Georgianna Houghton: Things of the Spirit

 

She called them "spirit drawings" but they were also abstract or else couched in a vocabulary to which she along held the secret decoder. It is tantalizing to wonder whether Houghton and Klint ever met on Klint's visits to London. Overlapping layers of swirls and circles in vibrant colors are dynamic features in the works of both artists. They are hardly the type of art expected from women at the time.

Born in Spain, Georgianna Houghton lived for most of her life in London.  Like Hilma af Klint after her, Houghton took part in séances and averred that she painted at the direction of the spirit world.  Male artists like Kandinsky and Malevich who were long credited as the creators of the non-objective style were also involved in exploring the things of the spirit.

Image: Georgianna Houghton (1814-1884) - The Eye of God, 09/25/182, watercolor and gouache on paper, laid on board, Courtauld Institute, London

Hilma af Klint: A Cartography of the Spirit

"Land lies in water; it is shaded green.

Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges

showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges

where weeds hang from the simple blue to green.

Or does the land lean down to lift from under.

drawing it unperturbed from itself?

Along the fine tan sandy shelf

is the land tugging at the sea from under?"

   - excerpt from "The Map" by Elizabeth Bishop, from North and South (1934)f

To me, Seven-Pointed Star looks like nothing so much as a map. Knowing that Hilma af Klint was born into a family of naval officers and cartographers, the comparison seems spot on. She spent her entire life pondering  in monumental paintings. the spiritual dimensions of science.

She was a member of the second generation  of women who were allowed to study at the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm where she was able to sketch male nudes in life class. What were considered unseemly activities for a woman interested af Klint not at all. She traveled far and wide, visiting Norway, Germany, Holland, Belgium, and London. Not everyone was accepting of those female students.

"It takes a man to create a Parthenon  frieze or paint the Sistine Chapel." 

"Woman must go. Immediately. Has a single one of these weak women at the Academy become an artist? For me there is not one who has any value at all." - 1889

These misogynistic comments came from fellow Swede Carl Larsson, an artist known for idyllic scenes of family life. 

Klinr spent her entire life pondering the fundamental conditions of existence in monumental paintings. Her ideal building was a spiral; she would have been thrilled with the Guggenheim Museum's retrospective of her work and that the exhibition single-handedly changed the shape of art history. 

Image: Hilma af Klint - Group V, Series, Seven-Pointed Star, Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Sylvia Sleigh: The Group

 

"A.I.R. does not sell art; it changes attitudes about art by women. A.I.R. offers women a space to show art as innovative, transitory and free of market trends as the artists' conceptions demand."

The group that called itself A.I.R. first met on Match 17, 1972 in a SoHo storefront. The  women founded a cooperative gallery to show art by women at a time when commercial galleries showed mostly work by men. There had been a demonstration at the Whitney Museum in 1970 brought attention to its paltry representation of women artists (five per cent). It was the painter Howardena Pindall who suggested the name A.I.R.

Who were they?  Susan Williams and Barbara Zucker were joined by Dottie Attie, Rachel bas-Cohain, Judith Bernstein, Blythe Bohnen, Maude Boltz, Agnes Denes, Daria Dorosh, Loretta Dunkelman, Harmony Hammond,  Ann Healy, Laurace James, Nancy Kitchell, Louise Kramer, Pat Lasch,, Rosemary Mayer, Patsy Norvell, and Howardena Pindell.

A.I.R. Gallery went on to curate groundbreaking exhibitions of art by women from Japan, Israel, Sweden, and the Third World in its first decade. 

Sylvia Sleigh (1916-2010) was a Welsh painter who lived and worked in New York City.

For more about A.I.R. go here.: A.I.R. Gallery.

Image: Sylvia Sleigh - A.I. R. Group Portrait, 1977-1978, oil on canvas, Whitney Museum, NYC

Winter Trees: Gandy Brody

 

"Suddenly, in every tree,

an unseen nest

where a mountain

would be."

 -  excerpt from "Choices" by Tess Gallagher

"Even Gandy's clothes seemed to have opinions." - Elaine de Kooning

"What sort of an age is this/ When to talk about trees/ Is almost a crime/" - Bertold Brecht, translated from the German by C. Salvesen

One of Brody's last paintings from 1975 bears the title I am a Tree. Trees bear an oblique symbolism in Brody's work, as does this tortuous looking specimen in The End of Winter; gnarled  branches caught on the diagonal, presented in unexpected shades of red and orange. Nature aslant, abstract but still evocative of nature. In  this typical Brody landscape there is no horizon, just a space that has no beginning and no end. Although working at the fringes of Abstratct Expressionism, Brody had a style of his own.

Here sooty remnants of snow show no trace of their former pristine whiteness, an in between moment when green struggles to reassert its presence in a dun-colored earth

Brody (1924-1975) knew he wanted to create something but what?  On his way to painting (he studied in New York with Hans Hoffmann,) he studied modern dance with Martha Graham and hung around New York clubs in the early days of  bebop. He had met and befriended the vocalist Billie Holiday in the early 1940s, rescuing her runaway dog Moochie He had already been painting for a decade when he realized he was an artist. 
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Brody divided his time between New York City and rural Vermont for much of his career and died too soon at age fifty-one.

Image: Gandy Brodie - End of Wi nter, 1956, oil on composition board, Whitney Museum, NYC.

Jane Piper: A Feeling For Color

"I didn't know such paintings existed. I had seen some things that were involved with color abstraction, some Picassos and Braques, but then when I saw the Matisses I didn't know what hit me. The experience threw me into a whole new emotional world of color and feeling." - Jane Piper on first seeing Matisse at the Barnes Collection.

Albert C. Barnes was Matisse's most ardent patron in America; the Barnes Collection eventually included about five dozen of his paintings. In 1930 when Barnes met the painter, he commissioned a three panel mural that would eventually span the Main Gallery at the Barnes. 

 

Jane Piper (1916-1991) grew up in Philadelphia and spent a year in France before studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art.  She studied privately with Arthur B. Carles, another neglected modernists, whom she regarded as her most important teacher.  The influence of Matisse was noticed early on in her career; Piper, like Matisse, created a sense of space through her use of color. She said that she finally captured the sense of space that she wanted on the canvas through the liberal use of white, that this color corresponded to what she felt about the space.  She preferred still life painting above all because it fit easily into her way of life, allowing her to organize and control the placement of the objects.  That Piper was able to achieve this through white, turning  an absence into a presence, is comparable to Matisse's use of black but more subtle and mysterious.

Image: Jane Piper, Almost A Cross - 1988, oil on canvas, Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica.

Orangerie: A Moveable Garden

  

"I peeled my orange

That was bright against

The gray of December

That, from some distance,

Someone might have thought

I was making a fire in my hands." 

                        -"Oranges" by Gary Soto

The most popular fruit in the world is the orange.  Its association with winter holidays makes perfect sense, a fruit that looks like the sun is fit  for purpose in the darkest time of year.

When Charles VIII invaded the Italian peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century he was smitten by a love for oranges. The orange trees were shipped in their root balls; on arrival the French gardeners bathed the roots in milk and honey. When Charles returned home to his chateau at Amboise he built France's first orangerie.  His wife, Anne of Bretagne, not to be outdone, built an orangerie for herself at Blois.

Henry II built one for his wife Catherine de Medici in 1533 and one for his mistress Diane de Poitiers. 

This competitive one-upmanship continued for centuries; each successive monarch felt the need to create a bigger, more elaborate hothouse for their precious citrus fruit.

Known as the Sun King, Louis XIV could just as well have been called the Orange King. He commanded a twelve hundred foot orangerie in the shape of a half moon to be built as a setting for masked balls and garden parties. His gardeners invented an ingenious method to make the trees  bloom year-round. This was also when the French began to pour hot orange juice over roasted chestnuts. C'est si bon!

The Musee de l'Orangerie was built in 1852 to shelter the orange trees from the Tuileries gardens. A typical orangerie, its glazed windows faced south to capture as much heat as possible. These hothouses evolved into the prototype for the modern greenhouse. At the turn of the century it was converted to a warehouse.  Claude Monet donated his panoramic water lily canvases to the nation; the paintings were installed in 1927 after the painter's death.

Image: Sergio-Gonzalez-Tornero - Orangerie, color intaglio print, 1966, Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica,

Scarab-Like: Mark Innerst

"Seers can see, for instance, the light of the scarabs, emanations expanding to great size." - Carlos Castenada, from The Fire From Within

Mark Innerst is known for  paintings of luminous landscapes so it is possible to see in Scarab-Like a portal to another time and place. He has used the beetle  shape as a frame for a star-flecked night sky through a scrim of trees. The gem-like tints are true to history; blue was the most common color for glazes. A divine manifestation of the early morning sky.

In Egypt by about 2055 BCE an impression of a beetle, called a scarab was a sought-after amulet that was believed to bring good luck to its  owner. It was often worn in the form of a ring. The term scarab comes from Scarabaeus sacer, the family name for ding beetles. Rolling a ball of dung was likened to the heavenly cycle of regeneration.

Image: Mark Innerst - Scarab-Like, 1992, oil and acrylic on panel, Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica.

A Predilection For Onions: Mary Ann Currier

"How easily happiness begins by

dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter

slithers and swirls across the floor

of the saute pan, especially if its

errant path crosses a tiny slick

of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions."

 - an excerpt from "Onions" by William Matthews which first appeared in Poetry in August 1989

Something about a still life painting turns its subjects into objects of desire. That is what happens in Mary Ann Currier's Onions and Tomato.  I want to chop them into small pieces and make soup. Three onions and a tomato, round, shiny, and luscious, guarded by a utility knife and a pot that functions as a mirror as well as a receptacle

Mary Ann Curries (1927-2017) had a predilection for onions. Currier chose onions as a favorite subject for their humble origins in fields of muck, the subtle variations in their color, and because they maintained their freshness while she finished painting them. She painted only from real fruit and vegetables, never from photographs although the realism of her paintings is breathtaking. 

Currier was born in Louisville.  Her parents emigrated to the United States from  Germany after World War II.  She studied art with many GIs, often being the only female in her classes.  She did advertising spreads, stationery, and then moved on to portraiture, finally finding her niche as a still life painter.  She had her first exhibition at the relatively late age of fifty.

Image : Mary Ann Currier - Onions and Tomato,1984, oil pastel on mat board, Metropolitan Museum, NYC