THE LONG VIEW
California Women of Abstract Expressionism 1945-1965

Abstract Expressionism is arguably considered to be the most important art movement of the second half of the twentieth century. Its overall influence was broad and continues to this day. The curator and author David Anfam notes that “Abstract Expressionism is a landmark in the general history of art and modern art in particular. Like the Cubist epoch, it represents a revolutionary event which revises our view of things before and after.”1 Much has been written about this international art movement, but perhaps a few more chapters will be written about the California women at mid-century. 

This exhibition of painting and sculpture features historically significant Bay Area women artists from the 1940s to the 1960s. This tightly curated exhibit features some of the finest examples by this group of museum-exhibited artists who have been mostly overlooked over the past few decades. The earliest paintings in the exhibit include non-objective abstractions from the 1950s to abstract expressionist paintings from the early 1960s when the movement had reached a later stage. Please find additional information in the Artist Biographies section.

Abstract and abstract expressionist art has ties to European Surrealism and even earlier periods of 20th-century art, but it is most closely associated with the major post-war painters of the New York School such Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Hans Hofmann. All four of these artists had connections with California and three became influential teachers and mentors in California. Before Still and the other NY School artists, Bay Area women pioneered early abstract and even nonobjective forms in the 1930s and 1940s and were shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art (SFMOA, now SFMOMA) under the groundbreaking Director Grace McCann Morley.

In the long view, these women artists of California were an integral part of the legacy of the Modernist and Abstract Expressionist movements. Many of these artists followed such a path that sought liberation from old habits and subjectivities. From time to time, it led to exciting new disturbances of thought and expression. As the artist Jay DeFeo chased her own mystical and personal threads in her greatest work, she was joined by other west coast women who “believed that strokes of paint on canvas could express their innermost feelings-even, some thought, their spiritual essence….”2

Despite many barriers to notoriety the California women of Abstract Expressionism created innovative and important work that is only recently getting a larger measure of documentation and exposure. For many of these artists, the road to aesthetic fulfillment and personal freedom often led to difficult personal choices as they “stepped out of that 50s normal lifestyle.”3 And for some it meant a life outside the bounds of understood society by “occupying the spaces disdained by those who sought overt power and influence.”4

With the exception of Nancy Genn and Joyce Rezendes, most of the women in this exhibition are not alive today, but their creative histories survive perhaps in the manner of what Clyfford Still considered to be “life’s resurgence against a mortal world.”5

This exhibition is in memory of the curator and scholar Susan Landauer (1958-2020), who has been indispensable in the research of California art history and in particular the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism. Susan was planning to curate a museum exhibition on the subject of the California Women of Abstract Expressionism in 2021.

1. David Anfam, Abstract Expressionism, Thames and Hudson, 7
2. Susan Landauer, San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism, U. of California Press, XVI
3. Mary Kerr, Out of the Shadows - Beat Women are not Beaten, Out of the Shadows – Women in the California Cultural Underground -1950s/60s, 242
4. Richard Candida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry and Politics in California, A Woman’s Path to Maturation, 211
5. David Anfam, Reading Abstract Expressionism Context and Critique, “Of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated”: Aspects of Clyfford Still’s Earlier Work, 588