERE WE ARE AT THE END OF EVERYTHING. I HAVE A BEARD, YOU HAVE A WIG"

penned a biography of Remedios Varo in 1988, said that the women spent their time enjoying “Surrealist games, practical jokes, elaborate costume parties and raucous story-telling,” which would go and astrology together, and on way into the night. conceptualised the rethinking of the domestic space as a Leonora and Remedios backdrop for witchcraft and experimented with Surrealism magical practices. You can in all aspects of their lives. see the pair’s fascination with The pair loved to cook witchcraft and reclaiming the “Surrealist meals” together —including an omelette made from human hair —and they made a habit of shopping for herbs from local markets, with which they attempted to make magic potions. One Surrealist recipe jotted down by Remedios aimed to arouse erotic dreams. It called for: “a kilo of horseradish, three white hens, a head of garlic, four kilos of honey, a mirror, two calf livers, a brick, two clothes pins, a corset with stays, two false moustaches and hats, to taste.” The women studied alchemy, magic, tarot

occult in several of their artistic works, perhaps most notably Leonora’s Three Women Around the Table (1951) and Remedios’ Witch Going to Sabbath (1957). Leonora and Remedios remained friends for the rest of their lives, becoming mothers and watching their children grow together— Carrington said that she would work with a baby in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. They lived through a host of European conflicts, many of which are explored through their work. Together, far from its inner circles in Europe and the US, these women reclaimed the Surrealist movement as something entirely their own, and through the magical realism of their art, somehow transcended their mortal

domestic spheres, to connect with the spectres of women long past. When Leonora came to write her 1974 novel, The Hearing Trumpet, she based the two main characters on herself and Remedios. Unlike the real friends, these characters share a friendship that lasts into old age. In reality, Remedios died unexpectedly in 1963. In The Hearing Trumpet, the pair are in their 90s. Leonora’s alias is bearded, has no teeth and has become a vegetarian. Remedios’s wears a red wig, smokes cigars and sucks on violet lozenges. Reflecting on a friendship that had endured so much, and been cut short so unfairly, Leonora writes, “Here we are at the end of everything. I have a beard, you have a wig!

RIGHT: Ascension at Mount Analogue / Remedios Varo / 1960

Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) / Leonora Carrington / 1937-1938

LEFT: Licensed under CC BY 2.0 RIGHT: Â© Estate of Leonora Carrington

Céline Marie Tabary

Gladioli in Vase with Books / Céline Marie Tabary / unknown © Mutual Art

Loïs Mailou Jones

Initiation, Liberia / Loïs Mailou Jones / 1983 © Smithsonian American Art Museum

appeared, was too white for her to put her talent to its best use. She took the advice and then some, and instead took up a teaching post at the legendary black college Howard University until 1977.

hen Loïs Mailou Jones, Museum of Fine Arts graduate and successful textiles designer, applied to teach at what is now the Massachusetts College of Art, she was told by the director to instead, “Go south, and help your people.” Boston, it

It was during a sabbatical from Howard spent in Paris, that Loïs first crossed paths with her soon-to-be closest friend and collaborator, Céline Tabary. Loïs later told an interviewer that her meeting with Céline was “one of the most wonderful things that could have happened.” Together, they met all manner of exciting acquaintances including the painter Émile Bernard and dancer Josephine Baker. The international black artistic community in Paris was unlike anything Jones had experienced back home, and gave her a renewed perspective on what was possible for her career.

Céline thrived alongside her friend in Washington, creating magnificent abstract landscapes— in 1944, she won the Landscape Prize from Washington’s National Museum. Together, the artists established Sunday morning art classes for children and a support group that promoted the practices of artists and art teachers known nostalgically as “Little Paris”. Indeed, the women became so close that when

"THESE WHITE WOMEN MADE IT. I SHOULD HAVE MADE IT ALSO" Loïs married the famous Haitian painter Louis Vergniaud PierreNoel in 1953, she did so where else, but at her friend Céline’s home in Cabris. While Loïs’ career and talents progressed, racial tensions in

So close did the pair become in France, where Céline assisted Loïs when she needed help with translation, that when Loïs returned to Washington DC, Céline joined her. She took up her own teaching post at Howard, and spent her career championing the work of African-American artists. The friends painted and sketched one another throughout their lives, and spent many happy afternoons painting along the riverside or in Céline’s family home in France.

the US remained fraught. In an interview in the journal Callaloo in 1989 she explained, “I discovered that not only being black, but being a woman created a double handicap for me to face…These white women made it. I should have made it also, but because of my colour and racial situation, it wasn’t possible.” On several occasions when Loïs did not feel comfortable revealing her race to the institutions acquiring her work, Céline would deliver the work on her behalf and ensure that her friend’s work was exhibited in the best possible way. In 1941, Loïs asked Céline to enter her painting into the Corcoran Gallery in defiance of their “whites only” rule. Her work subsequently won the Robert Woods Bliss Award. As she was unable to collect

the award in person, Céline arranged for her friend to receive the award without anyone discovering that she was black. When the truth was discovered, it was a watershed moment in breaking the racial barriers at the gallery. When they opened an exhibition of Loïs Mailou Jones’s work in 1994, the Corcoran made a public apology for the harm they had done to the African American artistic community. Reflecting on their friendship in later years, Loïs told Callaloo, “Very soon I’ll be going to visit Céline, who is now alone; her husband died three years ago. I’m going back to paint with her again, like in the old days, even at my age which is now 83. That’s certainly many, many years since it all started in Paris.”

RIGHT (clockwise from top) Little Paris Group in Loïs Jones’ Studio / 1948

Two African Hairstyles / Loïs Mailou Jones / 1982 Portrait of the Artist Loïs Mailou Jones / Céline Tabaray / 1940s

Above: © Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Below L: © Estate of Céline Tabaray Below R: © Lois Mailou Jones

Frida Kahlo

Self-Portrait With Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird / Frida Kahlo / 1940 ÂŠ Estate of Frida Kahlo

Lola Álvarez Bravo

Triptych of the Matyrs II / Lola Álvarez Bravo / 1950 © Throckmorton Fine Art, Inc. New York

espite arguably being the most famous female artist of all time, Frida Kahlo only had one solo exhibition in her home country of Mexico during her lifetime. And it was her friend, Lola Álvarez Bravo, who hosted it at her gallery La Galería de Arte Contemporáneo. She had realised that time was

running out as Frida’s health declined. Kahlo suffered from chronic pain throughout her life, the result of polio in childhood, a traumatic bus accident which saw a handrail penetrate her back leaving her body through her pelvis, multiple miscarriages and an amputation of her right leg. Doctors insisted that Frida should take to bed rest, and not attend her exhibition, but that didn’t stop her. Kahlo had her entire four-poster bed delivered to Bravo’s gallery, in which she lay for the duration of the party. Much has been said of Frida Kahlo’s brilliance, but Bravo herself was a highly visionary and successful, photographer. “If my photos have any value,” she once said, “it’s because they show a Mexico that no longer exists.” The interest in capturing daily life in the

Many of the iconic photographs of Frida Kahlo were taken by Bravo. In one, she’s captured lost in thought, her chin cradled in her palm. In another, she lies back on the bed which so often became her prison. Many of Bravo’s portraits of show her friend gazing into mirrors. They’re reminiscent of Kahlo’s compulsion to reflect and reveal the self in her own work. Bravo clearly understands the pain, trauma and emotional conflict that Kahlo experienced throughout her life—a sense of ease and understanding between the two is evident in every frame. In turn, Kahlo gifted Bravo many works over their friendship, including her painting, Portrait of a Lady in White. So deep was their artistic understanding, the pair wrote a surrealist

"MY PHOTOS SHOW A MEXICO THAT NO LONGER EXISTS" film script together, with plans for Bravo to film and Kahlo to star. Sadly, Frida’s rapidly deteriorating health prevented the project from being finished. She died almost exactly a year after her solo show.

wake of Mexico’s Revolution was one the two women shared. Bravo’s statement rings true with Kahlo’s description of her own work, “I paint flowers so they will not die.”

It’s evident that Bravo missed her friend dearly after her death. She photographed Kahlo’s body lying in state, and later opened her own exhibition dedicated to the life of the artist, entitled “Frida and Her World”. In her final years, the writer Olivier Debroise notes that Bravo “repeated the same old stories” about her friend over and over. Lola continued to work until her own death in 1993. Standing camera in hand at the dusk of

a revolution, with a passion for capturing the intimate lives of women so casually dismissed by politicians and “serious” male artists, she was an unrelenting free-spirit. She photographed poverty, prostitution, her friends, strangers—sides to Mexico never before documented. “I was the only woman fooling around with a camera in the streets,” she reflected years later. “All the reporters laughed at me. So, I became a fighter.”

LEFTThe Two Fridas / Frida Kahlo / 1939 RIGHTFrida Kahlo / Lola Álvarez Bravo / 1944 “I was almost thinking of… The Two Fridas, when I photographed her,” Bravo later recalled.

Eva Hesse

Yayoi Kusama

materials, including plastics and fibreglass. Their themes frequently overlap too. Kusamaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s installation work, which during her time in New York was often very interested in phallic shapes, set a precedent for the body-oriented objects Eva Hesse created. Each loved to use unconventional materials, and both experienced a diversity of mental health issues, often explored in their art through themes of repetition. Kusama first arrived in the US from Japan when she was 29. She orking in made friends with some of the very the biggest names in the same building as New York art world: Andy one another, Warhol, Claus Oldenburg and Donald Judd. Kusama the visionary artists Eva Hesse and Yayoi Kusama had suffered depression throughout her life and the a huge influence on each signs of her mental health otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work during their friendship. Both considered issues (later diagnosed post-minimalists, they shared as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) began in an artistic outlook, artistic space and frequently artistic childhood, when she would

Hesse was German-born but lived most of her life in the US. Hers was a difficult childhood. In a bid to outrun the Nazis, her parents sent her and her sister to a children’s home in Holland when she was just two years old. A year later, they reunited and fled to London, and then New York. Her parents divorced just six years later, and her mother committed suicide

"WE WOULD GO TO A RESTAURANT AND PICK UP THE BREAD THEY THREW OUT" the following year. Hesse was only 10. She later trained as an artist in New York, and became a very successful sculptor, pioneering the use of latex, which she used as though it were house paint.

hallucinate flowers, nets and dots that threatened to swallow her whole. Rather than distract from her art, these hallucinations were in many ways the origins of it, and you can see the traces of them in much if not all of her artwork—in particular the repetition of dots and natural forms. Kusama later explained that the dots represent disease. When she returned to Tokyo in 1973, she willingly chose to take up residents in a psychiatric hospital. “If it were not for art,” she has often said, “I would have killed myself a long time ago.”

In an interview for the Women’s Art Journal in 1970, she explained, “The way to beat discrimination in art is by art. Excellence has no sex.”

art historian Lucy Lippard, who was also Hesse’s close friend, described her work as “the materialisation of her anxieties.”

Eva Hesse died from a brain Like Kusama—who suffered tumour in 1970. Just three brutal abuse at the hands years later, Kusama returned of her mother, who strongly to Japan, where she has approved her becoming lived ever since. Asked an artist—the difficulties in 2012 what the artistic of Hesse’s childhood community was like in New influenced her work. The York back in the Sixties, Kusama said, “We were all poor but enthusiastic. We would go to a restaurant and pick up the bread they threw out. Eva frequently dropped in to talk. I miss her. She was so sincere and really devoted to her art.”

LEFTRingaround Arosie / Eva Hesse / 1965 © Estate of Eva Hesse RIGHTYellow Pumpkin / Yayoi Kusama / 1994 © Creative commons

Gallery Gals spotlights art works of women and by women, from the forgotten corners of galleries around the globe. This zine was created by Anna Walker.

#1 Gallery Gals: The Art of Friendship

Articles inside

Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan

Lola Álvarez Bravo and Frida Kahlo