Abstract expressionism, that all-American boys’ club, is being disbanded. In the latest revision to the overwhelmingly white and male canon of art history, east London’s Whitechapel Gallery has put together an exhibition by some 80 female artists from around the world.
Many of the works could easily be confused with the best known masterpieces of abstract expressionism, which emerged in New York in the late 1940s and made international celebrities of figures such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. Although never forming an official group, these artists shared a conviction in the emotionally expressive possibilities of abstraction and its fundamental elements: paint, colour and gesture.
But they were not alone. On view at the Whitechapel, there’s the Jewish-Ukrainian Janet Sobel, who emigrated to the US in 1908. It is believed that her technique of using pipettes and a vacuum cleaner to splatter and spread paint on the canvas directly inspired Pollock’s drip paintings. In the same east coast coterie is Elaine de Kooning, who signed her energetic, allusive abstractions with her initials to evade sexist comparisons with her husband.
Among those working further afield, there are representatives from Africa, Asia, Europe and across the Americas, each incorporating their own traditions and perspectives. The Taiwan-born Li Fang, for instance, who worked in France and Switzerland, painted nature-inspired oils using calligraphic brushstroke techniques.
The starting point for this show was a landmark 2016 exhibition at the Denver Museum of Art that featured female painters working on the US east and west coasts in the 1940s and 50s. The Whitechapel wanted to broaden that remit. As assistant curator Candy Stobbs explains, in the decades after the second world war, “artists all around the globe were thinking about how to represent the world after such destruction; how to begin again”. Even if they’d never seen each other’s work, many gravitated towards a “painterly language of gestural abstraction”.
To emphasise the sometimes surprising connections, the show is organised not chronologically or geographically but in five thematic clusters. One grouping surveys artists whose work explores myths, symbols and rituals, such as the Mozambique-born painter and sculptor Bertina Lopes, who abstracted African iconographic forms. Elsewhere, there are works relating to “material, process and time”; “environment, nature and perception”; “being, expression and empathy”; and “performance, gesture and rhythm”.
Many of the artists are no longer living and remain little known. To identify them, the curatorial team worked with a 13-strong advisory board of curators, art historians and collectors. They also combed through catalogues from related exhibitions.
In recent years, there has been a notable increase in initiatives to rediscover and reintroduce overlooked female artists. But, Stobbs says, “it was sometimes still hard to find published material. Many of the artists were very active at the time, but have slipped out of the art-historical narrative. Even if they were being noticed to an extent, it was still a male-dominated environment. They didn’t always get to develop their careers in the same way as male artists did.”
There is debate about the merit of projects that seek to simply add women to the canon, or create a separate “women-only” body of work. Is it not better to examine the conditions that have historically led to the exclusion of female artists, or to dismantle the notion of a canon altogether?
In her catalogue essay for this show, the feminist art historian Griselda Pollock acknowledges these questions but concludes that such exhibitions are “tactically necessary” – to ensure that our understanding of female artists is “as rich and as intelligible as that of their male co-creators of modern art”. Why let the guys take all the credit?
The female gaze: five artists in the show
Behjat Sadr (1924-2009)
Untitled, 1956
Born and educated in Iran, Behjat Sadr first encountered abstract expressionism on a study trip to Rome in the 1950s. “Representing reality has never been important to me,” she said. “Reality was a pretext for creating forms and colours.”
Wook-kyung Choi (1940-1985)
Untitled, 1960s (main picture)
“Wook-kyung Choi was a discovery for us,” says Stobbs. In the 1960s, the Korean artist moved to the US, where she began to develop her distinctive approach to abstraction. “I dash into the canvas and develop various situations without any conception or any plan, paying attention to almost spontaneously occurring forms,” Choi once said. Then, “I select, organise and create order”.
Lee Krasner (1908-1984)
Bald Eagle, 1955
This painting is composed of cut-up fragments of newspapers, burlap, and discarded drawings by Krasner and her husband, Jackson Pollock. Krasner achieved recognition in her lifetime, but her gender remained an obstacle. “It’s quite clear I didn’t fit in,” she said of the abstract expressionists. “With relation to the group, if you are going to call them a group, there was not room for a woman.”
Li Fang (1933-2020)
Untitled, 1969
Li Fang was the sole female founding member of the Fifth Moon Group, a collective of avant-garde artists formed in Taiwan in 1957. Two years later she travelled to Paris, eventually settling in Switzerland. “Her works are impressions of the natural world,” says Stobbs. “But she was still interested in using the calligraphic techniques she’d grown up with in Taiwan. She brought that context with her to Europe.”
Janet Sobel (1893-1968)
Illusion of Solidity, c1945
Janet Sobel is sometimes called “the grandmother of drip painting”. Her influence on abstract expressionism extends to her interest in “all-over composition”, says the show’s assistant curator Candy Stobbs. “There’s this tracery that covers the whole surface. Nothing is privileged on the canvas – it’s the whole thing.”
Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70 is at Whitechapel Gallery, London, to 7 May.
