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After the Explosions
John Haberin New York City
Emily Mason and Deborah Remington
Rebecca Purdum and Jill Nathanson
You know the story by now, of a generation of women artists overshadowed by men. The bad news is that it is a tale of neglect. The good news is that it has become the story of art today, with galleries and museums everywhere putting women on display. It has become the story of art in another sense as well. Successive generations of women are bringing it up to date, as part of the return of painting to the mainstream.
Emily Mason and Deborah Remington represent the first part of the story, with late but explosive contributions to Abstract Expressionism, but with a greater self-reflection. When Remington paints an oval, it is hard not to see it as a mirror. How could it not be, when it reflects so much light?
Rebecca Purdum sustains that tradition into her sixties, even as she raises questions about how long it can last. Meanwhile painters like Jill Nathanson are shaking up abstraction now. So which generation is more fully alive?
Waves of feminism
Art for Emily Mason ran in her blood. Her mother, Alice Trumbull Mason, was a founder of American Abstract Artists, if not quite a household name. An ancestor, John Trumbull, painted on a historic scale, too, with equally historic subject matter. His Declaration of Independence somehow escaped vandalism from the right-wing mass assault on democracy in the nation's Capitol—the very day before a show of Emily Mason opened in Chelsea. She kept good company, too, starting as a child, when Elaine and Willem de Kooning helped out as baby-sitters. She married Wolf Kahn, who had served as studio assistant to Hans Hofmann, and their children became artists.
No wonder it took her so long to break free. The show covers her "Chelsea Paintings," and that does not mean just another show in Chelsea. Mason moved to her Chelsea studio in 1979, from the couple's apartment on Broadway, at the very heart of Abstraction Expressionist New York, and spent the next decade cutting loose. (She kept a Flatiron studio later, until her death in 2020.) From that moment, every painting for her came as an release. Summers in Vermont must have felt like a well-earned rest.
Mason stuck to abstract art in oil, in bright primary colors. There is enough deep blue to make every ground a churning sky or sea—and enough red to set everything on fire. She moves freely between brushwork and spatters or stains, like Franz Kline on top of Helen Frankenthaler. Colors run into or across one another, up to the edge of the canvas. It may have helped that she was very much alone, for painting itself was out of fashion, much less abstract painting. Her husband built a reputation on being out of fashion, with bright landscapes based on southern Vermont, but she persisted in what she knew best.
So what about that story, of an older generation of women artists overshadowed by men? It is a true story, painfully so, but it helps also to recall why "second-generation AbEx" had become an insult. Every school or movement becomes a formula, and successors dedicate themselves to breaking it. Minimalism and Frank Stella had taken the shine off expression, before conceptual art, political art, Postmodernism, and, yes, feminism took the shine off painting. Even Neo-Expressionism came with quotation marks—and plenty of macho. If some women suffered neglect along the way, tough.
While you are struggling to keep opposite thoughts in your head, the gallery does its best to help. It devotes its other space to Kahn, for the decade before his death last year as well. The weave of bare, back-lit trees can almost convince me, although I far prefer Mason's putting the action back in Action Painting. In different ways, they were both trying to keep a looser kind of drawing, painting, and sheer observing alive. Are we having fun yet? Most definitely, but is that enough? I leave that to you.
A nearby gallery centers its whole program on recovering those years of gestural abstraction, but this once it leaps into the present, with Jill Nathanson. She, too, lets painting flow, but with a gentler flow. What may seem less explosive may well be more original, and her paler color is her "Light Phrase." Its successive peaks can stack vertically or run horizontally—here, too, to a painting's edge. It may have a basis in landscape as well, with the peaks as the wind, waves, or massive stones. She first exhibited in 1980, like Mason in Chelsea, but the relative quiet should stay with you well after the fireworks die out.
The mirror and the dark
It hardly matters that so much of painting for Deborah Remington is also dark, but then everything for her glows with light, and her most memorable color may be black. Even when she paints in deep blue or blood red, one can see it as a shade of black glistening in the light. For nearly fifty years, until her death in 2010 just short of age eighty, she stuck almost entirely to that black, red, and a plain bright white. Only their shapes kept changing, and a show in Tribeca tracks the changes with just thirteen paintings. A descendant of Frederic Remington, the painter of the Wild West, she traveled in her twenties to Japan, but her influences appear only indirectly, as a refusal to be pinned down. So, too, does her reflection in the mirror.
Remington was too young for the first wave of postwar American art, and she did not stick to Abstract Expressionism for long. But then Bay Area art then was always half a step out of the mainstream, and she had every right to claim it for herself. She studied, after all, with David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Clyfford Still. For Park and Bischoff, canvas meant nudes, never at home in the landscape and largely male, their brushy flesh and wide eyes capturing the sun. For Still, it meant titanic abstraction, like the face of a cliff looming over the gallery. Remington never gave up on abstraction, but for her, too, it seems as inviting and as ominous as the thing in her face that refuses to go away.
Even at her most abstract, her painting seems laden with things. She began with expressive brushwork, but as flickering outlines and immeasurable depths. The red in Big Red from 1962 all but merges with black, 
while yellow accents function as highlights. So far, art was her only object. She painted right through Minimalism, which was as obsessed with things as art gets. She did not have far to go before the objects seem real.
In no time, she sets a bottle shape against what might be a white page receding into depth. After that, the play between object, depth, and picture plane gets more complicated still. A central area might open onto hints of a landscape lit from behind, like a mountain at sunrise rising behind a lake—or that seeming mirror from 1972. Late work returns to something messier. She may have had qualms about her literalism, or she may have grown to treasure the encroaching white. It comes to suggest a fragmented space or fragmented object, like a prism or precious stone.
In a terrific catalog essay, Rachel Churner enumerates the changes, and she has the artist on her side. She quotes Remington as calling her successive styles incompatible. Still, there is no getting around the unity of a career based on three colors, their tonal variations, nuanced brushwork, and a ghostly light. If those painted shapes were real things, they could almost be photograms. A famous text by M. H. Abrams pursues two metaphors for realism and the Romantic imagination, the mirror and the lamp. Remington makes the most of both.
Churner also speaks of the work as lit from behind or within, but from where? Light appears to have fallen on the mirror, gathering toward the bottom of the oval while leaving the top in shadow. Curves surrounding the mirror's top might belong to its frame, and they glow, too, in red and blue. If the oval were her face alone, they could be her hair, but no way. Two black shards fall on top, like chips of plaster or paint, further flattening the whole. True to abstraction, the mirror does not reflect either the artist or the room, but only itself and the dark.
Pollock's children
"Why, a four-year-old child could understand this. . . . Run out and find me a four-year-old child." I quote Groucho Marx, but I could just as well be quoting plenty of museum-goers in their encounters with Jackson Pollock. An actual eight-year-old had other ideas. Rebecca Purdum was that age when she discovered Pollock's drips at MoMA, and art for her has never looked the same since. It taught her that paint was more than color and an image more than an outline waiting for her to color it in.
Her charming story accompanies an exhibition at the New York Studio School, where the scale alone of the work should put you in mind of Pollock. So should the marks on the surface, building into color and running every which way. That day in the late 1960s, Purdum also reached out to Claude Monet, so close that she could feel her breath touching its surface. A guard was not pleased, and I myself prefer to sit apart from the Water Lilies, allowing my eye to skim ever so slowly across the waters. I am only now coming to appreciate how much her art depends on both experiences, the tactile and the visual. Her largest work, like Monet's, needs more than one panel so that both can take flight.
She calls it Low Flight, from 2002, and its most prominent marks in white skate across, die, and reappear at the far side of its eighteen feet. The brightest, at left, seem on the verge of cohering into a signature or a message, just below a patch that is content to glow. Is that an actual flight path on the canvas at the right? Do the two competing whites of a smaller, vertical composition from 2000 hint at the head and waist of a person welling up from a darker mass in-between? No one could be further from the slippage of abstraction into figurative art today, like that of Medrie MacPhee and David Humphrey in the same two rooms the month before.
Purdum does have her presences. They just happen to be the presence of paint. It can look as misty as the all-over painting of Jules Olitski in the 1960s, who sought to sustain the Abstract Expressionism of Pollock or Marc Rothko without their signature mark or image. One could mistake her work, too, for spray painting. It is easy to damn her lush, atmospheric paintings with faint praise. I know I did, to my regret, in a brief, if respectful review back in 1999.
Still, a quiet monochrome can insist on art as object, too, quite as much as more visible brushwork or bare canvas. And her work then (like the image here) divided into two parts along a horizontal, one part more sober than the next, like the early, rigorous Minimalism of Brice Marden. Now, though, the overt divisions are gone, and painting takes on a life of its own. She assembles even the darkest and mistiest surfaces from layer upon layer of short, bright strokes. One has a predominant yellow that recalls those Water Lilies. Yet even the predominance of a single color is an illusion.
For all that, Purdum has needed little in the way of evolution, and the one work from the 1980s fits just fine alongside recent paintings. Given her scale, the show has space for only eight, and the smallest may give the greatest impression of mass. The sole work on paper, it looks almost like the stonework, with a white stone on top supplying the title, Coming Up for Air. It is the two triptychs, though, that most demand a reappraisal. In the second, Winter Work from 2015, the central canvas is taller than the others, like the central shaft of a building. Lest one mistake her for anything but abstraction, her winter is a fiery red.
Emily Mason and Wolf Kahn ran at Miles McEnery through February 13, 2021, Jill Nathanson at Berry Campbell through February 6. Deborah Remington at Bortolami through June 12, and Rebecca Purdum at the New York Studio School through April 18.