A modest room of small pictures, Mira Schor’s project space exhibition, The Red Tie Paintings, pulsates with lyrical fury. These Goyaesque allegories exude shamanic urgency, as if painted for purposes of exorcism. The artist does indeed describe a cathartic functionality for these works: “A day in the studio begins with the instantaneity of response to that day’s repellent news, which I can articulate very freely in ink and gouache on paper.” Red and black are at once symbolically charged and formally potent chromatic choices. The dramatis personae in this fiery suite include limp dicks, a melting swastika, eyes that are also vaginas and bleed, the Owl of Minerva (she who rises only at dusk) and the eponymous, synechdochal necktie that comes to menacing, serpentine life, a device that recalls anthropomorphized props in a William Kentridge animation. Artistic sisters channeled include Charlotte Salomon, Nancy Spero and Sue Coe. At once deeply personal and fiercely political, this is poetry meets therapy meets agit prop meets magic.
On view through January 7, 2018, 106 Forsyth Street at Broome Street, lylesandking.com

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This year, in its press communications at least, Frieze New York touted a number of galleries showing feminist artists and under-appreciated women of various important movements. This is a newly fashionable area of connoisseurship and does indeed provide an Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of a major international art fair

Part of the job of the gallery in this context is to educate the collector through convincing presentations of historic, lesser-known artists. In that sense I was happy to see Mary Corse (b. 1945) at Lehman Maupin. Corse was part of the male dominated Light and Space movement in California in the 1960s, and while I would have liked to experience some of those early works, I enjoyed her new freeway inspired paintings incorporating glass microspheres commonly used to brighten highway signs.

Another pioneer of past movements is the fabulous Kiki Kogelnik (1935-1997), an Austrian Pop artist shown by Gallery Simone Subal. She was a sophisticated colorist who made idiosyncratic imagery that sets her apart stylistically from more familiar male Pop Artists like Tom Wesselmann or Roy Lichtenstein. The gallery organized a great exhibition, managing to curate a representative overview of her work within the constraints of an fair space booth. Kogelnik’s yellow wall sculpture Untitled (Breast) (1986), next to an untitled black and yellow India ink drawing from 1965, is one of the sweetest moments in the fair. Nearby, the artist’s large oil and acrylic paintings (Untitled) Figures, 1972 and 1981, have a Vuillard-esque patterning that predicts some of the work being made by artists in New York right now.

I also learned of Yugoslav-born Hungarian performance artist Katalin Ladik, (b.1942) whose work from the 1970s was on display at Espaivisor. She overlaps with artists like Hannah Wilke and Yoko Ono and seeing a small amount of photographic documentation made me want to know more about her.

This year Frieze also offered plenty of booths with well-known women, for whom little introduction is needed.

Stephen Friedman, for instance, offered Huma Baba’s Castle of the Daughter (2016), a female fertility figure made of cork, styrofoam, wood, and paint. The piece has the totemic presence of Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014), though, of course, at a smaller scale. As an object it is experiential in that the burnt wood has a scent and the artist uses a surprising mix of disparate materials – all to amazing effect.

Sylvie Fleury at Salon 94 was another high point of the fair, in particular her life-sized Gold Cage PKW. Made of thick brass bars with a small opening just large enough to pass a food tray to an incarcerated human, it’s a frightening little space. It reminded me of recent protest slogans “Free Melania”, and though created in 2003, the reference to the proverbial kept woman is more pertinent than ever.

Also at Salon 94, male photographer Lyle Ashton Harris authored a self-portrait as Billy Holiday in Blue Billie (2003). Though small in size, it is especially powerful because Harris is able to mine the narrative of personal hardship linked to Holiday, while simultaneously enacting a double play on gender. We know Holiday’s familiar face, but Harris’s embodying of her actually deepens our understanding of the singer, because he gets at her pathos by way of empathic interpretation, just as any good actor can.

Lorna Simpson at Hauser & Wirth also employs blue, in a series of paintings made especially for the fair. By appropriating images from her collection of vintage Jet and Ebony magazines, she presents glamour as a failed project. Her painting Black & Ice appropriates the face of a young beauty holding a cocktail with a come-hither expression. It’s a mixed blessing being beautiful and vulnerable, the piece seems to say; the collaged text and painterly blurs of blue and violet get at the truly scary circumstances a young woman faces as an intoxicated sex object.

At Galerie Lelong Nancy Spero’s Sheela-Na-Gig At Home (1996), is an installation of ready-made bras, slips, and panties that hang on parallel clotheslines. Spero mixes realism with mysticism by interspersing small drawings of the goddess Sheela Na Gig among the clothes. This domestic theme in the work of such a well-known practitioner of feminist art in New York as Spero overlaps interestingly with younger English artist Tracy Emin, who has a number of strong pieces at the fair. Her subtle, sewn drawing on canvas at Loran O’Neill Roma is a seductive artwork both in subject (nude beauty in bed) and form. A small wall at White Cube is a place to pause and consider her abortion memorabilia from 1990. A glass case holds the artist’s hospital bracelet, medication, and bandages. Placed next to a related group of watercolors, the piece is confessional and personal, and in that sense it seems an act of generosity to her audience.

Another woman who blends art with life is Susan Cianciolo, at Bridget Donahue. A large group of her collaged works on paper hang salon style on two walls. But these are rather like souvenirs to the artist’s meatier work in fashion production and relational aesthetics and come across as less serious. A taste of her core practice is in the two floor based sculptures that look like grungy work desks and double as pedestals for fabric and bric-a-brac assemblages she calls “kits”. There is a reference to Cianciolo’s daughter Lilac, who may have been playing inside the boxes with the various pieces of clay, foam core, rhinestones, paper cups and other assorted objects. Though I’m not totally comfortable with Cianciolo being categorized as a feminist artist – her work lacks anger, which to me is an essential component of political art – I like that she presents fashion as high art, and I appreciate the radicality of leaving everything so unfinished.

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George Grosz: Politics and His Influence at David Nolan
September 8- October 22, 2016, 527 West 29th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, info@davidnolangallery.com

Sometimes merely to depict the world is to make a political statement. When Sue Coe draws Homeless Woman Dressed in Garbage Bags (1992) and Louis Lozowick’s lithograph depicts Hooverville (1932), both at St. Etienne, those images in themselves reveal injustice, and so should inspire responsive action. And, at David Nolan, the implication of the visual rhetoric of Nancy Spero’s F111- Victims in River of Blood (1967) is transparently clear. But sometimes the relationship between visual art and political ideals is more elusive, as with A. R. Penck’s Ubergang (1968/70), an ink drawing, and Marina Abramovic’s The Hero II (2001/2008), a silver print, both also at Nolan. Penck’s German title describes a ‘transition’, presumably towards a more just society—and Abramovic ironically shows herself as a hero with a white flag on a white horse. And Gerhard Richter’s print 14 Feb 45 (2001), so you can discover by Googling that date, is an aerial view of Dresden made right after the World War Two firebombing.

Galerie St. Etienne presents sixty-five drawings, lithographs, paintings and posters made by American artists associated with (or supportive of) the American communist party. Coe has an illustration NY Soup Kitchen—a Week Before Xmas (1992), George Grosz two works on paper, and Alice Neel a painting Longshoremen Returning from Work (1936). These figurative artists depicted poverty, racism and unemployment. One room at David Nolan shows a group of George Grosz’s iconic works from the 1920s through the 1940s. The rest of this exhibition, in three galleries on two floors, shows a marvelous variety of political artists. You see Leon Golub’s Mercenaries II (1975), Ian Hamilton Finlay’s installation The Revolution is Frozen—All Principles are Weakened. There Remain only Red Bonnets Worn by Intrigue (1991), and Martha Rosler’s photomontage Empty Boys (1967-72). And also Faith Ringgold’s narrative composition, Hate is a Sin Flag (2007); Jorg Immendorff’s painting Only when the rocks are flying we will be appeased (1978), and Robert Rauschenberg’s remarkable collage Untitled (Huey P. Newton, Arts Magazine, Nov. 1970) (1970).

These two exhibitions present a most instructive history of twentieth century political art. In a lengthy essay, which is on-line, St. Etienne traces the career of Grosz, who immigrated to this country when Hitler came to power in his native Germany, and the response of various American 1930s leftists to the Great Depression. And, after noting that the rise of Abstract Expressionism led to the marginalization of political art, it plausibly argues that now we have as much need for socially engaged art as in the 1930s. “Although the American establishment rejected political art in the latter part of the twentieth century,” it claims, “some collectors and dealers remained devoted to the genre.” In fact, for two generations the very influential critics associated with October, have argued that contemporary art should critique our social institutions. And a number of artists extolled in their pages are in the Nolan exhibition. What has changed, and this is an important development, is that the dominant style of political art has been radically transformed. The activist commentary of Jenny Holzer’s cold water (2013) and Glenn Ligon’s Introduction (5) (2004) needs to be being teased out. As also is true of Ciprian Muresan’s Communism Never Happened (2006), a vinyl label reproducing those words. The claims of Coe’s images are as direct as those of the drawings by Grosz, the one artist who appears in both exhibitions. But nowadays the statements made by fashionable political art are mostly elliptical.

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Barry Schwabsky’s new anthology, The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (2016), collects his columns for The Nation between 2006 and 2014, providing a clear record of a surprising variety of gallery and museum exhibitions. We get his response to shows of old masters and modernist heroes — Diego Velázquez, Gustave Courbet and Henri Matisse — and his often-critical views of famous senior contemporaries, such as Alighiero Boetti, Dan Graham and Ai Weiwei. We also get his sympathetic take on a number of lesser-known and emerging artists, including Laurel Nakadate, Zoe Strauss, Silke Otto-Knapp and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. And in the introduction, as well as in many of the reviews, readers get brief, instructive statements about the present-day role of art criticism, the contemporary art market, and about the role of art schools — three of the art world’s perpetual quandaries.

As art critic for The Nation, Schwabsky may be reasonably compared with the most famous holder of that post, Clement Greenberg. When Greenberg championed the Abstract Expressionists, calling them the only legitimate heirs to early French Modernist tradition, he appeared a prophet. By contrast, Schwabsky, modestly recognizing in his introduction that contemporary art critics have only a marginal practical role, aspires “to open up […] perspectives without, I hope, belaboring them.” While Greenberg provides a skeleton history of Modernism from Edouard Manet to Jackson Pollock, it’s abundantly clear that no such master narrative can conceivably extend into the present. But now, Schwabsky suggests, thanks to “an inner transformation in the nature of art itself,” it solicits “participants, collaborators, communities.” For this reason, the role of politics has also changed. Greenberg’s art writing, guided by Marxism, sententiously contrasts high art and kitsch. For Schwabsky, however, the goal is to “let the critical distance between art and politics — between my writing and its context — display itself.”

Schwabsky’s presentation of these important arguments is very elliptical, so I hope that elsewhere he will spell them out. Here is how I would place them: after art history became an academic subject, in the 1960s Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss (and her followers at the journal October) attempted also to turn art criticism into a discipline housed in the university. In pursuit of that goal, they introduced a methodology and technical vocabulary into writing about contemporary art. But this project failed. And so nowadays our best critics are poets (like Schwabsky), journalists, or perhaps moonlighting academics such as Schwabsky’s immediate predecessor at The Nation, Arthur Danto. And this means that Denis Diderot, Charles Baudelaire and even Adrian Stokes (the maverick 20th-century English writer who is repeatedly cited by Schwabsky) remain the most relevant role models for critics.

Schwabsky is an eloquent, compulsively quotable writer. His essays, he says, “aim to keep art unfinished.” Without ever seeming to try too hard, he is very effective at summarizing artists’ achievements in tightly coiled felicitous phrases. Kara Walker’s “instantly recognizable amalgamation of technique and content not previously associated with any other artist,” he nicely observes, is “the aesthetic equivalent of what the marketing gurus call a unique selling proposition.” Gauguin’s Polynesian women, he suggests, are “almost indecipherable. […] Something in them remained as mysterious to him as he was to himself.” I love it when he calls Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) an “immersive and synecdochical painting.” And I admire him when, in a surprising review linking the abstract paintings of Stanley Whitney and Jacqueline Humphries, he suggests that they both “aspire to grandeur — with a pictorial vocabulary that to some may seem painfully narrow.”

Critics, whose raison d’être is to scrutinize particular works, need to have a sensibility — which is to say that they are unavoidably more personal in their enthusiasms than art historians. But art historians deploy a method, and so generalize. Suppose, then, that an art historian devoted to contemporary art were to read The Perpetual Guest (as many no doubt will). What general view of the subtitle’s “art in the unfinished present” would she come away with? Schwabsky’s account of how Nancy Spero’s “effort to unmoor painting from the Western tradition finally did converge with Matisse’s earlier one” would show how our best critics link contemporary art with its antecedents. Reading in his discussion of Christopher Wool that “The price of things is crowding out the value of things” would reveal how skeptical our critics are about our overheated art market. And studying his account of Gordon Matta-Clark — “artist of fragments (who) left an oeuvre that feels whole” — could inspire the art historian to resist conventional critical clichés. Above all, I would hope that the contemporary art historian responded to his very dry sense of humor. His analysis linking the prospects of abstraction with Peggy Lee’s song “Is That All There Is?,” for example, is worth more than a lot of formalist or sociological analysis. “A dominant aesthetic,” says Schwabsky in his account of the 2009 Venice Biennale, “always undermines itself.” At this time — when older formalist and Marxist theorizing is no longer applicable, but has not, as yet, yielded to new approaches to art writing — he offers a reliable, necessarily unfinished guide to the dilemmas of the present.

Schwabsky, Barry. The Perpetual Guest. Art in the Unfinished Present (London & New York: Verso, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-324-2. 304 pages. $24.95

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“When I found my voice I allowed the work to become celebratory, I allowed myself to say that there is a sense of possibility.” Nancy Spero, 2000 [1]

With the completion of Notes in Time, in 1979, Nancy Spero began work on the final  entry in the trilogy of ambitious frieze paintings that define her classic period, The First Language, first shown at A.I.R. Gallery in 1981. In it Spero left behind the intensive engagement with found texts that had characterized her work since 1969, and though she occasionally used texts afterward, the focus of her work now became the figure, understood as a kind of hieroglyph.

She had come across the phrase “peut-être la première langue — c’est la danse” in a “little book I have in French on prehistoric art, called Forty Thousand Years of Modern Art, which is where I found the first images that I used of prehistoric women. Of course, I don’t just use images of women, many times I find images of men but then transform them into their female counterparts. Anyway, I was looking up ‘women’ in the book and I couldn’t find it, but I did come across the phrase ‘perhaps dance is the first language.’ Then I thought that the work wasn’t really ‘dance-like,’ although there were a lot of running athletic women, so I cut ‘dance’ out of the title, leaving ‘The First Language.’” [2]

The concept of a preverbal figurative language dates to a much earlier moment in Spero’s thought and work. Jung’s “primordial language” is prominently discussed by Erich Neumann in The Great Mother, as is the notion that dance can be thought of as a kind of language.[note 3] The following quotation from The Great Mother appears in Notes in Time:

In this connection the dance plays a crucial role, as expression of the natural seizure of early man. Originally all ritual was a dance, in which the whole of the corporeal psyche was literally “set in motion.” Thus the Great Goddess was worshipped in dance, and most of all in orgiastic dance. [4]

Artaud also had referred to the idea of a preverbal figurative language in A Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara, which Spero had quoted in the Codex Artaud: “one knows that the first men utilized a language of signs.” [5]

In a 1994 interview for Bomb magazine, Spero concisely described the development of her work after the 1960s: “To jump to the ’70s, it was then that I decided the figures were hieroglyphs. I used text along with image, as extensions of each other, at times in opposition, but always in relation to each other, even if contradictory. The figures themselves stand for language, just as in the symbols from ancient calligraphy or Egyptian art.” [6]

Spero’s earliest experiment with using figures in an explicitly language-like way may be Codex Artaud VII . Near the figure and above the texts of the central vignette appear hieroglyphic forms in five short rows, including one of scarabs (the scarab is an actual Egyptian glyph); two scarabs also appear over the rightmost text. The invented hieroglyphs include an acrobatic female figure on her back with arms and legs raised, touching toes with one hand to form a kind of O or D; and two bodiless heads, one a face-forward Medusa, the other in three-quarter profile with extended tongue.

She told her interviewer that she had stopped using text in the 1980s, agreeing with the comment that she did so “under the conviction that the image itself was a hieroglyph, inscribed sufficiently with language.” In the 1980s, Spero explains, “The image superseded the text. The language of the body, of the female body, its gesture and movement as in dance, or in movement to music, or ritual, took precedence. It all goes together — scribble to gesture, gesture of action, sexual roles. All of this is primal stuff, but taken up to the 20th century in a seemingly sophisticated way. You know, I don’t believe in progress in art. Prehistoric art can’t be beat! Sophistication isn’t progress. It’s just that now there’s a realization and an analysis on our part.”

The development of Spero’s figures, and of her use of language, is more complex than her comments allow. The figures are not hieroglyphs in the sense of characters that have an unvarying meaning, but linguistic signs, which mediate between the artist and the viewer and alter their meanings depending on how they are used. Similarly, her use of written language in her work evolves considerably from the early, brief scrawled phrases and French obscenities to the many quotations from Antonin Artaud’s writings, to the elaborate interweaving of texts drawn from a vast array of sources in her works of the 1970s. She does not, in fact, cease to use texts after 1980; indeed, some of her most powerful deployments of text occur in her late work.

However, as Robert Storr has observed, Spero’s “prematurely postmodern recognition of the semiotics of picture making” operated to her disadvantage. “I say ‘prematurely postmodern’ only to signal the discrepancy between Spero’s early understanding and use of linguistic concepts, and the general dissemination of structuralist and poststructuralist concepts of the 1970s and the 1980s, a discrepancy which explains why she is so seldom mentioned in the literature of the field. That is the fate of precursors who survive to become the contemporaries of younger artists styled as the personification of the new.” [7]

Spero’s Stock Company

As we have noted, a major change in Spero’s working process occurred from the late 1970s to the early 1980s as she moved from handpainted, collaged figures on paper with bulletin-type letters to the use of zinc or magnesium letterpress plates to handprint figures directly on paper. She drew from her own imagery and from published sources to make photoengraved matrices from which she could handprint multiple impressions. From about 1981, she worked closely with the artist and photographer David Reynolds to make the plates. He had recently graduated from Rutgers University, where he had been a student of Leon Golub. Reynolds saw that arthritis was restricting her ability to draw, and thinks her adoption of handprinting with letterpress plates was in part a response to her increasing difficulty in using her hands. [8]

Reynolds would make a photograph of a source image and give her a continuous-tone 8 by 10–inch black-and-white photographic print, and she would then determine whether it should be further processed for a line-art effect or remain a halftone image (that is, with shades of gray, as in a standard photograph). Spero might rework the print with gouache and ink, and then Reynolds would shoot the retouched 8 by 10 to make a copy of the photograph, adding photographic elements as needed — greater contrast, for example — following Spero’s instructions. At this stage the size of the eventual figure was set: she would specify the height she wanted, usually 20 inches or less, and Reynolds would adjust the photographic enlarger. Spero might again retouch the resulting print.

It now would go to the platemaking company in New Jersey. They would use a copy camera to duplicate the image, either in high contrast or preserving midtones, as instructed, and using a relatively coarse dot screen — Spero wanted the fact that images were derived from a printed source to be apparent (rather like the approach to photographs taken by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, though with a different aesthetic). This film was then transferred to a blank zinc or magnesium plate in a standard commercial photoengraving process. Finally, the plate was etched with acid to create the incised image for printing. In 1987 Spero wrote:

In recent years I have cut down (but not eliminated) the collaging of painted figures on these extended linear panels. I generally prefer printed images. In using zinc letter press plates (made from my drawings and appropriations), a hand printing process rather than a printing press, I am able to get many variations of imprint. Depending on the pressure of the hand, the angling of the plate, the amount of ink rolled onto the raised image etc., I can repeat and differentiate an image, emphasizing the staccato of the mechanical, varying hand printing directly on the paper itself with collaged hand printed images. Extremes: the collaged figures can be colorful, bold, celebratory, carnivalesque — or greyed and diffused with an unhealthy look of disintegration, outlines of iridescent color — figures printed to resemble x-rayed human forms — as in the moment the bomb blasts. All manner of processions, conflicts, interruptions, and disruptions. Gravity and ground plane are referenced or inferred and continuously contravened. [9]

Peter Soriano, who first encountered Spero’s work in 1979 when still in college and who subsequently became friendly with Spero and Golub, closely observed Spero’s printing technique. “Nancy never just stamps an image onto a surface,” he wrote. “At times the image is barely pressed onto the wall or paper, like the relaxed after-roll of a drumstick striking a drum. Her closely grouped repetitions are reminders of the control used in inking the plates and the range of pressure used to transfer the images to the surface. . . . Ephemerality and touch are the paradoxical bedfellows of her uncompromising subject matter.” [10]

In the late 1980s, Spero began using flexible synthetic polymer plates, as she was beginning to work directly on walls, and the metal plates could not be used effectively if they were even slightly uneven. At one point, Reynolds recalled, both zinc and polymer plates were being made by the studio.

A total of 416 metal-plate figures were made. In addition, beginning in the late 1980s, when Spero began printing directly on walls, 412 flexible polymer plates were made. There are, further, approximately 60 hand stamps, which repeat metal or polymer plate images in a much smaller size. [11] In all, then, Spero produced almost 900 printing plates. Of the metal ones, approximately 300 depict unique figures, and the remainder are alternative versions — at different sizes, cropped, or otherwise changed. Although the majority of the polymer plates reproduce existing metal ones (but often sized differently or reversed), nearly 140 of them are new images or substantially alter the earlier metal one. Thus nearly half of the 900 plates depict unique figures. Many of the polymer plates were produced for specific installations in the final two decades of the artist’s career and the images on them do not appear in other works. Other plate images were scarcely used. Of the 450 or so primary images represented by these metal and polymer plates, about 200 constitute the core of her stock company, and of them perhaps 50 can be counted as Spero’s stars.

As arthritis made it increasingly difficult for Spero to participate in the actual printing of the plates on the long paper works, she began to have multiple prints of figures made and cut out for her, assembled in an inventory of “paper dolls” that could be used as needed. Samm Kunce recalls that Spero would have the studio assistants put out several lengths of paper before leaving for the day, then Spero would lay works out on her long tables during the night. When the assistants returned in the morning, they would note the locations of the figures with pencil marks and collage the figures in place. “She rarely worked with anyone in the compositional stage,” Kunce recalled. “She would work at night and magically there would appear another art work in the morning.” [12]

In a 1968 lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, “Reflections on the State of Criticism,” Leo Steinberg quoted a paragraph by the poet and critic David Antin about Andy Warhol, which resonates for Spero’s art made with printed figures. “In the Warhol canvases, the image can be said to barely exist. On the one hand this is part of his overriding interest in the ‘deteriorated image,’ the consequence of a series of regressions from some initial image of the real world.” [13]

“The picture,” Steinberg resumes, is “conceived as the image of an image. It is a conception which guarantees that the presentation will not be directly of a world-space, and that it will nevertheless admit any experience as the matter of representation. And it readmits the artist in the fullness of his human interests, as well as the artist-technician. The all-purpose picture plane underlying this post-modernist painting has made the course of art once again nonlinear and unpredictable.” [14]

Spero adopted the technical innovations of Warhol as well as Rauschenberg — she allowed in a late interview that she must have been aware of Rauschenberg’s image transfer technique, which he developed beginning in 1958 — but used them in a way diametrically opposed to Warhol’s. She focused not on the image’s deterioration, but on rescuing it. Where Warhol is cavalier, even indifferent to the image’s survival as he kicks it down the street of technical translation, Spero engages the image, nursing it back to the surface of her work. She is impressed by the endurance of these iconic images, by woman’s “continual presence”; she respects their perseverance.

Spero’s use of found images needs to be understood in this active context. She extensively cannibalized her own work — photographing or otherwise copying key images and retouching and resizing them — and reworked found images, lifted from newspapers, books, and other mediums of reproduction. She deleted or altered elements, emphasized qualities, strengthened graphic impact, and of course printed the figures in colors unrelated to the original context. Spero’s figural approach was not so much one of copying as of adopting or casting, in the theatrical sense: choosing a figure and then using makeup, costume, and staging to draw out its meaning in the context of a specific work.

The First Language

Her second-longest work, at 190 feet, The First Language is constructed, like the previous large works, in twenty-two panels, each 20 inches by about 9 feet, assembled from four sheets of 20 by 27-inch handmade paper. Panels 12 and 13 are two and three sheets long, respectively. Completed in 1981 and the final major work of Spero’s classic period, it is the last large piece to combine cutout gouache-painted figures and figures handprinted using letter-press plates.

The First Language is perhaps Spero’s most overtly cinematic work. Its panels read from right to left like a series of film stills in Cinemascope, with figures in similar poses repeated in consecutive panels. That is, panel 1 should be at the far right when the work is shown, panel 2 to its left, and so on. Though it is not cyclical in a formal sense, as are Notes in Time and some later works, it has the feel of a compressed life cycle of figures rising up from abjection, gaining physical confidence, overcoming obstacles, and in the end finding a bond.

Spero brings together figures drawn from all eras, from the Paleolithic to the present, emphasizing the synchronicity of her world. In this work she has arrived at a mature, confident method of using the stock company: she constantly recasts figures in different roles. For example, the handprint of a standing figure with arms raised is a Victim when printed horizontally; multiple impressions of the same figure, superimposed on the first, depict a massacre (in panels 5 and 6, a scene that recalls the drowned figures in the Beatus illuminations).

The most striking addition to Spero’s repertoire of handprinted figures in The First Language are pictographs of leaping female figures adapted from Aboriginal art of Australia. The earliest of the Aboriginal figures she used appear to date from the Freshwater period, roughly from 1,200 years ago until the Contact period, when native peoples first encountered Europeans, a century or more before the present. It is not their position in chronological history that gives these dancing figures priority as expressing “the first language” — they are not more ancient than some Egyptian figures that Spero used — but their position outside, and prior to, the development of written language.

We sense recollections of Giacometti as well in some of these elongated, isolated figures. After this point, however, as painted cutout figures gave way to handprinted ones, Spero’s focus naturally shifted from the single figure to the reiterated multiple, and there was a corresponding shift in her artistic thought from the personal and solitary to the idea of art as an expression of community. Overtones of existential anxiety remained important until the end, however, as a comparison of Giacometti’s Head of a Man on a Rod (1947) and Spero’s Maypole/Take No Prisoners (2007) demonstrates (see page 315).

The critical response to The First Language included an evocative review by Peter Schjeldahl in the Village Voice, which mentions that the sheets of hand-molded paper were arranged “frieze-fashion, in two tiers,” when it was shown at A.I.R. [15] He responded to the musical dimension of the work: “Like notes on a staff, female figures of many sizes and shapes — primitive and hieroglyphic and medieval and modern (roller skates!), suffering and raging and ecstatic — surge around the walls. Cadenza-like congestions of images alternate with blank sheets like passages of silence. Indeed, after a while I seemed less to see the work than to hear it — an insouciant and savage music, pipes and drums. . . . Spero’s quality has to do with that mysterious ability — basic to expressionistic eloquence in art since Blake, Fuseli, and Goya — to invest complex emotional states in figurative images, ventriloquizing through the tilt of a head or the turn of an ankle. Only an extraordinarily direct and uncensored imagination can produce art like Spero’s.”

NOTES

1. Spero, quoted in Enright, “Other Side of the Mirror,” 31.

2. Spero et al., Nancy Spero, 32. The book to which Spero refers probably is Jacques Mauduit, Quarante mille ans d’art moderne (Paris: Plon, 1954) with fifty-one illustrations.

3. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, Bollingen Series ([New York]: Pantheon Books, 1955), was one of the earliest sources of Spero’s art and artistic thought.

4. Neumann, The Great Mother, 298–99; on page 299 there is an illustration of a “dance group” in a Paleolithic rock painting in Spain. Neumann speculated about a “first language” at length in The Great Mother, explaining Jung’s concept of a “primordial language” (page 15): “The archetype is not only a dynamis, a directing force, which influences the human psyche, as in religion, for example, but corresponds to an unconscious ‘conception,’ a content. In the symbol, i.e., image of the archetype, a meaning is communicated that can be apprehended conceptually only by a highly developed consciousness, and then only with great pains. For this reason the following remark of Jung’s is still applicable to the modern consciousness: ‘Myth is the primordial language natural to these psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery. Such processes deal with the primordial images, and these are best and most succinctly reproduced by figurative speech.’ This ‘figurative speech’ is the language of the symbol, the original language of the unconscious and of mankind.”

5. See “A Mountain of Signs,” in Antonin Artaud, Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 379ff. Artaud experienced a veritable orgy of signs, in figures and in the landscape, as he traveled through the land of the Tarahumara in Mexico.

6. Marjorie Welish, “Word into Image: Robert Barry, Martha Rosler and Nancy Spero,” Bomb 47 (1994).

7. Nancy Spero, Robert Storr, and Leon Golub, Nancy Spero: The War Series, 1966–1970 (Milan: Charta, 2003), 10.

8. David Reynolds, interview with the author, November 11, 2009.

9. Nancy Spero et al., Nancy Spero: Dissidances (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008), 158.

10. Peter Soriano, Raise/Time: An Installation by Nancy Spero, exh. brochure (Cambridge, MA: Arthur M. Sackler Museum/Harvard University Art Museums, 1995), n.p.

11. These figures are according to the card-file reference system used in the Spero studio.

12. Samm Kunce, interview with the author, November 23, 2009.

13. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 91. David Antin organized the first presentation of Spero’s Artaud Paintings, at the University of California, San Diego, in 1971.

14. Ibid., 36.

15. Peter Schjeldahl, “Opposites Attract,” Village Voice, April 15–21, 1981: 83.

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Nancy Spero was born in Cleveland and lived in Paris before settling in Manhattan, where she died in October at the age of 83. Her figurative work since the 1960’s unapologetically addressed the pervasive abuse of power, Western entitlement, male dominance, and the realities of political violence, especially against women.  She is regarded as an iconic figure and a leading feminist artist.  She was featured in the award winning series “Art 21.”

In partnership with husband Leon Golub, her politically committed work was incredibly influential to several generations of artists, including Kiki Smith.

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Timed to open the same week as The Armory Show on the piers, the ADAA’s long-running fair is Blue Chip city, with high-end historical and contemporary offerings. The name confusion between the two fairs is an ongoing source of befuddlement to the general public—and probably part of some larger, intentional strategy.

ROLLING OUT THE GRAY CARPET

POWER PARTNERS

A preview and press conference kicked things off, with remarks from Mayor Bloomberg. Whisked in to the assembled, he responded to a heckler: “Am I here to buy art? Not today.” He went on to cite the economic facts: a projected $44 million in activity for the fairs overall, including some $1.8 in tax revenues. He estimated some 60,000 visitors for the combined events, with 60 percent of those coming from out-of-town.

FEELING VISIONARY

Charles Long, idiosyncratic sculptor of biomorphic follies, was on hand, overseeing the installation of his solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar’s booth. This comprises three wall-mounted Saarinen-inspired tables that have undergone surrealist transformations, their tops facing viewers, hiding strange agglomerations behind. Long says he’s giving us an “alternate reality” of “displaced gravitational force,” playing off of the modernist tables and chairs found ubiquitously in surrounding booths.

EMOTIONAL OVERLOAD

“Optimistic” is how gallery employee Allana Strong categorized the Vivian Horan Fine Art booth, with its mirror-surfaced words by local artist Rob Wynne. I asked Strong if she felt her own “invisible life” or “destiny” in their presence. “My destiny, I hope, is to have my own gallery in a few years,” she mused.

JAFFE JUMPS

Tibor de Nagy’s booth is given over to the remarkably sophisticated and exuberant abstractions of Shirley Jaffe, a true “American in Paris” expatriate working at the top of her form at age 87. The artist was in town for Tuesday evening’s planned festivities, to be followed soon by a proper show at the 57th Street gallery.

SPERO’S LIFE LINE

Another strong solo consisted of Nancy Spero’s 1996 piece, “Sheela-Na-Gig at Home,” a clothesline installation strung with unique prints of a female fertility god and various undergarments, accompanied by a video of the artist (1926-2009), which finishes with her saying, “I have to get the dishes done.” Asked if she could relate to Spero’s wry feminist predicament, Lelong director Sabbatino responded, “I have a dryer.”

MATCHING ENSEMBLES

Greenberg Van Doren mounted a fine 1950s-1960s survey of works from the estate of still-underrated ab-ex master James Brooks. The lush brushstrokes of his earlier canvases are pared down to gorgeous graphic Matissian elements in later cut-paper collages.

HEADS YOU WIN

Gallery Michael Werner, of Cologne and New York, juxtaposed modernist works of Francis Picabia with the neo-expressionism of Georg Baselitz and Eugene Leroix and a contemporary work by Thomas Houseago, an emerging talent from Los Angeles. The results are authoritative and convincing.

GERMAN SPOKEN HERE

GESTURE AND FORM

The survey of Roxy Paine drawings and sculptures at James Cohan’s brings a personal response to our post-industrial landscape. His artificial take on nature is showcased not only in “tree” studies, but also in the products of his sculpture and painting “machines.” Gallery employee Goodson spoke of the “accresive process” of dropping heated “low-density polyethylene” on a conveyer belt to pleasingly accidental results. Here’s hoping that fair attendees will make the natural connections to Brancusi and Arp.

This is Blue Chip, after all.

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Robert Berlind, Eleanor Heartney, and Mark Stevens joined David Cohen to discuss Hans Haacke at Paula Cooper, Nancy Spero at Galerie Lelong, Duncan Hannah at James Graham & Sons, and Barbara Takenaga at McKenzie Fine Art.

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“Nancy Spero: The War Series, 1966-70” at Galerie Lelong
(528 W 26th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, phone: 212-315-0470) through December 6

Al Held is an artist whose work I stare at for hours every day. A while back I organized a survey exhibition of watercolors that included the artist, and (confession of copyright infringement) I couldn’t resist cannibalizing his jpeg as the “background” for my computer.

A suspended (or floating) open grid structure recedes diagonally into cosmic space. At the heart of the composition is an orb from which crystalline rays of color emanate. Infinity is given dense shape by relatively simple means: Regularly intervalled, overlapping, spiraling arcs create a pattern of distorted lozenges watercolored in an irregular but close-knit sequence of hues.

By Mr. Held’s standards, the composition on my desktop is a model of restraint and centeredness. His current show at Robert Miller, of large, sharply delineated canvases in mercilessly bright, flat colors, reveals a nutty, truly obsessive logic of monumental proportions.

Packed, altarpiece-like, into the top-lit back room of the gallery, is “Genesis II” (2002). With its endless loops and unreconcilable spatial ambiguities, this work is the Sistine Ceiling of screensavers. Mr. Held’s exhausting narratives of geometric unraveling are the kind of thing M.C. Escher would have come up with if seated at a computer and slipped some LSD.

Mr. Held’s paintings are as confounding stylistically as they are geometrically. They pit dumbness against sophistication, dipping into techno-culture yet coming back with synthetic treasure. Neat in execution but messy in the beholding, these hyperactive yet affectless works recall the phrase of Mr. Held’s one-time studio neighbor Alex Katz: “Something hot done in a cool way.” Only in his case the word “cool” must be replaced by “cold.”

It is telling how, with Mr. Held, this phrase operates as a kind of conceptual palindrome: Inverted- “something cold done in a hot way” – it means pretty much the same thing, so wedded in his painting are form and content, means and motif. Mr. Held enslaves himself and viewer alike to a relentless precision and manic cheeriness.

His career has paralleled that of Frank Stella in the arc it has described between simplification and recomplication. Early on, cool, reductive explorations of shape took him to the brink of minimal art. He then pulled away from that movement, which he had anticipated, and seemed to opt instead for complexity. His radically and remorselessly abstract painting substitutes reduction for its opposite, informational overload, but in such a way as to deny equally possibilities for formal satisfaction or narrative closure (it is this denial which makes him abstract, despite a depictive element). It turns out that excess can be every bit as soulless as denial.

***

A more forceful contrast with Mr. Held couldn’t be imagined than Nancy Spero’s War Series, next door at Galerie Lelong. To Mr. Held’s “Star Wars” backdrops Ms. Spero offers the “relief” of an all-too-real war, Vietnam – of which, it emerges, she was the Goya.

The War Series, dating from 1966-70, when the artist was in her early 40s, presents a strange and harrowing beauty. In scale and immediacy these gouaches are somewhere between agitprop and Outsider Art. Fiercely drawn and crudely expressive, they form a bestiary of war, with helicopters transformed into vicious bugs and birds, and atomic mushrooms rendered as writhing phalluses.

The series seems at once public and personal, a rallying-call to fellow peace activists and a retreat into the artist’s own psyche. As such, they anticipate Ms. Spero’s later career, when she became a leading light of the women’s art movement; for feminists, neat divisions of public and private do not hold.

In ideology and style alike these apocalyptic, mythopoeic images are urgent and angry. Brushwork is fierce, ink and paint artfully run dry before lines end, the skimpy paper buckles under physical and emotional stress. There’s an abundance of gnashing teeth, gushing blood, and flung body parts. The politics can be as primitive as the touch: American eagles morph into Nazi swastikas while “D.O.W. D.E.A.T.H.” and “D.O.W. M.U.R.D.E.R.E.R.” are inscribed on the barrel of an exploding phallus/cannon. But when was the power of protest art ever measured by the subtlety of its political analysis?

Despite the agitated handling and bolshy sloganizing, these images have a weirdly ethereal timelessness about them. Ms. Spero’s language filters classical and medieval elements through modern expressionism; the results, often enough, recall romantics of a century or two earlier -Blake, or Redon.

“The Bomb,” 1968, personifies modern destruction as a male figure. (The work, reproduced in the catalogue, did not appear in the exhibition). His legs and torso are rendered with classical finesse. His arms and head transmogrify into a mushroom cloud, on the crest of which ride gargogyle-like heads spewing blood or venom. Similar heads surmount a pair of at once weaponized and anthropomorphized penises that jut at right angles from his crotch.

And yet – no doubt counter to the pure ethical intentions of their author – these images take the viewer to a place beyond simplistic moralizing. However stridently anti-military her iconography tries to be, an element of ambiguity creeps in – like a good ‘ol rape-and-pillage scene in Titian or Rubens. The artist seems to have internalized more of the aggression she sought to exorcize than she might have realized

Sexuality, a forceful metaphor for aggression, is a pulsating presence in the artist’s voluptuous touch. The content may belong to Thanatos, but the form is claimed by Eros.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 4, 2003

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