One of the Boys

Is there any more macho American art movement than Abstract Expressionism? Just say the phrase and an image of hard-drinking and living artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning shouting opinions over liquor served at the Cedar Tavern comes to mind. What’s missing from that picture of men being men in the rough business of modern art is the very real presence of women, especially one woman—Grace Hartigan. In Grace Hartigan: Shattering Boundaries, an Amici Films documentary created and produced by Alice Shure and Janice Stanton, Grace Hartigan reclaims her place at the table with the boys club. Shure and Stanton recreate the smoky atmosphere of the time and recover the role Hartigan played in that movement. Both an artistic and a feminist statement, Grace Hartigan: Shattering Boundaries shows how one woman broke through the glass ceiling of the art world in the most masculine and hostile environments imaginable.

In many ways, the Cedar Tavern became Hartigan’s university. Hartigan had viewed one of Pollock’s earliest drip painting exhibitions and contacted Pollock to express her appreciation of his work, which was still poorly understood in the mainstream art world. Pollock invited Grace to visit him and Lee Krasner. (Pollock even baked an apple pie for the occasion.) Grace later met de Kooning through Pollock. de Kooning then invited Grace to join the Cedar Tavern circle, where she met poets such as Frank O’Hara and other artists such as Franz Kline. Kline and Hartigan eventually became lovers, but it was Grace’s relationship with O’Hara, who appealed to her Rilke-quoting side, that was deeper and more lasting. Although estranged for several years in the 1960s, Hartigan and O’Hara reunited in 1966, shortly before O’Hara’s tragic death. Hartigan painted Frank O'Hara (above, from 1966) soon after his death as a remembrance of their time together and the close ties of the Cedar Tavern days. Through Hartigan, the film emphasizes the supportiveness rather than the competitiveness of the Abstract Expressionist community. Their shared poverty due to no sales united them against the rest of the art world, even as figures such as John Cage and Dylan Thomas briefly wandered through their closeted world. Grace herself modeled nude for other artists at 95 cents an hour to stave off hunger. Thanks to Hartigan, we see the “softer” side of Abstract Expressionism that the macho men never revealed.

But, as the interview footage of Hartigan clearly demonstrates, she was no softie. Making her way in the boys’ club of art took great courage and sacrifices. To “pass” as a true, manly Abstract Expressionist, Grace even exhibited under the name George Hartigan in 1953 (above), something that she greatly regretted later. Through curators and art historians, the film examines with great insight the paradox of a woman painter trying to paint in a “masculine” style while remaining feminine and not losing the perspective of her gender. Hartigan’s Months and Moons, painted in 1950, connects the menstrual cycle with the lunar cycle and injects a female presence into the Abstract Expressionist school. Recounting this amazing balancing act, the filmmakers recover a lost side of the Abstract Expressionist movement while taking care not to reduce Hartigan to “just” a woman painter. From beginning to end, they stress how Hartigan never failed to be “a painter’s painter” who was the only woman to appear in such seminal 1950s exhibitions as Twelve Americans and American Painting.

Why then, do we not know the name of Grace Hartigan as easily as that of Pollock or de Kooning? Certainly gender played a big role, but Hartigan’s choice to leave New York City after marrying and move to Maryland divorced her from the heart of the art world. Hartigan’s New York Rhapsody (above, from 1960, the year she left) displays the affection she had for her home, but the true love of Winston Price drew her to a new home, where she continued to paint and began to teach at the Maryland Institute College of Art. One commenter explains how this physical separation was compounded by irate New York dealers intent on ruining Hartigan’s reputation as revenge for her leaving. Free of the long shadows of the New York art scene, Grace continued to grow as an artist, copying Old Masters paintings in a self-administered art history education and later incorporating pop culture imagery into her work that won her the title “Mother of Pop Art,” despite the fact that she hated the label.


Perhaps the most enjoyable section of the film involves interviews with Hartigan’s students, who laugh as they recount her ominous silences while judging their work but always return to the theme of her equal parts toughness and fairness. Grace ran a gauntlet of alcoholism, her husband’s mental illness and eventual death, her own suicide attempt, and crippling hip problems and came out the other end with her Matisse-like painterly qualities intact in works such as Another Birthday (above, from 1971). The filmmakers portray Hartigan as such an indestructible force that it’s hard to believe that she passed away shortly after the film was first screened. “In painting I try to make some logic out of the world that has been given to me in chaos,” Hartigan once wrote. Even into the twenty-first century, Hartigan continued to look for sense in chaos, painting in response to the 9/11 attacks Angels over Manhattan, in which she imagines the angels of Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire saddened by the carnage. Grace Hartigan’s legacy has found two angels in Shure and Stanton, who have traced the (il)logic of Hartigan’s disappearance from art history and returned all the color and bravura of the artist’s person and work to center stage. Both a touching tribute and a feminist manifesto, Grace Hartigan: Shattering Boundaries breaks up the old lies and builds up a new truth.

[Many thanks to Microcinema for providing me with a review copy of Grace Hartigan: Shattering Boundaries.]

Eye Spy

Barbara Crane (b. 1928). Eaters, 1981. Courtesy of the Chicago Cultural Center. © Barbara Crane, 1981.

At just around five feet in height, Barbara Crane has a height advantage over most other photographers. Crane makes herself inconspicuous and captures people at their most vulnerable, unguarded, and real moments, such as in Eaters (above, from 1981). The Amon Carter Museum’s current exhibition Barbara Crane: Challenging Vision displays this period of Crane’s long, protean career as well as many others. The catalogue, which features an introduction by Kenneth C. Burkhart and essays by John Rohrbach and Abigail Foerstner, brings Crane into clear focus not only as a visionary photographer but also as a groundbreaking woman photographer breaking into the boys club of modern photography while raising three children, who actually posed for her as her thesis subjects for 35 cents an hour. “It took me years—really years, way into adulthood to say I was an artist,” Crane confesses. In 1970, Crane began a two-year project of photographing people passing through a doorway, which became the series known as People of the North Portal. “Brought together, the images deliver a vivid sense of place and activity,” Rohrbach writes in his essay, “Seeing Life Differently,” “the repetitious dance of life walking out of a public doorway and into the street, given a nostalgic twist through hairstyle and clothing.” Crane’s still photography captures the movement and vitality of life with all its change and randomness. Crane herself has never stopped moving artistically over five decades of creating.

Barbara Crane (b. 1928). Human Forms, 1964–65. Courtesy of the Chicago Cultural Center. © Barbara Crane, 1964–65.

Crane’s Human Forms series (above, from 1964-1965) shows the influence of Edward Weston’s nudes but also just how different Crane’s approach to photography evolved from the work of Weston and others. Weston skirted the edges of abstraction with his nudes, but they always remained recognizably human. Crane, contrastingly, pushes the recognizable to the point of abstraction to make us see it anew. “Crane’s goal,” Rohrbach believes, “has been to critique our subservience to photographic realism and to suggest that we have fallen into a bad habit of giving undue preference to that part of photography’s magical language.” Writing specifically of Crane’s nude studies, Rohrbach writes that “[e]ach body almost dissolves, becoming a sinuous river flowing across a snowy landscape.” The gentle lyricism and natural sense of flow of Crane’s nudes departs drastically from Weston’s almost sculptural, static nudes. Such works beautifully capture the philosophical difference between Crane’s “challenging vision” and the vision of her contemporaries. Crane achieves what Rohrbach calls an “unnerving disconnect” that breaks old associations and forces us to reconnect with what we see before us.

Barbara Crane (b. 1928). Neon Cowboy, 1969. Courtesy of the Chicago Cultural Center. © Barbara Crane, 1969.

Crane jumps from subject to subject throughout her career, always seeking something new to cast askew and make new. In a series of collaged photographs involving neon lights, Crane “juxtapos[es] neon lights over faces like ceremonial urban masks,” writes Foerstner in her essay, “On the Path to the Perfect Photograph.” In Neon Cowboy (above, from 1969), Crane superimposes a grid of neon cowboy signs over a series of male nudes. Rohrbach connects Crane’s use of series to the influence of John Cage’s music celebrating the artistic potential of chance. Although the neon sign does not move, the male model beneath does, sometimes wearing the neon like a mask and sometimes pulling away, revealing the hollow “mask-ness” of the sign. Rohrbach also makes a fascinating connection between Crane and the philosopher- semiotician Roland Barthes. Contrasting Crane with Lee Friedlander, who sees photography as seeing rather than making, Rohrbach calls Crane “a linguist at heart, in love with photographs as signs rather than signifiers.” Such philosophical depth adds a whole new dimension to what seem to be Crane’s simple pictures of people, buildings, neon signs, etc. “Crane taps the everyday world for the tumultuous undercurrents of unifying themes: chance, accident, chaos, contradiction and mystery playing out before our eyes,” Foerstner concurs.

Barbara Crane (b. 1928). Coloma to Covert: Fleshy Fungi, 1990. Courtesy of the Chicago Cultural Center. © Barbara Crane, 1990.

After years of photographing the urban landscape and its inhabitants, Crane went “back to nature” in the 1990s with her Coloma to Covert series. Crane brings her “unnerving disconnect” to such subjects as mushrooms in Fleshy Fungi (above, from 1990), rendering them more alien than earthly. Stretching her images into panoramic scrolls, diptychs, and triptychs, Crane not only mimics the Chinese scroll in style but in substance. “The images recall the pared-down vocabulary of haiku poetry,” Rohrbach writes. “Crane’s world may be alien, but it is remarkably inviting.” In other photographs consisting mainly of out-of-focus leaves, Crane makes “[t]he eye, desperate to find a foothold, fall ever deeper into the chasm of crystal-sharp trees beyond,” writes Foerstner. Whereas someone such as Ansel Adams, a friend of Crane’s, used mountains to speak of infinity, Crane uses the minutiae of nature to open up a universe. Flipping through the 265 beautifully reproduced plates of the catalogue, you get a true sense both of the versatility of Barbara Crane as she shifts from subject to subject and of her unchanging faith in what Burkhart calls in his introduction, “the serendipity of happenstance.”

Barbara Crane (b. 1928). Schisms, 2001. Courtesy of the Chicago Cultural Center. © Barbara Crane, 2001.

The Amon Carter Museum’s exhibition and catalogue may help win a place for Barbara Crane and her art in the hearts of the mainstream public. Crane’s art is both uniquely accessible while remaining uncompromisingly modern in its theoretical underpinnings. Crane continues to expand her repertoire by embracing the latest innovations in digital photography and computerized manipulations. Perhaps more than ever, the reality Crane photographs will find itself remolded in her spiritual likeness. Crane’s story is more than just a feminist success story, but it is certainly that as well. Faced with the reality of a male-dominated, realist-centered medium, Barbara Crane changed the rules of the game and continues to ask us to play along.


[Many thanks to the Amon Carter Museum for providing me with a review copy of Barbara Crane: Challenging Vision, with an introduction by Kenneth C. Burkhart and essays by John Rohrbach and Abigail Foerstner, and for the images above from the exhibition.]

The Beautiful and the Damned

I both love and hate lists. They’re great fun to compile but always lead to an argument, which can be great fun, too, but not always. Someone always gets left out. A braver man than I, Stephen Farthing, editor of 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die, slaps a new bull’s eye on his back with 501 Great Artists: A Comprehensive Guide to the Giants of the Art World. As with his previous book, the “and one” acknowledges that there’s always “one more” name that should have been thrown into the mix. Farthing and his minions, however, ably take up the challenge and bear the brunt of critique, to which I shall add here. 501 Great Artists, however, unarguably achieves its primary goal—getting people to talk about artists and art. From the rank beginner to the rankled expert, 501 Great Artists will get you flipping pages one way or another and before long you’ll find yourself hooked on new discoveries or griping over new injustices. “The reach is chronologically and geographically vast,” Geoff Dyer writes in his forward. “We begin in China over a thousand years ago and end, in Iran, with an artist born in 1974—a welcome reminder that the word ‘artists’ is not invisibly or tacitly preceeded, either in the book’s title or its conception, by the word ‘Western.’” Noble in conception, 501 Great Artists’ sins of commission and omission all fall under the category of crimes of passion—passion about art in all its incarnations.

Starting with Dong Yuan in China circa 900 AD and wrapping up with Shirana Shahbazi, born in the age of Disco, 501 Great Artists does it’s best to span the centuries and circle the globe with individual artists as the touchpoints. “In the end, art history boils down to people: writers, patrons, collectors, artists, and then finally the audience,” Farthing writes in his brief introduction, “without the people there is no art.” Almost every artist earns a full page of coverage, with some, such as David Hockney (above), earning more thanks to their greater importance in the scheme of art history. Beneath each artist’s name appears their lifespan, “artistic style,” a list of masterworks, a short essay, and maybe a sidebar with an interesting factoid or two. Oversized text features quotes either from the artist or from some critic on that artist, ranging from Giorgio Vasari to Sister Wendy Beckett. I found myself at one point just scanning for those quotes. (Two favorites—Henry James on Correggio, “That’s a very pleasant life, to renounce everything but Correggio!” and Carl Jung on Hieronymus Bosch, “The master of the monstrous.. the discoverer of the unconscious.”) The format really does humanize art history, giving flesh and blood to the cold facts and reinforcing the idea that art is of the people, by the people, and for the people. As comforting as it is to come across familiar names, it’s even more enjoyable to experience the thrill of discovering a new star situated within a constellation you already thought you knew too well.

It was heartening to see some names included that normally don’t find a place in the pantheon. Jean-Leon Gerome and Hans Hofmann deserve spots as much as for their influence as teachers as for their own art. Alfred Sisley and Emile Bernard emerge from the Impressionist tangle. The underrated George Bellows finds a place on this world stage, yet Robert Henri and John Sloan, equally influential members of the Ashcan School, fail to make the cut. As much as I applaud the visionary and deserved inclusion of composer John Cage (above, Cage’s Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, a 1969 tribute to his friend Marcel Duchamp), I can’t agree with the logic of some of the choices. Farthing is British and I anticipated the same Anglocentrism demonstrated in 1001 Paintings, but what kind of good Englishman picks John Flaxman over Sir Thomas Lawrence? Do you really need both James Gilray and Thomas Rowlandson to acknowledge British political caricature post-Hogarth? Can Art Nouveau be understood without Aubrey Beardsley? In photography, is Edward Steichen more important than Alfred Stieglitz, Eugene Atget, and Walker Evans? I’m sure that the Guerrilla Girls would take great issue with the exclusion of Kathe Kollwitz (below, Kollwitz’s Self-Portrait With Hand on Brow, 1910), the otherwise fine selection of women artists notwithstanding. Although the essays are generally well written, clunkers such as calling Thomas Eakins “an unflattering portrait painter” that no Eakins’ authority would accept slip through.

The most dangerous part of this very dangerous list comes when dealing with contemporary artists. Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst eat up several pages each thanks more to their notoriety than greatness next to the giants of the past. Hirst’s section almost comically includes among his “themes” “pharmaceuticals, narcotics, love, the nature of existence, mortality, and religion,” which pretty much covers everything. All the Young British Artists appear as well as anyone within sniffing distance of the Turner Prize. Among all these Brits, couldn’t a slot have been found for Kehinde Wiley, the great young African-American artist? 501 Great Artists does a marvelous job of finding the fine young artists of the Middle East, but I found myself wondering how many deserving artists such as Wiley fell short in the barrage of Damien Hirst wannabees. As I said, lists are dangerous, but trying to write art history on the fly, literally trying to predict the future giants, borders on madness. Farthing courageously accepts the challenge and that courage should earn him some forgiveness for perceived failings. 501 Great Artists belongs on the shelf of any art lover, especially that of a young person to whom these artists are often just names on a museum wall or footnotes in a book. Farthing restores the human touch to these works and incites argument in a good way, calling out those who love art to pronounce or defend their territory. 501 Great Artists restores the giants to life size and allows us to see them again as the wonderful, fallible, contextualized, and context-breaking people they once were.

[Many thanks to Barron’s for providing me with a review copy of 501 Great Artists: A Comprehensive Guide to the Giants of the Art World, edited by Stephen Farthing.]