Whitney Museum show of female abstract artists misses the mark

Hooray! A major museum is arguing that women contributed immeasurably more to the history of abstract art in the mid 20th-century than is generally acknowledged. But wait! The museum is making that case with a grudging, tiny, misleading exhibition that will leave viewers concluding the opposite. Even as Jasper Johns manspreads across multiple floors of New York’s Whitney Museum, Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction, 1930-1950 is stuffed into a leftover wedge of real estate between the auditorium and the education centre. It should really have been called Pantry of Forms.

The disjunction between intent and aspiration is almost comically stark. A catalogue essay by curator Sarah Humphreville, titled “Boldness Knew No Limits”, enumerates the obstacles that women artists faced and the weapons they adopted. The usual doses of indifference, condescension and critical hostility were all increased for female applicants to the avant-garde boys’ club. And so they banded together to battle prejudice and carve out room to manoeuvre.

They also veiled themselves behind a useful public androgyny: Lenore Krasner went by Lee, Irene Rice Pereira by the initial I. Doris Bothwell called herself Dorr. All of them hoped not to be disqualified from serious attention by virtue of their names. Now, the Whitney honours that resourcefulness in the same way MoMA did in 2017, with Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, by not making nearly enough space.

A different show, conceived in anger rather than resignation, might have leveraged those limitations, offering a keyhole view into a vaster world. This one makes do, trotting out a token painting or print each (not always the best) by 27 artists, a few of them canonical but most virtually unknown. Almost all the works live in the Whitney’s vaults, which could have furnished a far meatier treatment of the same topic.

The museum’s stash of 10 Krasners is represented by a single, spectacular oil from 1938, a quasi still-life of mouthwatering mauves and buttery yellows, unfurling against great seas of white. Hans Hofmann, the teacher who tempted Krasner away from realism, was so bowled over that he bestowed the ultimate superlative: her work, he said, was “so good you’d never know it was done by a woman”. (It did not, however, dislodge him from his belief that “only men had the wings for art”.) 

Krasner is the megastar whose glow is expected to illuminate the cluster of obscurities. It might have helped, though, to include both the paintings by Perle Fine that the Whitney owns, instead of just one. “Sub-Marine” (1948), a pellucid blue expanse framed by an orange rectangle, resembles a window on to infinity from the confines of a cabin. Lines dissolve and re-form in the aquatic field, suggesting limitless combinations. But we are inside looking out, tethered to home and distanced from the open vista.

There’s some irony to the sense of claustrophobia, because abstraction promised to liberate women from the tyranny of suitable subjects. Instead of grappling with what Fine called “the oppressive particularities of realism”, abstractionists could fly into inner landscapes, wheeling and soaring as they pleased. The Whitney’s second Fine, “The Tolling Bell”, a scything form and a black hammer-like shape on a background like beaten gold, hints at that freedom but remains demurely locked away.

It’s true that “Tolling Bell” dates from 1954, outside the allotted time span, but so does Dorothy Dehner’s spiky “Nocturne”, which does make the cut. All chronological boundaries are essentially arbitrary, but here they are especially frustrating. Humphreville is making a narrow historical argument — that women belong in the origin story of American abstraction — and she has neither the space nor the scope to reach into the drama’s second and third acts. The show cuts off just as several tributaries converged into Abstract Expressionism, a marketing phenomenon pumped up by swagger, misogyny and booze. The women (mostly) drank less and lived longer, maturing across decades that the exhibition doesn’t cover.

And so we get a single 1937 lithograph by Esphyr Slobodkina, in which she riffs, with modest success, on Picassoid synthetic cubism. In 1940, she fulfilled her male colleagues’ most snobbish expectations and published a children’s book. Many generations and 2m copies later, Caps for Sale, about an itinerant peddler and a passel of monkeys, remains in print. But the Whitney might have put both those achievements in context by including one of her later and more original works, a 1952 oil painting with sturdy forms suspended, mobile-like, against a peach-and-sea green backdrop.

Alice Trumbull Mason, who was, along with Slobodkina, a co-founder of the American Abstract Artists Group, is another casualty of chronology. Overwhelmed by motherhood, Mason grudgingly gave up painting for a while in the 1930s. “Maybe you think intellectual life is not the real thing,” she wrote to her sister in 1934. “But dammit — just caring for babies isn’t either. I am chafing to get back to painting.”

She finally did, and the Whitney celebrates her return with a trio of pictures, none as interesting as the later works that stayed in storage. “Labyrinth of Closed Forms”, a vaguely Surrealist etching of amoeboid blobs from 1945, appears to have been included chiefly because it supplied the exhibition’s title. But Mason didn’t really come into her own until the 1950s, when her bold, yellow-and-black graphic geometries sprang off white surfaces.

Each of these women deserves a spotlight of her own — especially, perhaps, Dorr Bothwell, who followed an idiosyncratic path out of San Francisco. In 1928, she went alone to Samoa, managing to get herself adopted by a village chief and accepted as full Samoan. Even her later Mediterranean sojourns were distinctive; instead of joining the fashionable crowd on the Côte d’Azur, she made for Corsica. That rough island provided the title and inspiration for a screen print Bothwell made in 1950, in which an earth-toned patch — a continent? a face? a feeling? — hovers between pale and azure zones. This is where Labyrinth winds up: on a picture that feels less like a conclusion than an exciting, ambiguous opener.

To March 2022, whitney.org

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