M.O.M.A. Making Space Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction

In the postwar climate, women artists’ successes were hard won in the hyper-masculine world of Abstract Expressionism. The Abstract Expressionists’ fervent mark-making came to signify the artists’ existential struggles and, particularly in the case of large-scale paintings, heroic actions.
The works on view here include expansive canvases by Helen Frankenthaler (American, 1928–2011), Joan Mitchell (American, 1925–1992), and Lee Krasner (American, 1908–1984); intimate collages on paper by Anne Ryan (American, 1925–1992); a major bronze sculpture by Dorothy Dehner (American, 1901–1994); and a totemic wood sculpture by Louise Bourgeois (American, born France. 1911–2010), who forged her early career in New York’s Abstract Expressionist circles. Also on view are photographs by Lotte Jacobi (American, born Germany. 1896–1990), Barbara Morgan (American, 1900–1992), and Naomi Savage (American, 1927–2005) that were featured in two MoMA exhibitions that challenged contemporary notions about the representational function of photography, suggesting a vital relationship between abstractions in photography and painting: Abstraction in Photography (1951) and A Sense of Abstraction (1960).

Constructivist tendencies became increasingly transnational in the postwar period, as the geometric legacy of European Cubism and Constructivism travelled across geographic lines. This approach, based on reason and precision, flourished concurrently and in sharp contrast to the subjective, gestural style of Abstract Expressionism. In Latin America, and particularly in the urban centers of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela, a geometric aesthetic was closely linked to postwar projects of national modernization and a utopian vision of rationalism, internationalism, and social progress. Women artists were strikingly prominent and able to make formative contributions within the many progressive artistic circles in Latin America. Among the objects on view in this section are major works by María Freire (Uruguayan, 1917–2015), Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, Venezuelan, born Germany. 1912–1994), and Elsa Gramcko (Venezuelan, 1925–1994) that were acquired through the landmark 2016 gift of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection of modern art from Latin America and are on view for the first time at MoMA. Also on
view for the first time are Orange (1955), a major painting in nine panels by Lygia Pape (Brazilian, 1927–2004); Vibrational Structure from a Circle, Series B (1951) by Lidy Prati (Argentine, 1921–2008); and Altschul’s suite of photographs, which points to the symbiotic relationship between avant-garde photographic circles and contemporary painting and sculpture.
Artists outside of Latin America also experimented with the potential of geometric forms and a gridded structure, as suggested here through the works of Bela Kolárová (Czech, 1923–2010) and Louise Nevelson (American, born Ukraine. 1899–1988).

A number of artists, working in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reacted against the emotionally charged gestures of Abstract Expressionism. Their minimalist works feature flat, uninflected surfaces and highly simplified, mathematically regular forms, often based on a grid. Along with dozens of men whose work was heralded under the umbrella of Minimalism, there were a few key women, including Jo Baer (American, born 1929), Agnes Martin (American, born Canada. 1912–2004), and Anne Truitt (American 1921–2004), who pursued their uncompromising visions at a certain distance from the mainstream of the movement.

Reclaiming the historical coding of textiles as “women’s work,” the artists featured in this section created radical woven forms that upend traditional boundaries between art and craft. Hanging from the ceiling are monumental weavings by Magdalena Abakanowicz (Polish, born 1930) and Lenore Tawney (American, 1907–2007), as well as Asawa’s untitled looped-wire sculpture (c. 1955). Tawney, along with Abakanowicz and Sheila Hicks (American, born 1934), who is represented by a major wall hanging, was an early pioneer of a new genre known as fiber art, in which artists made soft sculptures by crocheting, knotting, looping, weaving, and twisting fibers, both synthetic and natural. This tendency is also evident in the work of other artists who were experimenting with materials and techniques, such as Mira Schendel (Brazilian, born Switzerland. 1919–1988), represented here with an untitled work, from the series Droguinhas (Little Nothings) (c. 1964–66), made of knotted paper. Like their minimalist contemporaries, artists working with fiber exploited the gridded structure of warp and weft—a logic that is also reflected in a large group of drawings and prints featuring gridded, woven, or lace-like lines by artists including Asawa, Gego, Pape, and Barbara Chase-Riboud (American, born 1939).

In the 1960s, women artists were among the key pioneers of a new direction for abstraction that emphasized unusual materials and processes. This new tendency was first identified by the critic and art historian Lucy Lippard, who organized the 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstraction for New York's Fischbach Gallery. Two of the artists in this section, Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse (American, born Germany. 1936–1970), were included in that exhibition. Others on view here, including Lynda Benglis (American, born 1941), Lee Bontecou (American, born 1931), Carol Rama (Italian, 1918–2015), and Alina Szapocznikow (Polish, 1926–1973), created similarly tactile works that suggest bodily forms or functions. Their objects call attention—sometimes loudly, as in an untitled motorized work (c. 1967, from the series Histéricas) by Felizia Bursztyn (Colombian, 1933–1982) that shudders with frenetic motion—to the materials and processes they used. Employing found, sometimes abject objects and raw or viscous matter, these artists injected subversive and obliquely feminist content into the rhetoric of aesthetic purity that had been one of the defining threads of postwar modernism and abstraction.