A Modern Movement’s Creative Women
BY KAREN WILKIN
A Modern Movement’s Creative Women
The Wall Street Journal
By Karen Wilkin
Monday, 2 March 2026
Page A012
The often-overlooked female artists of Abstract Expressionism are now the subject of an engaging, expansive exhibition
Williamsburg, Va.
The phrase “Abstract Expressionist” conjures up hard-drinking, chainsmoking men arguing loudly in the male-dominated enclaves of the Cedar Tavern and the Club about what paintings can and cannot be.
Add the official story that women in their orbit were expected merely to be devoted helpmeets.
Esther Gottlieb, after studying at Pratt, abandoned art to teach at Needle Trades High School so that her husband, Adolph, could concentrate on painting. (The sculptor Dorothy Dehner, David Smith’s first wife, told me that Esther made beautiful underthings for the women of their circle.) That some of those women were dedicated artists, too, is not news, but neither is the complaint that they were sidelined and condescended to by the men. The loaded sweeps and strokes of gestural Abstract Expressionism could be read as assertions of masculinity, not the purview of female artists.
The testosterone-based view of Ab Ex is entrenched, but recent scholarship has focused attention elsewhere. Witness Mary Gabriel’s immensely popular book “Ninth Street Women,” and the Denver Art Museum’s pioneering but problematic 2016 exhibition “Women of Abstract Expression--ism.” Currently, “Abstract Expressionists: The Women,” an ambitious survey circulated by the American Federation of Arts, is at Williamsburg’s Muscarelle Museum of Art. Curated by the expert on Abstract Expressionism Ellen G.
Landau, the selection of about 50 paintings by 32 artists was drawn from the collection of FAMM (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum) and the Christian Levett Collection. It is accompanied by a handsome catalog, more comprehensive than the exhibition, with biographies and a chronology.
Not surprisingly, the show is dominated by women who worked in New York, but it also examines cross-connections between East and West Coast artists, nods at those in Paris, and gestures faintly toward the persistent influence of Ab Ex ideas. A strong selection of paintings made between 1936 and 1977 by artists born between 1891 and 1943 demonstrates that women, as committed and ambitious as their male counterparts, were significant players in the movement from the start.
Not everything is abstract, nor is everything expressionist. Some works are paradigmatic, some rather generic; the inclusion of others is perplexing. Some artists are familiar, others virtually unknown. Some flirted only briefly with Ab Ex ideas before moving on. What’s unequivocal is that they are all women.
The installation begins with works made in New York and San Francisco early on, providing a sense of what was at stake in the formative years.
An atypically gestural Mercedes Matter, from 1936, demonstrates what the artist learned from the influential German- born modernist painter and teacher Hans Hofmann, who had recently opened a school in New York. The similarly broad planes of Joan Mitchell’s moody “The View From My Window” (1949) suggest an entirely different direction she might have followed. The fluid shapes and delicate lines of Willem de Kooning protegée Pat Passlof’s “Untitled” (1949) announce still other possibilities, as does the emphatic ocher shape dominating Deborah Remington’s “Eleusian” (1951), made before she left San Francisco for New York to become a hard-edge abstractionist. Most of “The Women” is devoted to works made between 1951 and 1966, offering a compendium of wide-ranging approaches and occasional surprises. Grace Hartigan’s restless shifts are represented by two robust “textbook” Ab Ex canvases from 1951-52 and the haunting, figurative “Two Women” (1954) who momentarily coalesce from rapid strokes. The floating “glyphs” in Helen Frankenthaler’s playful “Circus Landscape (1951)—she was 22 years old—announce her enthusiasm for Joan Mirò, Paul Klee and Arshile Gorky but end up pure Frankenthaler.
Passlof’s radiant blue “Stove” (1959) celebrates the evocative power of color and her pleasure in applying paint across a surface.
Other high points: Mitchell’s “Rufus’s Rock” (1966), a clenched knot of dark gray held by a scribbled blue web; Judith Godwin’s “Black Pagoda” (1958-59), the sparest, most graphic work on view, an homage to Henri Matisse and an authoritative personal declaration; Sonia Gechtoff’s explosion of red and white against scumbled grays, “The Map” (1958); Lee Krasner’s fleshy, disturbing “Prophecy” (1956), its burgeoning, tightly pressed forms evoking body parts and internal organs. These works need no qualification.
The installation ends with two vigorous Frankenthalers from 1961 and 1977, dramas enacted by disembodied pools of luminous hues.
But was Frankenthaler an Abstract Expressionist? Like others in the exhibition, she shared the convictions that the source of art was the unconscious and that the artist’s role was to reveal the unseen, not to depict the known. Yet unlike just about everyone else, she rejected Ab Ex’s angstdriven layering, inventing, instead, an influential method of staining unprimed canvas with floods of thin color, offering many artists, including such older men as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, an alternative to loaded gestures. The question is worth considering.
Associated Exhibitions
- Sonia Gechtoff Forces of Nature on the Grand Stage: Paintings from 1988 to 1995
September 10, 2019 - October 26, 2019
MORE INFO
Associated News
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March 2, 2026
A Modern Movement’s Creative Women
BY KAREN WILKIN -
September 4, 2019
Sonia Gechtoff: Forces of Nature on the Grand Stage: Paintings from 1988 to 1995
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October 12, 2019
A Forgotten Painter and Her Visionary Abstraction
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October 12, 2019 -
September 9, 2019
Paintings from 1988 to 1995 10 Sep?—?5 Oct 2019 at the David Richard Gallery
Wall Street International Magazine
September 9, 2019 -
September 9, 2019
Paintings from 1988 to 1995
Wall Street International Magazine09/09/2019
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August 28, 2019
Press Release - Sonia Gechtoff "Forces of Nature on the Grand Stage: Paintings from 1988 to 1995"