The Muscarelle Museum of Art takes an engaging, expansive approach to highlighting the often-overlooked female practitioners of the assertive midcentury style.
The phrase “Abstract Expressionist” conjures up hard-drinking, chain-smoking men arguing loudly in the male-dominated enclaves of the Cedar Tavern and the Club about what paintings can and cannot be. Add the official story that women in their orbit were expected merely to be devoted helpmeets. Esther Gottlieb, after studying at Pratt, abandoned art to teach at Needle Trades High School so that her husband, Adolph, could concentrate on painting. (The sculptor Dorothy Dehner, David Smith’s first wife, told me that Esther made beautiful underthings for the women of their circle.) That some of those women were dedicated artists, too, is not news, but neither is the complaint that they were sidelined and condescended to by the men. The loaded sweeps and strokes of gestural Abstract Expressionism could be read as assertions of masculinity, not the purview of female artists.
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Image Credit: Helen Frankenthaler’s ‘Circus Landscape’ (1951). FAMM