Published: October 19, 2009
Nancy Spero, an American artist and feminist whose
tough, exquisite figurative art addressed the realities of political
violence, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 83 and lived in
Manhattan.
The cause was infection leading to respiratory problems that in turn caused heart failure, said her son Philip.
Born in Cleveland in 1926, Ms. Spero studied at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago and there met her husband, the painter Leon Golub, to whom she was married for 53 years until his death, in 2004.
The
couple moved to Paris in 1959, where Ms. Spero steeped herself in
European existentialism and produced a series of oil paintings she had
begun in Chicago on the themes of night, motherhood and eroticism. When
they settled in New York City, which became their permanent home, in
1964, the Vietnam War and the social changes it was creating in the
United States affected Ms. Spero profoundly.
To come to grips
with these realities, Ms. Spero, who always viewed art as inseparable
from life, developed a distinctive kind of political work. Polemical
but symbolic, it combined drawing and painting as well as craft-based
techniques like collage and printmaking seldom associated with
traditional Western notions of high art and mastery.
One
result was a group of pictures in gouache, ink and collage on paper
titled “The War Series” (1966-70). With its depictions of fighter
planes and helicopters as giant, phallic insects, the series linked
military power and sexual predatoriness, but also included women among
the attackers. Ms. Spero later described the work as “a personal
attempt at exorcism”; it remains one of the great, sustained protest
art statements of its era, all the more forceful for its unmonumental
scale. Exhibited in 2006 at LeLong Gallery in Manhattan, its pertinence
to contemporary politics was unmistakable.
In 1971, Ms. Spero
also returned to the interests of her Paris years in the introspective
and tormented “Codex Artaud,” a series that interspersed images of
broken bodies and hieroglyphic monsters with the transcribed writings
of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the mentally ill French poet who viewed
himself as an outcast from society and who spoke of human folly with a
mocking rage. To some degree, the work reflected Ms. Spero’s own sense
of exclusion from an art world that had the character of a men’s club.
By the time of the “Codex Artaud” her long involvement with the women’s
movement had begun. Ms. Spero was active in the Art Workers Coalition,
and in 1969 she joined the splinter group Women Artists in Revolution
(WAR), which organized protests against sexist and racist policies in
New York City museums. In 1972, she was a founding member of A.I.R.
Gallery, the all-women cooperative, originally in SoHo, now in the
Dumbo section of Brooklyn. And in the mid-1970s she resolved to focus
her art exclusively on images of women, as participants in history and
as symbols in art, literature and myth.
On horizontal scrolls
made from glued sheets of paper, she assembled a multicultural lexicon
of figures from ancient Egypt, Greece and India to pre-Christian
Ireland to the contemporary world and set them out in non-linear
narratives. Her 14-panel, 133-foot-long “Torture of Women” (1974-1976)
joins figures from ancient art and words from Amnesty International reports on torture to illustrate institutional violence against women as a universal condition.
Ms. Spero considered this her first explicitly feminist work. Many
others followed, though over time she came to depict women less as
victims and more often as heroic free agents dancing sensuously.
Although Ms. Spero received relatively little art world attention
during the early part of her career, she gained visibility in the 1980s
and ’90s as socially concerned art came into favor. By this time her
work had gained in formal complexity and variety, with its weavings of
image and text, its time-consuming techniques of painting, cutting and
stamping, and its adaptation of aspects of Pop, Minimalism and Color
Field painting, styles she had previously distanced herself from.
Beginning in the late 1980s, she transformed the scroll format into
site-specific wall murals. In 2001, she completed a mosaic installation
for the 66th Street subway station at Lincoln Center
in Manhattan. In 2006, despite painful degenerative arthritis that had
crippled her for years, she executed wall paintings for “Persistent
Vestiges: Drawing From the American-Vietnam War,” an exhibition at the
Drawing Center in SoHo. For a concurrent solo show at the LeLong
Gallery, she made a single printed-paper frieze that wrapped around the
base of the gallery’s walls.
Titled “Cri du Coeur,” (2005) and
adapted from an Egyptian tomb painting, the mural depicted a procession
of mourning women. Some viewers saw in it a reference to the war in
Iraq or to Hurricane Katrina;
others understood it as Ms. Spero’s response to the death of her
husband the previous year. Like her, he had created an art that
insisted on balancing ethics with aesthetics.
Ms. Spero had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1992 and the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Los Angeles in 1988. A traveling career retrospective was organized
by the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse in 1987. In 1997, she was
included in Documenta X in Kassel, Germany. She often exhibited in
two-person shows with Mr. Golub. A Spero retrospective is planned for
the Pompidou Center in Paris next year.
In addition to her son
Philip, who lives in Paris, her survivors include her sons Paul, also
of Paris, and Stephen, of Swarthmore, Pa.; six grandchildren; and a
sister, Carol Neuman, of Portland, Ore.
Kiki Smith,
one of the many younger artists influenced by Ms. Spero, once said in
an interview: “When I first saw Nancy Spero’s work, I thought, ‘You are
going to get killed making things like that; it’s too vulnerable.
You’ll just be dismissed immediately.’ ”
Ms. Spero herself, who
experienced both being dismissed and celebrated, said simply of her
work, “I am speaking of equality, and about a certain kind of power of
movement in the world, and yet I am not offering any systematic
solutions.”
image: Nancy Spero and Mark Hughes at Strike benefit for Visual AIDS on May 21, 2007
