This is Making Space: Women Artist and Postwar Abstraction, a new exhibition here at MoMA.
The title, “Making Space,” refers to the fact that there were so many women artists
working in the decades right after World War II who had to find a way to make space for
themselves in the art world and space to do their work, and they worked with abstraction.
And we can think about abstraction as a way of making space within your artwork.
And so that's what they were doing as well in many different ways which are explored
in this exhibition.
As you can see we have all different types of works including photography, painting.
There's sculpture.
There's works on paper, drawings, and collages.
And here we are in the first section of the exhibition which deals with a type of abstraction
known as "gestural abstraction.”
Gestural abstraction or abstract expressionism was all about the act of painting, the gestures
of painting.
And it's a movement that's probably most closely associated with a number of men, especially
Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others.
But there were a number of women artists who we see in this section who were making amazing
works during this time and they have not received the same recognition and credit as those men.
And one of the women artists that I'm talking about is Lee Krasner who made this painting
titled "Gaea" in 1966.
To make this painting, Krasner used her whole body in the process.
It's such a large canvas that to get those rolling, somersaulting shapes, she had to
use her whole arms in sort of forceful gestures.
And if you look closely, you can see these kind of somersaulting shapes and these almost
floral colors that reflect her longstanding interest in nature, the natural world in primordial
forces.
You'll see all these kind of splatter marks and splashes.
So it just suggests all the energy and the sense of freedom and spontaneity that she
poured into making this work.
We'll keep going.
There's a beautiful section that has to deal with what we termed "reductive abstraction,"
which is almost minimalist, dealing a lot with the grid and monochrome, especially white.
And then here, this section has largely to do with the phenomenon known as fiber art.
And we're gonna look at this massive weaving by Magdalena Abakanowicz.
This work is titled "Abakan" which was the name she gave to a lot of these large-scale
weavings that she created in the '60s.
And the word “Abakan” refers to her last name, Abakanowicz.
The shape and the form of this work have all kinds of associations and suggestions for
us as viewers.
If you look closely on it, the weaving is very uneven.
It's very coarse in some places.
You can see the rope aspect of it here and some of these aspects of the weaving almost
look like scars.
She had lived through World War II in Poland.
She lived through the Soviet occupation so there's very much a sense of trauma and healing
and scarification in her works.
This is a work by Lee Bontecou, an American artist who emerged in the late '50s and '60s.
Bontecou lived in New York at the time that she made this.
She lived above a laundry and she found the leftover conveyor belts, the canvas from the
conveyor belts, and she used those to make this work.
So there's elements of canvas, and then she stitched them with copper wire onto this steel
armature.
So it's really a very...a combination.
It's in a space that's sort of between painting and sculpture.
And in terms of the abstract form, it's also is in an in-between place.
On the one hand, it's very organic in its shape.
On the other hand, there's a sense of the mechanical in terms of the material that she
used.
There's this black void in the center which is also very suggestive.
Does it refer to some kind of a body part or does it refer to, again, something from
industry like an airplane engine or something like that?
A lot of the works in this gallery were made in the '60s which was in a period when many
artists—men and women—were questioning traditional assumptions about what art could
be, what it could be made off, how it could be made.
And this was an important new direction that women artists were especially involved in
pushing forward.
Women were very much pioneers of this new direction.
And, in one way, we can see it as a way of separating themselves from the tradition of
oil and canvas, and sculpture and bronze that had been defined by men for centuries and
finding a new way, making a new space where they could do new things that didn't have
the weight of history, that didn't have a hierarchical terms that put them in a separate
category.
And so they became major pioneers of this new direction in art.