It’s not often I get to curl up with a good page-turner that also happens to inform my art career— but reading Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel was this and more.
I found the book addressed two major topics- what it was like to be a woman in the art world from 1939 -1959, and some of what Abstract Expressionism is about.
So this is mostly a collection of quotes from the book with some of my thoughts mixed in.
The first page of the book introduces Grace Hartigan— a female artist in a time “when servitude to family was the only goal toward which a ‘healthy’ woman was to aspire.” (p.xi) (has that time passed?)
Gabriel writes about Elaine de Kooning’s mother who “would have been expected to seek fulfillment in cooking and cleaning, washing and ironing, in making her home a castle for her husband and a sanctuary for her children” (p.64). Neither Grace Hartigan or Elaine’s mother bought into these societal pressures.
In talking about her experience being a female artist Elaine de Kooning says “You have to have confidence amounting to arrogance, because particularly at the beginning, you’re making something that nobody has asked you to make.”
Willem de Kooning painted a series of paintings titled “Woman.” Gabriel says in these pictures “his painting playfully mocked the hypocrisy of 1950s society, in which women were exalted as queens in order to make their social and domestic servitude more palatable” (p. 331). (has that time passed?)
Gabriel quotes Grace Hartigan talking about being a woman artist: “There you are alone in this huge space and you are not conscious of the fact that you have breasts and a vagina. You are inside yourself, looking at a damned piece of rag on the wall that you are supposed to make a world out of. That is all you are conscious of. I simply cannot believe that a man feels differently…” (p. 353)
There is a lot more commentary on the experience of women artists in the art world but now I’ll move on to the ideas of the Abstract Expressionists in general as quoted by Mary Gabriel.
Gabriel introduces three other female Abstract Expressionist artists who painted around the time of World War II: Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler . In talking about the art they made Gabriel quotes Albert Camus “ In the world of condemnation to death which is ours, artists bear witness to that in man which refuses to die” (p. xvi).
She said the artists were struggling “to grab hold of the intangible” in their work (p.35). In John Graham’s (the cofounder of the Tibor De Nagy gallery) System and Dialectics of Art he writes, “Because art was therefore intrinsically abstract, the duty of the artist would be to push abstraction fearlessly to its logical end instead of evading it under the disguises of charm or being ‘true to nature’ “ (p.69).
I paint from observation or as some people call it “from life.” But here I felt challenged— is there a way to push abstraction fearlessly to its own end and be true to nature? Are the two mutually exclusive?
Isn’t abstraction a form of nature?
Perhaps nature and abstraction are the same in the realm of the unconscious. Graham goes on to write that the unconscious “is the creative factor and the source and the storehouse of power and of all knowledge, past and future… risk all and let the unconscious be your guide.”
Around the time of World War II the artists in New York who were forming the Abstract Expressionist movement strove to make work that “revealed true spirit” in a time when the future of the world was so uncertain. In the 1946 book “The Artist and Society” Gabriel quotes Gino Severini “We need, therefore, to go deep down into ourselves, into the depths of our subjectivity, so as to search for a Truth that can revivify and strengthen our certainty that life is useful, beautiful and eternal.”
It seems that most of the work that came from these artists was a sort of distilling of the spirit and of the times. Which leads me to ask— what is the spirit of our times? How has this time been built on theirs?
Gabriel quotes William Seitz who speaks of artists past and modern here: “The painter of the past, as a functioning unit of society, painted the public myth, ritual, and propaganda of his time, whereas the modern turns to his inner experience… not necessarily because he is so egocentric… but because private experiences have become the chef, and often the only, ones he trusts.”
I love the way Gabriel talks about the experience of being an artist. Here she writes about great art “ Great art in general, is not about materials used or methods mastered or even talent possessed. It is a combination of all these factors, and an individual driven by a force that seems outside them , toward expression of an idea they often to do not understand.” (p.461)
Gabriel quotes Virginia Woolf here “ All artists succumb to self-doubt; it is the handmaiden of creation.”
Gabriel quotes Joan Mitchell about the feeling of painting “ When you are really involved in writing or painting you are someone else… You are what I call ‘no hands,’ the riding a bicycle. You do not exist.” (p.471)
Another quote from Grace Hartigan: “ One of the most difficult things of all is not to have the painting be a depiction of the event but the event itself… Most art looks like it is talking about something that happened some other place.” (p.487) (does the event have anything to do with narrative?)
Gabriel quotes Elaine de Kooning: “There are two images the spectator gets from every work of art: one while looking at the work, the other— the after-image, while remembering the work… The artist creates the after-image, the painter makes the painting.”
Another Elaine de Kooning quote: “True art… is that which reflects an individual creator in a particular time and place, and by its very nature must adapt and change.” (p. 562)
A quote from Joan Mitchell: “I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me… and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with.” (p. 565)
A quote from Mark Rothko: “I take the liberty to play on any string of my existence… Everything is grist for the mill.” (p.596)
In talking about Lee Krasner Gabriel writes, “The surprises a canvas held for an artist who painted it were, she believed, what sustained them.” (p.632).
In talking about a Helen Frankenthaler painting Gabriel writes about the particular problem Helen was wrestling with: “Can a mass of brushstrokes of a bed of color at one end of a painting be made to weigh the same as a line or smudge at the other?” (p. 642) (a fascinating challenge!)
A quote from Joan Mitchell that has stuck with me: “When you are tired, depressed, or even sick… there is only one cure: get up and work.” (p.695).
Gabriel quotes a critic from the publication Revista about the abstract expressionists’ work in the New American Paintings show: “Each picture is a confession, an intimate chat with the Divinity, accepting or denying the exterior world but always faithful to the more profound identity of conscience.”
I work from life but think of my paintings as abstractions. These thoughts from the Abstract Expressionist have been very chewy. What do you think?
There is so much more to this book I highly recommend it!