You know you’ve seen enough art when you stroll past a Joan Mitchell painting and say to yourself, oh yeah, another great painting. There is such a thing as art overload.
The Whitechapel Gallery exhibition, Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70 is a mammoth show. As you walk into the first viewing room you are greeted with the colossal painting that is Helen Frankenthaler’s, April Mood, a wide luscious pool of liquid acrylics on canvas.
Turn the corner and you’ll find stunningly beautiful works by Lee Krasner, Gillian Ayres, Elaine de Kooning, and a host of artist women from around the world, all of whom were making abstract art during the period between the suffragettes and 1960s second-wave feminism. These are the artists on whose shoulders abstract womxn artists now stand and at one point I just had to stop, do a 360 turn, and say a silent thank you. Thank you for your service to the arts. Thank you for persisting. Thank you for being pioneers.
There are over 150 works in this exhibition and to be honest, I’d have been tempted to take 20 of them out - sometimes the works jostle for attention - but the resulting riot of colours, shapes and concepts is an art rollercoaster. You think you’ve reached the very pinnacle of the show - surely nothing can top that Lee Krasner piece featuring a discarded piece of her husband, Jackson Pollock’s work? - but then you go upstairs to find this delicate still life by Polish American artist Janice Biala:
It is almost too much beauty in one place.
It’s refreshing to find artists from all across the globe in this show and my personal favourite is this painting by a South Korean artist I hadn’t come across before, Wook-kyung Choi. The painting is mesmerising and I kept walking back through the gallery to take another look; there’s an energy that bounces off the canvas which is perfectly balanced by the geometric vertical blue lines and that bold swathe of green. A perfect composition.
Any exhibition that centers women artists is an important one. Intentionally re-writing the story of Abstraction and women’s position within that movement, Whitechapel Gallery does a grand job. The men aren’t missed here even though they may be alluded to. Upstairs you’ll find a small drip painting by Ukrainian American artist Janet Sobel, whose work directly “influenced” that of Jackson Pollock - a story that is echoed around the gallery.
Art dealer Gary Snyder, a great advocate of Janet Sobel’s work, said:
“Janet Sobel didn’t fit into that myth of powerful hard-drinking painters of big paintings. The attention went elsewhere.”
She didn’t fit in so she was not included in the origin story of abstract expressionism. It makes me wonder how much art created by women has been lost because “[t]he attention went elsewhere.” How much has only ever been created for the Private View of the artist herself and her family? What a loss to humanity.
A short walk up from the Gagosian gallery in London’s Mayfair district - where you just have to sit outside with a cup of Earl Grey and people watch - you’ll find the Sadie Coles HQ gallery. It’s a glass-fronted space that bounces light around its interior and lends itself to large-scale works such as the mixed-media hangings by Isabella Ducrot that were on show when I visited last week. I’d seen the works on Instagram and was drawn by the story of the artist who is 91 years young and this is her first solo show in Britain. The work was gorgeous - a mixture of drawing, painting, textiles and collage, created with a gentle hand.
These are large pieces, around 3ft wide by 4ft high I’d estimate, and created with gossamer handmade paper that I just know must be a nightmare to work with.
Upstairs there were several smaller framed works made using the same techniques:
I really enjoy this work, it has a simplicity that belies the intricacy of the making. I can imagine how much time it must take to gently draw on that handmade, tissue-thin substrate and then oh so gently glue elements on top without tearing the paper. A labour of love. Inspiring.
I have been so inspired by all the women artists I’ve seen in London these past few weeks. More and more I find my own attention moving elsewhere when I’m faced with a room of work by artist men, regardless of what status they hold in the canon of art history. I stood in front of an Alice Neel painting a couple of weeks ago and imagined her hand pulling the paintbrush across the canvas and thought of all the stories held within that one stroke: stories of love and loss, of lovers and friends, of husbands and children, of rebellion and resistance. I saw those stories in the abstract works at Whitechapel Gallery too and in the gentle collage works by Isabella Ducrot: women sharing their own raw experiences, their pain, their dreams; women trying to create a better future for themselves and for other women across the globe. And this is why we create, isn’t it? To tell our stories so others may learn from us and live better lives. I create in the hope that one day there will be a world in which attention is given equally to all gender expressions and that nobody will be excluded from the story in the way Janet Sobel was.
In Catherine McCormack’s fascinating book, Women in the Picture: Women, Art and the Power of Looking (read my review HERE) the author says:
Historically speaking, women have not been allowed to look.
The artist women in the two exhibitions above were not only looking but staring. Looking and recording. Looking and responding. Looking and through the making of art requesting that others look too. I remember a friend telling me that the year Seattle’s modern art museum decided to put on an exhibition by womxn artists only, the visitor numbers dropped. Many folks DON’T look when the view is overtly womxn focused, their attention goes elsewhere as Gary Snyder said of the critics and Janet Sobel. If that is to change, we must normalize shows where men are absent without framing them as something out of the ordinary or as once in a year programs. Value follows attention: We start to value the places where our attention is held. If galleries spotlight artist womxn, draw attention to their work through great programming and marketing (equal to that afforded artist men) then value will follow. It’s up to all of us as art makers and art consumers to demand that.
Until next time.
JC
I just love that quote! Women weren’t allowed to look. To observe. To set gaze. How powerful is that statement. And how slow the progress it seems. This exhibition sounds riveting.