PETER BLUM GALLERY

SONJA SEKULA

Born 1918 in Luzern, Switzerland Died 1963 in Zurich, Switzerland

EDUCATION

1941 Studied at Art Students League, New York, New York 1937 Studied at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2017 Sonja Sekula: A Survey, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY 2016 Sonja Sekula & Friends, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland 2016 Sonja Sekula, Arbeiten auf Papier, Galerie HILT, Basel, Switzerland 2004 Sonja Sekula. 8.4.1918 Luzern bis 25.4.1963 Zürich, Galerie HILT, Basel, Switzerland 2001 Sonja Sekula (1918-1963), Ölgemälde, Gouache, Collagen, Scratch, Galerie HILT, Basel, Switzerland 1999 Sonja Sekula (1918-1963). Candle in the Wind, Galerie HILT, Basel, Switzerland Sonja Sekula 1918-1963. Malerei. USA – Die Jahre danach, Galerie Claudine Hohl, Zurich, Switzerland 1997 Sonja Sekula USA / CH (1918-1963), Galerie HILT, Basel, Switzerland 1996 Sonja Sekula, Von New York nach Zürich 1943-1963, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland / Sonja Sekula (1918-1963): A Retrospective, Swiss Institute, New York, NY (catalogue) 1995 Sonja Sekula, Galerie Zodiaque Perroy, Switzerland 1992 Sonja Sekula 1918-1963, Galerie Suzanne Bollag, Zurich, Switzerland Sonja Sekula, Galerie Zodiaque, Perroy, Switzerland 1989 Sonja Sekula, Galerie Zodiaque, Perroy, Switzerland 1987 Sonja Sekula 1918-1963. Zum Andenken, Galerie Suzanne Bollag, Zurich, Switzerland 1984 Sonja Sekula (1919[sic]-1963). Peintures, gouaches et collages, Galerie Zodiaque, Perroy, Switzerland Sonja Sekula. Peintures-Gouaches-Dessins-Collages, Focus Gallery, Lausanne, Switzerland 1978 Sonja Sekula, (1919[sic]-1963). Peintures, gouaches et collages, Galerie Zodiaque, Perroy, Switzerland 1977 Sonja Sekula, Oeuvres, Galerie Saint-Antoine, Genève, Switzerland 1976 Sonja Sekula. Gemälde + Zeichnungen, Galerie zur Matze, Brig, Switzerland Sonja Sekula (1919[sic]-1963). Peintures, gouaches et collages, Galerie Zodiaque, Perroy, Switzerland 1975 Sonja Sekula, Galerie Cinq, Lausanne, Switzerland Sonja Sekula 1918-1963, Galerie Orell Füssli, Zurich, Switzerland 1973 Sonja Sekula, Swiss Bank Association, Hottingen branch, Zurich, Switzerland Sonja Sekula. Peintures, collages, dessins, Galerie Jeanne Wiebenga, Epalinges, Switzerland (catalogue) 1971 Sonja Sekula. Paintings, Drawings and Poetry, Contemporary Wing, Finch College Museum of Art, New York, NY (catalogue) 1969 Joachim Breustedt / Sonja Sekula, Galerie Jeanne Wiebenga, Epalinges, Switzerland 1967 Sonja Sekula 1918-1963, Galerie d’art modern Jeanne Wiebenga, Epalinges, Switzerland 1966 Arend Fuhrmann / Jenny Losinger-Ferry / Sonja Sekula, Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft, Helmhaus, Zurich, Switzerland (catalogue) 1964 Sonja Sekula (1918 – 1963), Gimpel & Hanover Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland (catalogue) 1962 Galería Fortuny, Madrid, Spain

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1961 Sonja Sekula. Collages, Galerie Suzanne Bollag, Zurich, Switzerland 1960 Sonja Sekula, Galerie L’Entracte, Lausanne, Switzerland Sonja Sekula, Malerei / Trudi Demut. Plastic, Galerie 58, Rapperswil, Switzerland 1959 Sonja Sekula, Zurich / Duncan, Paris, Galerie Suzanne Bollag, Zurich, Switzerland 1958 Sekula. Quince años de pinturas 1943-1958, Galeria Don Hatch, Caracas, Venezuela (catalogue) 1957 Sonja Sekula, Galerie Palette, Zurich, Switzerland 1955 Paintings and Drawings by Sonja Sekula, Boylston Street Print Gallery, Cambridge, MA 1952 Sonja Sekula, Paintings & Scratchboards, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY 1951 Sonja Sekula, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY 1950 Sonja Sekula, Bookshop Gallery, The London Gallery, London, UK 1949 Sekula. Drawings – Gouaches, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY 1948 Sonja Sekula, Paintings, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY 1946 Sonja Sekula. First Exhibition of Painting, Art of this Century Gallery, New York, NY

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2021 A Future We Begin to Feel: Women Artists 1921-1971, Rosenberg & Co., New York, NY Women of Abstraction: Artists on Eastern Long Island 1960-2020, Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, NY 2020 Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY 2019 Sparkling Amazons: Abstract Expressionist Women of the 9th St. Show, Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY Surrealism Switzerland, Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana Lugano, curated by Tobia Bezzola and Francesca Benini, Lugano, Italy 2018 Surrealism Switzerland, Aargauer Kunsthaus, curated by Peter Fischer and Julia Schallberger, Aarau, Switzerland 2017 NO EXIT, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY Seachange: Contemporary Highlights, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA 2015 Seachange: Abstraction in Norman Lewis’ Time, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA 2011 Abstract Expressionism and its Discontents, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA 2010 Post-War American Art: The Novak/O’Doherty Collection, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland 2008 Dunkelschwestern, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland 2007 Pathways and Parallels: Roads to Abstract Expressionism, Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York, NY 1996 The Surrealists and Their Friends on Eastern Long Island at Mid-Century, Guild Hall Museum, Easthampton, NY (catalogue) 1995 Neun Räume-einige Fenster: Der Erweterungsbau – Die Sammlung, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (catalogue) 1994 Projekt Sammlung: Meisterwerke des 16. Bis 20. Jahrhunderts aus der Sammlung des Kunstmuseums Luzern, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland 1993 Dimension Schweiz 1915-1993: Von der frühen Moderne zur Kunst der Gegenwart, Museion, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Bolzano (catalogue) 1990 Contrasts, Galerie Suzanne Bollag, Zurich, Switzerland 1989 Abstract Expressionism: Other Dimensions. An Introduction to Small Scale Painterly Abstraction in America, 1940-1965, toured: Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL; Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, IL (1990); The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ (1990) (catalogue) 1988 30 Jahre Konkrete Kunst, Galerie Suzanne Bollag, Zurich, Switzerland (catalogue)

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1987 Angelica, Anna und andere Schwestern von gestern, Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland 1978 Banken förden Kunst, Städtische Galerie zum Strauhof, Zurich, Switzerland (catalogue) 1976 30th Anniversary Show, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY 1975 Artistes suisses, Manoir de Martigny, Martigny, Switzerland (catalogue) 1969 Hommage à Helen Dahm, Karl Ballmer, Charles Rollier, Sonja Sekula, Emanuel Jacob, Galerie Palette, Zurich, Switzerland 1966 Arend Fuhrmann, Jenny Losinger-Ferri, Sonja Sekula, Stadthaus, Zurich, Switzerland 1961 Der Surrealismus und verwandte Strömungen in der Schweiz, Kunstsammlung der Stadt Thun, Switzerland (catalogue) Zürcher Künstler in Helmhaus und Stadthaus, Helmhaus und Stadthaus, Zurich, Switzerland (catalogue) GSMBuk: Gesellschaft Schweizerischer Malerinnen, Bildhauerinnen und Kunstgeweblerinnen, Sektion Zürich, Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland (catalogue) 1960 Contrastes II, Galerie Suzanne Bollag, Zurich, Switzerland (catalogue) Zürcher Künstler im Helmhaus und Stadthaus, Helmhaus und Stadthaus, Zurich, Switzerland (catalogue) 1959 Zürcher Konkrete Kunst, Galerei Suzanne Bollag, Zurich, Switzerland (catalogue) Contrasts, Galerie Suzanne Bolag, Zurich, Switzerland (catalogue) Zürcher Künstler im Helmhaus und Stadthaus, Helmhaus und Stadthaus, Zurich, Switzerland (catalogue) Weinachtsausstellung, Galerie Suzanne Bollag, Zurich, Switzerland 1958 22.Ausstellung der Gesellschaft schweizerischer Malerinnen, Bildhauerinnen und Kunstgewerblerinnen, in the framework of Saffa. 2. Ausstellung: Die Schweizer Frau, ihr Leben, ihr Arbeit, Zurich, Switzerland (catalogue) Collages, Galerie Suzanne Bollag, Zurich, Switzerland 1957 Amherst College, Amherst, MA Dezember-Ausstellung, Galerie Palette, Zurich, Switzerland 1956 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (catalogue) The University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, IA 1955 Ten Years, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY 1954 Summer Exhibition, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA Le dessin contemporain aux Etats-Unis (organized by The Art Institute of Chicago), Pavillon Vendôme, Aix-en-Provence, France (catalogue) Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints, Sales and Rental Gallery, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN Group show: Drawing, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY 1953 International Watercolor Exhibition: Seventeenth Biennial, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (catalogue) 1952 University of Illinois Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, College of Fine and Applied Arts, Urbana, IL (catalogue) The Artists’ Exchange Gallery, Santa Fe, CA Contemporary Drawings From 12 Countries: 1945-1952, The Art Institute of Chicago. Toured The Toledo Museum of Art; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; San Francisco Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum; Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center; The J.B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY. (catalogue) Thirty U.S. Contemporaries: Paintings, San Francisco Museum of Art, CA An Exhibition of Contemporary Religious Art and Architecture, Union Theological Seminary, New York, NY 1951 International Watercolor Exhibition: Sixteenth Biennial, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (catalogue)

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9th Street: Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, New York, NY 1950 Accrochage, Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris, France Young American Artists, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (catalogue) 1949 Fifty-Ninth Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Nebraska Art Association, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY International Watercolor Exhibition: Fifteenth Biennial, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (catalogue) 1948 Watercolors From the 27th Annual Exhibition of the California Watercolor Society, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA Survey of Season, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, NY Museo de Arte Moderna de Sao Paolo, Brazil 1947 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme. Le Surréalisme en 1947, presented by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp, Galerie Maeght, Paris, France (catalogue) 1945 The Women, Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery, New York, NY 1943 Spring Salon for Young Artists, Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery, New York, NY Exhibition by 31 Women, Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery, New York, NY

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

2021 Anger, Jenny. “Sonja Sekula and ‘Art of the Mentally Ill,’” American Art – Smithsonian Institution, Spring 2021 2020 Gibson, Eric. “Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury’ Review: Sketching a Path Into a New Era,” Wall Street Journal, December 5 2019 Dobrzynski, Judith. “An Expanded MoMA Adds More Women Artists,” Wall Street Journal, October 10 Keane, Tim. “Positively Ninth Street Women,” Hyperallergic, November 30 “Overdue Recognition for Abstract Expressionist and Alumna Sonja Sekula,” Sarah Lawrence College, October 3 Sparkling Amazons: Abstract Expressionist Women of the 9th St. Show, The Katonah Museum of Art, New York (cat.) 2017 Smith, Roberta. “Gallery Guide: Sonja Sekula,” The New York Times, C26, April 28 Yau, John. “Sonja Sekula’s Time May Have Finally Come,” Hyperallergic, April 29 NO EXIT, Peter Blum Edition, New York, NY (cat.) 2016 Sonja Sekula & Friends, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (cat.) 2011 Sonja Sekula: Grace in a cow's EYE: a memoir, Black Radish Books, Lafayette, LA (cat.) 2008 Dunkelschwestern Annemarie Von Matt - Sonja Sekula, Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich, Switzerland (cat.) 1996 Sonja Sekula: 1918-1963, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (cat.) 1995 Kunstverein Wintertur: 75. Jahresbericht 1995. Winterthur: Kunstverein Winterthur, P. 10, 36, 40-42. (cat.) 1992 Perret, Roger “Auf Bedeutungsjagd, auf Bedeutungsflucht, Die Wortund Farbkünstlerin Sonja Sekula,” Affenschaukel 16 (1992), P. 14-15. 1987 Kunstmuseum St. Gallen: Katalog der Sammlung. Gemälde, Pastelle, Glasbilder, Textile Werke, Skultpuren, Objekte. St. Gallen: Kunstverein St. Gallen, P. 329. (cat.) 1984 The Brooklyn Museum: American Watercolors, Pastels, Collages. A Complete Illustrated Listing of Works in the Museum’s Collection. St. Gallen: Kunstverein St. Gallen, P. 329. (cat.) 1983 Werke des 20. Jahrhunderts von Cuno Amiet bis heute. Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau, Switzerland, P. 419. (cat.)

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Kunstmuseum Luzern: Sammlungscatalog der Gemülde. Luzern: Kunstmuseum Luzern, P. 277. (cat.) 1971 Foote, Nancy. “Who was Sonia Sekula?”Art in America, October, pg. 73-80 1966 Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft: Jahresbericht 1961. Zurich: Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft, , P. 7. (cat.) 1961 Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft: Jahresbericht 1966. Zurich: Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft, P. 7, 8, 57. (cat.)

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich, Switzerland Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN The Magis Collection, Minneapolis, MN Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, NJ Grinnell College Art Collection, Grinnell, IA

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] Sonja Sekula, The Town of the Poor, 1951. Oil on canvas, 66 × 90 in. Committee on Painting and Sculpture Funds, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y. Courtesy the Sonja Sekula Estate and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, N.Y.

94 American Art | Spring 2021 the ‘psychopathology of expression’ are designed to neutralize the living utterance which madness can be.”8 In other words, those who produce “art of the mentally ill” may produce pure art but should be kept as far from “culture” as possible. What is lost by not considering the mental illness of practicing artists? Are there moments in which the modernist fantasy of madness coincides with actual mental illness, and, if so, do the imagined and real match up, or do their differences teach us something about art and/ or mental illness? Meret Oppenheim, for example, suffered from depres- sion for nearly two decades; what were its characteristics, how did it impact her art or life, and who knew about it?9 Leonora Carrington purportedly had a harrowing experience in a mental institution following a psychotic break in Spain early in her career. In a typi- cally modernist idealization of mental illness, André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, encouraged her to write a memoir about her experiences. How Carrington’s actual institu- tionalization and Breton’s (and possibly her own) romanticization of mental illness intersect remains to be explored.10 Nancy Princenthal’s recent biography of Agnes Martin deals sen- sitively with the artist’s schizophrenia. She theorizes that “the sense of hyper-connectedness that is a feature of paranoia may also be seen in Martin’s formal choices, the grid in par- ticular.” Yet on the following page she opines “it would be a gross error to see in her work symptoms of illness.”11 Art historians still shrink before the suggestion of links between the work of recognized artists and their mental illnesses. There are clearly issues of privacy and pathologization, but I suggest that stigma is the real culprit. Exceptions exist to this split, and one suspects that their subjects are typically male and so secure in the canon that exploring their illness could not damage their reputation; indeed, it might add to their image as “tortured artist.” The quintessential example is Vincent van Gogh. In the twentieth century, the obvious counterpart is Jackson Pollock, whose alcoholism led him to a mental institution in the summer of 1938 before it finally killed him in 1956. Michael Leja has carefully traced how Pollock’s developing interest in Jungian psychoanalysis corresponded with the artist’s need to find a psychological solution to his own problems.12 What Leja does not address, however, is how far Jungian analysis strays from the psychiatric practice Pollock likely encountered in the hospital, where medi- calized psychiatry, augmented by occupational therapy, was superseding psych oanalysis at this time.13 What might we learn by investigating this artist’s lived experience? And what of others, especially those with less secure reputations and a greater need for prolonged psychiatric treatment? The category of “art of the mentally ill” may have origi- nated in Kraepelin’s psychiatric hospital, but artists’ frequent idealization of the patients’ art (or art of the unconscious, in Pollock’s case) became increasingly separated from psychiatry, the medical treatment of mental illness. Thus, many modernists fantasized about madness while many artists who truly experienced mental illness found themselves in uncharted territory: sometimes their illness was idealized, sometimes it forced them into months or years of experimental psychiatric treatment, sometimes it was manageable, and sometimes it caused suffering far beyond what any romantic view of it could comprehend. Stigma still warns us against revising “art of the mentally ill” to “art by people with mental illness” and including practicing artists in that category. The tendency is to lump “art of the mentally ill” with outsider and self-taught art—with the exception of work by the occasional tortured genius—but “art by people with mental illness” criti- cally blurs boundaries between inside and outside. I will in this essay point toward what such a reassessment of categories could reveal. The subject is Sonja Sekula (1918–1963), a Swiss-American artist who bridged Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism in New York from 1936 to 1955. She was included in major exhibitions at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century, starting withExhibition by 31 Women in 1943, and was given her first solo show at the gallery in 1946. After Sekula and other Abstract Expressionists moved to

96 American Art | Spring 2021 Betty Parsons’s gallery in 1947, she enjoyed five solo shows there over the next decade.14 Such a record of group and solo shows should have secured her a place in the history of midcentury modernism, yet references to her, let alone accolades, are rare today. Sekula is little-known in part, no doubt, to the misogyny and homophobia (she was a lesbian) of the period.15 My argument, however, is that her mental illness ultimately destroyed her career. Art historians occasionally allude to her illness and suicide, if they mention her at all, but Sekula is neither romanticized nor stigmatized, presumably because she is not of the stature of an Oppenheim, Carrington, or Martin, let alone a Pollock. One must look closely at her mental health record to see how it affected her career and critical reception—specifically, how she disappeared from the art historical record. Contemporary critics do not appear to have been aware of her condition. Her illness did not affect her artwork in any obvious way, although future scholarship may show otherwise. It did slow 1 Sonja Sekula at André Breton’s apartment, summer 1945. production during periods of intense suffering.16 Yet extended hospital stays with various Reproduced from Dieter treatments appear to have helped her, and support networks large and small—and their Schwarz, Sonja Sekula 1918– failings—impacted her life and production profoundly. Some fellow artists appear to have 1963 (Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1996), 24. Photo: Karen seen Sekula’s illness poetically, sometimes with dire consequences. She had other artist Hueftle-Worley friends and acquaintances who helped her in times of need, and gallerist Parsons supported her through thick and thin. With all of these factors in mind, it is my contention that Sekula’s return to Switzerland for affordable treatment ruined her career; as the move’s result, her personal and professional base fractured and her exhibiting career in the United States came to an abrupt end. As art historian Griselda Pollock has speculated, “Exile by coming ‘home’ broke the thread of what might have become a more recognized and sustained American career, even if punctuated by recurrent illness.”17 Sekula’s case reminds us of how critical a supportive environment and a community of like-minded people are for the production and reception of art. Considering Sekula’s work in the category of “art by people with mental illness” also helps us understand how someone of such promise, grace, and provisional success could virtually disap- pear from the history of art.18 Originally from Lucerne, Sekula traveled as a child to Hungary (her father’s homeland), Paris, and Florence, where, at age sixteen, she took lessons in painting and art history. After the family immigrated to the United States in 1936, they lived in Douglaston, on Long Island, near the painter George Grosz, and Sekula studied with him briefly. In fall 1937, she entered Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied art, philosophy, and literature.19 All was not well, however; Sekula tried to take her life at the age of twenty. In March of 1939 she suffered a complete breakdown, necessitating her admission to New York Hospital–Westchester Division, White Plains, where she stayed until the spring of 1941.20 Details of her hospital stay are

American Art | Spring 2021 97 impossible to ascertain, but treatment methodologies cited in annual reports of the institu- tion offer a window into a patient’s slow convalescence. Emphasis on family relationships at admission suggests a continuing adherence to some psychoanalytic principles, while medi- calized psychiatry was on the rise. For example, the report of 1940 reads: “Careful somatic studies are essential for the understanding and treatment of psychiatric disorders.” Insulin was used, and the stimulant metrazol was introduced to induce seizures (a precursor of electroshock therapy). In 1941, it is reported that electroencephalography (EEG) was “used increasingly.”21 Exactly what treatment Sekula received is unknown, but in this era of psy- chiatric experimentation, it was likely a range of methods. It had to be a time of struggle, not revelatory vision, as some modernist mythology would have it. However hard this two-year episode was for Sekula, she emerged from it with renewed strength—and was fortunate not to suffer another mental collapse for a decade. Later in 1941, she studied with the painter Morris Kantor, who called her work “much more creative and moving than most [students’].”22 Perhaps more importantly for her career, in 1942 Sekula met Breton, who provided essential if ambivalent support, both romanticizing Sekula and affording her access to exhibiting venues. Breton wrote her in 1944, for example, “I hope you will continue to talk to me in that scintillating manner which is your very own.” He joined the writer Charles Duits, who characterized her in the following way: “An invisible cloud enveloped Sonja, lending her movements gentleness and slowness. She was caught in a transparency, isolating her from the world.”23 The sculptor David Hare later theorized that “The Surrealists liked the way she talked and the poetic ideas she had.”24 Many authors have problematized the Surrealist idealization of women; one wonders in Sekula’s case if the romanticization Breton and Duits exhibit and that Hare encapsulated was also due to her experience with mental illness, which they also revered in others and sometimes themselves. There were limits to this reverence, to be sure. The art historian Roger Cardinal argues, for example, that Surrealist writer Antonin Artaud’s own “clinical interventions . . . carried him to that point of total shipwreck whence the majority of sur- realists understandably recoiled.”25 Yet, as mentioned above, Breton reputedly encouraged Carrington to write about her own breakdown, because, in the historian Marina Warner’s estimation, “from his point of view, the English artist, wild muse, femme-enfant, had realized one of the most desirable ambitions of surrealism, the katabasis of the modern age, the voyage to the other side of reason.” Further, “She had truly experienced the derangement Breton and poet Paul Éluard had only been able to simulate in L’Immaculate Conception in 1930.”26 Breton and Éluard had imagined it but she had lived it (or so they imagined), and it was too perfect that she was a woman, because female madness was especially venerated. Consider Breton’s novel Nadja (1928), in which the title character goes insane.27 Whether Breton’s and others’ fascination extended to the appreciation of Sekula, whose own actual psychiatric experience was in all likelihood not so picturesque, and her art, cannot be verified, but it is clear that she and Breton developed a certain closeness. In a photograph from the summer of 1945 taken in Breton’s apartment, she exudes a comfort- ableness in the space that comes only with friendship (see fig. 1). Breton’s “modernist fantasy” of Sekula’s illness was likely not detrimental to her—unlike another case we will encounter—and it was, in any event, combined productively with his practical acumen for building her career. In January 1943 Breton was on the jury that selected participants for the Exhibition by 31 Women at Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery. There Sekula mixed with Surrealists Carrington, Oppenheim, and Frida Kahlo, as well as the emergent Abstract Expressionists Hedda Sterne, I. Rice Pereira, and Buffie Johnson, placing her well within the leading movements of the day.28 This showing led to others. One, The Women (1945), reprised the theme of the earlier exhibit and focused on gender for the first time in Sekula’s career. On the one hand, she built supportive

98 American Art | Spring 2021 2 Sonja Sekula, African Moonsun, friendships with other women artists. On the other, their work was read in gendered 1945. Oil on canvas, 24 × terms—not always negatively, it must be said.29 Which of Sekula’s artworks were included 29 9/10 in. Kunstmuseum Luzern. Courtesy the Sonja Sekula in The Women is unknown, but she figured prominently in a review in ARTnews: “The Estate and Peter Blum Gallery, women who[m] Peggy Guggenheim has picked for her string have definitely something on New York. Photo © Andri Stadler, the ball. The most surprising trait here is an almost masculine vigor of ideas—in connec- Lucerne tion with Kay Sage and Hedda Sterne, with Sonia Sekula and Helen Phillips in particular.” The anonymous reviewer goes on to call the show “refreshingly unladylike.” Given the hypermasculinity of the period, such gendering was a high mark of approval.30 One wonders if Sekula’s majestic African Moonsun (fig. 2) was part of the group that solicited such a response. In it, bold yet somber tones reinforce the impact of strength that might, at the time, have been called masculine. The resulting figures of varying size yet equal weight lead to an almost “allover” impression. However approving these gendered readings may have been, others were less positive. Writing about Sekula’s first show at Parsons’s gallery in 1948, one reviewer referred to her “airy abstract trifles,” and another claimed her work showed “too much reliance on the manners of others.”31 “Trifles” is likely code for “feminine,” and a dependence on others

American Art | Spring 2021 99 signals derivativeness, also a trope of feminin- ity, instead of (masculine) originality. This is no surprise; Abstract Expressionism was by and large a misogynist movement. What is pertinent here is that these attacks did not adversely affect Sekula’s career: Parsons continued to show her work, and the sexist, negative reviews ended immediately. Indeed, as much as misogyny reigned during the period, Sekula saw herself as belonging to a new era of gender possibilities. In an inter- view for The League, the publication of the Art Students League, she stated:

It is the women’s era too, they are at last coming forward, painting pictures of sensitivity, emotion, worth. Modern times have demanded that man be more scientific, deductive. Women have always been more instinctive and emo- tional. Today the feminine and masculine element in painting have been completely elimi- nated. Women are doing creative work that is completely accepted by the public as good art.32

Sekula may have been overly optimistic about postgendered art or reception, but gender does not appear to have hindered her. In fact, she benefited from strong friendships, many with women. In September 1945, Sekula traveled with the poet Alice Rahon—her lover at the time—to New Mexico and Mexico. There she met Surrealist artists Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Kahlo, with whom she became close and to whom she lent moral support.33 Sekula’s letters to Kahlo, 3 Max Ernst, André Breton, Kurt who suffered enormous physical pain and emotional anguish related to injuries from a bus Seligmann, Roberto Matta, accident in her youth, flow with warmth and goodwill. Sekula wrote Kahlo, “I would like Marcel Duchamp, and Sonja Sekula, Dessin successif, ca. 1943. to tell you so much I hope for for [sic] you. I believe in your courage[,] in your strength[,] VVV, March 1943, 2–3. Photo: in everything that you are.”34 She also gave practical advice: “Please Darling tell Cristina to University of Iowa Libraries, keep people away from you for 2–3 days. I give you this advise because you will only get Special Collections well if you have mental rest and are able to be quiet as much as possible.”35 Indeed, Sekula’s artistic friendships, stretching back to Breton, yielded opportunities for collaboration as well. In the spring of 1943, Sekula contributed to a game of “successive drawing” with Max Ernst, Breton, Kurt Seligmann, Roberto Matta, and Marcel Duchamp (fig. 3).36 Here she features as an equal participant among major, male figures. A bird shooting a bow and arrow appears successively in each artist’s drawing. Ernst’s figure is oddly disconnected, while Matta’s bird grips the bow and arrow securely. In Sekula’s drawing, which closes the sequence, bird and bow are simplified and bonded together, while another rectangular bow is added (a target?) and the arrow is dropped. Each artist’s rendition is unique; all share in artistic community.

100 American Art | Spring 2021 4 Merce Cunningham dances in A more intimate collaboration occurred in May 1947, after Sekula moved into an costume for Dromenon painted apartment across from that of the composer John Cage and choreographer Merce by Sonja Sekula, 1947. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Cunningham. Years later, Sekula recalled: “With John Cage at Monroe Street in Courtesy the Sonja Sekula New York in my youth, I still felt a natural joy in life, there I could forget the surround- Estate and Peter Blum Gallery, ings I had been born into and become absorbed in the understanding of immediate New York. Photo © Jack Mitchell communication. I miss the silent understandings of the conversations and the cheerful 5 Sonja Sekula, Costume for 37 Dromenon, 1947. Painted wool company.” This was a sympathetic environment. One artifact of their friendship is bodysuit, variable dimensions. Cunningham’s costume for the dance Dromenon (figs. 4, 5), for which Cage provided Collection Walker Art Center, the music. The entire bodysuit is covered with abstract, biomorphic, and angular motifs Minneapolis, Merce Cunningham in earth tones, painted by Sekula, apparently while on Cunningham’s body—a practi- Dance Company Collection, Gift of Jay F. Ecklund, the Barnett and cal solution for providing a firm surface on which to paint and, at the same time, an Annalee Newman Foundation, extremely intimate one, as she coursed down and around every curve. It was a remark- Agnes Gund, Russell Cowles and able example of aesthetic collaboration and empathy. Josine Peters, the Hayes Fund of HRK Foundation, Dorothy Professional and collegial relationships—and Sekula’s artistic experiments— Lichtenstein, MAHADH Fund coalesced such that Guggenheim gave Sekula her first solo exhibit in May 1946. The of HRK Foundation, Goodale show was well received. TheNew York Times critic identified two types of works: Family Foundation, Marion Stroud Swingle, David Teiger, “Color in richly diversified surface patterns makes up the primary appeal of the Kathleen Fluegel, Barbara G. Pine, abstract and non-objective paintings by Sonja Sekula at Art of This Century Gallery. and the T. B. Walker Acquisition One dark group called ‘night paintings’ contrasts sharply with the other group in Fund, 2011. Courtesy the Sonja bright, clear, intense values.”38 The reviewer for ARTnews wrote, “She has been lately Sekula Estate and Peter Blum Gallery, New York experimenting with blacks, attempting to capture in pure abstraction the feeling and the colors of a cloudless, starry night.”39 The small, playful ink and gouacheUntitled (fig. 6)

American Art | Spring 2021 101 6 Sonja Sekula, Untitled, 1946. Ink may have been among the first group. Except for the lack of handwriting in this par- and gouache on paper, 14 × 17 in. ticular artwork, the reviewer might have been alluding to it: “Her small intricate forms Grinnell College Art Collection, Grinnell, Iowa. Courtesy the within forms, plus miniscule handwriting, are placed into a machine-like system of com- Sonja Sekula Estate and Peter position.”40 Sekula’s high-keyed, biomorphic forms spread across the page; at the same Blum Gallery, New York. Photo: time they adhere to transversals that undergird the composition. The arresting work is at Peter Blum Gallery once free-flowing and tightly organized. As this circle of friends coalesced, another site of connection for Sekula unfortunately disappeared: Guggenheim closed her gallery and decamped for Venice at the end of May 1947. Luckily for Sekula, Parsons had opened another venue the previous year and became a great supporter, sales agent, and friend, giving Sekula five solo shows, the first in May 1948.41 It was a time of great self-assurance for Sekula. A letter to her mother reads: “As I write to you looking out my window I think of all the contemporary American poets and artists who represent their outlook on this strange country and I find myself beginning to realize that I shall be one of them, I shall be an American painter.”42 Sekula felt at home in the United States and was emboldened to claim her place among artists of her generation. Secure of Parsons’s backing, Sekula felt comfortable enough to expand her repertory. Her first Parsons show included a range of linear creations: bold, broad strokes in a series of totemic figures as well as feathery, thin structures emerging from transparent

102 American Art | Spring 2021 7 Sonja Sekula, The Arrival of the Gods, 1949. Watercolor on paper, 29 ½ × 21 ⅝ in. Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 51.92. Courtesy the Sonja Sekula Estate and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

wash.43 Yet despite Parsons’s vote of confidence, such experiments were not well received. Whereas gender had not impinged negatively on Sekula’s reception before, it did, to some extent, now; these were the works the New York Times critic had described as “trifles.” Parsons’s faith in Sekula allowed the artist to pursue her development unabated. She continued with these architectural paintings, which became at times more ethereal, at others more structural. Parsons gave Sekula her second solo exhibit in early 1949.44 The Arrival of the Gods, a large watercolor on paper (fig. 7), may be representative of the work shown. Its title is inscribed at center left, adding a literally calligraphic element to the calligraphic line. Temples and skyscrapers appear and disappear behind the gorgeous mist. The New York Times appreciated the works, calling them “a small, highly individual group of abstract, gossamer-fine drawings and gouaches.”45

American Art | Spring 2021 103 8 Sonja Sekula, Nightselves, 1951. Oil on canvas, 23 8/10 × 23 ¾ in. Collection John Matheson, Meilen, Switzerland. Courtesy the Sonja Sekula Estate and Peter Blum Gallery, New York, in Dieter Schwarz, Sonja Sekula 1918–1963 (Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1996), no. 60. Photo: Karen Hueftle-Worley 9 Sonja Sekula, Silence, 1951. Oil on canvas, 57 9/10 × 39 ¾ in. Kunsthaus Zürich, Donated by the Artist’s Mother, 1966. Courtesy the Sonja Sekula Estate and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. Photo: Kunsthaus Zürich

Sekula had established herself in the United States, an accomplishment that a nearly two-year trip to Europe in 1949–50 could not spoil.46 The artist was back in New York in 1951, and Parsons positioned her squarely within Abstract Expressionism. In April, Sekula shared equal billing at Parsons’s gallery with Mark Rothko.47 Sekula’s reviewers recognized her enhanced stature. One noted she “has a third solo show with free, calligraphic abstrac- tions that seem to owe as much to [Mark] Tobey and Pollock as they do to André Breton’s program.”48 Far from calling her work derivative, reviewers hailed its originality. Stuart Preston wrote for the New York Times:

There is a dazzling display of ingenuity in Sonia Sekula’s pictures at the Betty Parsons Gallery. This whole column could be devoted to cataloguing the impulsive patterns; to the tiny explosions of color on one; to the furious calligraphic scribbles on another; or to the carpet of color medal- lions on a third. It may just be said that her color is sensitive and surprising and her ideas neither dull nor obvious. She is the abstract Paganini.49

One wishes Preston had identified specific pictures, but it is clear that Sekula produced a richly varied collection, and that he considered her a virtuoso, in the company of the great violinist. Two extraordinary examples from 1951 may have been among the works exhibited. In Nightselves (fig. 8), fine calligraphic line has moved to the surface, leaving a dreamy deep blue to flow behind it. The alternately bodily, architectural, or whimsical notation spreads evenly across the plane. Such playful mystery is nothing like Silence (fig. 9), although it, too, has line that skims the surface. Yet in this work, which Sekula dedicated to Cage, the lines

104 American Art | Spring 2021 American Art | Spring 2021 105 are like threads of rain, gently and silently dropping to the dew below.50 Strange symbols begin to emerge, but they are not ready to share their secrets. This expression of silence shares Cage’s depth of feeling and is also wholly her own.51 Tragically, however, one sees the peace of Silence and asks what befell Sekula, for she suffered her second psychotic break the day after this solo exhibition opened. Her artist friends Manina Thoeren and Joseph Glasco drove her to the hospital in White Plains, where she had stayed a decade before. Despairing upon arrival at the hospital, Sekula reputedly said, “I don’t cry for myself, I cry for the others.”52 Some sense of the importance of community stayed with her, even at this moment of mental collapse. Despite the extreme dislocation accompanying a journey into psychosis and hospital admission—Sekula was again diagnosed with schizophrenia—her description of the clinic after a few months of recovery is sanguine:

Life here consists of sitting a lot . . .in a little yard with 3 beautiful trees . . . and as one moves on to new, better Halls, the lawns get bigger + you can smoke more cigarettes + put on new shoes. The doctors go by twice a day . . . the patients say “good morning” or “good evening sir, how are you?”. . . we are fine . . . a big consoling, doll like U.S.A. smile etc. etc. few tub-baths with pro- longed hours, a few injections . . . or a “pack” (of bedsheets) to “calm down” occupational therapy . . . (I make bright potholders to calm the imagination) + thru all that slowly we all get well + find the white Road that leads back to Reality + eternal Bliss—such as being creative or medi- tative in New York City . . . (For the moment Creation means something else to me) as yet I still, maybe thru the many shocktreatments (patients call it “electrocutions” for fun), we forget a lot of things or names.53

Sekula does not describe mystical visions or a revelation of the unconscious, that is to say, modernists’ fantasies of mental illness. Rather, she describes the slow process of rehabilita- tion in a mental hospital circa 1950. Long baths were standard fare. Sekula’s “injections” are not securely identifiable, but they could have been insulin. Electroshock therapy was widely used at the White Plains hospital beginning at this time.54 It is unknown how her friends responded to her condition and her location, though surviving clues are not encouraging. Idealization, once relatively harmless, appears here to have been hurtful. For example, Cage glorified Sekula’s mental illness, claiming “when she was about to have a breakdown she would begin to speak in religious terms. She had deep insights of truth—a sense of identifying with everything. It was as though she was perceiving on a higher plane.”55 Compare her plaintive letter to him from the hospital in White Plains:

Dear John . . . I miss you, and wonder why I don’t hear from you.. would like to see you again sometime or have a word how you feel .. and work—live—Maybe we can get together some- times from 4–8. I can go to Whiteplains now. One of these days they’ll even let me “visit” New York. But days are still pretty long, a timeless existence like mine is really music-less too . . . Hope to see you soon. Love Sonja.56

It is not known whether this appeal to the composer—including the reference to sorrowful music-lessness—elicited a visit or not. But it seems clear that for some time Sekula was left very much alone with, or without, the insights Cage attributed to her.57 Cage may have idealized her illness as a source of her creativity, but he abandoned her to loneliness, a far cry from the empathy they had experienced as neighbors. He appears to have understood little or nothing of her current experience. Social support has been shown to be a protective factor for people with schizo phrenia, so the tear in this social fabric was likely painful for her.58

106 American Art | Spring 2021 Parsons, for her part, does not appear to have visited Sekula in White Plains, but she did inaugurate a correspondence that would be supportive in the years to come. Following Sekula’s spring solo show, Parsons wrote that she took down Sekula’s paintings “with deep regret,” having “enjoyed them every minute while they were on the walls.” She thought the Times’s “abstract Paganini” reference was “very good!” and reported two sales “with possibilities of others.” Parsons declared she “would love to hear” from Sekula and closed with “Much love.”59 In the letter, Parsons conveys both professional respect and personal concern in a warm and natural manner. Bolstered in part by the gallerist, Sekula persevered. Released from the hospital near the end of 1951, she set to work right away on what would be her largest work, The Town of the Poor (frontispiece). Hospitalization—not psychotic visions—clearly helped return her to her full creative powers. This painting would be the centerpiece of Sekula’s fourth solo show at Parsons’s gallery in March 1952.60 The critic Dore Ashton provides a perceptive and moving review:

Throughout her work there is a sustained mood of mystery, wonder, and irony inspired it seems by the city. An exceptional oil, City of the Poor [Town of the Poor], epitomizes Miss Sekula’s facility both as technician and creator. A huge canvas, it is constructed in a complex group of interweaving planes suggesting the imaginative space of Piranesi. Luminous areas slip behind linear frontal forms, and legions of tiny figures—suggesting both human and mechanical city phenomena—move in and out of interstices. Frenetic or calm, billowing or tightly woven, Miss Sekula’s compositions vibrate with color.61

In the New York Times, Preston also referenced Piranesi’s prints of architectural inventions to convey Sekula’s architectural representations. He admired Sekula’s “extreme refine- ment, both of color and technique,”he recognized the vitality of the pulsations and the chiaroscuro caverns that resemble, perhaps tellingly, Piranesi’s “Carceri.” Preston conceded that “A first glance may only see confusion but a second should convince that this has been intellectually dictated and mastered.”62 If “nervous” might be read pejoratively—perhaps even alluding to neurasthenia, commonly associated with women—there is no doubt of Sekula’s “mastery” in the end. Further, Town of the Poor fulfilled two goals of Abstract Expressionism: immense size and allover painting.63 Here Sekula took her architectural abstractions and intensified them in size, intricacy, and impact. Ashton closed with a specific allusion on an altogether different register: “The artist also shows a number of scratchboards which rival [Paul] Klee for inventive use of pigment and line.”64 Grace (fig. 10) is one such scratchboard. Its whimsical arrow and crescent-moon shapes, interlaced with poetic text, are indeed reminiscent of her countryman Klee— whom Sekula had long admired.65 Lacking Klee’s irony, however, Sekula voices a fervent wish, written on the canvas, below and right of center: “True artist[s] are true givers and true workers[;] please let them be happy.” The poignancy of one holding onto precarious happiness and health is palpable. Luckily, Parsons was unwavering in her support; she included Sekula’s work in a group show in May 1952.66 The New York Times review was brief: “Good pictures for the spectator to tackle are, at Betty Parsons, those by Sterne, Stamos, Sekula, Rothko, Ossorio, Pollock, Miles and Margo.”67 By all appearances, then, Sekula’s mental illness had not impeded her career thus far, even if it had caused her pain, interrupted her work, and upset some friendships. Parsons’s openness and commitment would be all the more precious to Sekula, who, traveling back to Switzerland with her mother in the fall of 1952, suffered another break- down and had to be admitted to the Bellevue sanatorium in Kreuzlingen in October.68

American Art | Spring 2021 107 108 American Art | Spring 2021 10 Sonja Sekula, Grace, 1952. Ink on The treatment she received there appears to have been a combination of “existential paper, 13 ¼ × 11 in. Courtesy of psychotherapy” and psychiatric treatments like those she had received in the United Kaba Roessler / Margrit Schmid; States.69 The varied treatment must have been helpful, in any case, because Sekula’s and the Sonja Sekula Estate and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. parents returned her there some years later. Photo © Andri Stadler, Lucerne In 1952, despite such upheaval, Parsons still gave her continuity, demonstrating that her support system was thus far intact. In December, she addressed Sekula at the “Sanatorium Bellevue,” excusing herself for “not writing long ago.” But she reported that she was trying to sell Sekula’s works from her father’s apartment and that Town of the Poor was “enormously admired” at a recent show. She gushed, “I love your pictures and wish I could own at least a hundred of them.”70 Yet again Parsons showed admira- tion and kindness, and demonstrated she was working in her professional capacity to promote Sekula’s work in the artist’s absence. Despite such efforts, Sekula’s first letter (after her August release) in October 1953 foreshadows problems to come. She offered to send Parsons a “batch of several very small sized watercolors,” a necessity due to limited materials and funds. Sekula’s fragility was also impacting her ability to make contacts in Switzerland: “I am unable to meet people or galleries, etc. or do much about it as my nerves seem just strong enough to even go on painting + not much more anymore.”71 Parsons was ready to redouble her efforts for Sekula. She wrote with an idea to sell the “very small sized watercolors” as Christmas cards at the Museum of Modern Art and encouraged Sekula to “Go on doing your beautiful things.” Sekula wanted more, though; she wanted to know when Parsons would offer her another show.72 Despite Sekula’s inconsistent presence and productivity over the last few years, Parsons intrep- idly offered her a show for October 1954. Sekula returned to New York in January 1954, no doubt in anticipation of preparing the exhibition.73 All was in place, then, for Sekula to work toward her next show at Parsons’s. She suffered another breakdown, however, and entered Hall-Brooke sanatorium, in Westport, Connecticut, from May to July 1954, reentering intermittently until March 1955. The director of Hall-Brooke reported to Sekula’s mother that there was “satisfactory symptomatic improvement” with “electrically-induced convulsions” each time.74 Recovery was not fast enough, however. Her solo show had to be forsaken. Suddenly, after Sekula was released in March 1955, her parents took her home to Switzerland. Treatment in both countries was generally comparable, but as Sekula wrote to Parsons in 1956, “sanatoriums are impossible for us to pay in the USA.”75 The move had dire consequences for Sekula and her networks. A social being, she was increasingly isolated from her friends and the art world. In one of many distraught letters, Sekula wrote in September 1957:

I miss New York daily and a few friends, though I have no writing contact anymore and seem like on an island. . . . I am totally lost and unhappy in Switzerland, but its hard to explain the reasons—I feel cut off from all former contact and encouragement and often would need somebody else to talk to except my parents. . . . I should never have come back here—but I couldn’t choose and they couldn’t afford it to leave me there.76

The move had calamitous implications for her art as well. From 1955 to 1957 Sekula preferred to paint on a small scale. She knew the American market preferred larger canvases, but she could not respond to that call with a clear conscience. She also had to deal with the practicalities of living on the move. As she shared with Parsons, “I work often on paper with oil, small size, as that suits my heart best—Yes, I have big canvases, new, but the point does not go after size and American public must have bigness. O.K.

American Art | Spring 2021 109 But I stick to my own need and prefer to work small scale for outward and moral reasons.”77 If in that account size appears as a purely personal choice, elsewhere other anxieties appear: “Would like to paint on a big canvas, in my mind I try and try to do it—but am subconsciously discouraged at having to hide it all again in some dusty storage place.”78 Is it a withering confidence or discouragement with itinerancy or both? In any case, if Sekula had been allowed to stay in New York, she might have approached scale less cautiously, returning, perhaps, to the monumentality of Town of the Poor. Parsons did her best to support her from afar, though her efforts after the artist’s move to Switzerland would prove to be in vain. The two had met up at the Venice Biennale in June 1956. (Sekula wrote, reflecting on Parsons’s ability to draw her out of depression, “it helped a lot.”79) Discussions about a future show fill their correspon- dence thereafter. Sekula was able to send the new works on paper in March 1957.80 They would be joined by two oils already in New York, including Town of the Poor. The reviews were generally positive but revealed an ambivalence that is telling. Sekula is introduced, for example, as “a gifted painter who has not shown for some time in New York”; her “larger oil, a faintly toned painting with characteristic deep recessions, pale figures and symbols, and a linear counterpoint dates from 1951.”81 Town of the Poor outshone its smaller, younger pictorial cousins, but its age was not unnoticed. Another reviewer also commented on the artist’s long absence, stating that Sekula “who has not had a one-man show here since 1952, shows small, abstract, oil-on-paper paintings.”82 This reviewer, Irving Sandler, would go on to lionize the masculine exploits of Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock in his book The Triumph of American Painting.83 He describes no triumph in Sekula: “Although different styles are utilized, all of her works depict a fanciful dream state, a playful never-never land of shifting forms and colors.” Such a purportedly lighthearted lack of forcefulness, compounded by relative smallness, could never impress Sandler.84 Parsons reported nine sales from the exhibition, but the ambivalent reviews suggest that Sekula’s American moment had passed.85 This was the last show she would have in the United States. Her acclaim for more than a decade of shows came, it seems, to naught. Gender discrimination, potential homophobia, allusions to nervousness, unfor- tunate idealization—none of these had impeded her career. What seems on reflection to have caused Sekula the most professional displacement was her move to Switzerland in 1955. The move precipitated her having to paint on a smaller scale, which did not meet the needs of the American art market. But even more consequentially, if she had been able to remain in New York, her non-romanticizing friends might have nurtured her, and she and Parsons could have continued to work together to build her once promising career. Instead, her story ends catastrophically. Sekula was in and out of institutions in Switzerland, where she took her own life on April 25, 1963. Sekula’s case has much to teach us. In April 1957, one month before her last solo exhibition at Parsons’s gallery, the artist and her mother took a trip to Paris, where they met Jean Dubuffet at an opening to his show. Sekula wrote to Parsons excitedly, “Am in Paris for a short time also trying to arrange a show for later on—met Dubuffet—we spoke about you—his new work is incredible.”86 Sekula’s mother also wrote to Parsons: “We went to the Vernissage [opening] of Dubuffet and spoke to him to[o]. Though I never cared to[o] much for his work many years ago, at [Galerie] Matisse this time I was absolutely fascinated by some of his recent work.”87 What is extraordinary about this encounter is not that Sekula and her mother were excited to meet the major French artist, but rather that Dubuffet’s obsession with “art of the mentally ill”—which, strictly speaking, Sekula produced—does not appear to have been a pressing topic of conversation, if it was one at all. Dubuffet, as mentioned

110 American Art | Spring 2021 above, is famous not only for his painting but also for his enormous collection of Art Brut, a considerable amount of which is art by people with mental illness. Despite Sekula’s chronic illness, however, neither she nor anyone then or now would consider her art to be “art of the mentally ill.” The obviousness of that assertion—despite its illogic—requires us to reassess the flaws of this category.Not considering the production of practicing artists who are mentally ill as art by people with mental illness perpetuates modernist fantasies about mental illness. These misconceptions persist in the market for and scholarship about “outsider art” as well as the trope of the genius, “tortured artist.” There are broader consequences as well. If the art by people with mental illness—as continually defined at places like the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne—has to remain brut, uneducated, uncivilized, even when it is romanticized as such, then we will undoubtedly continue to think of people with mental illness as equally brut. Sekula was clearly not brut and yet her art is “art by people with mental illness.” We cannot recognize the strength of Sonja Sekula’s contribution until we acknowl- edge the role of mental illness in her career (and in bringing that career to an end). Despite her schizophrenia, she was able to produce extraordinary work for more than twenty years. The support of her non-idealizing personal and professional community was instrumental in helping her produce such exceptional art, support that her forced removal to Switzerland eviscerated—along with her career. Among the modernists, Sekula was not the only artist with mental illness, of course. Considering mental illness in the art world more broadly—welcoming professional artists with mental illness into the category “art by people with mental illness”—humanizes those with mental illness. Indeed, it helps us to contemplate a vast range of sorts and degrees of illness, as well as how they affect art, artists, and their legacies.

Notes This essay is dedicated to Dr. Jess Tuchman and Carol S. Eliel, Parallel 6 “Person-first” usage is currently preferred Fiedorowicz, who encouraged this research Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider in disability studies, such that the person and fielded questions about psychiatry. I Art (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County has a disability rather than being defined thank my research assistants, Sonja Spain Museum of Art, 1992), 78–93. by it. and Margaret Coleman; incisive readers, Jay 2 Alfred H. Barr Jr., Cubism and Abstract 7 Preziosi, “Art History,” 301. Clarke and Eileen Bartos; Sekula scholars Art (New York: Museum of Modern Roger Perret and Dieter Schwarz Manon 8 Thévoz,Art Brut, 13. Art, 1936); and Barr, ed., Fantastic Art, for sharing her memories of Sekula; Starr 9 For a brief evaluation of Oppenheim’s Figura at the Museum of Modern Art; Dada, Surrealism (New York: Museum of art in relation to her depression, see Lena Lehmann and Laura Breitschmid at Modern Art, 1936). See Donald Preziosi’s Thomas McEvilley, “Basic Dichotomies the Kunstmuseum Luzern; Simona Ciuccio trenchant analysis of Fantastic Art in “Art in Meret Oppenheim’s Work,” in and Thomas Huth at the Kunstmuseum History, Museology, and the Staging Meret Oppenheim: Beyond the Teacup, Winterthur; Joan Rothfuss at the Walker Art of Modernity,” in Tuchman and Eliel, ed. Jacqueline Burckhardt and Bice Center; David Blum and Vlad Smolkin at Parallel Visions, 296–307. Curiger (New York: Independent the Peter Blum Gallery; Walter Denzler and 3 Michel Thévoz,Art Brut, trans. Curators, 1996), 49–52. Dr. Stefan Büchi at Sanatorium Hohenegg James Emmons (New York: Rizzoli 10 Leonora Carrington, Down Below Meilen; and the anonymous readers and International Publications, 1976), 41; (New York: New York Review Books, Robin Veder at American Art. Sarah Wilson, “From the Asylum to the 2017). Museum: Marginal Art in Paris and 11 Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her 1 Hans Prinzhorn, Bildnerei der New York, 1938–68,” in Tuchman and Life and Art (New York: Thames and Geisteskranken: Ein Beitrag zur Psychologie Eliel, Parallel Visions, 136–39; and L’Art Hudson, 2015), 9–10. und Psychopathologie der Gestaltung Brut (Paris: Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 12 Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1922). See 1967). Hal Foster, “Blinded Insights: On the Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in 4 Kraepelin was not a psychoanalyst, but Modernist Reception of the Art of the the 1940s (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, early twentieth-century artists viewed Mentally Ill,” October 97 (Summer 2001): 1993), 121–202, esp. 149, 353n67. 3–10; and on Klee and other Blaue Prinzhorn’s book about his collection 13 Jackson Davidow, “Art Therapy, Reiter artists, see Reinhold Heller, through a psychoanalytic lens. Occupational Therapy, and American “Expressionism’s Ancients,” in Maurice 5 Foster, “Blinded Insights,” 3. Modernism,” American Art 32, no. 2

American Art | Spring 2021 111 (Summer 2018): 96; and 167th Annual no. 5 (September-October 1971): 73–80. and the Surrealist Movement (London: Report of the Society of the New York Sekula’s name was misspelled frequently; Thames and Hudson, 1985). Hospital 1938 (New York: Society of the the primary-source errors are reproduced 26 Marina Warner introduction to New York Hospital, 1939), 82, 85, 84, as printed. A recent effort to revitalize her Carrington, Down Below, xxiii. See André 88–89. All New York Hospital annual reputation was the Swiss exhibition Sonja Breton and Paul Éluard, Immaculate reports cited in this article are avail- Sekula and Friends. A New York show, Conception, trans. Jon Graham (London: able at archive.org. An excellent layman’s Sonja Sekula: A Survey, followed in 2017 Serpent’s Tail, 1992). history is Jeffrey A. Lieberman with at the Peter Blum Gallery in New York. 27 André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Ogi Ogas, Shrinks: The Untold Story of 19 For biographical details, see Dieter Psychiatry (New York: Little, Brown and Howard (1928; New York: Grove Press, Schwarz, “From New York to Zurich 1960). Company, 2015). 1943–1963,” in Schwarz, Sonja Sekula, 14 On Sekula’s exhibition record, see Dieter 63–93; Roger Perret, “Der Ruf der 28 Schwarz, Sonja Sekula, 272. Exhibition Schwarz, Sonja Sekula 1918–1963 Sirenen,” in Sonja Sekula: Im Zeichen by 31 Women ran January 5–February 6, (Winterthur: Kunstmuseum Winterthur, der Frage, im Zeichen der Antwort; 1943. See Davidson and Rylands, Peggy 1996), 268–75; Susan Davidson and Ausgewählte Texte und Wortbilder auf Guggenheim, 290–92. Philip Rylands, eds., Peggy Guggenheim deutsch, englisch und französisch (1932– 29 The exhibition ran June 12– and Frederick Kiesler: The Story of Art of 1962), ed. Perret (Basel: Lenos, 1996), July 7, 1945. Davidson and Rylands, This Century (New York: Guggenheim 178–235; and Perret, “Biography,” Peggy Guggenheim, 324–25. Museum Publications, 2004), 291–92, in Schwarz, Sonya Sekula, 249–60. 30 “The Passing Shows,” ARTnews 44, no. 9 296–97, 324–25, 336–37; and Lee Hall, Although the timing of their migra- (July 1945): 26. Betty Parsons: Artist, Dealer, Collector tion suggests that they could have been (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1991), escaping European anti-Semitism, other 31 “In Brief: Exhibitions,” New York Times, 182–85. Sekula scholars with whom I have con- May 16, 1948, X8; and “Sonja Sekula,” 15 On misogyny and homophobia in sulted do not believe that her father’s ARTnews 47, no. 3 (May 1948): 48. the art world at the time, see Ann Jewish heritage played a role in the move. 32 Sonja Sekula quoted in Cicely Aikman, Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: 20 A later letter confirms this was Sekula’s “An Artist Speaks: Sonia Sekula,” The Other Politics (New Haven: Yale Univ. first hospitalization. George Hughes League (Winter 1945–46): 2, quoted in Press, 1997); Gibson, “Universality to Bertie Sekula, March 7, 1955, Sonja Schwarz, “From New York to Zurich,” 65. and Difference in Women’s Abstract Sekula chart, Sanatorium Hohenegg, 33 Perret, “Biography,” 249. Painting: Krasner, Ryan, Sekula, Piper, W ll 91.4271, Staatsarchiv des Kantons and Streat,” Yale Journal of Criticism 8, Zürich (hereafter Sanatorium Hohenegg). 34 Sonja Sekula to Frida Kahlo, New York, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 103–32; Griselda Dr. Stefan Büchi (Sanatorium Hohenegg) ca. 1946, Museo Frida Kahlo, The Blue Pollock, “The Missing Future: MoMA has approved my use of these records House, Mexico City. Thanks to Roger and Modern Women,” in Modern in this article. Due to the Health Perret for sharing these letters. Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Insurance Portability and Accountability 35 Sonja Sekula to Frida Kahlo, summer Modern Art, ed. Cornelia H. Butler and Act (HIPAA), Sekula’s records are not 1946, Museo Frida Kahlo. Alexandra Schwartz (New York: Museum publicly available in the United States. of Modern Art, 2010), 28–55; and Mary 36 Schwarz, “From New York to Zurich,” 64. 21 169th Annual Report of the Society of the Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, 37 Sonja Sekula, Untitled Sketchbook, August New York Hospital, 1940 (New York: Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan 1957, Inv. Nr. 1996.40.2, Kunstmuseum Society of the New York Hospital, 1941), Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler; Five Winterthur. This and all other trans- 54, 74–77; and 170th Annual Report of Painters and the Movement that Changed lations are by the author, unless otherwise the Society of the New York Hospital, 1941 Modern Art (New York: Little, Brown and noted. (New York: Society of the New York Company, 2018). Hospital, 1942), 36. 38 H. D., “One-Man Shows: Lautrec,” 16 Typically the illness is chronic, but New York Times, May 19, 1946, X6. 22 Morris Kantor quoted in Perret, Sonja there are cases of sporadic schizophre- The exhibition ran May 14–June 1, Sekula, 194. nia. See Courtenay M. Harding et al., 1946. Davidson and Rylands, Peggy “The Vermont Longitudinal Study of 23 André Breton to Sonja Sekula, August 21, Guggenheim, 336–37. Persons with Severe Mental Illness, I: 1944, private collection of Roger Perret; 39 “Sonja Sekula,” ARTnews 45, no. 3 Methodology, Study Sample, and Overall and Charles Duits, André Breton a-t-il dit (May 1946): 61. The Night Paintings Status 32 Years Later,” American Journal passe? (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1969), 102, included in the exhibition were Fountain of Psychiatry 144, no. 6 (June 1987): quoted in Schwarz, “From New York to under the Sea, Sleep Walker, Shadows (of 718–26. Zurich,” 64–65. the Moon), Midnight, Red Night, Moon 17 Griselda Pollock, “Seeking ‘It’: Seeing 24 David Hare quoted in Foote, “Who was Dust, Eagle Darkness, Faceless Night, Arctic Beyond; Some Thoughts on Sonja Sonia Sekula?” 79. Night, Apparition of the Window, Night Sekula’s Oeuvre,” in Sonja Sekula and 25 Roger Cardinal, “Surrealism and the Animals, Aube, Frost Night, Projection Friends, ed. Fanni Fetzer and Dominik Paradigm of the Creative Subject,” in North, and Self Portrait. “Eight gouaches” Müller (Lucerne: Kunstmuseum Luzern, Tuchman and Eliel, Parallel Visions, are announced but only two are named 2016), 80. 94–119, quote at 114. See also Mary Ann in the potentially truncated version of 18 Already in 1971 it was necessary Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, and Gwen the flyer in Sekula’s archives: Painting to title an article “Who was Sonia Raaberg, eds., Surrealism and Women (Earthquake) (1942) and Painting Sekula?” Nancy Foote, “Who was (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); (Beginning of Toys) (1939). Their locations Sonia Sekula?,” Art in America 59, and Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists are all unknown, but one from the series

112 American Art | Spring 2021 can be seen in Schwarz, Sonja Sekula, 57 Fear and stigma keep many from visiting also gives (“Biography,” 252). Dr. Regina no. 10. Sonja Sekula: First Exhibition patients in a mental hospital. Many justi- Keyler to the author, October 10, 2017. of Paintings (New York: Art of This fications are also given. In Breton’s novel 69 See Susan Lanzoni, “An Epistemology Century, 1946) in IX. Ausstellungen- Nadja, whose title character is institu- of the Clinic: Ludwig Binswanger’s Kritiken, Sonja Sekula Archive, Zurich. tionalized, the narrator refuses to visit her Phenomenology of the Other,” Critical 40 “Sonja Sekula” (1946), 61. because “My general contempt for psy- Inquiry 30, no. 1 (Autumn 2003): chiatry, its rituals and its works, is reason 41 Hall, Betty Parsons, 91, 182–87. 160–86; and Sekula chart, Number enough for my not yet having dared 14194, Blatt 1, 1.10.58, Sanatorium 42 Sonja Sekula to Bertie Sekula, investigate what has become of Nadja.” Hohenegg. November 5, 1947, VII. Briefe 1934–62, Breton, Nadja, 141. 70 Betty Parsons to Sonja Sekula, Sonya Sekula Archive, Zurich. 58 Judith Buchanan, “Social Support December 24, 1952, Parsons 43 See likely works in Schwarz, Sonja Sekula, and Schizophrenia: A Review of the Correspondence. nos. 21 and 23. Literature,” Archives of Psychiatric Nursing 71 Sonja Sekula to Betty Parsons, 9, no. 2 (April 1995): 68–76. 44 The show ran February 21–March 12, October 14, 1953, Parsons 1949. Hall, Betty Parsons, 182. 59 Betty Parsons to Sonja Sekula, May 4, Correspondence. 1951, Betty Parsons Gallery records 45 “In Brief,” New York Times, 72 Betty Parsons to Sonja Sekula, and personal papers, ca. 1920–91, bulk February 27, 1949, quoted in Schwarz, October 22, 1953; Sekula to Parsons, 1946–83, box 16, folder 30, Archives of “From New York to Zurich,” 80. November 25, 1953, both in Parsons American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Correspondence. 46 Perret, “Biography,” 251–52. Washington, D.C. (hereafter Parsons 47 The show ran April 2–21, 1951. Hall, Correspondence). 73 Betty Parsons to Sonja Sekula, January 9, Betty Parsons, 183. 1954, Parsons Correspondence; and 60 The show ran March 10–29, 1952. Hall, Perret, Sonja Sekula, 283. 48 T. B. H. [Thomas B. Hess], “Sonia Betty Parsons, 183. 74 Hughes to Bertie Sekula, March 7, 1955. Sekula,” ARTnews 50, no. 2 (April 61 D. A. [Dore Ashton], “Sonia Sekula,” 1951): 48. Art Digest, March 15, 1952, 20. Ashton’s 75 Sonja Sekula to Betty Parsons, October 9, 49 Stuart Preston, “Chiefly Abstract,” review, like many period sources, refers to 1956, Parsons Correspondence. New York Times, April 2, 1951, 106. the painting as City of the Poor. For con- 76 Sonja Sekula to Betty Parsons, See also Mary Cole, “Sonia Sekula,” Art sistency I use the Museum of Modern September 4, 1957, Parsons Digest 25, no. 13 (April 1951): 17. Art’s title, The Town of the Poor. Correspondence. 50 Fanni Fetzer, “The Right Person at 62 Stuart Preston, “Shahn, Hare and 77 Sonja Sekula to Betty Parsons, the Wrong Time in the Wrong Place: Others,” New York Times, March 16, January 28, 1956, Parsons Conjectures on Sonja Sekula (1918– 1952, X9; and “In Brief: Exhibitions,” Correspondence. 1963),” in Fetzer and Müller, Sonja Sekula X8. See also Carlyle Burrows, “Two 78 Sekula to Parsons, October 9, 1956, and Friends, 38. Artists,” New York Herald Tribune, Parsons Correspondence. March 16, 1952; and Henry McBride, 51 For more on Sekula, Cage, and silence, 79 Ibid. see Perret, Sonja Sekula, 210–12. “By Henry McBride,” ARTnews 51, no. 2 (April 1952): 47. 80 Sonja Sekula to Betty Parsons, March 31, 52 Conversation between Manina Jouffroy 1957, Parsons Correspondence. and Roger Perret, January 12, 1996, in 63 On Abstract Expressionists’ predilection 81 Dore Ashton, “Art: Painting by Haitian Perret, Sonya Sekula, 213. for large-scale works, see Jeffrey Wechsler, ed., Abstract Expressionism: Other Primitives,” New York Times, May 14, 53 Sonja Sekula to Manina Thoeren, July 6, Dimensions; An Introduction to Small 1957, 71. 1951, quoted in Perret, Sonja Sekula, Scale Painterly Abstraction in America, 82 I. H. S. [Irving Sandler], “Sonia Sekula,” 213–15. It is unknown if the ellipses in 1940–1965 (New Brunswick, N.J.: ARTnews 56, no. 4 (Summer 1957): 21. Perret are original to Sekula. Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 83 Irving Sandler, The Triumph of 54 The hospital’s annual report empha- 1989). American Painting: A History of Abstract sizes the benefits of electroshock therapy, 64 D.A., “Sonia Sekula,” 20. Expressionism (New York: Praeger, 1970). insulin therapy, EEG, and prefrontal lobotomy, the last of which they (thank- 65 Sekula often lauds Klee in her notes about 84 Sandler confirmed both his taste for fully) performed sparingly. See The Society art. V. Kunstbetrachtungen, Sonya Sekula large-scale works and his lack of interest of the New York Hospital: The Annual Archive, Zurich. in Sekula in an interview in Wechsler, Report of the Medical Director of the 66 The show ran May 12–June 14, 1952. Abstract Expressionism, 76–84. New York Hospital–Westchester Division, Hall, Betty Parsons, 183. 85 Betty Parsons to Sonja Sekula, June 4, 1951 (New York: Society of the New York 67 Stuart Preston, “By Groups and Singly,” 1957; Sekula to Parsons, August 28, Hospital, 1952), 23–24. New York Times, May 18, 1952, X8. 1959; and Parsons to Sekula, May 15, 55 Cage quoted in Foote, “Who was Sonia 1959, and December 14, 1959, Parsons 68 An inquiry to the Bellevue archives Correspondence. Sekula?,” 79. resulted in confirmation that Sekula 56 Sonja Sekula to John Cage, box 20, was there four times. The correspondent 86 Sonja Sekula to Betty Parsons, April 30, folder 9, John Cage Archives, Music wrote that the first visit was October 15, 1957, Parsons Correspondence. Library, Northwestern University 1951–August 6, 1953, but the admission 87 Bertie Sekula to Betty Parsons, May 16, Libraries. date is more likely 1952, the year Perret 1957, Parsons Correspondence.

American Art | Spring 2021 113 PETER BLUM GALLERY

ART REVIEW

Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury’ Review: Sketching a Path Into a New Era

An exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art shows how artists used the most elemental of creative practices—drawing—to reinvent their world.

By Eric Gibson Dec. 5, 2020, New York

Because drawing is more modest in scale and intimate in its mode of address than many of the other forms of contemporary art being shown today, it is easy to overlook or take for granted. Kudos to the Museum of Modern Art, then, for thrusting it into the conversation with “Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury.” The show covers the years 1948-61, when in the aftermath of World War II artists felt art itself had to be reinvented from the ground up and chose that most fundamental of processes, drawing, for the task. At every turn “Degree Zero” upends our expectations to tell us something new about what was going on at that time.

The approximately 80 works here were all drawn from MoMA’s collection by Associate Curator Samantha Friedman, the show’s organizer, and have been installed with sufficient space between them to permit safe viewing at close quarters. They were made by artists from Sonja Sekula, The Voyage, 1956, ink and watercolor on paper, 12.5 x 9.5 inches

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Latin America, Asia and Africa in addition to Europe and North America, until recently the museum’s almost exclusive focus. So along with MoMA pantheon members like Henri Matisse and Jackson Pollock, we encounter the likes of Jean Dubuffet, Willys de Castro, Otto Piene and Yayoi Kusama, as well as names likely to be as new to the general public as they were to me. This broad-gauge approach is nothing less than revelatory, forcing us to think differently about certain exalted reputations as a result.

The show’s theme is poignantly captured in an untitled charcoal and chalk drawing by the French abstractionist Hans Hartung from 1960. It consists of closely abutting dark, black vertical marks of almost uniform length. On the one hand it reads as a kind of existentialist manifesto, “I draw, therefore I am.” Yet at the same time, the individual parts seem to be in the process of resolving themselves into an image—art coming into being before our eyes.

Among the unforgettable discoveries is Sonja Sekula (1918-1963), who divided her time between the U.S. and her native Switzerland, where, the label tells us, she underwent treatment for mental illness. “The Voyage” (1956) is a jewel-like, ink-and-watercolor work organized into a loose grid. Each of its panels is a different color and obsessively filled with a dense web of lines and minuscule circles within which the only recognizable image is that of a ship. It is a mesmerizing, vertiginous record of the journey through a charged interior landscape that demands—and rewards—prolonged, close scrutiny. A pity, then, that it’s hung almost too high to be seen properly.

But the artist whose work is most likely to linger in the mind is that of Joong Seop Lee (1916- 1956). A refugee during the Korean War who was continually on the move, he “drew” with a sharp-pointed object on the foil from cigarette packages, adding paint to the incisions. “People Reading the Newspaper (Number 84)” (1950-52), one of three such works here, is a semi- abstract image that is as much about the lively, all-over dialog between dark lines and colored shapes as it is a group portrait. Adding to the work’s impact is the contrast between its intense pictorial energy and diminutive size—about that of an iPhone screen.

Next to such works, forged in the fire of adversity by individuals for whom art-making was nothing less than a lifeline, the efforts of the high priests of the New York School can seem slight, even trifling. Jasper Johns’s shadowy image of an American flag looks wanly ho-hum, while the blizzard of lines making up Cy Twombly’s three untitled works comes across as so much pseudo-Abstract Expressionist posturing. Ellsworth Kelly’s “Study for La Combe II” (1950), a network of diagonal black lines on a white ground derived from the play of shadows he saw on a stoop, has the feel of a clever design-school project and little more.

The only such figure who emerges unscathed is first-generation Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline. In his collage-drawing “Untitled II” (1952), thick black lines lunge across a now-yellowed page torn from a Brooklyn phone book (“Annlew Louis…Ann&Emily Bridal Shoppe…Ann Leone Silkscreen Studio…Annable Oliver S”). The thick marks are urgent and authentic, playing off both the page’s flatness and rectangular shape, as well as the underlying pattern of type.

Aside from the venerable Matisse and Alberto Giacometti, the other artists who shine here are the Latin Americans. Their work is a live wire newly threaded through MoMA’s permanent collection displays and exhibitions thanks to an enhanced commitment to this region in recent

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY years. It enlarges the language of geometric abstraction pioneered by Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian in the early 20th century, not only with a new formal inventiveness and rigor—their imagery is much more architectonic—but also, God bless them, humor. You often encounter witty interplays between figure and ground, two dimensions and three, as in the Brazilian Hércules Barsotti’s “Drawing No. 1 (Desenho No.1)” (1958) where one moment its horizontal black spines appear flat on the sheet and in the next to be ballooning out at you like a relief sculpture.

Plan on an unhurried visit to “Degree Zero.” You’re going to want to spend a lot of time with these drawings—and maybe even come back.

—Mr. Gibson is the Journal’s Arts in Review editor.

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A Curator’s Guide to Degree Zero Exhibition Highlights Take a close look at 10 essential works from the exhibition, selected by curator Samantha Friedman. Samantha Friedman // Nov 17, 2020

Modest, immediate, and direct, drawing was the ideal medium for the period of renewal that followed the Second World War. Degree Zero features 75 drawings from MoMA’s collection made between 1948 and 1961, spanning movements, geographies, and generations. These 10 highlights show some of the myriad ways artists started again from scratch.

Sonja Sekula. The Voyage. 1956. Ink and watercolor on paper

“Small size . . . suits my heart best,” Sonja Sekula wrote to her dealer Betty Parsons in 1956. “The American public must have bigness. OK. But I stick to my own need and prefer to work small scale.” The portable medium of drawing allowed the artist, who struggled with mental illness, to continue to work as she traveled back and forth between New York and her native Switzerland, where she received treatment. This transatlantic journey is alluded to in this work’s title and in the ship that appears in one of its interior frames. Together, these jewel-toned zones suggest a narrative, as one might find in the panes of a stained-glass window.

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Positively Ninth Street Women By the mid-1970s, critic Thomas Hess acknowledged the critical favoritism shown to postwar male artists when he singled out the women of the Ninth Street Show as “sparkling Amazons.” By Tim Keane | November 30, 2019

Elaine de Kooning, “Bullfight” (1959), oil on canvas, 77 3/8 in. x 130 1/2 in. (Denver Art Museum Collection: Vance H. Kirkland Acquisition Fund, 2012.300 © Elaine de Kooning Trust Photography courtesy of the Denver Art Museum)

KATONAH, New York — The Ninth Street Show in 1951 is among the more enduring of the origin stories about New York’s postwar art scene, uniting the theme of artist solidarity to the ideal that art can be a vocation unsullied by money and fame.

As the story goes, painter Jean Steubing, working on behalf of her obscure New York artist-peers, secured gallery space in a vacated storefront on East Ninth Street near Broadway. The resulting exhibition was curated by Leo Castelli with substantial input from artists, around 60 of whom were included in the hastily assembled roster. History — or legend — holds that the show was a breakthrough. Museum curators and uptown collectors attended and began to acquire this brave new art. Art reviewers noticed, too. And as the 1950s progressed, New York surpassed Paris as the art-making capital of the world.

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In reality, the tale of the Ninth Street Show did not end quite happily ever after. Only a handful of the Ninth Street artists gained increased recognition from it. Even fewer saw any sales. Still, postwar New York accommodated these artists who, for the most part, operated without institutional affiliations. In the 1950s, a downtown loft could be rented for about $30 a month — the equivalent of about $400 in today’s money. So most Ninth Street artists soldiered on in obscurity, getting by through shitty day jobs or family money while finding morale boosts and genuine recognition through their own cooperative galleries. Many finally left the city. Some, like Steubing herself, abandoned art-making entirely.

Franz Kline, Poster for “9th St.” Show (1951), linoleum cut, 16 x 8 1/2 in.

Another messy fact is that The Ninth Street Show reflected the era’s sexism. Archival evidence indicates that only about 11 women were included. Sparkling Amazons: Abstract Expressionist Women of the 9th St. Show at the Katonah Museum of Art revisits these 11 artists.

As one of many current retrospectives about postwar American women artists, this exhibition rounds out the art historical record even as it undercuts the artists’ long-professed desire to be recognized for their art rather than for their status as women. Still, this new, extended spotlight has been a long time coming. By

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY the mid-1970s, critic Thomas Hess acknowledged the critical favoritism shown to postwar male artists when he singled out the Ninth Street women as “sparkling Amazons,” a jarring choice of words that perpetuates the chauvinism it aims to debunk.

Reservations about Hess’s diction aside, the exhibition of 32 works, curated by Michele Wije, also includes period photographs, artist statements, and explanatory wall charts. The sharply focused show is cinematic and intimate. While the featured works vary greatly in scale and tone, the exhibition succeeds through its inbuilt polyphonic variation.

Four wall-sized paintings serve as the exhibition’s pillars, showcasing marquee names from that Ninth Street roster; these include Lee Krasner’s botanical epic “The Seasons” (1957); Helen Frankenthaler’s coastal fantasia “Seascape with Dunes” (1962); Elaine de Kooning’s violent drama “Bullfight” (1959); and Joan Mitchell’s romantic, eruptive topography, “Slate” (1959).

Rounding out the famous five is Grace Hartigan, whose abstractions frequently integrate figuration and still life, confounding art criticism’s norms about stylistic purity. On Ninth Street, such shape-shifting overrode careerist strategies. And these painters did without Artist Statements saddled with theory and buzzwords. Self-branding seemed pointless. Of all these eclectic artists, only Mitchell and Frankenthaler developed a signature style.

In addition to unveiling these iconoclastic energies, the exhibition reveals Ninth Street’s internationalism. Two sculptors, the Austrian native Day Schnabel and Russian-born, French-educated Marguerite Guitou Knoop, bring classical and Cubist elements to bear on American audacity, producing sculptures that look primordial yet modern, accessible while also gnomic.

Marguerite Guitou Knoop, “Abstract” (1944), stone and marble, 39 3/8 x 17 x 8 in. (Accession Number 56.169.1-2 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Mrs. William H. Harkness 56.169.1-2)

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And no single figure personifies this New and Old World hybridity more than Sonja Sekula, the Swiss-born poet and painter whose art converts subconscious Surrealist imagery into meticulous formal compositions. Highly regarded by fellow European émigré artists and American peers in the Coenties Slip neighborhood, Sekula found her momentum interrupted by a mental illness that led to frequent institutionalization; this lifelong struggle culminated in her suicide in 1963.

Although biographers characterize Sekula as an unhinged savant, her work reflects discipline and acumen that make her firepower all the more unnerving. Her spectral painting “7 Am” (1948-49) remodels everyday city exteriors and amplifies their nightmarish peculiarities. The gray skylines, building facades, and scaffolding form an underlying grid upon which Sekula orchestrates percolating dramas. The painting’s muted colors and dissolving forms meet clarifying lines as a dreamscape emerges through a thrilling, imaginative cartography.

Sonja Sekula (1918 – 1963), “7am” (ca. 1948-49), oil on canvas 24 7/8 x 30 3/4 in. (Collection Edouard Labouret I HonestEye LLC)

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Sekula conveys such magnitudes even in small-scale works. In “A Word, a Name, a Gift” (1952) green arches and brickwork form a fragmented building facade. Openings within the structure’s stories form a kind of punctuation while pale yellows and black lines glide vertically down the picture plane suggesting Sekula as poet voicing her utterances within the silent domain of paint.

Like Sekula, Anne Ryan brought her experience with poetry to bear on abstract art. Born in 1889, Ryan was a widely published poet when she visited a Kurt Schwitters exhibition in New York in 1941 and immediately thereafter turned to making visual art, especially collage. Dispensing with the often flamboyant tendencies in Dada and Surrealist collage, she repurposed paper, candy wrappers, rag paper, worn fabrics, varied textiles, and newsprint to make abstract works that unfold like hypnotic tone poems. Ryan’s nuanced, contemplative works replicate the condensed syntax and sudden insights associated with poetry, as earth-toned color bands meet bright, irregular forms that generate a visual correlate.

Ann Ryan, “Number 547” (1954), cut and torn papers and fabrics pasted on paper, 16 3/4 x 30 in. (Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Elizabeth McFadden, 1986)

Like Ryan, Perle Fine harnessed the allover, gestural liberties in Abstract Expressionism to create and then further explore transitional states of being as well as precipitous, shifting moods. Fine’s liquescent, luminous color washes in “Untitled” (1951), from her breakthrough Prescience series, feature pinks, grays, and yellows in which pictographic and calligraphic forms materialize, seeming to float in and out of the picture plane like half-formed apprehensions coasting through the subconscious.

Fine was enjoying peak critical acclaim at the time of the Ninth Street Show and her experience before and after it encapsulates what a mixed blessing the era was. Despite the positive notices, she was dropped by the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1954. In response, she left the city and set up a home studio in Springs on Eastern Long Island, where she continued to

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY make transformative art for many decades. Of her dedication, her friend and neighbor in Springs declared that “Perle never let anything interfere with her art! Never!”

Perle Fine, “Untitled (Prescience)” (1951), oil on canvas, 44 x 37 in. (© AE Artworks, Courtesy Berry Campbell, New York)

In hindsight, maybe a few things did impede. After all, the culture in which these Ninth Street artists created their art effortlessly ignored it, and women’s art was considered less valuable than men’s. So it was then, so it is now. And today American art remains further imperiled by its absurd, inflated commodification, by the banal ideological agendas of cultural institutions, and of course by a deep-seated general neglect of its real meanings. By taking up painting as a personal obsession and vocation that provide its own inherent incentives and rewards, these artists remind us about the deep pleasures and high cost of independence. And, rather urgently, their lives and works embody the countercultural power that can flow from all serious art.

Sparkling Amazons: Abstract Expressionist Women of the 9th St. Show continues at the Katonah Museum of Art (134 Jay Street – Route 22, Katonah, New York) through January 26.

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Overdue Recognition for Abstract Expressionist and Alumna Sonja Sekula

OCT 3, 2019

Sarah Lawrence alumna Sonja Sekula (1918-1963), whose tremendous talent as an artist did not prevent her from fading into obscurity, will be one of 11 female Abstract Expressionists to be featured in a Katonah Museum of Art exhibit this fall. Titled Sparkling Amazons: Abstract Expressionist Women of the 9th St. Show, the exhibit will present 32 works by women artists who were part of the 1951 “9th Street Show” in New York, which the museum describes as “a pivotal moment for the emergence and acceptance of Abstract Expressionism.” The exhibit opens on October 6 and will run through January 26, 2020. Included will be seven paintings by Sekula along with pieces by contemporaries including Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Elaine de Kooning, and Grace Hartigan. These prominent artists are the subjects of Ninth Street Women, a book by Mary Gabriel, whose publication by Little, Brown and Company last year coincided with the Sonja Sekula, 1939 Sarah Lawrence College Yearbook | Photo: courtesy of Sarah Lawrence College planning of the Katonah exhibit. This is the first time works by the female 9th Street artists will be brought together since the original groundbreaking exhibit 68 years ago. Curator Michele Wije came up with the idea for the show while considering exhibits that have changed the course of art history. “The 9th Street Show was one of those,” she said. “I thought it would be interesting to focus on the women artists from 9th Street because Abstract Expressionism was always a very male-centered story.”

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Sonja Sekula Pour l'Animal Noir, 1945 | ink and gouache on paper | 12 x 16 1/2 in. (30.5 x 41.9 cm) | Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, NY

The 9th Street Show was assembled by artists of what came to be known as the “New York School” who were frustrated by the lack of attention and respect they received from the city’s art scene. Curated by the now renowned gallerist Leo Castelli and located in an abandoned East Village storefront, the show featured works by 70 artists, almost all of them men, some of whom would go on to achieve legendary status, such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline. Wije said there were many women artists who were part of the “artistic fabric” of the expressionist movement, but their contributions have generally been under-acknowledged if not completely overlooked. “Women have kind of been elided from art history. Now is the moment that we’re bringing them back,” she said. “The 9th Street Show was the catalyst to show that women artists were as productive as their male counterparts.” Creating a chronological span of the artists’ work through the 1950s, Wije has made it possible to follow their stylistic evolution and maturation during that important decade of American art history. “Many of these artists, like Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, went on to have incredible careers,” she said. “But others, like Sonja Sekula, kind of disappeared.” There have been only three U.S. exhibits devoted to Sekula’s work since her death, though she has achieved some fame in her native Switzerland. Still, her contributions to Abstract Expressionism have remained largely unsung and her compelling life story is unknown to most.

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Sonja Sekula 7am, ca. 1948-49 | oil on canvas | 24 7/8 x 30 3/4 in. (63.1 x 78.1 cm) | Collection Edouard Labouret I HonestEye LLC

Born in Switzerland in 1918, Sekula relocated to New York with her parents in 1936 and enrolled at Sarah Lawrence the following year. According to a timeline created by family members, she studied philosophy and literature with poet Horace Gregory, and painting with Kurt Roesch. Following a summer trip to Europe with her parents, Sekula suffered a mental breakdown, launching a lifelong battle with mental illness. She was hospitalized in White Plains and her parents moved to Scarsdale and then to Westport, Connecticut. Upon release from the hospital, Sekula studied at the Art Students League in New York with Morris Kantor and moved back to Manhattan with her parents when she was 24. She was soon immersed in the city’s avant garde arts world; her social circle included André Breton, Frida Kahlo, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and David Hare, and after moving downtown on her own, she lived in the same Monroe Street building as John Cage and Merce Cunningham, who became friends. Sekula began achieving success at age 25 with a series of exhibitions, including solo shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of the Century Gallery and at the Betty Parsons Gallery, where she continued to show until 1957. Reviews in both America and at shows in Europe were enthusiastic, with one reviewer describing her as “an abstract Paganini.” “She really comes out of the European tradition of surrealism,” said Wije. “What’s interesting to me about these artists we’ve pulled together is that the ones who had European connections are much more entrenched in European art forms. I would characterize her work as coming out of the surrealist tradition. It’s also very quirky—each piece is so different. There’s no stylistic continuity with her, which could speak to her biographical situation.” Sekula’s friend, composer Morton Feldman, later said, “She was unusually gifted; her work had conviction, an authenticity that made you wonder who this person is and what is going to happen to all this talent.'' Sadly, Sekula’s mental illness persisted and she was repeatedly hospitalized. “What’s really unfortunate about her life is that it seems she suffered from either bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, and today could have been treated with medication,” said Wije. In addition, Sekula was an out lesbian at a time when being so could be perilous. As reported by her biographer for the glbtq Encyclopedia, she was subjected to conversion therapy, as her

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY lesbianism was seen as a “debilitating manifestation of schizophrenia” and she endured “shock therapy, injections with various mind-altering drugs, and wet-sheet wraps.” In a wearily poignant entry in Sekula’s diary in 1960, she wrote: "Let homosexuality be forgiven . . . for most often she did not sin against nature but tried to be true to the law of her own—to feel guilt about having loved a being of your own kind, body and soul, is hopeless." The entry suggests she was well familiar with the idea of “sinning against nature.” However, despite the difficulties she endured, Sekula produced an impressive catalog of paintings, and was also a prolific poet. Some of her largest works reside with the Museum of Modern Art, but, as it was closed for renovations during the last year, the works were unavailable to the Katonah exhibit. Nevertheless, Wije acquired a rich sampling of Sekula pieces in a variety of mediums including ink and watercolor, ink and gouache, oil, mixed media, and watercolor. “She had a very keen sense of color,” said Wije. “If you’re good at watercolor or gouache and you’re a good colorist, that’s a wonderful combination.”

Sonja Sekula The Voyage, 1956 | ink and watercolor on paper | 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. (31.8 x 24.1 cm) | Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, NY

Sonja Sekula never achieved the recognition that she sought for her work. In 1961, she wrote: "No more reading of art magazines . . . I am as good as bad as all of them, even though I am ignored . . . I go on." Two years later, she committed suicide, at age 45. Still, the 21st century may yet come to recognize her unique talent and contribution to Abstract Expressionism, and the Katonah Museum of Art exhibit provides a fresh step in that direction.

(Note: The Sonja Sekula paintings included in the Katonah Museum of Art exhibit are: Pour l'Animal Noir, 1945, 7am, ca. 1948-49, A Word, A Name, A Gift, 1952, Air, 1956, The Voyage, 1956, Untitled (Human Head, Surface, Space), 1956, and Untitled (Bottle), 1958.)

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Sonja Sekula’s Time May Have Finally Come Sekula was part of a number of different overlapping scenes, and she was loved and thought highly of by many. And then nearly everything about her and her work got forgotten.

GALLERIES | WEEKEND By John Yau Saturday April 29, 2017

Sonja Sekula (1918-1963) piqued my curiosity when I first saw some of her works just a few months ago. Still, I was not sure what to expect when I went to the current exhibition Sonja Sekula: A Survey at Peter Blum Gallery (April 21 – June 24, 2017). I had known that this troubled, Swiss-born artist was part of an international circle of artists, writers, choreographers, and composers in New York in the 1940s, when she was in her early twenties, and that since her death by suicide in 1963, she and her work have largely been effaced from history. But aside from a few biographical facts and the handful of works I saw, I knew little else, but it was more than enough to bring me back.

Ethnique, (1961), gouache on paper, 20 1/8 x 20 1/8 inches (all images courtesy Peter Blum At one point, while circling the Gallery, New York) galleries two space for the second or third time, I stopped to peer into a vitrine and saw photographs of a young woman sitting in the apartment of Andre Breton when he lived in New York during World War II. In another photograph she and sister are hugging Frida Kahlo, who is recuperating in a New York hospital room. There is a letter and drawing she sent to John Cage and a postcard she sent to Joseph Cornell. There is a photograph of a costume that she designed for Merce Cuningham, and an announcement for her show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in 1946.

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Sekula and her family relocated to New York from Lucerne, Switzerland when she was a child. She lived in New York, New Mexico, Mexico, and in different cities in Europe. She was friends with Gordon Onslow-Ford. She fell in love with various women, including the Mexican artist and poet Alice Rahon, who had once been married to Wolfgang Paalen. Some of her work seems to reflect her knowledge of Onslow-Ford and Paalen, who, along with Lee Mullican formed the short-lived Dynaton group, and offered another path to abstraction. Sekula was part of a number of different overlapping scenes, and she was loved and thought highly of by many. And then nearly everything about her and her work got forgotten.

Sekula’s last show in New York was at the Swiss Institute in 1996. There was an extensive catalog, but nothing seemed to happen. Perhaps the current exhibition will stir up a wider interest. It certainly would in a just world.

The works are dated 1942 to 1963, the entirety of her short-lived career. Sekula, who never worked big, also never became a gestural or a geometric painter, but this is also true of Charles Seliger (1926 – 2009), an artist who was also given his first solo show by Peggy 7-Levels, (1958), ink and watercolor on paper, 14 3/4 x 10 1/8 Guggenheim at Art of this Century in 1945, a year inches before Sekula. Although they were both influenced by Surrealism and associated with Abstract Expressionism, neither of them fit the profile of the macho painter using a loaded brush or working on a large, post-easel scale. As the work of Thomas Nozkowski proves, orginality has nothing to do with scale and production costs, that these measures are capitalist myths.

Discussing the exhibition Abstract Expressionism, the first in-depth look at that movement to be mounted in England since 1959, which he organized for the Royal Academy in London (September 24, 2016 – January 2, 2017), David Anfam said: Now is the moment to see its breadth and depth afresh. It’s an art of enormous ambition and originality, with which we need to reckon once more.

In Sekula’s case, the delicacy of her line and her tendency to section the surface into separate areas or, in some cases, compartments, connects her to another Swiss artist, Paul Klee, and to paintings of his such as “In the Current Six Thresholds” (1929), which is in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, New York. At the same time, while Klee might have been an influence, Sekula made that influence into something all her own.In the early painting “Natica” (1946), she divides the horizontal canvas into a field of different-sized diamonds, rectangles, semi-circles, triangles, and irregular geometric forms. Through this field she draws a variety of colored lines, which may outline a form, or gather a number of them together to become a diagonal plane. “Natica” is an all-over geometric painting in which no form seems to be repeated. The predominant colors are shades of

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dark blue, giving a nighttime feel, interrupted by somber reds, lime greens, and a few yellows. I don’t how many paintings Sekula did in this vein, but “Natica” holds its own with Lee Krasner’s “Little Image” paintings, which she worked on from 1946 to 1950. She is a decade younger than Krasner.

After she began showing at Betty Parsons, Sekula did not try to fit in. She did works on paper and did not enlarge her scale. If anything, she seemed unable to

Natica, (1946) oil on canvas, 29 7/8 x 44 1/8 inches accommodate herself to the world around her.

According to the biography included in the Swiss Institute catalog:

In April of 1951, the day after the opening of her third exhibition at Betty Parsons, she suffers a breakdown and has to be taken to the psychiatric clinic of the New York Hospital in White Plains by Manina Thoren and Joseph Glasco.

For the rest of her life, until she hanged herself in her studio in Zurich, Switzerland, at the age of forty-five, Sekula went in and out psychiatric hospitals, in both America and Switzerland. Despite her suffering and feelings of isolation, she made many distinctive works, as this exhibition conveys. In “Untitled” (1958), which is done in oil, graphite, and sand on cardboard, she makes a lattice of black lines, which are drawn horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. Some of the lines do not extend all the way across to the nearest vertical. The lattice begins on both the right and left sides of the composition and extends toward the center, which is dominated by a black, vertically oriented abstract form with a narrow vertical crevice visible in the upper half. That crevice gives the form volume, makes it a thing rather than just a shape. The thickness of the lines squeezes the spaces between them. The feeling is claustrophobic, and one senses that the thing (or life force) is trapped. All of this is conveyed formally; there is nothing overtly expressionistic about her work.

In this and other works done around this time, Sekula is out on her own: her work does not fit in with Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Color Field painting, nor Untitled, (1958), oil, gouache, graphite, and sand on cardboard, 27 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches the movement towards what would become known as

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Pop Art. And yet, she is not looking back, not reviving a pre-modern approach. That alone is reason to look again. We have to begin to discover what is urgent and original in her work, just as we did in the 1980s with Forrest Bess, another artist who showed with Betty Parsons.

Sectioning the surface, as she does in many of her works, suggests that compartmentalization was rooted in her psyche. So while she might not have attained a signature style, there are a number of formal preoccupations running through her work. Perhaps these preoccupations are connected to a statement she made in a journal entry: “1957: I do not feel part of any country or race.” At a time when we seem to be preoccupied with identity and nationality, Sekula’s statement speaks to those who feel that they belong to nothing and nowhere. As her writing makes clear, examples of which are included in this exhibition, she never overcomes her sense of displacement and isolation. It is not a social loneliness she endures, but one that afflicts the bones of her being.

As she wrote in a long run-on sentence that can be seen in the gallery, “The heart is a bit sad on all four corners, when it’s such a clear fall day in the middle of summer and all is wide open + you hear that…” Sekula did not always possess the ability to shut out the world, and that her senses and the associations they stirred up gave her extreme vertigo. Sekula’s center did not hold.

Years ago, I had the opportunity to sit next to Lee Krasner, while she was having lunch with Barbara Rose, Rosalind Krauss, Gail Levin, and other art historians. At one point, disgusted by the tenor of the conversation, she said: “You are just waiting for me to die so you can make your reputation.” Krasner had lived long enough to know that her work was going to be seen differently, even if she would not live long enough to see it happen. The recent The heart is a bit sad…, (ca. 1950’s), gouache and ink on paper, 11 3/4 x 9 inches reevaluation of Krasner’s status, as in Anfam’s exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism in England and America, gives a ring of truth to her pronouncement. Sekula is long dead. It is time to give her work a fresh look. I think we would be surprised by what we find there. I certainly was, and I have seen fewer than twenty works.

Sonja Sekula: A Survey continues at Peter Blum Gallery (20 West 57th Street, Midtown, Manhattan) through June 24.

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