Ninth Street Women

Introduction

THE IDEA FOR this book arose out of a conversation I had with painter Grace Hartigan in the fall of 1990. At sixty-eight, she was in the midst of her biggest year in decades, with multiple exhibitions scheduled and a monograph of her work newly released. The publisher of the art magazine where I worked decided that all this activity warranted a feature, which she asked me to write. It was an assignment I approached with trepidation. I had known of Grace for years; she was the head of the graduate painting program at the Maryland Institute College of Art while I was an undergraduate. From a safe distance, I had watched terrified as she walked, blond and imperious, ahead of a gaggle of eager students, held forth loudly amid rapt listeners at the Mount Royal Tavern next door, and delivered withering critiques as she toured classrooms and studios. From my student perspective, she was a tough old bird who I imagined had had to fight throughout her career against art world prejudices that viewed a woman’s art as “women’s work” (inherently lesser) and that, having endured such systematic debasement, she was not inclined toward magnanimity. I therefore rang the bell at her Baltimore loft braced for an hour with an impatient, dismissive diva. Of greatest interest to me as I waited on the street below was how many minutes would pass until I could return there.

And then Grace opened the door.

The woman who greeted me warmly and generously was utterly disarming. She bore no resemblance to the person I had grown to fear. Confused and smitten, I followed her up the many flights to her studio, where we sat as our one-hour interview stretched into four, as the light through her massive windows faded from gold to gray, as the story she told stirred my imagination and changed my life. I was in the presence of a woman who had sacrificed everything, including her only child, to be what she was: an artist. The rewards had been few, beyond a life well lived (not materially, but spiritually) and the recognition in her waning years that she had been honest about who she was and what she needed. A rare accomplishment for a woman of any generation, it was particularly so of hers, when servitude to family was the only goal toward which a “healthy” woman was to aspire. Grace was living proof that, on the contrary, a life dreamed could be a life lived. All it took was courage, commitment, and humor. I remember both of us laughing a lot that afternoon. Though the subject was serious, the stories Grace told were fantastic and the woman who recounted them was as wild as the twenty-six-year-old who had abandoned everything in 1948 to paint, though she wasn’t even sure how.

Grace was part of the art movement born in New York in the 1930s that shifted the capital of Western culture from Paris to New York, and changed the very history of art. It was nothing short of a revolution and, like every revolutionary endeavor, it was peopled with an assortment of talented, brilliant, and mad visionaries who existed, initially, so far outside society that they were invisible to everyone but each other. She described the people she counted as friends—men and women, straight and gay, writers and painters and composers—who survived and thrived during the most turbulent two decades of modern U.S. history and amid a society so timidly conservative that its greatest ambition was conformity. Grace and her friends were outlaws in that world, joyfully upending every tradition that presented itself—artistic and social—and in the process creating a new way of painting, sculpting, writing, and composing that shaped the standards by which we still make and appreciate art today. But Grace’s stories went beyond the sweeping importance of the movement. She described the intimate struggles endured and victories achieved by people who became legend and, almost more interestingly and significantly, people long forgotten who were nonetheless vitally important to their peers. In each of those stories, because Grace spoke of friends, the trials and triumphs felt immediate. Art wasn’t removed from life, it was life.

I had never encountered art history as stirring. Paintings I had only half understood now came alive because I felt I had met, if only figuratively, the artists who made them. I began to understand the cross-pollination between painting and music, or painting and poetry, through Grace’s myriad tales of the writers and composers she knew and loved. And I recognized the necessity of understanding the times in which Grace and her fellow artists lived. They did not create in a vacuum, as those who rely on theory to explain art often imply. They had not expunged all recognizable imagery from their work on an aesthetic whim or to coldly advance the progression of modern art begun in the previous century. They stripped their work of all life except their own internal meanderings because they existed in a world destroyed by war, dehumanized by the death camps, and denied a future by the atomic bomb. Under those circumstances, what else could they paint with any degree of honesty?

As Grace spoke, she didn’t dwell on the fact that she was a woman artist or that other women formed an important part of the Abstract Expressionist group. But each time she mentioned a woman painter or sculptor, I found myself wondering why, in the official history, those names so rarely surfaced. Their contributions were significant. In fact, in the cases of Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, the movement would not have existed or unfolded as it did without them. And yet, the story of that movement has been taught and accepted as the tale of a few heroic men.

There are many reasons for that interpretation, some endemic to the history of art, in which man is traditionally the creator and woman the muse, and some specific to America at mid-century. Prior to the Abstract Expressionists, Americans generally mistrusted male artists (female artists weren’t even worth discussing) and labeled them as effete or elitist. The New York crowd, beginning in the 1930s, was the first generation to make painting and sculpture an American “manly” occupation. The movement’s macho character was, therefore, part and parcel of the transformation it initiated. But another important reason the Abstract Expressionist story has belonged to men involves something much more insidious: the market. When art became a “business” in the turbocharged consumer economy of the late 1950s, work by women artists wasn’t considered as valuable as that of men, which meant dealers didn’t show it, magazines didn’t write about it, collectors didn’t buy or donate it to museums, and art history courses failed to mention it. Gradually, most of the women who were part of the Abstract Expressionist movement were at best sidelined and at worst forgotten, despite the fact that they had been heralded before the “art business” took control of the art world and that they were pioneers, breaking down centuries-old cultural and social barriers.

Before the Abstract Expressionists, professional women artists were considered exceptional, either oddballs or “European” because they worked in a less hostile climate abroad. Beginning in the 1930s, however, women artists formed part of the New York art scene and by the 1950s, a handful of them had reached its very center. That history has been largely lost, leaving the chronicle of Abstract Expressionism half told, and robbing many aspiring artists of an awareness of a grand tradition.

It is true that art, while indebted to tradition, is usually at odds with it; art is about the thrill of mutiny. Young painters and sculptors are particularly unwilling to be hampered by the past, especially if that past is encased in the cement shoes of gender. But familiarity with tradition can be liberating for an artist because it provides a map illustrating the route other people have taken, which is especially valuable at the start of such a perilous journey. Male artists can inspire and instruct, surely. Artistic concerns are gender neutral. But there are social and personal issues a woman artist faces that cannot be found in the stories of men; these are the obstacles confronted and obstacles overcome. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “For spiritual values and a creative tradition to continue unbroken we need concrete artifacts, the work of hands, written words to read, images to look at, a dialogue with brave and imaginative women who came before us.”¹ It’s instructive as well as comforting to know how other women have managed and what other women have dared. It’s also gratifying to find in their stories an occasional energizing dose of inspiration. When Grace began her quest to become an artist, she faced two questions: How do I paint? and How do I live as a painter? She turned to Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning to help with the first. To answer the second, she turned to a woman, Elaine. I am ashamed to say that before I met Grace I would not have considered asking her advice on the subject. I was too indebted to a Western art tradition to imagine a woman artist had as much to teach me as a man. After my evening with her, I saw not only the value but the absolute necessity of learning from both.

I left Grace’s studio reeling, my head filled with her tales—hilarious, tragic, edifying—and the question, why hadn’t I heard this before? Why didn’t I know that at the most thrilling moment in American art history, women were instrumental in its success and fruition, that men and women worked together as equals supporting one another in the greatest artistic experiment America had yet experienced amid a society arrayed against them and the art they produced. I decided to write a book to try to fill the void. Twenty years later, I finally began. Ninth Street Women is the result.

To tell the story as vividly and intimately as Grace told me, I decided to focus not on a single artist, but on a group of artists. I felt this would allow me to broaden the history and offer a truer, more vibrant portrait of the time. The avant-garde art community in New York at mid-century was tiny, but about one-third of the serious artists who formed part of it at any given moment were women—sometimes a dozen, sometimes as many as thirty. I chose a core five—Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler—based on the importance of their art or their personal significance to the movement. Also, because of the differences in their ages—a span of twenty years—each of these characters represented an important chapter in the development of Abstract Expressionism. During my years working on this project, I was aware of the irony of writing about these characters as “women artists” at all. None of them would have wanted to be characterized as such. The women among the Abstract Expressionists did not constitute a subgroup. They were painters. Period. As for their very real rebellion against a society that declared the best women to be those most easily ignored, Lee, Elaine, Grace, Joan, and Helen didn’t rebel as much as ignore society’s dictates. They didn’t believe its rules pertained to them.

I went in search of their stories first through more than two hundred interviews spanning sixty years, some of which I had the pleasure to conduct myself. I also pored through dozens of archives and collections belonging to libraries, foundations, and individuals, including several not previously open to the public, in a hunt for letters, journals, and notes. Those primary materials, written by the various characters, their friends, and their extended colleagues, helped me establish a clearer picture of their world as they lived it, as opposed to the way it has been interpreted over the past six decades. Finally, I spent years reading a mountain of general, women’s, social, art, literary, and music history books pertaining to that period, as well as the many, many volumes describing the Abstract Expressionist artists, from the very first publications on the subject in the early 1940s to the most recent. What I was after was enough information to allow me to tell the full story, to introduce the reader to my artists in the society in which they lived. I chose to follow the path described by philosopher John Dewey, and art historians Erwin Panofsky and Meyer Schapiro, who taught that one is unable to understand art deeply without understanding the time and place in which a work was created, and without having a proper introduction to the artist responsible for the work.² The scope of my book expanded accordingly.

What I have come to write, through the biographies of five remarkable women, is the story of a cultural revolution that occurred between the years 1929 and 1959 as it arose out of the Depression and the Second World War, developed amid the Cold War and McCarthyism, and declined during the early boom years of America’s consumer culture when the “latest” was inevitably the “best.” Throughout the book, I have also described the ever-changing role of women in U.S. society, and the often overlooked spiritual importance of art to humankind. As I wrote, that last point became particularly relevant. The modern disassociation of the average person from art began at the very time when those who created it were most akin to them. The Abstract Expressionists were largely working people, the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves, men and women who lived a hardscrabble existence. But because their art generally abandoned people, objects, and landscape—those elements most easily recognized by nonartists—it became difficult to understand and therefore easy to dismiss. Critics, art scholars, and museum officials often made matters worse. The formalist language that arose around art so obscured its meaning that art became removed from so-called real life. Gradually, society came to believe it didn’t need art. And that is a tragedy, especially in an age such as ours.

Art serves a social function not unlike religion. For those who are open to it, it speaks directly to that aspect of man that is not beast-like, and stirs the part of modern man that is nearly calcified from neglect, his soul. I often thought, as I wrote, that our own troubled world is sorely lacking in the nutrients that art provides. The stories told in this book might be a reminder that where there is art there is hope. Or, as Albert Camus wrote, “In the world of condemnation to death which is ours, artists bear witness to that in man which refuses to die.”³

I would like to briefly explain my method to the reader so he or she does not feel cheated by a lack of traditional biographical detail. Because I am writing about five people during a period of a mere thirty years I had to be judicious in my choice of material, both for length and to fit the broader story line. I have used those elements of the five women’s histories that are most pertinent to their lives as artists in the Abstract Expressionist milieu. For example, I don’t dwell overly on childhoods and families except where doing so helps a reader understand essential facts that contributed to the artists’ development. I don’t spend time on specific dates that normally comprise and ritualize a person’s life. I am interested less in a vertical history than a horizontal one, in other words, those experiences and people that influenced the artists, rather than their chronological development. Chronology is, in fact, a thorny issue in this book because memories about specific occurrences often conflicted, as did published accounts. Sometimes a letter appeared to help corroborate a date, sometimes a journal entry, but in other cases I had to rely on the logical preponderance of the evidence in placing an event at a particular time. Also, because the book ends in 1959, when the movement sputters and dies, I have, to my own frustration, offered mere snapshots of the characters’ later lives. Those interested in full biographies of some of these women—dates and all—are lucky. In the past few years, biographies have been published on all but Helen Frankenthaler. References to the biographies of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Grace Hartigan are included in the bibliography, as are many other wonderful biographies and books on the extraordinary characters with whom the Ninth Street Women lived and worked.