What did it mean for painter Lee Krasner to be an artist and a woman if,
in the culture of 1950s New York, to be an artist was to be Jackson
Pollock and to be a woman was to be Marilyn Monroe?
With this question, Griselda Pollock begins a transdisciplinary journey
across the gendered aesthetics and the politics of difference in New
York abstract, gestural painting. Revisiting recent exhibitions of
Abstract Expressionism that either marginalised the artist-women in the
movement or focused solely on the excluded women, as well as exhibitions
of women in abstraction, Pollock reveals how theories of embodiment, the
gesture, hysteria and subjectivity can deepen our understanding of this
moment in the history of painting co-created by women and men. Providing
close readings of key paintings by Lee Krasner and re-thinking her own
historic examination of images of Jackson Pollock and Helen
Frankenthaler at work, Pollock builds a cultural bridge between the New
York artist-women and their other, Marilyn Monroe, a creative actor
whose physically anguished but sexually appropriated star body is
presented as pathos formula of life energy.
Monroe emerges as a haunting presence within this moment of New York
modernism, eroding the policed boundaries between high and popular
culture and explaining what we gain by re-thinking art with the richness
of feminist thought.
