Abstract Women Artists at the Whitechapel Part 3

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BEING

EXPRESSION

EMPATHY

The ruinous violence and displacements of the Second World War left a deep wound in the cultural psyche of the 1950s. It was in this era that existentialism, phenomenology and nihilism emerged as dominant themes in philosophy, themes that also underlie the paintings in this section. We can see the manifestation of trauma, feelings of emptiness or a brooding anxiety about a future 'defended' with nuclear weapons through a dark palette, chaotic fragmentation and congested, overwhelming compositions. To break with the past and generate a new creativity, artists also embraced destruction in art with the dissolution of form and physical attacks on the canvas. These artists are investigating the very nature of existence, triggering non-linguistic, empathetic responses in the viewer.

Juana Francés

(1924, Spain - 1990, Spain)

No. 8, 1958

Mixed media on canvas

Initially self-taught, Spanish painter Francês went on to study art in Madrid and Paris. During the 1950s she embraced Art Informel, which led her to found the El Paso group, along with other artists, in 1957. This group represented the culmination of Abstract Expressionism in Spain and became a definitive influence on post-war Spanish art. Francés' paintings employed a muted monochromatic palette with the paint scraped, dripped and scratched onto the canvas, sometimes adding materials such as sand or earth.

Martha Edelheit

(b. 1931, USA, lives and works in Sweden)

Sacrificial Portrait, 1958

Oil, wood, metal and canvas

'It didn't really occur to me that I could be an artist. All the artists in the museums were men', said Edelheit, an American artist who now lives and works in Sweden. She is known as a pioneering feminist artist, whose work addresses women's desires, the body, and skin as a canvas. Combining a variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, film and performance, Edelheit's art challenges social expectations of women, formalist paradigms and traditional notions of painting.

Sonia Gechtoff

(1926, USA - 2018, USA)

The Map, 1958

Oil on canvas

With an artist father and a gallerist mother, Gechtoff received a BF in painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She moved to San Francisco in 1951, where she abandoned figurative work in favour of painterly gestures largely inspired by nature and poetry. Known for her innovative manipulation of the palette knife on canvas, in 1958, Gechtoff moved to New York, but felt the atmosphere unsupportive of Abstraction Expressionism with the rise of Pop Art.

Franciszka Themerson

Capricious Growth, 1961

Oil, canvas and plaster relief

Michael West

(1908, USA - 1991, USA)

Narkisses, 1966

Oil on canvas

Born Corinne West in Ohio, West attended the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music before enrolling the Cincinnati Art Academy in 1925, eventually relocating to New York in 1932. In the mid-1930s, West, like her contemporaries Lee Krasner and George (Grace) Hartigan, adopted a masculine name. West sought respect based on the merit of the work, free from the bias of gender. West appreciated a linear approach to painting, preferring to use the paint brush to almost draw onto her canvas.

Deborah Remington

(1930, USA - 2010, USA)

DrS, 1962

Oil on canvas

Remington was part of the San Francisco's

Beat scene in the 1950s and in 1954 was one of six painters and poets, and the only woman, to found the legendary Six Gallery in San Francisco.

Most recognised for her works in hard edge abstraction characterised by flat colours and sharp edges, from 1955 Remington spent two years travelling and living in Southeast Asia, India and Japan, where she studied classical and contemporary calligraphy, which had a significant impact on her painting.

Mercedes Pardo

(1921, Venezuela - 2005, Venezuela)

Pequeña Nada [Little Nothing,

1959

Oil on canvas

In the 1950s, during a climate of renewal and optimism, abstraction began to be celebrated in Venezuela and Pardo was one of the central figures in this artistic scene. Predominantly a painter, she also worked in stained glass, enamel and graphic design. Around 1956 she began making Informalist works that incorporated rich pictorial layering and vibrant explorations of colour. Pardo was also a founding member of the San Antonio de Los Altos Cooperative School in her home country.

PERFORMANCE

GESTURE

RHYTHM

Also described as 'Action Art', the paintings here are conceived as events. Often painted at the scale of the human body and made through physical movements such as throwing, jabbing, jumping and dancing, gestures that are mirrored with tonalities and shapes that balance, swoop or collide. Many of the artists here were influenced by modern dance and its rejection of traditional forms of ballet for the embrace of physical freedom - in particular for women. There is an exhilaration of pure abandonment as painting becomes performance, and the body and the canvas become one in a synthesis of physical and psychic energy.

Bernice Bing

(1936, USA - 1998, USA)

Untitled, 1959

Oil on canvas

Born in San Francisco to Chinese parents, Bing studied at the California School of Fine Arts, developing an artistic language that combined Western abstraction with Eastern philosophies introduced to her by Japanese artist Saburo Hasegawa. Bing cited the exposure to existential philosophy as a path to her pursuit of abstraction, alongside a broad array of. musical, literary, film and artistic influences.

She travelled extensively, including to South Korea, Japan and China, where she studied traditional Chinese ink painting and calligraphy.

Miriam Schapiro

(1923, Canada - 2015, USA)

Idyll II, 1956

Oil on canvas

Schapiro was a painter, sculptor, printmaker and pioneer of feminist art. In the 1950s she created a substantial body of work in a gestural language that involved thinning her paint with turpentine before spreading it across the canvas in broad wipes. Although these works were abstract, Schapiro based them on works by old masters, specifically referencing male artists and recreating their works in her own style so as to position herself on an equal playing field as her male forebears.

Alma Thomas

(1891, USA - 1978, USA)

Etude in Brown (Saint Cecilia at the Organ), 1962

Oil on linen

An African American painter known for vibrant series of works featuring concentric circles, layered geometries and mosaic patterns inspired by observations of the earth, science and space. She produced much of her work at her kitchen table turning to full time artmaking after she retired as an art teacher in 1960. She achieved national recognition as a major artist and was the first African American woman to have a solo at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1972.

Elaine de Kooning

(1918, USA - 1989, USA)

Untitled, 1950

Oil on paper on canvas

A key figure in the New York School of the 1940s and 50s, de Kooning was aware of the gender inequality of her time, so chose to sign her artworks EDK, to avoid her paintings

'being labelled as feminine in a traditionally masculine movement' as well as to distinguish her work from her husband, Willem de Kooning.

Though mainly working in abstraction, she retained an interest in figuration, bringing the expressive gesture of Abstract Expressionism to bear on figurative subjects such as bullfights and portraits of friends and family.

Lilly Fenichel

(1927, Austria - 2016, USA)

Untitled, 1950

Oil on canvas

Associated with the Bay Area School and Beat Generation, Fenichel was born in Vienna and escaped to the UK with her family following the Nazi invasion of Austria, before moving to California in 1940. Her work tended to combine both influences of West Coast gestural abstraction and the New York School of Abstract Expressionism during her early career, with brief forays into geometric abstraction and three-dimensional constructions after joining the artistic community in Taos, New Mexico where she spent much of her life.

Lilly Fenichel

(1927, Austria - 2016, USA)

Untitled, 1950

Oil on canvas

Judith Godwin

(1930, USA - 2021, USA)

Black Pagoda, 1958-59

Oil on canvas

Godwin studied art in Virginia and moved to New York in 1953, inspired by Hans Hofmann and modern choreographer Martha Graham.

Through her studies with Hofmann, her long association with Graham, her expressive dance movements, her participation in the burgeoning of Abstract Expressionism and her love for Zen Buddhism. Godwin forged a unique artistic vocabulary of open, gestural strokes often featuring chevrons, spirals and arc forms that she dynamically interwove into complex relationships between figure and ground.

Toko Shinoda

(1913, China - 2021, Japan)

Shinoda began as a calligrapher, and started experimenting with abstraction in the mid 1940s. In 1954 she achieved renown outside of Japan with her inclusion in an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy at MoMA. She then spent two years in New York, where she met many of the Abstract Expressionist artists. Returning to Japan, Shinoda further fused calligraphy and an expressionist aesthetic, with sumi ink on traditional Chinese and Japanese papers, or on backgrounds of gold, silver or platinum leaf.

Sarah Schumann

(1933, Germany - 2019, Germany)

Untitled, 1962

Egg tempera on canvas

An important figure in artistic exchange between the UK and Germany. Schumann lived in London between 1960-63. She had a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1963, after which she relocated to Italy, where she began painting gestural abstractions in egg tempera paint.

She organised the exhibition 'Künstlerinnen International 1877-1977', presenting many women artists from across art history. Shortly afterwards, she began a lifelong partnership with feminist writer Silvia Bovenschen.

Pat Passlof

(1928, USA - 2011, USA)

Stove, 1959

Oil on linen

Passlof studied at Queens College in New York with art historian Robert Goldwater and at the fabled Black Mountain College with Willem de Kooning. In New York, she organised young artist evenings at the celebrated 8th Street Club. Her work, fully immersed in Abstract Expressionism, grew progressively lighter and more spontaneous over the years, as did her sense of colour. Passlof made both figurative paintings, often landscapes with centaurs, nymphs and horses, as well as large abstractions derived from repeated patterns and marks.

Amaranth Ehrenhalt

(1928, USA - 2021, USA)

Jump In and Move Around, 1961

Oil on canvas

An American painter who spent much of her career in Paris before returning to New York, Ehrenhalt's paintings in lush colours, fluent brushwork and bustling compositions bordered on figuration while remaining committed to abstraction. Of her days as a young artist in New York, Ehrenhalt described how she painted directly on the floor, 'not by choice à la Jackson Pollock but for lack of a table', eventually settling in Paris and bringing the influence of the New York School with her.

Mary Abbott

(1921, USA - 2019, USA)

Mahogany Road, 1955

Oil on canvas and collage

A member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists in the late 1940s and '50s, Abbott studied at the experimental art school Subject of the Artists with Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, and had her studio on 10th Street in Manhattan, a location at the centre of New York's artistic scene. She worked on large canvases, combining vibrant colours and sweeping, energetic brushstrokes with sections of painted collage to create emotional abstractions that draw on mythology, religion and nature.

Yvonne Thomas

(1913, France - 2009, USA)

To the Forest, 1960

Oil on linen

French-born Thomas moved to New York in 1925 and studied at Cooper Union and the Art Students League. In 1948, she joined the short-lived experimental school Subject of the Artists alongside male figures such as Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, and three years later was part of the famous 9th Street Art Exhibition, with painters such as Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell.

Her paintings combine coloured planes with instinctive gestures and forms that reference her relationship with nature.

Perle Fine

(1905, USA - 1988, USA)

Painting No. 56

(Lacerated Yellows), c. 1954

Oil on canvas

An American Abstract Expressionist painter whose parents were Russian émigrés, Fine moved from her native Boston to New York City to study at the Art Students League while still in her teens. By the 1930s, her art was firmly abstract and non-objective. Known for her fluid brushstrokes and renderings of biomorphic forms intertwined with irregular geometric shapes, in 1950 she was admitted as one of the first women members of the influential artist group known as the 8th Street Club.

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