It is both refreshing and surprising that gallerists James Payne and Joan Sherwell chose to represent three artists from New York in their Great Cities of Art Explained series.
These gentlemen would be the obvious choice, although only one of the three, Basquiat, was a native of New York.
Three abstract expressionists from New York – Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler.
The contribution of these women to the movement was enormous, but Krasner and de Kooning spent most of their careers in the shadow of their famous husbands, abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
New York Abstract Expressionism overthrew Paris as the center of the art world and became the most masculine movement. Krasner, Frankenthaler and Elaine de Kooning often hear their work referred to as “feminine”, “lyrical” or “subtle”, which means that they are somewhat lower.
Hans Hofmann is an abstract expressionist who runs Krasner’s studio on 8th Street, where she studied after studying at the Cooper Union, the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design and worked for the WPA Federal Art Project. Once praised one of her paintings, saying, “It’s so good you won’t believe it was made by a woman.”
Penn and Showell detail how the outgoing Krasner, already established in the New York art world, shares important connections with Pollock in their work, exhibited alongside those of Picasso, Matisse and Georges Braque. Soon after, she became romantically involved with Pollock. At a key 1942 exhibition of French and American paintings at the Macmillan Gallery.
They married and moved to Long Island, but unsuccessfully focused Kibosh on their drinking and extracurricular activities. He requisitioned a barn on the ground for his workshop, and she made do with a bedroom.
While Pollock famously sprayed large canvases lying on the floor of the barn, Krasner created a series of small images on the table, sometimes applying paint directly from the tube.
Krasner compares the characters to the Hebrew alphabet, which she learned as a child but now can’t read or write. In any case, according to her, she is interested in creating a personal symbolic language that does not convey any specific meaning.
After Pollock died in a drunk driving accident – his mistress survived – Krasner said the barn studio was for her own practice.
This is a transformative step. Not only did her work get bigger, but she was also influenced by full body movements in the creative process.
Ten years later, she had her first solo exhibition in New York, and in 1984, six months before her death, MoMA held a retrospective for her.
In a very interesting interview with Inside New York’s Art World in 1978, Krasner recalled that in the early days, her gender did not affect how her work was perceived.
I went to high school with only female artists, all women. And then I was at Cooper Union, an art school for girls, all female artists, and even when I was later in the WPA, you know, it’s not unusual to be a woman and be an artist. All this started to happen quite late, especially when the places moved from central Paris to New York, I think this period is called abstract expressionism, and we now have galleries, prices, money, attention. Until then, it had been a fairly quiet scene. It was then that I first realized that I was a woman, and I had a “situation”.
Elaine de Kooning was an abstract portrait painter, art critic, political activist, teacher, and “the fastest painter in town”, but these accomplishments are often inferior to those of Mrs. Willem de Kooning, whose pair is “Abstract Expressionism”. half of a couple.
The great city of arts explanation reveals that her two decades of estrangement from William—they reconciled when she was in her fifties—was a period of personal and artistic growth. Drawing inspiration from the bullfights she had witnessed during her travels, she turned her energetic feminine gaze to men and was commissioned to paint the official portrait of President Kennedy:
All his life sketches had to be done very quickly, grasping features and gestures, half as memorization, even in my opinion, since he never sat still. Instead of looking flustered, he sat like an athlete or a college student, bouncing around in his chair. At first, this impression of youth interfered, because he never sat still.
Like Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler was part of the golden pair of abstract expressionists, but she was not destined to play a distant second fiddle to her husband, Robert Motherwell.
This is certainly due to her pioneering development of the “dip-painting” technique, in which she pours oil paint diluted in turpentine directly onto an unprimed canvas lying flat.
Visiting Frankenthaler’s studio, where they saw her iconic mountains and seas above, abstract painters Kenneth Nolan and Maurice Lewis also used this technique, along with her vision for the broad, flat-colored, later known as gamut painting.
Like Pollock, Frankenthaler has been featured in LIFE magazine, though as Art She Says points out, not all LIFE artist profiles are the same:
The dialogue between these two transmissions seems to be a story of socially determined masculine energy and feminine self-control. While Pollock’s dominant posture is a key part of his artistic practice, the problem isn’t that he’s standing, she’s sitting. Rather, it is through Pollock that we can look into the intimate side of his painful and innovative practice. By contrast, Frankenthaler Parks reinforces our idea of ​​female artists as carefully crafted, chiselled figures as perfect as the masterpieces they create. Even though the pieces seem very abstract and visceral, each stroke is considered to represent a calculated, flawless moment of visual enlightenment.
There are three topics that I do not like to discuss: my previous marriages, artists and my views on contemporaries.
For those who want to learn more about these three abstract artists, Penn and Schuwell offer the following book recommendations:
The Women of Ninth Street: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Artists and the Movement That Changed Contemporary Art by Mary Gabriel
Three female artists: Amy von Lintel, Bonnie Roos and others expanded Abstract Expressionism into the American West.
Women Pioneers of the Bauhaus Art Movement: Discovery of Gertrud Arndt, Marianne Brandt, Anna Albers and Other Forgotten Innovators
A quick six-minute tour of contemporary art: how to go from Manet’s 1862 Lunch on the Grass to Jackson Pollock’s 1950s drip painting
Vulgar Nazi indignation against abstract art and the “Degenerate Art Exhibition” of 1937.
— Ayun Holliday is lead primatologist at East Village Inky magazine and most recently the author of Creative But Not Famous: The Little Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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The missing inclusion Alma W. Thomas is a black female Abstract Expressionist who was the first black woman to join the “school” of ideas (Washington School of Color) and the first in Whitby. A black woman with a solo show in Ni, the first female artist whose black work was purchased by the White House – funny and sad, very typical of how often black artists are forgotten. Her work is now completing a retrospective at 4 city museums, and a short film about her life and work has been screened at over 38 festivals over the past year. https://missalmathomas.com https://columbusmuseum.com/alma-w-thomas/about-alma-w-thomas.html
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