This season of the Recording Artists podcast, hosted by Helen Molesworth, explores what it has meant to be a woman and artist through the lives of six iconic artists.
Lee Krasner
Lee Krasner’s Second Act
Though Krasner often invited art historians to interpret her work biographically, she was too resourceful an artist for those reductive readings to overshadow her art’s complexity.
Lee Krasner’s Early Prophecies
Krasner’s teacher, Hans Hofmann, told her that her work was so good, you would have never known it was done by a woman.
How the Mythic Heroines of the New York School Changed Modern Art
Mary Gabriel charts the Abstract Expressionist movement through the lives of its five most prominent female painters in her newest work of biography, Ninth Street Women.
A Play About Jackson Pollock’s Life Obscures Lee Krasner’s Importance
Pollock by Fabrice Melquiot is in many ways just another paean to the ‘heroic male painter.’
An Ambitious Survey of the Titans of Abstract Expressionism
This expansive AbEx show is brash, irreverent, and unconstrained, just like the period it aims to express.
‘Women of Abstract Expressionism’ Challenges the Canon But Is Only the Beginning
DENVER — The story goes like this. It is 1950. Virginia born painter Judith Godwin learns that dancer and choreographer Martha Graham will be in the region and all Godwin can think about is her desire for Graham to perform in Staunton at the all women’s school she attended, Mary Baldwin College.
The Fly in the Ointment: Lee Krasner
One view of Lee Krasner’s career is that there is no dramatic rupture marking the emergence of something new — at least not like the widely celebrated ones that occurred in the work of her husband, Jackson Pollock, or with Willem de Kooning, or, later, Philip Guston.
Artists of the Dark: “Night Visions: Nocturnes in American Art, 1860–1960”
Nighttime darkness compresses space and alters colors, making ordinary places both more terrifying and more freeing, changing the social dynamic of those who walk in them.
The Triumph of Revisionism: The Whitney’s American Century
With America Is Hard to See, the exhibition inaugurating its luminous new Renzo Piano building, the Whitney has reclaimed its role among the city’s museums as the engine of the new.
From Calder to Kruger, the New Whitney Museum’s First Show
The inaugural exhibition at the new Whitney Museum is not perfect, but it is pretty damn good.
America’s Grand Gestures Reign Supreme Again in Basel
BASEL, Switzerland — Fifty-five years ago, the exhibition The New American Painting arrived at the Kunsthalle Basel. It was the first stop on a yearlong tour that touted the work of seventeen Abstract Expressionists before eight European countries — the first comprehensive exhibition to be sent to Europe showing the advanced tendencies in American painting. All but five of the original artists from the show had work on view at last weekend’s Art Basel, where postwar American painting and sculpture dominated the halls.