Shane Guffogg: Color Essay 7 Women and the Abstract Expressionist movement making history (Conversation between Victoria Chapman and Los Angeles based artist, Shane Guffogg continues)
In Color Essay 6 we talked about women artists from the Abstract Expressionist movement starting with Helen Frankenthaler’s absence of color to the bold brushstrokes of Lee Krasner, and onward to Joan Mitchell who taught us how to see differently. Then there were the spiritual missions of Agnes Martin and Hilma af Klint. In Color Essay 7 we continue to explore the movement and talk about how these courageous women develop their own independent voice during this revolutionary period in art history.
Shane Guffogg: Color Part 6 Women Artists Finding a Voice Through Color and Abstraction (Conversation between Victoria Chapman and Los Angeles based artist, Shane Guffogg continues)
Women painters of the abstract expressionist movement embraced the zeitgeist of their male peers, while managing to add to this new visual language, creating sensual artworks. Their ideas on life and nature and how it could be expressed with color, space, and line were guided by their intuition. They produced some of the most sublime and beautiful abstract paintings ever.
The fight for equality was ongoing, as was the dialogue surrounding issues caused by World War II, but for the first time, women artists began to transmit their personal messages. These sometimes featured an absence of color and lines, with portions of blank canvas being equally as important as the saturated areas. Helen Frankenthaler (1928 – 2011) said, “Color without space is meaningless.” The women of this period had much to unravel about painting’s history so that they, too, could construct their own meaningful interpretation of art’s future.
Abstract Expressionism and Freedom (Conversation between Victoria Chapman and Los Angeles based artist, Shane Guffogg continues)
VC: We finished Part 4 entering the uncharted waters of Abstract Expressionism, a movement that incorporated beauty and violence. I was awestruck with the opening monologue of Emile De Antonio’s art documentary film; Painter’s Painting – The New York Art Scene 1940 -1970
The monologue begins …
“They say the problem of American painting is there was a problem of subject matter. Painting in America kept getting tangled up in the contradictions of itself. We made portraits of ourselves when we had no idea who we were. We tried to find God in landscapes, and we were destroying them as fast as we could paint them. We painted Indians as fast as we could kill them. And during the greatest accomplishments in technological history, we painted ourselves as a bunch of fiddling rustics. By the time we became social realists we knew that American themes were not going to lead to a great national art. Only because the themes themselves were hopelessly absolute. Against the consistent attack of Mondrian and Picasso, we had only art of half-truths lacking conviction. The best artists began to yield rather than kick against the pricks. And it is exactly at this moment, we finally abandon the hopeless constraints to create a national art, that we succeeded for the first time to do just that. By resolving a problem forced on a painting by the history of French art. We created for the first time a genuine art of magnitude. And if one had to ask what made American art great, it was American painters who took hold of the issue of abstract art – a freedom that could get with no other subject matter and finally we made high art out of it.”
