As a new exhibition opens at London’s Royal Academy, we take a closer look at the female artists who made their mark on the scene, signposting pioneers in women once dismissed as "amateurs and housewives"
It has proved reliable, as a general rule of thumb, that where mass destruction takes place creativity will follow – and never was this truer than in the wake of the Second World War. The chaos that reigned in the mid-20th century inspired vigorous waves of creativity and, as the war ended, pioneering new techniques in artistic expression emerged around the world. Formats became more experimental. Paintings grew to monumental scales. The 1950s are often described, in fact, as a breaking point in the evolution of modern art as we know it; New York transformed into the art capital of the world as jazz, beat poetry, and a new kind of visual art found their feet. A restorative and fervent creative energy was afoot, and pulsing through the city.
In this dynamic atmosphere, the groundbreaking talents of the likes of Pollock, Rothko, Kline, Gorky and de Kooning emerged, gathering under the umbrella of Abstract Expressionism and at the famous Cedar Tavern of Greenwich Village. Tomorrow, a major new exhibition opens at London’s Royal Academy in celebration of this movement. On closer inspection, however, we’ve found ourselves more intrigued by the female artists who have made their mark on what the Royal Academy are presenting as a dominantly male movement; only six of the 36 artists featured are women. So what helped these women make the cut above their female peers? We take a closer look...
Barbara Morgan Raised on a Californian peach farm, and trained in dancing, poetry, and painting, Barbara Morgan took to photography when she realised it “made essence visible”, expressing “the thingness of a thing”. It didn’t hurt that her husband worked for Lexia cameras ahead of the 35mm revolution. Practising techniques such as light drawing and photomontage, her projects ranged from photographing ice as it formed and melted in her studio windows to capturing the movements of modern dancers and choreographers like Martha Graham. With Ansel Adams and Minor White as admirers, she also co-founded the photography magazine Aperture, which survives till this day.
Lee Krasner The Yin to Jackson Pollock’s Yang. Born in Brooklyn to Russian-Jewish immigrants, after studying art extensively and working as a model and waitress, Krasner moved to the mural division and Public Works of Art Project during the 1930s. Soon after, she became one of the first artists to recognise Pollock’s potential as “a living force” when she met him and later married him in 1945. Heavily influenced by Matisse, she worked with collage as well as experimenting with many styles of painting, and remains one of the few female artists to have a retrospective show at MoMA.
Louise Nevelson Born in Russia, Nevelson studied art under Hans Hofmann, as well as assisting Diego Rivera on one of his New York frescoes in 1932. In the same year, she transitioned from painting and lithography to sculpture. Initially influenced by the stylisation of Cubism, she compiled found objects into vast room-sized structures to express physical dislocation and self-invention. She would then paint these assembled objects a unifying black, cementing them as singular pieces. With time the unifying colour changed, first to white, then gold. So did the materials, shifting from wood to metal and even, by 1968, to perspex.
Janet Sobel The woman who dripped paint before Pollock. Born in Ukraine, Sobel only began painting as a mother of four at the age of 43 in 1937. Often considered the “mother” of drip painting due to her all-over compositions, she also liked to mix materials like sand and enamel into her work. Sobel was included by Peggy Guggenheim in The Art of This Century Gallery in 1945, where her work made a great impression on Pollock. Yet she has often been marginalised as a “housewife” or amateur, and her influence discarded. By 1948 she had developed an allergy to paint but continued to work in crayon.
Joan Mitchell The daughter of a successful poet – her mother was co-editor of leading American magazine Poetry – Joan Mitchell followed in her footsteps as an English major, but soon realised her true passion lay not in poetry, but in painting. This switch becomes unsurprising when one learns that Mitchell had a rare form of synaesthesia, and experienced letters, sounds, personalities, and emotions as colours: hope was yellow; loneliness was “a clingy green”; depression “a silvery white”. She referred to her works as “expressionist landscapes” that “never mirror nature” but rather allowed her “to paint what it leaves with me”.
Abstract Expressionism runs from September 24, 2016 until January 2, 2017 at The Royal Academy of Arts, London.
