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Ninth Street Women: The Women of Abstract Expressionism

ART HIS 874.03

This class will take as its point of focus Mary Gabriel's book Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art, published in 2017. The course will expand the book's content so as to include other female painters and sculptors allied with Abstract Expressionism.

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What you can learn.

Explore the history of female painters and sculptors allied with Abstract Expressionism
Understand the role the women in Mary Gabriel's book, plus others, played in the movement that changed modern art
Discuss the context of the New York art world in the late 1940s and 1950s

About this course:

While the story of Abstract Expressionism's emergence in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s has been much told, the role played by women artists associated with the movement has rarely been the subject of review. This class will take as its point of focus Mary Gabriel's book Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art, published in 2017. The course will expand the book's content so as to investigate even more recent exhibitions and biographies devoted to these artists. It will also include other key female painters and sculptors allied with Abstract Expressionism. Their place in the New York art world of the time, their reception by dealers, curators, and other artists (often husbands and/or lovers), and their legacies will all be considered. Gabriel's Ninth Street Women, which is being developed as an Amazon Studio TV production by showrunners Amy Sherman Palladino and Dan Palladino, is recommended reading for this class. A few guest speakers will be featured to further enhance the course content.