Women Artists new britain museum
Women Artists new britain museum
Sherry Buckberrough and Nancy Noble with research assistance by Sara Allen, Kimberly Ehart, Kerry Bridget Heimer, Christy Johnson, and Hollie Lyko
Distributed by the Unversity Press of New England and Hanover and London
Essay At first glance, the lack of representation in abstract art appears to render it gender-neutral; not so, however, when considered within the context of its inception in the early twentieth century and its American triumph in the 1950s. Abstraction emerged from avant-garde challenges to artistic rules. It demanded that its public cease looking for subject matter and adopt entire new criteria for seeing art. The move into abstraction required the daring to face both “unknown” artistic territory and an onslaught of critical rejection—not a comfortable position for most female artists. While there were women in all avant-garde Western urban circles, they generally moved into abstraction more slowly than their male colleagues. If abstraction demanded masculine challenge and bravado of its inventors, it slipped precipitously toward the feminine on the visual register. Untrained eyes easily mistook abstract compositions for designs in such decorative arts as needlework, a traditionally feminine practice. Male abstractionists avoided accusations of making mere decoration by writing reams of theory—intellectual supplements to their visual production. An exception was Russia, where women rose readily to the front lines of the avant-garde—perhaps attributable to the strength of Russia’s late nineteenthcentury arts and crafts movement, which valorized folk arts done by both men and women, and to the Revolution, which mandated work-based gender equality. Textile and embroidery design were on a par with oil painting, eliminating much of
Although one can make out a table and can guess at the identity of other forms, the work is ultimately a study of vital colors, lines, and forms. Krasner’s reputation as a bold experimentalist was established well before 1941, when she met her future husband, Jackson Pollock. It diminished as she put his career before hers until his death in 1956 but, benefiting from strong support from the feminist movement, began to revive in the 1970s and later. Now seen as an important member of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, her significance was largely overlooked during her lifetime. Dorothy Dehner was married for twenty-five years to the sculptor David Smith; like Krasner, she did not promote her own work until she left her husband, in 1950. She returned to school, studying printmaking and eventually venturing into sculpture, for which she became best known. The etching Totem Destroyed (1958) is clearly related to her early sculptural production. Negative linear forms, indicating scattered pieces of metal, interconnect inconsistently, oscillating between the possibility of three-dimensional structure and the dispersed surfaces of Abstract Expressionism. Dehner and Louise Nevelson met at Stanley Hayter’s printmaking studio and became lifelong friends. Both are known as sculptors but were also prolific printmakers. Nevelson did not adhere to European abstraction or Abstract Expressionism. Untitled (ca. 1985) is typical of her sculptural practice.
Recycling remnants of architectural interiors cast off into New York streets, nesting them within rectangular containers, and painting them black, she establishes clear structure while also compelling the spectator into mysterious darkness, intricate interiors, and intimate enclosures. Her ethic of reuse and balance of large rectangular forms and myriad small details continues in her lithograph Untitled, 7:00 A.M. (1967) (fig. 23), which is actually a combination of two identical prints in reverse vertical position. The work impresses us with its unusually large scale and dramatic use of bright red against black. The oil Untitled (1986) (fig. 24) by Hedda Sterne also explores interiors on a large scale. The layered and translucent structure resembles an infinitely extending skyscraper, seen by the artist as an architecture of the mind. She produced a series of these mammoth yet subtle works as a new venture upon reaching her seventies. never faltered. With the ongoing friendship and approval of critic Clement Greenberg, she maintained a more secure standing. Frankenthaler is best known for her sensually colored, stained canvases made with intuitive immediacy. Wary at first of the forced planning of printmaking, she asked several professional printmakers to alter their skills in order to accommodate her image-led process.3 She brings a fascination with the palpability of material surfaces to Bronze Smoke (1978), a lithograph that deserves close examination. Its layers of browns, grays, and blacks— probably the result of combined fragments of multiple stones—fuses broad
brushstrokes with rivulets of ink that expand across the varying thickness of the handmade paper, producing a somber earthiness, at once ethereal and precise. Nine years after immigrating to the United States in 1941, she was the only woman pictured in the famous photograph of the “Irascibles,” a group of first-generation Abstract Expressionists.2 Her status later diminished, as she refused to adhere to their style. Now one hundred years old, Sterne has outlived most of her generation, including her husband, the cartoonist Saul Steinberg. Her prolific and varied work has regained currency in recent years. A generation younger, Helen Frankenthaler was the only woman among the Abstract Expressionists whose reputation
To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?” Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.
The oil Untitled (1986) (fig. 24) by Hedda Sterne also explores interiors on a large scale. The layered and translucent structure resembles an infinitely extending skyscraper, seen by the artist as an architecture of the mind. She produced a series of these mammoth yet subtle works as a new venture upon reaching her seventies. Nine years after immigrating to the United States in 1941, she was the only woman pictured in the famous photograph of the “Irascibles,” a group of first-generation Abstract Expressionists.2 Her status later diminished, as she refused to adhere to their style. Now one hundred years old, Sterne has outlived most of her generation, including her husband, the cartoonist Saul Steinberg. Her prolific and varied work has regained currency in recent years. A generation younger, Helen Frankenthaler was the only woman among the Abstract Expressionists whose reputation never faltered. With the ongoing friendship and approval of critic Clement Greenberg, she maintained a more secure standing. Frankenthaler is best known for her sensually colored, stained canvases made with intuitive immediacy. Wary at first of the forced planning of printmaking, she asked several professional printmakers to alter their skills in order to accommodate her image-led process.3 She brings a fascination with the palpability of material surfaces to Bronze Smoke (1978), a lithograph that deserves close examination. Its layers of browns, grays, and blacks—probably the result of combined fragments of multiple stones—fuses
broad brushstrokes with rivulets of ink that expand across the varying thickness of the handmade paper, producing a somber earthiness, at once ethereal and precise. Alice Baber spent most of the 1950s in New York and was a part of the second-generation Abstract Expressionist scene. Like Frankenthaler’s, her work is recognized for its color intensity—The Light in the Depths (1975) (fig. 25) is an excellent example. Creating what she calls an “outer space,” in which overlapping ellipses of color generate atmospheric movement, her works recall both the colors of Indian miniatures and the undulating dynamics of Baroque painting. The visual resonance between Baber’s painting and Ellen Carey’s photographic print Blue Pull with Flare and Yellow Rollback (2002) is circumstantial but remarkable. Carey uses the interior workings of a twenty-by-twenty-four-inch Polaroid camera to fabricate intensely colored abstract forms on photographic paper. The startling monumentality of her blue ellipses references the formal clarity of Minimalism. Like Frankenthaler, however, she submerges herself in her materials and their processes, stretching their means to give maximal visual effect.Carey’s work participates in a recent renaissance of concern for color manifested as well in the stairwell installation The Gravity of Color (2007) (fig. 26) by Lisa Hoke. Environmental in scope, it employs
the unlikely media of paper and plastic cups. While Carey explores the camera as an art-making machine, Hoke employs industrial readymades to provide unorthodox aesthetics and humor. Incrementally (and with assistance), she builds colored towers resembling high-rise buildings that project off the wall and delineates patterns and swirls, forming a polychrome pinwheel that expands cartographically across two floors. Extending Frankenthaler’s ideas yet further, the relationship between color and material poses conceptual questions. Is color about relations or physical matter? Is it in the material or on it? Does it result from surface reflection, or surrounding light? What is it, in the end, that attracts us to color? Like Carey, Jennifer Bartlett responds to Minimalism. Circle, Line, House (1992–93) (fig. 27) is a triptych of etchings that replicates three segments of her giant work Rhapsody (1975–76; Museum of Modern Art, New York), a compilation of 987 one-foot-square enameled-steel plates. The “story of a mind in action,”6 Rhapsody invests the format of the grid—a gesture to such artists as Sol LeWitt—with repetitions of a conceptually limited set of categories (mountain, tree, ocean, house) that are visually extendable through variations of line, shape, size, and color. Migrating between abstraction and representation, Bartlett joins concep-
tual stringency to open options for narrative. Although not politically a feminist, she challenges what some see as the “masculine” grid with images that evoke memory and intimate sentiment.Bartlett, like Nevelson, remains essentially unclassifiable, forging a singular artistic statement, simultaneously reviled and revered. Another unique voice appears in the work of Nancy Graves, who also emerged in the 1970s. Anthropological, zoological, textural, and often outrageously decorative (another problematic word for women artists), Graves’s art ranges from the overtly representational to the entirely abstract. Indicate (1982) (fig. 29), a new addition to the Museum’s grounds, is constructed from parts of an offset lithograp hy press, welded to Cor-ten steel forms made from the artist’s drawings. Seeking unusual surface effects, as do many artists in this group, Graves allowed the steel to rust, applying lacquer to preserve its color and texture.7 Strategically welding precariously balanced pieces, she assembled an ebullient puzzle of two-dimensional forms and three-dimensional space that, in its global “indications,” refers to her earlier interests in satellite images of the earth. “But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete
1
Harriet Casdin-Silver (1935-2008) and Kevin Brown (b.1965) Alice Mitchell, 1999 Hologram and audio dome, 26 3/4 X 21 5/8 X 1/4 in. Charles F. Smith Fund (2000.2)
2
Lisa Hoke (b. 1952) The Gravitiy of Color, New Britian, 2007 Plastic and Paper Cups, paint and hardware, Stephan B. Lawerence Fund and Edwin Austin Abbey Mural Fund of the National Academy of Design
3
Janet Biggs (b.1959) Anana Dream, 2006 Single Channel video with sound, 2 min. 23 sec.
4
Sarah Charlesworth (b. 1947) Control & Abandon. 1992-93
5
Ellen Carey (b.1952) Blue Pull with Flare and Yellow Rollback, 2002 Color Positive Print, 108 x 22 in.
6
Joy Bristol Getting Ready, 2000 Oil on Linen, 33 x 35 1/2 in.
7
Sarah G. Austin (1935-1994) Venus at Her Toilette, 1991 11 x 8 1/2 x 2in.