Curator’s Lecture: Abstract Expressionists: The Women

Since its inception more than half a century ago, critical reception of Abstract Expressionism—widely considered the “triumph” of American painting—has overwhelmingly marginalized its women participants. By the early 1950s, a loosely affiliated group of male artists working in New York began to elaborate a truly radical approach to gesture, process, scale and surface. To an interesting degree, the extreme physicality of their emboldened techniques mirrored in art the kind of hypermasculinity so recently demonstrated by U.S. soldiers in WW II. Completely upending this gendered narrative became the goal of Abstract Expressionists: The Women, drawn from the renowned Christian Levett Collection and FAMM, the Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins, his award-winning museum in the south of France. Fifty undoubted masterworks provide conclusive validation for more than thirty female painters who concurrently had explored this pioneering mode in New York, the California Bay Area, and also in Paris. The paintings on view provide conclusive proof these women were not—as has been so long presented—mere acolytes or re-interpreters of male achievement, but clearly ambitious practitioners and innovators on their own. This lecture, in conjunction with the show, expands the standard narrative, detailing their truly vital role.

Exhibition Curator Ellen Landau will present this lecture as part of our spring Muscarelle Explorations series, focusing on the artists highlighted in the special exhibition Abstract Expressionists: The Women — the remarkable and, until recently, under-appreciated women who shaped one of America’s great art movements.

This talk will take place in the Event Hall at the Muscarelle Museum of Art. Free and open to all. Registration is encouraged but not required.

Artwork featured: Charlotte Park, Jubilee, 1955. Oil on canvas, 68 x 58 in. © James and Charlotte Brooks Foundation. Courtesy of Berry Campbell, the Levett Collection, and FAMM. Photo: Fraser Marr.