Hi, I'm Corey D'Augustine.
I'm an art conservator and I'm also teaching MoMA's online course called In the Studio,
Postwar Abstraction.
We're here today in MoMA's excellent exhibition called “Making Space: Women Artists and
Postwar Abstraction.”
In fact, some of the artists in this show are also covered in the course, so check that
out on Coursera if you have a moment.
And today, what we're gonna do is look very closely at some of the really interesting
paintings in this exhibition, paintings and sculpture, I should say.
And we'll really be focusing in on the artist materials and working methods, how these paintings
get made.
Now, a word or two about the exhibition itself, these are works all painted by women in the
postwar period, so 1945 through, let's say, 1970, something like that.
Suffice to say for now that these women had an extremely challenging situation to be taken
seriously as artists in a very male dominated and at times, potentially misogynistic art
world.
However, issues of gender are obviously on the table here.
In fact, that's really the only thing that all of these artists have in common but it's
potentially a slippery slope because sometimes we may think about issues of gender too much
at the expense of the paintings themselves since many of the artists in this exhibition
really didn't want to be thought of as women artists per se, but just as artists, just
as painters.
Since a lot of these are really damn good painters.
Let's in fact start with Hedda Sterne here, in fact the first painting that you'll see
walking into the exhibition.
Hedda Sterne born in Romania, a really remarkable life, as a matter of fact, she narrowly escaped
a concentration camp in the World War II era and moved here to New York City to pursue
a career as a modern artist.
Hedda Sterne was sort of an abstract expressionist but she never really fit into that category
very comfortably, in fact, many of those artists didn't really fit that category.
Sterne changed her style again and again and again and here in 1954, we see her right on
the threshold between figuration and abstraction.
On first glance, this absolutely looks like a nonobjective or an abstract painting but
as we get close here, we realize that there certainly is a structure.
And in fact, Sterne really developed this vocabulary at first looking at farming machinery
and think about huge conveyor belts and tractors and things like that, but then really here
in New York City, in Manhattan specifically, looking at the structures of skyscrapers and
here really of bridges.
This painting is called New York 8, painted in 1954, it's not a bridge but certainly the
vocabulary here is closely related to it.
The grid is really accentuated and some of these diagonals, they almost seem like trusses
or perhaps cables on the Brooklyn Bridge here in Manhattan or something like that.
As we come in really close, you'll see something quite remarkable, especially for its period
that some of these light spots which initially read as being, you know, some light space
behind that bridge or something like that, they're in fact painted right on the surface.
So kind of reverse way of bringing light into this painting opaquely right on the surface
and you'll notice that that's spray paint.
And what Sterne is doing here really hot off the press is working with acrylic paints which
had literally just been invented where here in 1954 and she's immediately using them spraying
paint kind of an industrial treatment of the surface, right on to the canvas here.
Now spray paint of course was used on bridges and other industrial surfaces in the 1950s,
so there's something very real about her treatment of materials here.
There's also something very aggressive in cutting edge about using paints that had literally
just been invented at that time.
So as we're really looking at the facture or the making of this painting, we can see
traditional brush marks, we can see sprayed passages like these and then we see a lot
of scraping.
And this here, these are not actually brush strokes, but this is, you know, the tip of
a palette knife or perhaps the reverse of a paintbrush that she is scoring back into
that dried paint, you know, literally stripping off a little bits of it here.
So this is very muscular, very aggressive technique.
This one made the following in year in1955, it's called Trojan Gates by American painter,
Helen Frankenthaler.
Frankenthaler is really best known for a very different take on how to paint horizontally
on the floor in other word.
Very influenced by Jackson Pollock as many artists in the 1950s were.
However, whereas Pollock is known for these very crisp, linear kind of marks all over
the canvas, we can already see on a first glance that Frankenthaler's marks here, they're
much softer, more fluid, more nebulous or organic in character and part of the reason
why as we really, you know, get our nose in toward the painting here is that we realize
that this is a stain painting.
In almost all of this paint is really thinly applied and has been absorbed into the canvas
itself.
She's not working principally with enamels although she certainly dabbled with them,
instead she's working with traditional oil paints but using, using, excuse me, a ton
of solvent, that's turpentine to really thin her paints so the consistency of let's say
wine or watercolor or something like that.
So working so thinly, her paint becomes very translucent and looking at this area here,
you realize that there is stain over stain over stain, four, five, six, seven different
applications of paint.
A few words about Joan Mitchell, another of the New York school painters.
In fact, Mitchell herself, her New York'ness, if you will, is a bit debatable because the
year after making this painting, excuse me, a couple of years after making this painting
in 1960, Joan Mitchell moved to Paris where she would spend a lot of time in, let's say,
the second half of her career.
In fact, Mitchell is known as one of the principal painters of the 2nd generation or the 10th
Street generation of abstract expressionists or New York school artists.
So many of the artists in the 1950s, working here in New York City, were really trying
to break away from European modernism.
They're trying to find styles that were new or were perhaps more American than what had
been made in this country beforehand.
Mitchell perhaps is in a different category, though.
Mitchell wears her influences on her sleeves, and they're very European, in fact, in nature.
Mitchell repeatedly drew attention to her interest in Vincent van Gogh and, for me,
I think even more strongly to Henri Matisse.
From van Gogh, and I think, probably, you can see this right off the bat, her interest
in these brush strokes is quite evident.
van Gogh, of course, if you think of starry night or something like this, these pastels,
thick, kind of toothpaste, applications of paint dabs, well, these are now really blown
up, and those are those same van Gogh-type dabs of paint.
But now, rather than the knuckles flexing, it's the elbows rotating and extending.
So these become kind of muscular Van Gogh-type applications of paint.
Joan Mitchell, also very interested in landscape, and a lot of the colors of nature are summarized
here in this kind of our crossing mesh of aggressive thick brush strokes.
But I shouldn't say only thick brush strokes, there certainly are some thick ones.
Look at his yellow straight out of the tube here almost very pasto or thick in character.
And as we allow our eyes to kind of move around this painting, this all over composition here,
we realize that this is virtually a dictionary of physical qualities of paint.
Basically, every single thing that you would ever imagine that paint could do, it's here
somewhere.
So we saw that very thick mark here, we see some very thin and runny and translucent paints
here.
At other times, she's painting very forcefully, you can see she's put a lot of pressure on
the brush here as she's almost scraping paint across the canvas, the brush...the bristles
here are very evident.
At other times she's been a little bit more gentle as she hasn't put as much pressure
on the brush here with this looping green stroke where you don't see the canvas and
she's just kind of allowing the brush to move over the canvas really rather than scrubbing
into it.
Let's take a look at the work and sculpture here by Louise Nevelson.
This is a sculpture made in 1963, it's called Big Black and this is really Nevelson's signature
style.
We can say that this is a work in assemblage.
These are found objects, almost all of these are wood and they've kind of been bric-a-brac
or assembled together and this is really Nevelson's key contribution to mid-century abstraction.
In fact, she lived in a part of Manhattan called Kips Bay, which in the mid-1950s, 1955,
if I'm not mistaken, was rezoned and really demolished.
That's where her studio was and around her, one tenant after another after another, were
getting evicted, so of course, they were taking old furniture and leaving it out on the sidewalk
or what have you, and Nevelson began well dumpster diving, so to speak and really scrounging
around for all of these interesting shapes, found art if you will.
As we really start to look inside of some of these boxes, there are some very recognizable
objects.
There are bedposts here.
Perhaps this is a kind of a banister for a stairwell or something like that.
And some...I don't know what this is, some kind of molding up by the ceiling and all
of these very dated, but quite recognizable objects.
But as we retreat from a distance here, we realize that by painting these monochrome,
they all become kind of the same thing, they become buried by a very interesting treatment
of form here, where suddenly, the entire structure has this totemic form, whereas we realize
it's actually assembled from all of these, you know, almost a thousand little bits and
pieces here.
Nevelson was very cavalier about her use of paint and color.
Black is really the signature color of her works.
She also does work in white monochrome and for a time worked in gold monochrome, but
it's interesting I've read some correspondence with her conservators worried, "Oh, there're
some scratches, a loss in the paint, so what do we do."
And she basically said, "Just take it on the fire escape and krylon it...sssshhh like this."
So for her, it wasn't really about the application of paint, it was more about the color of the
work entirely.
quite interesting in some of the emotional connotation that's here.
As we take a walk around the corner, we'll go from black to white here.
Okay, so looking at a painting by the Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama, called number F.
Well, F is not exactly a number but we’ll forgive Yayoi for that.
In fact, this is a painting that we referred to in, in the course in a YouTube video.
So you might check that also.
But as we look at Kusama's 1959 canvas here, this is really her signature style.
This is the infinity net.
Kusama carving out space here, loop to loop to loop to loop here, obsessively, neurotically,
really filling this entire space of the painting.
very thick, very dry application of these crusty accumulations of paint in some places,
and then in other areas, quite thin and much smoother as she's adding some oil, some medium
to her paint.
Also, the holes, if you will here, you can see that there's a lot of black showing through
there.
So what she's done is to ground this canvas with black and then to stain over with white
to have a very active surface.
But Kusama, again, she made these infinity nets in a really wide variety of different
waves, reinventing her motif, if you will, which again, according to her, comes from
these hallucinations that she suffered from flowers, you know, repeating in her field
of vision.
This is some kind of cathartic mode of mark-making to really relieve the tension of what sounds
like some very terrifying experiences.
Kusama sometimes would paint like this style but in huge canvases and we have legend, perhaps
true perhaps not, now where she's staying up for night after night after night, loop,
loop, loop, loop.
So these are in fact the knuckles flexing like a van Gogh or something like that and
quite different from de Kooning which is really the main style of so many painters of the
New York school.
If we move over here to the right, we'll see really interesting work again by Kusama.
This is actually a collage of photos that Kusama took of her own paintings.
Kusama was very well aware of the lens.
She's someone who had herself photographed in her studio wearing, you know, costumes
of her own design in front of her paintings.
As we move into the Vietnam era, she made a lot of very well known protests including
some here at the Museum of Modern Art and brought a film crew with her.
So we have some early inclinations about her awareness of the lens and its power as she's
documenting her own paintings and in fact these are all different paintings photographs
of different paintings of hers that she has cut into squares and she's essentially making
an infinity net out of an infinity net.
So she's inbreeding her own ideas if you will complicating something that's already quite
complicated.
And as we backdrop here, it's almost this checkerboard of darks and lights that has
this almost optical kind of vibrating effect, a really interesting motif here by Kusama,
again recycling her own ideas and finding new ways, new creative pathways forward through
it.
All right, thanks for watching.
Hope you enjoyed that.
If you did, be sure to check out the playlist here on YouTube for other “In the Studio”
as well as how-to-see videos.
Also, do check out Coursera for our online course.
Hope to see you there.
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