Ends And Odds: The Ravings Of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe. How Abstract Expressioinsts Help Me Survive Old Age - Part Five.

  How Abstract Expressionists Help Me Survive Old Age.  Part Five by Dave Jaffe.




      There were quite a few male abstract painters in the U.S. in the late 1940's. Of course there were  some women abstract painters too. Yet if you turn to an art history book written and /or published before say 1980 you won't see too many or any women abstract artists in those books.
    Linda Nochlin, the American art historian wanted to find out why women weren't included in most art histories. "Why have there been no great women artists?" Nochlin asked in the title of her 1971 essay. Nochlin reeled off in her essay the very many obstacles women artists have faced for centuries. The obstacles ranged from not being allowed into  on what were called" life drawing classes" or places where there were nude models, to having no rich powerful patrons who would buy the women's paintings. Many men did have these and other advantages.
     Since that groundbreaking essay, many women art historians have re-examined the artistic past and have re-written art history. Women who were totally ignored have been liberated from the silence about women artists. In the late 1940's and into the 1950's, artists like Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning (the wife of Willem De Kooning), Helen Frankenthaler, and Lee Krasner who married Jackson Pollock, were painting and exhibiting their work. Then as Claudia Roth Pierpoint  pointed out in a recent New Yorker story, along came pop art and these women disappeared from the art scene.
      Yet in the early 1970's a second wave of feminism sprung up and many forgotten women artists were re-discovered like those I mentioned above along with  many women.. Nochlin's essay was part of  this re-writing of art history.
       If American women were erased or never mentioned in art history books, so were many others. Most American art history books rarely mention Canadian artists whether male or female. Artists in Canada like Gita Caiserman-Roth, Jean Paul Riopelle, ,Harold Town, and Jack Shadbolt painted abstract paintings yet are rarely if ever written about in most American art histories. Other artists who painted realistically don't even get noticed. "Portraits," Willem de Kooning once said, "are pictures that girls made."
      In any case I draw abstract pictures based on the paintings  that American abstract male artists did many years ago. Soon I may turn to the works of Canadian women abstract painters, and use their works as a take off point for my work. But don't blame me for may male fixated work. I'm just following the art historians of the past. These men and women unfortunately didn't recognize women artists until very recently.