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REOONFIGURING

An international roster ofwomen Pop artistssomelong negleoted and othersunexpeotedis the toousota traveling exhibition,

BY SAUL OSTROW SEDUCTIVE SU BVER SION ; Women Pop Ar t is t s1958-196 8 is the rare show that encou rages you torethink an entire period. Curated by Sid Sachs ofthe Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at University of the Artsin Philadelphia, where it premiered last winter, it isbilled as the first-ever all-woman survey of Pop art.Affording us the opportunity to rediscover artists andsee unfamiliar work, the show revisits the origins ofPop art and the influence wielded by popular cultureinternationally during the decade in question.^ In sub-ject matter, content and esthetics, the work on viewdeparts in surprising and significant ways from whatone might expect of Pop art, and in so doing chal-lenges much received wisdom about the movement.

In the early '60s, the term Pop was generally appliedto art that depicted mundane objects or banal commer-cial products, and whose imagery and style referencedadvertising or graphic design. Pop's defining exhibi-tions New Painting of Comm on Objects, curated byWalter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Mus eum ; The NewR ealists, at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York (both1962); and Six Painters and the O bject, organized byLawrence Alloway at the Guggenheim Museum 1963) were all-male affairs (though Marisol was included in the

Janis show). Sachs reminds us that there is much moreto Popto its artistic sources and objectivesthan

Marjcrie Strider: Green Triptych 1963,acrylic paint and iaminated pine onMasonite, 72 by 105 inches. ColleotionMichael T. Chutko.

CURREN TLY O N VIEW Seductive S ubversion; WomenPop Artists 1958-1968, at the SheldonMuseum of Art, Lincoln, Neb.,through Sept. 26, and opening atthe Brookiyn Museum Cet. 15.

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MU CH OF THE WORK SEEM S AT FIRST TOREPLICATE THE ERA'S O BJECTIFICATIONOF WOMEN, ALONG WITH PREVAILINGVIEWS OF THE FEMININE AND DOMESTIC.

the critical and art historical canon would lead us to believe.Ideas about Pop art, right down to the roster of its principal

proponents, have rarely strayed far from those set forth inLucy R. Lippard's 1966 book Pop Art.

Seduc tive Subv ersion includes not only underkn own Popartists but also artists who are not typically identified with themovement. Marisol and Niki de Saint Phalle, both well known

. .;^v.,L,. :. .^. :,... ; ..e r: Body Beautiful,

or Beauty Knows No Pain: Woman withVacuum Vacuuming Pop Art), 1966-72,photomontage, 20 by 24 inches. C ourtesyMitchell-lnnes & Nash, New York.

Above, Chryssa: Car Tires. 1962,oil on paper, 38 by 23V'4 inches.

Harry N. Abrams Family Collection.

Right, Rosalyn Drexler: HomeMovies, 1963, oil and synthetic

polymer with photochemioalreproductions on oanvas,

48 /8 by 96^/8 inch es. Hirshho rnMuseum and Sculpture Garden,

Washington, D.C.

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and associated with mainstream Pop, are present, but sois the Greek-born artist Chryssa, who is now fairly obscurebut had a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1961, whenshe was in her late 20s. (Having begun as a painter, she didpioneering work in neon in the '60s and '70s.) Other familiarfigures in the exhibition are Yayoi Kusama, Martha Rosier,Vija Ceimins and Faith Ringgold, who, while they are notidentified with Pop today, were considered Pop-ish duringthe decade covered. Still others were (and are) better known

abroad than in the U.S.; the Briton Pauline Boty (1938-1966),who was aiso an occasional model and actress of stage,film and TV; Jann Haw orth, an American wh o participatedin the British Pop art movement; the Swede Barbro Ostlihn(1930-1995), who had a retrospective at the Art Museum ofNorrkping in 2003; and, from Belgium, Evelyne Axell (1935-1972), a TV presenter, actress and scriptwriter turned artist.

The catalogue does a good job of documenting the sys-tematic exclusions these artists experienced. They weretreated as second-class citizens in the male-dominated artworld of the period, and their work continues to be over-looked in most surveys of Pop. Yet neither the cataloguenor exhibition constitutes a feminist grudge-fest. While thetimeframe covered coincides with the emergence of second-wave feminism , much of the work in Seductive Subvers ionseems at first to replicate the objectification of women, along

with prevailing views of the feminine and domestic. As Sachspoints out, the era's gender divisions, both in the domesticand public spheres, permeated the artistic and personallives of the women surveyed. Nonetheless, we find in therepresentation of these themes an implicit proto-feministattitudethough sometimes the work is more overt, as inthe case of 10 photomontages by Martha Rosier focusingon what one might think of as the politicization of femininedomestic servitude and dec orum. The women in Rosler's

collages may go about doing their chores, sometimes inhomes decorated with posters by famous Pop artists, butthe world impinges in places as images of war taken fromnewspapers occupy windows or picture frames.

Helpfully, given the unfamiliar terrain c overed , the catalogue isless a document of the exhibition than a stand-alone book [notyet issued s A i A goes to press]. It provides information onthe lives and careers of women artists identified with Pop andfurnishes a context for both the period and the show. Essays bySachs, Rosier, Linda Nochlin and Kalliopi Minioudaki addressthe issue of feminism, while individual case s tudies of som eof the artists are supplied by Bradford Collins (on RosalynDrexler), Annika Ohrner (on Ostlihn) and Sue Tte (on Boty andother women artists associated with British Pop). Patty Muchagives a first-person account of her years of marriage to ClaesOldenburg during the beginnings of Pop; it was she who fab-

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ricated his early soft sculptures. (The essay is a reprint of anarticle first published A.i.A., Nov. '02.)

While this might seem petty, I find the title Sedu ctiveSubversion misleading, tinged more with chauvinism thanirony. The term sedu ction can imply what were once con -sidered feminine wilesguile, coyness and even deceit.The work in the show is, if anything, antithetical to seduc-tion in this sense. In fact, the exhibition lives up to its origi-nal working title, Beyond the Surface: Women and Pop

Art, 1958-19 68, wh ich is now the title of Sach s's catalog ueessaya response to the famous comment by Warhol thatif you want to know all about him or his work, all you need

DESPITE MANY DIFFERENCES AMONG TARTISTS, RUNNING THROUGHOUT THEIIS A CRITIQUE OF THE EMO TIONAL CONAND ANONYMITY OF COLD WAR SOCIET

Opposite, Pauline Boty:With Love to Jean RaulBelmondo. 1962, oil oncanvas, 59 a by 4 8inches. Collection NadiaFakhoury, Paris.

Right, May Wilson:Untitied (Queen Elizabeth),

ca . 1966-72, collage,8'/2 by 1O'/8 inches.Courtesy of William S.Wilson, and PavelZoubok Gallery, New York.

Below, Alina Szapocznikow:Stele, 1968, polyesterresin and polyurethane,31 by 18 by 271/8 inches.Courtesy Piotr Stanislawskithe Estate of AlinaSzapocznikow, andBroadway 1602, New York.

to do is look at the surface. Sachs's efforts, by contraswell beyond a superficial reading of the movement. Thists in Seductive Subversion employ Pop motifs and but they do not adopt the cool industriai look normallyassociated with Pop. Nor do they emphasize product l

and logos, or the esthetics ofmass reproduction. While sociaand cultural commentary mightarise in art using commercialtechniques, formats and styles,the established artists hereoften turned to more hand-madmeans to convey their messageThey also make little or no reference to celebrities, glamour, gli

or kitsch (though Joyce Wielandoes incorporate into her 1964construction Young Woman sBlues a cheap dime-store Val-entine's Day heart and a plasticmodel of a jet plane). Sachs'saccount embraces Pop's sourcein craft, folk art, gendered imagery (particularly the representa-tion of women's bodies) and indi-vidual experience as well as othcontemporary art. All combine give expression to highly persoapproaches and points of view.

In his seven years researchingthe show, Sachs culled a list of 65 names from periodicais, extion catalogues and checklists, books and articles. He also haconversations with artists Idelle Weber, Drexler, Marjorie StriMinioudaki, stiihn and m any others. Not all the artists w homuncovered are included in the exhibition. He hunted dow n w ostorage facilities of museums and collectors, and in the holdininactive estates (nearly half the artists are deceased). Sometimthe works were in a state of disrepair; Dorothy Grebenak's wohooked rug Tide Box (1964) had fallen apart and had to be repli-cated for the show (by fiber artist Emily Peters). The sole survexample of Laura Grisi's illuminated Plexiglas reliefs and boxowned by a German museum, is too fragile to travel. Only a setching of a crossword puzzle (1964) by the late Letty Eisenhoriginally an edition of 60, could be located; she had lost neaentirety of her oeuvre in recent years to floods. And some of artists have actually gone missing: Sachs could find neither GGraves nor any of her works. Not all the explanations of excluor near-exclusions are so bleak, however. Lee Lozano (who issented by a single drawing on graph paper from 1958) and Hfor example, were the subjects of retrospectives at the time Swas organizing this exhibition; therefore key works by them wavailable. Sedu ctive Subv ersion (which in Philadelphia con s56 works by 21 artists^) is obviously not comprehensive. Yet,artists are often unevenly (though intriguingly) represented, thas a whole gives us a compelling view of works that have lonunseenif they were ever seen in the first place.

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IN ITS BOLD, AGGRESSIVE imagery and grand scale-sometimes billboard-sizethe work of Lichtenstein, Dine,Rosenquist, Rauschenberg et al. has often been character-ized as the last bastion of the heroism and masculinity ofAbstrac t Express ionism. Such traits are absent in Seduc -tive Subversion, though the women here were certainly notalone in presenting an alternative. They remind me of somemale artists at times associated with Popthough notamong the defining starswho similarly lacked a critical

link to Ab-Ex; Joe Brainard, Allan d'Arcangelo, Alex Hay,Joe Goode, Alex Katz, yvind Fahistrm, Wayne Thiebaudand John Wesley, among others. These artists also drewupon elements of popular culture (comics as well as mass-produced and common objects), but their workby turnsminimal, personal, conceptual or formalistnever enteredthe canon of Pop art as narrowly defined.

Of course there are parallels between the women artistsand their better-known male counterparts. Chryssa createda number of Warhol-like works, such as her painted gridsof repeating images Car Tires, 1962) or newspaper adver-tisements Newspaper 11 , 1961), and a Johns-like plasterrelief of letterpress type Unmaiied Letter 1960). Grebenakappropriated imagery from other Pop artists (Warhol andLichtenstein), which she turned into rugs. In so doing, sheappears to have been less concerned with popular imageryper se than with addressing the difference between thoseartists' paintings (high art) and her own craft, which playedwith the idea of hobbyism. Other works, iike her rugs depict-ing Bugatti cars (ca. 1964), had more personal associations;her dealer, Allan Stone, collected them.

Marisol likewise incorporated elements of craft, thoughof the folk art variety. Her wooden sculpture John Wayne(1962-63) shows the cowboy star, gun drawn, astride ahorse going at cartoonish full gallop (all four legs extend-ing out from its body). Given its strong horizontal and ver-tical axes and pronounced silhouette, it is reminiscent ofa whirligig or weathervane. (The work was commissionedto appear in a special issue of Life magazine devoted tofilm.) Marisol's approach, in turn, is radically different fromthat of Drexler, whose works are more formalist. Drexlerisolates her figures (pop singers, film characters and othersubjects) within flat, geometric grounds. An example isTwist Around the dock (1964), in wh ich the figures of

Chubby Checker and dancing couples were adapteda poster for the eponymous film. Earlier, more collagelikpaintings by Drexler similarly appropriated stereotyimagery from film posters advertising damsel-in-dismovies, but in those she rearranged the elements to the results more expressionistic King Kong aka The Dream1963). Of a very different order are the mimetic paiof Ceimins and Kay Kurt, who rendered such objectpencil (Ceimins) and a box of chocolates (Kurt) as d

as possible, strategically positioning their work in liboth the objectivity of Minimalism and the banality Sometimes mixed messages arise from combining so

cultural critique and formalist esthetics. S trider's paintbathing beautieskittenish, Colgate-smile, bikini-clad Green Triptych, 1963)differ decidedly from similar wby such male counterparts as Lichtenstein, Tom Wesse

and the British artistsGerald Laing and TomPhillips. Executing theibreasts and buttocksin relief, Strider not onmetaphorically but phycally objectifies them .A woman's appeal, sheseems to say, is reducibto her protuberances; iaccordance, she punninly shapes her canvaseBuilding masculine faninto her imagery, Stridethe same time transgrees the dictums of flatneassociated with formaland Minimalist hard-edabstract painting, whicwere Pop's main com -

petitors for critical attetion at the time. Anothapproach to sexual appmay be found in the woof Alina S zapocznikow(Polish/French), w ho isrepresented here by Steie(1968), a gothic-look insurrealist-tinged, predonantly black polyesterand urethane sculpturethat at first appears torepresent a shrouded,kneeling female figurewith exposed breasts.On closer inspection orealizes that the breastare actually knees, as tsculptor turns the erotiinto the grotesque.

Despite many differees among the works inthe exhibition, a genertheme that runs througout is a critique of theemotional conformity anonymity of Cold Wa

1 The exhibition will vary slightlyfrom venue to venue. 2 EvelyneAxell, Pauline Boty, Vija Ceimins,Chryssa, Niki de Saint Phalle,Rosalyn Drexler, Letty Eisen-hauer, Dorothy Grebenak, KayKurt, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Lozano,Marisol, Mara McAfee, Barbrostlihn. Faith Ringgold, MarthaRosier, Marjorie Strider, AlinaSzapocznikow, Idelle Weber,Joyce Wieland and May Wilson.

Seductive Subversion; WomenPop Artists 1958-1968 openedat the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery,University of the Arts, Philadel-phia [Jan. 22-Mar. 15j. Currentlyon view at the Sheldon Museumof Art, Lincoln, Neb. [throughSept. 26], it traveis to the Brook-lyn Museum [Cet. 15, 2010-Jan. 9, 2011] and Tufts Univer-sity Art Gallery, Medford, Mass.[Jan. 20-Apr. 3, 2011].

S U L O S T R O W is a critic,independent curator, and thechair of visual arts andtechnologies at the Clevelandinstitute of Art.

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This page,Mara McAfee:Marvelous idem

chanicalivien. 1963,oil on canvas,Rn by 47'/2

hes. Harry N.I rams Family

lleotion.

Opposite, KayKurt: F or AllTheir InnocentAirs, The y KnowExactly WhereThey re Going,1968, oil oncanvas, 60 by144 inches.NeubergerMuseum ofArt, PurchaseCollege, SUNYPurchase, N.Y.

society. Searching for a means of formulating a fresh, moreeffective representation of seismic shifts in their world, theartists turned to discrete objects, cheap goods, readymades,shiny plastic and enamel surfaces, and commercial design tobetter convey the sense of dislocation they were experienc-ing. The works in this show are devoid of tired humanistictropes, from Boty's painterly combinations of disparate per-sonal and public images (With Love to Jean Paul Belmondo,1962) to Axell's glossy. Pop-psychedelic paintings in enamel

on Plexiglas (Campus, 1970); Drexler's cinema-derivedpractice {Home Movies, 1963); Mara McAfee's deliberatelymannered references to fashion illustration (MarvelousModern Mechanicai Men, 1963); Weber's stark graphics(Munchkins I II & ///, 1964); and May Wilson's faux-documentary Ridiculous Portrait collages. Far more than a simple redis-covery of women Pop artists, this exhibition offers us unex-pected insight into the artistic challenges, issues and ambi-tions that arose in a period of radical cha nge , o

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