New survey brings omenmtothe action of Abstract E press1on1sm• • By Richard Lacayo l
IN THE LATE 19408 AND early 'sos, when Abstract Ex pressionism first empted, life wasn't easy for those who adopted it as their practice. Red-baiting Congress mem bers denounced it as a com munist plot. Wary museums refused to show it. And just about nobody was buying it. But to be a woman working in AbEx- to use the short hand term-required dealing with other kinds ofmargin alization, condescension and worse. Postwar abstraction became so identified with theatrical machismo-as the realm ofhard-living, hard drinking men like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline-that you pretty much had to show your testicles at the door. Some galleries refused to rep resent women. Press coverage tended to employ terms like lady artist, making it sound as if painters as vital as Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan were embroidering doilies. Even when Pollock's formi dable wife Lee Krasner pro duced a canvas that deeply impressed her teacher, the fa- i. bled painter Hans Hofmann, bis highest compliment was an insult: "This is so good, you would not know it was done by a woman." Ouch. Some of those women were eventually recognized as among the most important American painters of their time-and others might be due for a second look. These are the takeaways of"Women ofAbstract Expressionism;' an indispensable show at the MARY ABBOTT One of six less Denver Art Museum (DAM), amiliar names in the show, Abbott where itvvill remain through was often inspired by landscape Sept. before traveling to 25, All Green (1954) Charlotte, N.C., and Palm LEE KRASNER She made much of her best work after Pollock's death in 1956 freed her from her husband's shadow The Seasons (1957)
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A JOAN MITCHELL The influential critic Harold One of the few women Rosenberg fiunously pre who earned early ferred to call AbEx "action critical attention painting;' with the canvas as Hudson River Day an "arena in which to act?' It Line (1955) wasn't long before an Abstract Expressionist painting was no longer thought of as a mere picture but as the visible resi due of a titanic throwdown between the artist and the cosmos. By those hyperbolic standards, it was easy to dis miss women for producing ELAINE DE KOONING work that was too "delicate;' She didn't depict a description that rarely holds events or lands'capes, when you look at their work. but made corollaries There's nothing dainty for their impressions about DeFeo's canvases, some built from magma flows Bullfight (1959) of thick gray pigment with ( cinder-block density. Then there's Krasner's rhapsodic Springs, Calif. Organized by idiom of shallow space, ex nctions of her palette in a panorama The Seasons, from DAM curator Gwen Chanzit, pressive paint handling and icture like Hudson River Day i957, whichsummonsthe it mixes the works of six abstract imagery on (mostly) ine, from 1955, a canvas in vegetal succulence of nature women with a secure place in large canvases, in works that hich she wields white like a in forms that are nothing less art history-Krasner, Mitch typically combined deliberate roadsword, then counteracts than explosive and muscu ell, Hartigan, Elaine de Koon brushwork with risk, accident i with fine filaments of cobalt lar. And when she hurled the ing, Helen Frankenthaler and improvisation. Once they Jue and yellow. And if some mighty thunderbolt of Bull andJayDeFeo-withsixwho got there, all ofthem knew fher pictures ended up con fight in 1959, Elaine de Koon are less familiar: Mary Ab what to do with the business ested or unresolved, which ing was not only making a taut bott, Perle Fine, Sonia Gech end of a paintbrush. ey did-well, that happened and forceful painting, she was toff, Judith Godwin, Debo Take Mitchell as a lus Pollock too. announcing her readiness to rah Remington and Ethel cious example. It's impossible Even the very terms in enter the same ring as Goya, Schwabacher. Each found to resist the virtuosity of her hich AbEx was formul;ited Picasso and Hemingway. her own path into the AbEx brushwork and the acute con- ut women at a disadvantage. Which she did. Ole to that. D 59