Group 4 Presentation Summary: Gender, Race and Modernism after World War II

This presentation will provide an introduction of the hardships that women artist of color faced after the World War Two. As Chadwick said in her book, that post-war women artists of color often faced “formidable political and social barriers.” Chadwick mainly talked about three women artists of color, and the first one was Mine Okubo.

 Okubo was trained at the University of California in Berkeley, and she exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1940. After Japanese attacked the Pearl Harbor, she was incarcerated to Tanforan Assembly Center with over 100,000 Japanese (including her brother). It was in the assembly center that Okubo started to record her everyday struggle as images or paintings, and more importantly, she kept teaching children art in the center.

The second artist that Chadwick introduced was Elizabeth Catlett. She was best known for her depictions of the African-American experience in the 20^th century, which was a difficult time for a black woman to pursue a career as a working artist. Because of her left-wing political beliefs, Catlett was harassed by the House Un-American Activities Committee and arrested in 1949. Eventually, she was barred from entering the U.S. and chose to be a Mexico citizen in 1962.    

Harriet (1975): Depicting a prominent African American female who illegally helped free escaping slaves; turning it into a positive, inspirational image, especially for women.

Lois Mailou Jones is the most special one among the three artists, since she chose to be a black expatriate in Paris, France rather than suffer from racism in her country during the 1930s and 1940s.   

Les Fétiches: 5 overlapping masks from dofferent African convey the artist’s effort to draw strength and protection from her cultural heritage in the face of prejudice.

Expressionism was a modernist movement that originated in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. It was emerged in various cities as a response to a widespread fear and anxiety about the war and hatred that was increasingly thriving throughout the world. People started to depict not objective reality but rather than subjective emotions and responses that arouse the artist’s feelings. Expressionist artist often employed swirling, swaying, and exaggeratedly executed brushstrokes in the depiction of their subjects. The techniques were meant to convey the emotional state of the artist reacting to the anxieties of the modern world. Even with chaos in the world, many women artist managed to use their emotions and troubles to make one of the most regarded and notable art in that time period.

Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter in mid-twentieth century. She was a major contributor of the history of postwar American paintings. She invented the “soak and stain” technique, in which she poured turpentine-thinned pain into canvas producing luminous color washed that appeared to merge with the canvas and illustrate. She made the ground her canvas and let the colors take their own free directions. In 1952, Frankenthaler created “Mountains and Sea” which was a breakthrough painting of American abstraction. Mountains and Sea ws immediately influential for the artists who formed the Color field school of painting.

Lenore "Lee" Krassner was an American abstract expressionist painter in the second half of the 20th century. She is one of the few female artists to have had a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art. Throughout the first half of the 1940s, Krasner struggled with creating art that satisfied her critical nature. She was highly affected by seeing Pollock's work for the first time in 1942, causing her to reject Hofmann's cubist style which required working from a human or still life model. Beginning in 1946, Krasner began working on her Little Image series. She created around forty of these types of paintings until 1949. They are commonly categorized as mosaic, webbed, or hieroglyphs depending on the style of the image. These little image series were mosaic images that were  created through the thick buildup of paint while her webbed paintings were made through a drip technique in which the paintbrush was always close to the surface of the canvas. Since she used a drip technique in creating her webbed images, many critics believed upon seeing this work for the first time that she reinterpreted Pollock's chaotic paint splatters. Many scholars interpret these images as Krasner's reworking of Hebrew script. In an interview later in her career, Krasner admitted to subconsciously working from right to left on her canvases, leading scholars to believe that her Jewish background affected the rendering of her work.Some scholars have interpreted these paintings to represent Krasner's reaction to the tragedy of The Holocaust. Others have claimed that her work with the War Services project caused her to be interested in text and codes since cryptanalysis  was a main concern for winning the war.

The Composition, 1949-Lee Krasner

Minimalism is an art movement that started around the end of the 1950’s towards the 1970’s and is a painting or sculpture that embraced the idea of pop art. As well as using every day objects to give their art more texture and had the basic idea of colorful childlike expression.

Carmen Herrera, Lines of Sight

 Two major artists were Eva Hesse who was well recognized and debuted her artwork in an exhibition with other male artists called Eccentric Abstraction. The other artist was Niki de Saint Phalle, she was mainly known for her sculptures called Nana’s. These sculptures were large sculptures of the female body, and were all very colorful and in playful poses. Unfortunately she wasn’t as recognized for being a minimilast artist quite possibly because of her unusual sculptures and male critics strayed from her sculptures. But her claim to fame was her eighty two foot long Nana sculpture called Hon meaning her. Hon was a large sculpture of the female body where you could enter through the vagina and inside the Hon would be a play ground and a milking station where the breast’s would be. Her main purpose of this was that she didn’t want women to be an object of viewing but tactile pleasure. 

Eva Hesse, Ringaround Arosie, 1965

Niki de Saint Phalle, Hon, 1966