Man Up & Paint Big- Unearthing a Bizarre trap

The first time I took a Modern Art class, it was in '96 at BMCC (Borough of Manhattan Community College). I loved learning about the painters and the various art movements of the 20th century. It was my evening class and afterwards on my way home, I would leave the building in quiet, wistful reflection and see the Twin Towers shimmering only a few blocks away, lit up so beautifully in all its glory. How lucky I felt to be amongst its beauty. And how integrated I felt to society to be a student taking my classes and commuting, not in my usual state of truancy.

Apparently that good feeling didn't last too long because I eventually dropped out. I was going to do my report on Frida Kahlo and I don't know what exactly made me derail like that. But fortunately, that wasn't for long either. Through a friend, I got a job as a notetaker at BMCC and City Tech and one of the courses I was assigned to take notes in happened to be Modern Art. I got to sit in as a kind of observer or outsider (as opposed to a direct student) and be exposed to this material once again. When I went back to enroll for myself, I retook Modern Art and was so happy. This time I did my report on Jackson Pollock. I loved his splatter action painting and the Abstract Expression art movement. I also started to learn about its other painters such as Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian, Norman Lewis, and Lee Krasner.

The size of most of these Abstract paintings was grand to behold- it was a departure from the smaller European ones and made NYC the art capital of the world.

At one point around this time, I saw that there was an actual Lee Krasner exhibit coming up in Brooklyn, but I somehow missed it. And man, was I sore about it for years to come! 

In 2023, I read the book, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art by Mary Gabriel. Set against the backdrop of post-World War II New York City, Gabriel meticulously covers the evolution of the art scene, focusing on how the city became a magnet for artistic talent, drawing in European expatriates and establishing itself as the center of the art world. 

With this book, I was able to revisit Lee Krasner and delve more into the female perspective of this movement. And the more I learned about the artists themselves, the stranger the story became.

At first, I thought I was simply discovering a group of remarkable female painters whose contributions had been overshadowed by their more famous male contemporaries. That much was true. But as I read on, I noticed something far more perplexing. And the more I thought about it, the more dizzying this became.

Women who wanted to be taken seriously were often expected to suppress anything that might be labeled as too "feminine". Their paintings couldn't be too delicate or decorative, intimate, or too pretty. They had to do it up big and bold in order to get anywhere. 

If a woman painted too delicately, she could be dismissed as feminine. If she wanted to be taken seriously, she had to paint with enough force, scale, and aggression to prove that she belonged. Meanwhile, many male painters were wrestling with an entirely different anxiety.  A man choosing painting as his profession could find himself having to establish that he was still sufficiently masculine.

So, the women had to "man up," while the men had to reassure everyone that painting hadn't made him too girly. But if painting is such a feminine endeavor, why did women still have this pressure not to appear too feminine in their work?

WHO PRAYTELL, WAS ACTUALLY "ALLOWED" TO PAINT?!!

It was lose-lose, and terribly ironic. 

Abstract Expressionism was celebrated as a revolutionary movement that rejected convention. Yet even in this supposedly liberated world, many of the old social expectations remained firmly in place. 

I've heard of art classes where students were asked to guess the gender of a painter based solely on the artwork, only to discover how unreliable those assumptions really were. Likewise, "blind auditions" in classical music prove to be an interesting experiment. Once orchestras place musicians behind a screen, suddenly listeners are judging only what they hear.

When I finally finished this 700+ page book, it led me to find out about a nearby event:

I was finally able to stand in front of not only Lee Krasner's work, but the paintings of Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Audrey Flack, and the rest. Here are some of my favorites from that show. 

The Southampton Arts Center (SAC) - “Heroines of the Abstract Expressionist Era: From The New York School to The Hamptons”

And finally, face to face with Lee Krasner's work, making up for missing it so many years ago.

Yes, her work can also be found in other places, such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and I've seen it there a few times. But it was really something special to see it featured more prominently here and alongside her peers who faced similar, painfully absurd obstacles and double standards.

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