It would not have taken much reflection to conclude that works of art created before 1940 were no longer appropriate to describe the postwar world. The broken planes of Cubism might have anticipated the destruction inherent in war but they were made irrelevant by its onset. The dark terrors of the Surrealists were clever ruminations on the unconscious amid the rise of fascism. But as one visitor to a Surrealist exhibition said, "After the gas chambers ... what is there let for the poor Surrealists to shock us with?" (165)
"We need, therefore, to go deep down into ourselves, into the depth of our subjectivity, so as to search for a Truth that can revivify and strengthen our certainty that life is useful, beautiful and eternal." Gino Severini. (151)
Ninth Street Women is a joint biography of 5 women - Lee Krasner, Elaine De Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler - who were central to the creation of an American avant grade in visual arts as part of the Abstract Expressionist movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s whose presence in art history has been diminished by time and sexism. It is a long, dense, supremely researched, often brilliant and evocative rendering of a particular place and time in American history. It very clearly establishes that these women, and women generally, have been written out of this history to our collective loss. It is a very good book but ultimately its strengths are closely related to its weaknesses.
It is over 700 pages long and it gives a thumbnail sketch of each woman's childhood and youth and another thumbnail of their lives after 1958. The vast bulk of this is about their lives in the years 1946-1958 - the birth and establishment of the school of painting they are associated with. Gabriel does a brilliant job of evoking that time period - the horrors of the war, the joy that came with its ending, and the slow panic that came with the dawn of the Cold War and the atomic age. I got a very strong sense of the New York of the time - the energy and the promise along with the tension and the poverty. As the forties give way to the 50s and that decade comes to an end, the modern consumer society of the 1960s beckons forcefully and we feel the necessity of the shift to Warhol and the Pop artists. But for that brief flowering of the artist as hero represented by Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and these women the passion of the early New York art world is visceral here. I wanted to drink coffee at the Waldorf cafeteria and get blackout drunk at the Cedar Tavern, I wanted to crowd into the The Five Spot to see Frank O'Hara listen to Thelonious Monk and Billie Holiday. If that kind of historical daydreaming does not appeal to you, you may not want to take on 700 pages of it.
One thing that comes across is the dire poverty these artists took on to do their work. Neither Pollack nor De Kooning sold paintings until late in their careers, and no one sold paintings until they did. This meant that women like Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning needed to become agents and financiers of their husbands careers to the detriment of their own work and Hartigan, Mitchel and Frankenthaler lived from hand to mouth. This is a portrait of the New York art world before there was serious money involved in it. The Whitney and MOMA had been formed, but their attention was drawn to earlier generations. All of the artists in this book dedicated their lives to painting with religious fervor and no reason to think they would make any real living off it. The ethos is that the artist is a kind of hero who faces down the blank canvas and finds a way to pour her true self onto it. The artistic struggle is rendered powerfully here.
Gabriel also makes the struggles these women faced as women clear. While the men in their lives and communities were rejecting many of America's cultural norms, they continued to feel that any serious work - and to them painting was the most serious work - could really only be done by men. Gabriel wears her own feminism lightly however. She recreates the world faced by women in this decade and accepts some its norms: that what women wore was important, that who women slept with was important and that the gossip and infighting that went along with affairs and ambition are important topics. So the reader is treated to a lot of information about affairs and sexuality. While this feels very important early in the book, and adds tremendously to the feeling of looking into a real window to the times, it gets wearing. Once we understand the milieu these women have helped create, the news of their lives distracts more from their painting than it adds to our understanding.
Gabriel does an excellent job of showing the historical forces that these women faced down to be seen as painters rather than as "women painters" (a clear pejorative in 1950). In doing so, she misses the chance to discuss them as women painters. It is odd in a post-theory world of criticism to spend so much time on their lives and art and not get any discussion of the role gender played in their actual painting. I would have liked some attempt at a feminist interpretation of their specific contributions to abstract painting. As the 50s start to fade and their careers as painters are established, this volume could have used more discussion of their contributions to art and less about how they were living their lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment