Ninth Street Women
by Kitty Kelley
Curling up with a hefty book of almost 1,000 pages dense with footnotes, endnotes, acknowledgements, an index, and a bibliography is like cuddling a St. Bernard: It’s a challenging prospect. Yet Mary Gabriel’s behemoth Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art rewards in almost every chapter.
Gabriel has written a massive homage to the women who barged through “men only” barriers to help establish Abstract Expressionism in America, a movement (1937-1957) once defined solely by male artists like Jackson (“Jack the Dripper”) Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Discrimination against women artists was so pervasive at the time that art historians claim Grace Hartigan exhibited her work under the name George Hartigan until 1953, when she was finally given her first show. A raging feminist and the first female artist to make money, Hartigan denied the charge. “It never entered my head,” she said. Elaine de Kooning also rebuked being characterized as a woman artist:
“To be put in any category not defined by one’s work is to be falsified.”
Readers will be grateful that the author defines Abstract Expressionism through the women painters who resisted being characterized as such but represented with their husbands and lovers, “too often fueled by alcohol and dizzying infidelities,” the miraculous movement of 20th-century art in America.
Lee Krasner, who married Pollock, signed her paintings with initials only so no one would identify her work as having been done by a
Seated from left: Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art, ca. 1950
woman. Early in Krasner’s career, she took lessons from the esteemed painter Hans Hofmann, who stood before her easel one day in wonder. “This is so good you would never know it was done by a woman,” he said. Krasner later focused on helping her husband gain recognition because she believed that he had “much more to give with his art than I do with mine.”
Elaine de Kooning, a painter in her own right, frequently slept with renowned art critics and gallery owners in order to promote her husband’s work. One male artist of the era is quoted as saying, “The fifties was a boys club, but some of the women painted almost as well as the boys so we patted them on the ass twice and said keep going.” Elaine de Kooning collected lots of pats.
The book, a bohemian saga, divides between the first wave of female artists — Krasner and de Kooning, scramblers who lived in the shadow of their famous spouses and only came into their own as painters later on — and the second wave of more successful figures like Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler.
Joan Mitchell Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan in 1957.
Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Grace Hartigan in 1957.Photograph by Burt Glinn / Magnum
All of these women, with the exception of Frankenthaler, gravitated to the grittiest parts of Greenwich Village around Ninth Street, where they toiled in cold-water flats with no heating or plumbing but surrounded by great wall space where they could spread their canvases. Gabriel describes Frankenthaler as the daughter of a New York Supreme Court judge and a graduate of Bennington College in Vermont, then the most progressive and expensive women’s school in the U.S.:
“She was a woman of enormous self-confidence who never wasted her time with anything but the best.”
The most tempestuous was Mitchell, raised by prosperous parents in Chicago who arranged for her to go to Paris to meet Alice B. Toklas, the life partner of Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Beach, who owned Shakespeare and Company, the French bookstore that published James Joyce and sold copies of Ernest Hemingway’s first book. When Mitchell married Barney Rosset, the union made history: Rosset owned Grove Press, which published Samuel Beckett, Pablo Neruda, Tom Stoppard, Henry Miller, and D.H. Lawrence. Mitchell, the author maintains, “was one of the greatest artists the U.S. has ever produced.”
The book sweeps from erudite scholarship to gritty gossip as it presents the panorama of American art history from the Depression and World War II through McCarthyism and the Red Scare, all of which affected the majestic talents of the “Ninth Street Women.” Like a St. Bernard, that majestic alpine dog, it will save you from avalanches of boredom and ennui and provide a vicarious plunge into the messy lives and mesmerizing genius of American Abstract Expressionism. You’ll emerge gobsmacked and gratified.
Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books