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.
