You can no longer go to New York’s famous Cedar Bar, famous for its 15-cent beer and the birth of a new American style of painting. It closed years ago. But visitors to the American Federation of Arts’ traveling exhibition “The Abstract Expressionists: Women” can see Grace Hartigan’s 1951 painting Cedar Bar. In it, they will find many of the movement’s hallmarks – non-representational images, bold gestural strokes, vibrant energy, and an emphasis on spontaneity and practicality. But beyond that, they will find something more. For decades, the story of Abstract Expressionism, once framed as the work of lone male geniuses, has been expanding into a fuller, more complete narrative, thanks in part to recent exhibitions in Denver, New York, the Hamptons on Long Island, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., London, and Paris, and books like Bestseller Marie Gabrielle Women of Ninth StreetWhich brought the women of the movement back into the public eye.
“We’re not bringing them back into history,” Catherine Wright, a curator at the AFA, told the Observer. “They’ve been there from the beginning.” Many of the artists featured in the exhibition were successful in their lives, working and appearing alongside the towering names of the movement. Everyone had to deal with their dual roles as women and artists.
Hartigan was one of the most popular artists in the early days of Abstract Expressionism. She was the only woman included in “New American Painting,” a 1958 international touring exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art. She was one of five female artists featured in Life magazine’s “Women Artists in Ascendance”, with photographs by the famous Gordon Parks. By her own assessment, she was a “household name.” But none of that was enough to cement her name in art history.
“These women were exposed to different risks than their male peers,” Wright noted. Hartigan Cedar Bar is an example of this. “I titled it as a way to pay tribute to the fact that women, including herself, spent a lot of time at Cedar Bar talking through avant-garde art with all these male poets and writers and painters. But when I first painted it, it was originally titled Aries, and it had a softer palette of pastels. I worked hard to push that out of the canvas.” “She couldn’t stand the idea of someone thinking of it as feminine,” Wright explained.
The exhibition includes works by 32 artists, with 47 paintings made between the 1930s and 1970s, the majority from the 1940s and 1950s, the height of the movement’s popularity. It’s the first time most American audiences have heard of French women artists at the Musée Mougins (FAMM), which opens in 2024 with works from the Christian Levitt Collection. The show was organized by AFA with guest curator Ellen Landau.
The American Federation of the Arts was established more than 100 years ago by act of Congress, although it is now a stand-alone nonprofit organization. Wright explained that its mission is to bring world-class art to museums and venues outside major metropolitan areas. “There are amazing communities across the country that love art. And oftentimes, because of geography, budget or staffing constraints, they’re not able to run these really big, ambitious shows that we do.”
The business is big and ambitious too. Many are wall-sized and require innovative techniques that women pioneered. to Naked Power: A Tribute to Franz KlineAudrey Flack threw her brush across the canvas. The handle tore a hole. She noted that she was “disturbed at first, but then I realized that the hole was very much part of the Abstract Expressionist process and an important part of the painting.” Vivian Springford incorporates the mental preparation and calligraphic techniques of oriental brush painting into her soft, fluid color sets. Helen Frankenthaler Blue benda massive 9-by-7-foot canvas with orange hues dissolving into a periwinkle field offset by clouds of red and white, showcases the soaking method she created by pouring thin paint onto an unprimed canvas.
“The women on the show were often taking abstractions to new, more diverse and, in my opinion, exciting heights,” Wright noted. “For example, you’ll see works by Eileen de Kooning or Grace Hartigan experimenting with photography in a way that we understand now as what comes next, but at the time that was really revolutionary.”
There is no sense that these paintings were painted by women, but there are differences between them and the works of their male counterparts. Wright points out the use of colour, especially the use of Sonia Gestov Map For example. “It’s hard to understand until you see it in person. There’s an area that looks like a red volcanic eruption in the center, and it’s big enough that it almost starts to fall into the formation,” she said. “One of the things we tried to talk about on the show is all those risks and visual scale materials. She’s painting with a palette knife instead of a paintbrush.”
The exhibition is divided into four sections: “The New York School,” “The Early Years in San Francisco,” “A Tale of Two Cities: New York and Paris,” and “Vocal Girls and Beyond.” (Some places will also include cases containing documents and teaching materials.) The titles are self-explanatory, except for Title IV, which we’ll get to shortly, and the works are presented in roughly chronological order within each section. Many artists have achieved fame so far, but some are still relatively unknown. The exhibition, the Levett Collection, and FAMM aim to restore the names of these artists to the history from which they were erased.
The New York School includes paintings by Mercedes Matter, Sonia Sekula, Pearl Fine, Elaine de Kooning, Janet Sobel, Pat Passloff, Michael (Corinne) West, and Joan Mitchell. “San Francisco Early Years” presents works by artists from the West Coast, some of whom are unknown outside the region, such as Ruth Armer and Emiko Nakano, as well as Claire Falkenstein, Lily Fenichel, Deborah Remington, Sonya Gestoff, and Bernice Bing. “A Tale of Two Cities: New York and Paris” brings together paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Ethel Schwabacher, Audrey Flack, Eileen de Kooning, Yvonne Thomas, Janice Biala, Charlotte Park, Lee Krasner, Miriam Shapiro, Betty Parsons, Pearl Fine, Judith Goodwin, Mary Abbott, Pat Passloff, Amaranth Ehrenhalt and Joan. Mitchell.
“Vocal Girls and Beyond” was named after a 1960 Time magazine article that posited that while men of the movement often said the work spoke for itself, women were more likely to participate in the discussion and make it accessible to viewers. Eileen de Kooning, who wrote extensively for what later became ARTnews, did just that, presenting the work of her fellow artists. The group includes her, Frankenthaler, Deborah Remington, Alma Thomas, Bing, Howardena Bindel, Nancy Graves, and Mitchell and Vivian Springford.
“The goal was to talk not only about the movement’s early development and heyday, but also about the continuing cross-currents that came out later in the 20th century to other places outside of New York,” Wright said, noting that artists like Flack, Shapiro, and Bendel took their roots in abstraction in very different directions.
Presenting a collection of the work of distinguished artists is one thing. It is another thing to collect high-profile works by these artists, as “The Abstract Expressionists: Women” does. With bright and colorful Nancy Graves Untitled No. 2; Howardena Bendel’s thoughtful and evocative 1971 film Untitled; A Study in Brown (Saint Cecilia in the Organ)a softly burning Alma Thomas painting; And the effervescence of the rainbow by Vivienne Springford Diving seriesHarmony and difference energize the show. Rare viewings include an early piece by Janet Sobel, the Brooklyn artist whose drip paintings predate, by his own admission, those of Jackson Pollock and those of Lee Krasner. prophecyA painting that proves that every picture tells a story.
Krasner and her husband, Jackson Pollock, were experiencing difficulties in their marriage when she painted this complex composition of flesh-colored shapes compressed into the canvas’s borders. It was a work in progress when I traveled to Europe in the summer of 1956.
“This is one of the most important pieces in the show,” Wright said. Krasner discussed her concerns about the photo with Bullock, and the photo was still on its easel when she returned due to her husband’s death in a car accident. “When he died, she went back and finished the painting,” Wright explained. “I later realized that she had begun to associate it with her grandmother, who was rumored to have second sight. I felt the piece was almost prophetic.” It was the beginning of an important new series.
After World War II and its psychological impact, many artists, including these women, felt the need for a different artistic vocabulary. Abstract Expressionism didn’t just come into existence; It evolved from searching within. Krasner once said: “The painting I am thinking of is one in which the interior is inseparable from the exterior, transcends technique, transcends subjects, and moves into an inescapable world.”
But was it inevitable that these women would find their way into important museums, private collections, and art history textbooks? Unfortunately, no. But the good thing about the canon of art history is that it is still being written. “The Abstract Expressionists: Women” is an important chapter in that review.
“Abstract Expressionists: Women“It is currently on display at the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, Virginia, until April 26, 2026. From there, it will be transported to the Speed Art Museum in Kentucky, the Grinnell College Museum of Art in Iowa, the Mobile Museum of Art in Alabama, and the Frick Museums and Gardens of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.
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