Failed Missions
RAYNOR, VRVIEN
On Art FAILED MISSIONS BY VIVIEN RAYNOR Generally speaking, the feminist cause brings out the horse's ass in men who oppose it and, in men who support it, the opportunist. The range of attitudes...
...Hepworth reluctantly acknowledges the patriarchal tilt of the English art establishment, and cites a small instance of discrimination that involves, interestingly enough, her husband Ben Nicholson, who, as editor of the arts journal Circle, did not give his wife her deserved credit on the masthead...
...It may therefore seem odd that women, traditionally conditioned by society to assume just such a role, have on the whole not flourished in the field...
...Anyone nostalgic for the old Nichols and May routines will find much here to fill the gap...
...Now in her 90th year, she says she is "against women's work being seen apart," and clearly feels no sense of feminist solidarity...
...I hate it...
...Louise Nevelson is her usual flamboyant self, dishing out the dirt about the scene and naming names, especially Clement Greenberg's...
...It is to this shared experience she owes her allegiance, yet she remains concerned about the additional problems facing her sex, feeling that most of them can be solved if women "slug it out for themselves" as individuals...
...In a few words, Hartigan makes sense out of the all-American camaraderie that characterized the Abstract Expressionist movement...
...Grace Hartigan, a second-generation Abstract Expressionist, similarly risks charges of Uncle Tomism by denying that de Kooning displays violence toward women in his paintings...
...Maybe she is hiccoughing," counters Hartigan inspiredly, "maybe she is shy, maybe she dropped her fan...
...Surely now the reporter will retire gracefully...
...so did] some society people, but not the artists...
...The absence of index, the intrusiveness of the interviewer and the flaccidity of taped talk make Art Talk a book only to be dipped into idly...
...I like the way she heads off a "creative anxiety" question by saying: "I'm not afraid, you see...
...Politely evasive, Delaunay is finally pressed beyond endurance by the interviewer trying to establish "value" in Laurencin's work...
...It was doubtless an intuition of this that made Georgia O'Keeffe and Joan Mitchell, among others, averse- "adverse," as the author and her editors prefer-to being taped...
...asks Nemser hopefully...
...So to take up the slack Nemser has included some vociferous mediocrities...
...In part, this is because they have had trouble meeting certain standards...
...Though she studied at UCLA and was an assistant teacher in the sculpture department there, she had to go to graduate school to discover she knew nothing of her subject...
...Hartigan replies: "No one is going to convince me that Bill de Kooning does not love women," and points to a pastel nude of his to prove it...
...But no, back she comes with: "They do the tests with adults too...
...To the barricades anyone...
...A cram course in taste wouldn't have hurt either, to judge from the description of a painting entitled "Bigamy": It contains "a double vagina/heart form, with a broken heart below and a frozen phallus above...
...Prominent in their collective oeuvre was a "performance" featuring the sacrifice of 1,000 eggs...
...More female students than male have difficulty grasping the idea of form, conceiving spatial relationships, and developing an eye that when coordinated with the hand can instinctively measure and place shapes and rhythms-skills that have, until recently, been central to the practice of all art, however innovative...
...The sculptor Marisol displays the overwhelming advantage of having an unearned income...
...Attributing this to "sex-role conditioning," Chicago decided she would have to learn "craft, process and technique" in order to be taken seriously as an artist...
...No credit to me, I was born that way...
...Painting to her is not a matter of sexual self-consciousness but of simply being alone in the studio with "this damn piece of rag on the wall you are supposed to make a world out of I simply cannot believe a man feels any differently...
...Fortunately, the subjects tend to concentrate on talking about their work...
...I know how to carve...
...Still, I think women stand a better chance of excelling in art than in any other homophiliac endeavor, if only because of the more tolerant atmosphere...
...In Art Talk (Scribners, 367 pp., $14.95) Cindy Nemser presents 12 somewhat loaded interviews with female artists, accompanied by black-and-white photographs of them and their work...
...As a result, figures like Barbara Hepworth are obliged to travel with vulgarians like Nancy Grossman, who specializes in portraying male anatomy without, evidently, ever having researched the subject...
...Even without this, Hartigan's contribution is one of the best in the book...
...Refusing to buy this point of view, Nemser observes darkly that "people are not always conscious of what they are doing...
...She wanted to test "male reaction" to overt female imagery...
...Nevertheless, everything ends happily, with Chicago and her students releasing themselves in the Women's Art Programs she establishes in seats of California higher learning...
...A perfect instance of unappreciated talent, Delaunay began showing only 20 years ago, even though she co-invented Orphism with her husband Robert...
...The young boy became so embittered with his mother's painting and poverty that she was forced to send him to live with her ex-husband...
...We trudge through sexual episodes-infantile, adolescent and, for want of a better word, mature-as well as countless weeping jags...
...When played out in the realm of art, this farce veers into obscenity...
...Too bad it couldn't have been staged in Calcutta...
...She also supported him for several years by designing fabrics, sets and costumes for Diaghilev and accessories for haute couture...
...Of the same generation, Eleanor Antin-best known for the adventures she staged for her hundred pairs of boots-proves to be an entertaining conceptualist...
...Star of several solo exhibitions, TV and radio, Chicago was Mademoiselle's "Outstanding Woman of the Year" in 1973...
...It is in this commercial field she has been best known, but some European retrospectives have restored her to the fine arts, notably by way of her tapestries...
...But the sculptor's feelings about self-discipline are a lot stronger...
...Was Maries Laurencin taken seriously as an artist...
...From there on it is 216 pages downhill...
...Since women in primitive societies possess these abilities, one must assume that for some reason their Western sisters, more than the males, are the victims of our cultural attrition...
...In her case it has included parting from her son...
...Hartigan firmly dismisses this attempt to equate the work of a great artist with that of a "child...
...Subtitled My Struggle as a Woman Artist, it fits more snugly into the true confession category, soggy-core porn division...
...Being an artist is a rather passive occupation, for artists usually require outside support to create...
...Deftly bouncing back, Nemser tackles the question of the bared teeth in de Kooning's women, solemnly observing that in psychology test drawings such an emphasis indicates aggressive impulses...
...Well, she took herself seriously...
...Kind and enlightened as her parents were, they were unable to spare their daughter (or us) the trauma of penis-envy, revealed by page 3, or the therapy-induced "guilt" for it that she has suffered lo these many semesters...
...It begins promisingly enough at the start of World War II with a description of the writer's infancy in the city whose name she has taken...
...But of course...
...The subject matter was the double death of my father and husband, and the phallus was stopped in flight and prevented from uniting with the vaginal form by an inert space...
...The better the artist, the less she dwells on the obstacles encountered...
...I wish I could say even that much for Through the Flower, the autobiography of Judy Chicago (Doubleday, 240 pp., $8.95...
...In fact, the movement has been transformed into a business whose survival depends on wrongs not being righted, making the polemics of feminism a mockery to women desperate for intelligent inspiration or practical help...
...Nemser's lack of taste-r perhaps it is plain ignorance-as insulted first-rate artists more grievously than they ever could have been by the enemy...
...she bursts out...
...Lee Krasner furnishes some interesting details about her development as a painter, and the late Eva Hesse describes a life that does much to explain the macabre ambience of her soft sculptures...
...I'm not sure whose side that's one for...
...Editor of the Feminist Art Journal and a contributor to various art magazines, her main mission is to set female accomplishment against a background of discriminatory hardship and thereby make it shine all the brighter...
...She conveys hardship with both eloquence and a light touch...
...The printer didn't turn a hair...
...Sonia Delaunay, too, maintains a cool and sometimes acerbic stance toward her interlocutor: "It's a false idea you have-an American idea that artists must be famous...
...Although this hardly excuses anti-female prejudice, it does seem to make it less irrational...
...The turning point in her own work was the making of a lithograph depicting a hand (female) withdrawing a Tampax...
...She is covering her face in a protective gesture," observes the interviewer...
...The range of attitudes it provokes in women is near-indescribable, but-as usually happens in media-saturated controversies-the more fatuous opinions get the most ink, and, consequently, great profit for their exponents...
...But ambitious polemicists will not be denied, and they ask us to consider the plight of women artists as if, in the context of human misery, it were of prime importance...
Vol. 58 • May 1975 • No. 11
