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This exhibition showcased the work of four early modernist
American women painters, two of whom worked in New York, and two
in California. Although the paintings ranged from the 1920s through
the present, the focus was on the 1930s and '40s, when American
modernism was coming into its own.
Like their male counterparts, these women explored
the esthetic innovations that later became the pillars of modern
American painting: the tension between figuration and the flatness
of the picture plane, the evidence of the painter's hand, and the
optical effects of color.
New Yorker Theresa Bernstein, the most exuberant of
the quartet, made landscapes and images of street life that burst
with energetic, allover brushstrokes. Her paintings from the late
1940s dissolve almost completely in a riot of line and color, prefiguring
Abstract Expressionism. San Franciscan Helen Ludwig's subjects are
more spare and delicate. Her collage-and-ink cityscapes are charming
and moody, in spite of their brevity of line and detail. With similar
simplicity, Russian émigré Ruth Gikow used saturated
color and flat patterns to evoke both celebratory and contemplative
moods in her intimate portraits.
Most surprising was the work of Dorothy Winslade,
a British-born California painter. The smooth, rounded forms and
reductive, almost Fauvist color schemes of her landscapes are bold
and muscular, and seem truly modern.
While the show was too small to support any judgments
about differences between the East and West Coasts (much less between
women and men), it's a refreshing reminder that no gender has exclusive
claim to modernity.
This review originally appeared
in the December, 2005 issue of ARTnews.
Reprinted with permission.
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