Far from being “wives of the rich and famous,” the women included in this traveling exhibition at the Muscarelle Museum of Art are trailblazing artists in their own right.
Nearly 50 paintings by 32 women from the renowned Christian Levett Collection and The Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins in France comprise “Abstract Expressionists: The Women.”
The show explores the growth of abstract expressionism (Ab-Ex) among the oft-overlooked women and is organized into four sections: New York School (1940s), San Francisco: The Early Years (1940s-50s); A Tale of Two Cities (New York and Paris in the 1950s); and Vocal Girls and Beyond (1960s-70s).
Ab-Ex, aka the York School, is the first uniquely American visual art movement to influence the national art scene, gaining popularity after World War II. It is closely associated with large-scale, gestural and nonrepresentational painting; but some artists bent away from action painting and toward more calm and contemplative color fields and away from pure abstraction toward figurative abstraction.
Men and women working during this post-war period were “all trying to make sense of a world where two cities had been decimated by atomic bombs and many of their friends who had gone into the services to fight in the colossal war had come home having sustained both physical and emotional trauma,” said David Brashear, director of the Muscarelle.
The zeitgeist of the times seemed to demand a different language, even if the artists’ concerns lay more with the natural, psychological or spiritual worlds than with more purely emotional and formal considerations that were the typical drivers of abstract creations.
The so-called Ab-Ex women varied in their resistance to labels, with some rejecting affiliation with the movement, some with being referred to as a "woman artist" and some preferring “painter” to “artist.” Likewise, many of them distanced themselves from the overt feminist movement in art of the 1970s, feeling that gender identification limited their work.
The men of the Ab-Ex movement, e.g., Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, achieved household name status. The pioneering women working in the same vein at the same time, some of whom were married to these artists, e.g., Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner, respectively, were eclipsed by their husbands, despite being artists of originality and depth. But they, along with dozens of others, such as Judith Godwin—who grew up in Suffolk—Grace Hartigan and Joan Mitchell, are becoming more frequent subjects of acclaim and recognition.
The ebb and flow of recognition for the women swung between art dealer infatuation and solo shows early on at New York’s Museum of Modern Art to a “hard sell” in the market before finally gaining some traction. Though they came from different backgrounds, by the middle of the 1960s, Brashear said, “all were living a different kind of life than they had before.”
Women and men pursued new modes of expression with fierceness and vigor, with “lots of interplay and interaction in the development of their styles.” But, Brashear said, despite being “artists of conviction,” rather than muses, the women were sidelined and “largely written out by the ’90s.”
He identifies two seminal moments in the last decade that have contributed to that momentum: The Denver Art Museum’s 2016 exhibition, “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” and acclaimed author and biographer Mary Gabriel’s 2018 book, “Ninth Street Women.” The book title is a reference to dealer Leo Castelli’s Ninth Street show in 1951 that launched Ab-Ex with the work of 61 men and 11 women.
The Denver exhibition was the first to gather in one show a dozen Ab-Ex women from the East and West coasts. The book is an intimate and comprehensive cultural biography and social history of the personal struggles, personalities and professional challenges of Hartigan, de Kooning, Frankenthaler, Krasner and Mitchell.
“Those two events were an earthquake that shifted the world,” Brashear said.
And then there is Levett, a former British investment manager who has been collecting art for some 30 years. In 2011, he opened Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins in Mougins, France, to showcase Old Masters, antiquities and classical art with the work of male and female modern and contemporary artists with a direct classical influence.
Around 2020, his robust research and collecting began moving him toward the assembly of a museum-quality collection of the women artists whose work, compared to the men's, was more affordable, not to mention deserving of attention.
Noting that his private museum was in need of a change, he decided to rededicate it to female artists as a result of colliding forces, including how much attention his female art collection was garnering. The FAMM opened in 2024, specializing in work from the late 19th century to the contemporary period. The reputation of this collection means that, at any given time, many of his paintings are on loan to shows around the world, including “Abstract Expressionists: The Women.”
Said Brashear, “I think this is a body of art that is worthy of contemplation, thinking about forms and gestures and color adjacencies and what emotions that brings out.”
Generally speaking, across the range of styles represented in the exhibition, the richly colored and resonant surfaces are lushly scumbled, scraped, sgraffitoed and stained, which prompted Muscarelle curator Melissa Parris’ observation that the paintings are “so much more dynamic in person than they are in reproduction.”
Just like the men, she said, the women “wanted to show raw emotion and express their unconscious mind,” noting their interest in psychology and the collective unconscious. Visitors are invited to see them, as she said, “working it out on canvas.”
The show is on view through April 26. Visit Muscarelle Museum, College of William & Mary, 611 Jamestown Road, Williamsburg, muscarelle.wm.edu
Several workshops and lectures are planned for the exhibition, including a curator's lecture on Tuesday, March 17.
