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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