Woman's work?:Adventures in female Abstraction.

There's always been something peculiarly macho about being an artist, think how many male ones you can name compared to females, and when that comes to abstraction that ratio seems to extend further. Think of Jackson Pollock's womanising, drinking, and cowboy schtick or some of the more misogynistic views of Willem de Kooning. You could easily get the impression that abstract art is the sole preserve of men if it wasn't for artists like Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Liubov Popova.

The Victoria Miro Gallery's recent survey of female abstraction, Surface Work, indeed includes those three big names but it digs quite a bit further as well offering up some artists that were completely new to me and most likely will be to you as well. The exhibition was spread over both their Mayfair and their Wharf Road galleries but due to an administrative oversight on this blogger's part he was only able to attend the Mayfair half of the show. It was a pity as it meant I missed work by artists like Etel Adnan, Lynda Benglis, Mary Heilmann, and Fiona Rae.

Suzanne Blank Redstone - After Piero Della Francesca - The Flagellation of Christ (1967)

What I did get to see was, for the most part, pretty good though. From Suzanne Blank Redstone's renaissance riffing trompe l-oeil to Ilse D'Hollander's smudgy grids and Prunella Clough's seemingly random blocks of colour it was often, as with any abstract art, hard to work out the point but the power of the paintings could not be denied, nor the necessity of such an exhibition to set the balance straight.

Betty Blayton's Hard Egde #3 was particularly eye catching. It reminded me a little of the riot of colour I saw at the recent Beatriz Milhazes show at the White Cube in Bermondsey but Betty Blayton doesn't come from Brazil, she comes 'from' the sixties. She was a black activist, arts administrator, and lecturer as well as an artist (she died in 2016) but you don't need to know that to appreciate the swirling blues, oranges, pinks, and purples of her work. It's not art you need to understand but art you need to feel.

Ilse D'Hollander - Untitled (306) (1995)

Ilse D'Hollander - Untitled (292) (1995)

Prunella Clough - Stone (1985)

Betty Blayton - Hard Edge #3 - Intermezzo (1969)

Liubov Popova - Non-Objective Composition (c.1920)

The oldest works in the exhibition come from the Russian suprematist painter Liubov Popova who died in 1924 of scarlet fever, aged just 35. Her Non-Objective Composition not only stands comparison with the likes of Malevich and Kandinsky but to any abstract art created anywhere in the world at any time. It's simple, effective, powerful, and it's stood the test of time. Popova is surely the mother of female abstraction.

Some, like the Austrian painter Svenja Deininger, have hewed close to Popova's blueprint while others, check out Rio's Adriana Varejao's Azulejao where the moon's cracked surface almost resembles a human brain, have taken Popova's lead in a different direction. Varejao's work is said, though it's hard to read it that way, to be about the affects of colonialism and Popova, too, was interested in the bonds that linked modern abstract art to traditional renaissance painting and how they could be both broken and strengthened simultaneously.

Svenja Deininger - Untitled (2018)

Adriano Varejao - Azulejao (Moon) (2018)

Jay DeFeo - White Water (1989)

Yayoi Kusama - INFINITY-NETS (HNBKU) (2012)

Some of the work forces abstraction towards minimalism and these are not among my favourites of the exhibition. Jay DeFeo hung with the Beats in San Francisco in the late sixties but a quick Google search will reveal she did much better stuff than White Water, created in 1989 - the last year of her life.

I'd been to Yayoi Kusama's installation at the Broad Gallery in Los Angeles back in 2016 and that too was infinitely preferable to her INFINITY-NETS (HNBKU) which looked not unlike an Artexed ceiling. At least Howardena Pindell's untitled work from 1971 had the decency to tempt me in by looking a bit like a map, if a somewhat inscrutable one.

The Romanian born American artist Hedda Sterne who died in New York City in 2011 at the grand old age of 100 uses blurry lines to give the illusion of speed, or to suggest the unreliability of our own vision. She seems to be as much influenced by JMW Turner as by the likes of Richard Diebenkorn and the abstract expressionists. In fact if we bear in mind her age it'd be interesting to know if any of the more famous, more male, names were influenced by her. She was born before Diebenkorn, Jackson Pollock, and Jean-Paul Riopelle.

Howardena Pindell - Untitled (1971)

Hedda Sterne - Vertical Horizontal #7 1/2 (1963)

Paule Vezelay - Silhouettes (1938)

This is all well and good if you're visiting for a lesson, or an overdue yet necessary corrective, in the art historical narrative but, and maybe I'm just a sucker for pretty patterns, the show improved vastly for me when I reached the section devoted to Paule Vezelay, Lee Krasner, Betty Parsons, and Helen Frankenthaler.

Vezelay's flowery Silhouettes is exquisite. It would work well on a vase or even or a dress (women's things, apparently) but it also works pretty well on canvas. Vezelay was born Marjorie Watson-Williams in Bristol in 1892, moved to France in 1926, changed her name, and abandoned figuration in favour of abstraction. She made quite a name for herself in Parisian art circles but on moving back to Britain when war broke out found she wasn't respected by the British art establishment who were suspicious of abstraction anyway, let alone female abstraction. Shock horror!

Lee Krasner is normally done the disservice of playing second fiddle to her husband Jackson Pollock, which is perhaps understandable as he was one of the 20c's most groundbreaking artists, but she's formidable in her own right. The Farthest Point does have some echoes of Pollock's jazz like application of paint despite being painted more than two decades after Pollock's untimely death and when Krasner was in her seventies and coming to the end of her own life. Modern orthodoxy now holds that Krasner influenced Pollock just as much as Pollock influenced Krasner but, as with any relationship (either working or romantic), we'll never know. It's very possible that those involved aren't exactly sure what each other brings to the party. That's the great mystery of connection.

Lee Krasner - The Farthest Point (1981)

Betty Parsons - End of Winter (1958-59)

Helen Frankenthaler - Winter Figure with Black Overhead (1959)

Betty Parsons was, perhaps, better known (though not by me, I'd never heard of her) as an art collector and gallerist (she showed Pollock, Rothko, Hedda Sterne, and gave Barnett Newman his first solo show) than an actual artist but her daubs of colour and slashed lines look as vital and urgent as the likes of Clyfford Still and Robert Motherwell.

It's Motherwell, and to a lesser extent Franz Kline, that Helen Frankenthaler's Winter Figure with Black Overhead reminds me of. It seems a shame that I have to keep comparing these female artists with their more famous male counterparts but it's the job of shows like this to slowly change not just our knowledge of female artists but our perception of them. Like any journey it begins with the first step and takes a long time to get there but that doesn't mean it's not a journey worth making. Quite the opposite.

Frankenthaler, as mentioned earlier, is one of the more well known names whose work is on show at Surface Work. Born in Manhattan in 1928 she was included in Clement Greenberg's Post-painterly abstraction exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964 alongside Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella and, alongside those artists as well as Newman and Rothko, she came to be seen as one of the prominent names in a style called Color Field painting She seemed to have been remarkably, and refreshingly, unpretentious about her work, saying, in a few more words admittedly, that the main aim was to make a painting that looked nice.

There's room for ugliness in art, sure, but sometimes it's good to hear someone admit they just want you to like looking at the thing they've painted. Alma Thomas, from Columbus, Georgia, made works that looked great too. They've a hint of the impressionistic, or even post-impressionistic, about them. 

Still in her teens she, with her parents, relocated to Washington DC due to racial violence in Georgia, they were African-Americans, and started making puppets and sculptures. After a period of studying home economics (but of course) she switched to fine art and spent the rest of her life as an art teacher. 

Her own striking art, however, was, as The Wall Street Journal said, "underappreciated" and in that she was typical of many of the artists in this show and many female artists both in the fields of abstraction and elsewhere then and now. In that she was typical of many females full stop - and that's the reason shows like this, not overlooking the overwhelming majority of great paintings included, are important.

Alma herself once said that "creative art is for all time and is therefore independent of time. It is of all ages, of every land" but she could possibly have mentioned that it's open to both genders also, and those of a non-binary nature too if they so wish, so perhaps Andrea Dworkin's line that "feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not a crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species" speaks a louder truth about this exhibition. Good work, Victoria Miro. 

Alma Thomas - Untitled (1961)