You can no longer go to New York’s storied Cedar Bar, famous for its 15-cent beers and the birth of a new American painting style. It was closed years ago. But visitors to the American Federation of Arts’ traveling exhibit “Abstract Expressionists: The Women” can see Grace Hartigan’s 1951 painting. Cedar bar. In it, they will find many hallmarks of the movement—non-representative imagery, bold strokes, bold energy and an emphasis on spontaneity and process. But after you, they will find something more. In the decades created as the work of male intellectuals, the story of Abstract Expressionism is growing into a full, complete narrative, thanks in part to recent exhibitions in Denver, New York, the Hamptons of Long Island, San Francisco, Washington, DC, London and Paris, and books like Mary Gabriel’s bestsellers. Ninth Street Womenwho has returned the women of this movement to the public eye.
“We’re not writing ourselves back in history,” Katharine Wright, curator of the exhibition at AFA, told the Observer. “They were there from the beginning.” Many of the artists on this show have been successful in their careers, working and performing alongside the movement’s leading names. They all had to face their dual roles as women and musicians.
Hartigan was one of the most recognized artists in the early days of Abstract Expressionism. She was the only woman included in “The New American Painting,” a 1958 international traveling exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art. She was one of five female artists featured in Life magazine’s “Women Artists in Ascendance,” with photographs by Gordon Parks. By his own admission, “he was a household name.” But none of this is enough to put his name in the history of art.
Wright noted, “These women were taking different risks than their male peers.” Hartigan’s Cedar bar it is an example. “She called it a tribute to the fact that women, including herself, spent a lot of time at the Cedar Bar talking about avant-garde art and all these male poets and writers and artists. But when she first painted it, it was originally titled Aries, and it had a very soft palette of pale colors. Wright explained, “She couldn’t get over the idea that someone was thinking of it as a girl.”
The exhibition includes the work of 32 artists, with 47 paintings made between the 1930s and the ’70s, most of them from the 1940s and 50s, the height of the movement’s prominence. This is the first time that a large American audience is hearing about France’s Female Artists of the Mougins Museum (FAMM), which opened in 2024 with works from the Christian Levett Collection. The program was organized by AFA and guest curator Ellen Landau.
The American Federation of Arts was established more than 100 years ago by an Act of Congress, although it is now an independent non-profit organization. Its mission, Wright explained, is to bring world-class art to museums and beyond the big metropolitan areas. “There are amazing communities all over the country that love the arts. A lot of times, because of space or budget or staffing issues, they can’t host these big shows that we do.”
The jobs are big and ambitious, too. Many are on the wall and require new techniques pioneered by women. Because Abstract Force: A Tribute to Franz KlineAudrey Flack dropped her brush to the canvas. The handle cut through the hole. “At first I was upset,” he notes, “but then I realized that the hole was a big part of the Abstract Expressionist process and an important part of the painting.” Vivian Springford combined the mental setting and calligraphic techniques of Eastern brush painting in her delicate pools of liquid color. Helen Frankenthaler Blue Bendinga large 9 x 7-foot canvas of orange tones melting into a field of periwinkle fixed with a red and white zipper, he demonstrates the immersion technique he created by pouring small amounts of paint onto an unprepared canvas.
“The women on the show were often taking things to new and, in my mind, different and exciting heights,” Wright noted. “For example, you’ll see the works of Elaine De Kooning or Grace Hartigan trying to think in a way that we now understand what’s next, but at the time that was really revolutionary.”
There is no sense that these paintings were made by women, but there is a difference between them and the work of their male counterparts. Wright points to the use of color, drawing out Sonia Gechtoff’s Map as an example. “It’s hard to understand until you see it for yourself, there is a sky that almost looks like a red volcanic eruption in the middle, and it’s big enough that you start to almost fall into its formation,” he said. “One of the things we tried to talk about in the show is all these risks and materials. You paint with a palette knife as opposed to a paint brush.”
The show is divided into four sections: “The New York School,” “The Early Years of San Francisco,” “A Tale of Two Cities: New York and Paris” and “Vocal Girls and Beyond.” (Some of the areas will also include cases with documents and materials.) The topics are self-explanatory, save for the fourth, which we’ll get to shortly, and the activities are presented in chronological order in each section. Many artists are now famous, but some are still unknown. The exhibition, the Levett Collection and FAMM aim to restore the names of these artists to history from which they can be removed.
“New York School” includes paintings by Mercedes Matter, Sonja Sekula, Perle Fine, Elaine de Kooning, Janet Sobel, Pat Passlof, Michael (Corinne) West and Joan Mitchell. “San Francisco Early Years” presents the works of West Coast artists, some of whom are not well known outside the region, such as Ruth Armer and Emiko Nakano, as well as Claire Falkenstein, Lilly Fenichel, Deborah Remington, Sonia Gechtoff and Bernice Bing. “Tale of Two Cities: New York and Paris” brings together paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Ethel Schwabacher, Audrey Flack, Elaine de Kooning, Yvonne Thomas, Janice Biala, Charlotte Park, Lee Krasner, Miriam Schapiro, Betty Parsons, Perle Fine, Mary Abloth Godwin, Judith Godwin, Judith Godwin, Elaine de Kooning. Joan Mitchell.
“Vocal Girls and Beyond” was coined by Time magazine in the 1960s which stated that while the men of the organization often say that the work speaks for itself, women are more likely to join the conversation and make it accessible to the audience. Elaine de Kooning, who wrote most of what would become ARTnews, did just that, presenting the works of other artists. The group includes himself, Frankenthaler, Deborah Remington, Alma Thomas, Bing, Howardena Pindell, Nancy Graves, Mitchell and Vivian Springford.
“The goal was to not only talk about the early development of the movement, its future, but also the progression of the cuts that came out later in the 20th century to other places outside of New York,” says Wright, noting that artists like Flack, Schapiro and Pindell began to emerge in very different ways.
It’s one thing to present a collection of works by top artists. Another is to collect the best works of those artists, as “Abstract Expressionists: The Women” does. With bright, colorful light by Nancy Graves Untitled #2; Howardena Pindell’s thoughtful, rousing 1971 song It has no title; Etude in Brown (Saint Cecilia at the Organ)a smoldering Alma Thomas painting; and Vivian Springford’s rainbow performance Scuba seriesharmony and contrast bring the show to life. Rare sightings include an original piece by Janet Sobel, a Brooklyn artist whose graffiti, by her own admission, predates Jackson Pollock’s, and Lee Krasner’s. A prophecya painting that proves that every picture tells a story.
Krasner and her husband, Jackson Pollock, were experiencing difficulties in their marriage when she painted this complex arrangement of flesh-tone shapes squeezed onto sections of canvas. It was a work in progress when he went to Europe in the summer of 1956.
“That’s one of the most important pieces of the game,” Wright said. Krasner awkwardly discussed the photo with Pollock, and it was still in her ears when she returned from her husband’s death in a car accident. “When he died, he came back and finished the painting,” explained Wright. “He later realized that he began to connect it to his grandmother, who was rumored to be seeing it for the second time. He felt that this piece was almost prophetic.” It was the beginning of an important new series.
After World War II and its psychological impact, many artists, these women included, felt the need for a different artistic vocabulary. Abstract Expressionism didn’t just happen; it came from an internal search. “The painting I envision,” Krasner once said, “is a painting in which interior and exterior cannot be separated, transcends techniques, transcends studies and transcends into the inevitable.”
However, was it inevitable that these women would find their way into important museums, private collections and art history books? Sadly, no. But the good thing about art history is that it is still being written. “Abstract Expressionists: The Women” is an important chapter in that review.
“Abstract Expressionists: Women” is currently on view at the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, Virginia, until April 26, 2026. From there, it will travel to the Speed Art Museum in Kentucky, the Grinnell College Museum of Art in Iowa, the Mobile Museum of Art in Alabama and the Frick Pittsburgh Museums & Gardens in Pennsylvania.
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