When Norman Rockwell died in 1978, Time Magazine art critic Robert Hughes briefly discussed the artist’s place in American art. Hughes acknowledged that Rockwell in his last years had moved beyond the soda-fountain-American-flag-and-Mom’s-apple-pie subject matter that had made him a household name over the years in which his illustrations regularly appeared on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post and other publications. Rockwell’s world view had darkened in the 1960’s. His later works had dealt with school desegregation and with the murder of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. “But these did not represent the essential Rockwell as far as his public was concerned,” wrote Hughes. “What they wanted was a friendly world, shielded from the calamities of history and the endemic doubts that are the modernist heritage, set down in detail, painted as an honest grocer weighs ham, slice by slice, nothing skimped; and Norman Rockwell gave it to them for 60 years. He never made an impression on the history of art, and never will. But on the history of illustration and mass communication his mark was deep, and will remain indelible.” So things seemed in 1978, at least to one important critic. But the art world was already changing. The modernist paradigm had proved unsustainable – I mean, after you’ve pared everything down to Minimalism, what else is there to do? – and a move back to figuration was already underway. Pop Art had brought back the figure, albeit in an ironic fashion, with artists such as Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist using images and painting techniques derived directly from what had...
O’Keeffe’s art is currently having a moment. Not Georgia O’Keeffe’s – that’s as popular as it’s ever been. No, I’m talking about the art of her little sister, Ida Ten Eyck O’Keeffe (1889-1961), which scored a huge success at Christie’s last week. Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Ida studied art with the same teacher as her older sister and a younger sister, Anita, in Williamsburg, Virginia, where the family had moved when she was 13. The sisters’ family was artistic – both grandmothers had been artists, and yet another sister, Catherine, was also a painter – but family finances were often precarious, and the girls learned early that they would have to make their own ways in the world. Both Georgia and Ida became public school art teachers, but Ida later became a nurse. Ida continued her art studies, however, eventually receiving her MFA from Columbia University in 1932. While living in New York, Ida was in close contact with her older sister and with Georgia’s husband, the noted art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, but sibling rivalry often made things uncomfortable. Georgia’s biographer, Laurie Lisle, noted in a 1980 book that Ida “got the emphatic message that Georgia wanted to be the only O’Keeffe who painted.” Georgia forbade Stieglitz from ever exhibiting her sister’s work. “I’d be famous, too, if I’d had a Stieglitz,” Ida later groused. In her first New York exhibition, she listed herself as Ida Ten Eyck. That may have been as much a matter of Ida’s not wanting to be compared to her sister as of Georgia’s sharp elbows. At any rate, Ida left New York...
It was the spring of 1985, and seven women artists were still pissed. The previous summer, the Museum of Modern Art in New York had held an exhibition entitled, “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture” to inaugurate the museum’s newly renovated building. The exhibition had included the works of 165 artists, supposedly the best of the best. Only 13 were women. The women who met the following spring had participated in a picket line across the street from the museum during the exhibition’s run to protest the exclusion of female artists, but New Yorkers are fairly oblivious to picketers, at least if the protests aren’t accompanied by large, inflatable rats. Something more media-savvy was needed. The seven women who met that spring decided to call attention to the facts and figures of the situation, laid out on inexpensive, well-designed posters, and many SoHo buildings soon had these posters pasted on their walls. But a moment foregrounded by nothing but grievance can turn off potential supporters, so the women brilliantly hit on another factor in their campaign: humor. In those days not long after the Vietnam war, Americans were well-acquainted with the term “guerilla warfare.” The women decided that the name of their insurrection against the art establishment would be the Guerilla Girls. Photo courtesy National Museum of Women in the Arts The founders of the movement and the other women artists who soon joined them wore gorilla masks in their public protests. To emphasize the collective nature of the movement, the identities of individual members were kept secret. As a spokesperson said, “We wanted the focus to...
In 1978, Roberta and I joined our friend Buzz Spector to found White Walls: A Magazine of Writings by Artists. One of the few publications dealing with word-and-image art, it soon began to attract submissions by some notable artists in the field. One evening as we sat around a table examining submissions for the second issue, Roberta held up a submission. “We’ve got to publish this,” she said in a tone that brooked no dissent. Not that there was any dissent, as Buzz and I were likewise struck by “Spell,” our introduction to the work of Rosemary Mayer. I have been thinking recently about Rosemary, who died in 2014, because she’s been having quite the posthumous career lately. In the past couple of years, exhibitions of her work have been held in New York, Germany, and England. A recent visit to the gift shop of MoMA P.S. 1, the Long Island City venue of the Museum of Modern Art, revealed two books by or about her on sale. I recently received Rosemary Mayer: Ways of Attaching, a handsome new monograph on her life and works. Monograph cover.Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter und Franz Konig. No artist achieves a posthumous career without champions, in this case Mayer’s niece, the art historian Marie Warsh, and Mayer’s nephew Max Warsh. What they have been able to do for their aunt is all the more remarkable because of the ephemerality of Mayer’s art. Born in 1943 in Ridgewood, then part of Brooklyn (it is now part of Queens, go figure), Mayer majored in Classics at the University of Iowa, but on her return to...
