“Abstract Expressionists: The Women” Adds an Essential Chapter to the Movement’s History

You can’t go to New York’s storied Cedar Bar anymore, famed for its 15-cent beers and the birth of a new American style of painting. It closed years ago. But visitors to the American Federation of Arts’ traveling exhibition “Abstract Expressionists: The Women” can see Grace Hartigan’s 1951 painting Cedar Bar. In it, they’ll find many of the hallmarks of the movement—nonrepresentational imagery, bold gestural strokes, vibrant energy and emphasis on spontaneity and process. But behind it, they’ll find something more. For decades framed as the work of lone male geniuses, Abstract Expressionism’s story is expanding into a fuller, more complete narrative, thanks in part to recent exhibitions in Denver, New York, Long Island’s Hamptons, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., London and Paris, and books like Mary Gabriel’s bestseller Ninth Street Women, which have returned the women of the movement to the public eye.

“We’re not writing them back into history,” Katharine Wright, the exhibition’s curator at the AFA, told Observer. “They were there from the beginning.” Many of the artists in the show were successful in their lifetimes, working and showing alongside the towering names of the movement. All had to contend with their dual roles as women and artists.

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 touring show organized by the Museum of Modern Art. She was one of five women artists featured in Life magazine’s “Women Artists in Ascendance,” with photographs by the renowned Gordon Parks. By her own assessment, she was “a household name.” But none of that was enough to cement her name in art history.

Wright noted, “These women were taking different risks than their male peers.” Hartigan’s Cedar Bar is a case in point. “She titled it that as a means of paying tribute to the fact that the women, herself included, spent so much time at the Cedar Bar talking through avant-garde art with all of these male poets and writers and painters. But when she first painted it, it was originally titled Aries, and it had a much softer palette of more pastel colors. She worked really hard to exorcise that from the canvas.” Wright explained, “She could not stomach the idea of someone thinking of it as girly.”

The exhibition includes the work of 32 artists, with 47 paintings done between the 1930s and the ’70s, with the majority from the 1940s and ’50s, the height of the movement’s prominence. It’s the first time most American audiences will have heard about France’s Female Artists of the Mougins Museum (FAMM), which opened in 2024 with works from the Christian Levett Collection. The show was organized by the AFA along with guest curator Ellen Landau.

The American Federation of Arts launched more than 100 years ago with an Act of Congress, though it’s now a stand-alone nonprofit. Its mission, Wright explained, is to bring world-class art to museums and venues beyond the major metropolitan areas. “There are incredible communities all across the country that love art. Oftentimes, through constraints of geography or budgeting or staffing, they aren’t able to manage these really large ambitious shows that we do.”

The works are large and ambitious, as well. Many are wall-sized and required innovative techniques that the women pioneered. For Abstract Force: Homage to Franz Kline, Audrey Flack threw her brush at the canvas. The handle tore a hole. “At first I was upset,” she noted, “but then realized the hole was very much a part of the Abstract Expressionist process and an important part of the painting.” Vivian Springford merged the mental preparation and calligraphic techniques of Eastern brush painting in her softly liquid pools of color. Helen Frankenthaler’s Bending Blue, a monumental 9 x 7-foot canvas of orange tones melting into a periwinkle field offset by zips of red and white, displays the soak-stain method she created by pouring thinned paint onto unprimed canvas.

“The women in the show were often taking abstractions to new and, in my mind, more varied and exciting heights,” Wright noted. “For instance, you’ll see works by Elaine de Kooning or Grace Hartigan that are experimenting with figuration in a way that now we understand as what comes after, but at the time that was really revolutionary.”

There’s no sense that these paintings were made by women, but there are differences between them and the work of their male counterparts. Wright points to the use of color, singling out Sonia Gechtoff’s The Map as an example. “It’s hard to comprehend until you see it in person. There’s an expanse almost like a volcanic eruption of red in the center, and it’s big enough that you start to almost fall into the composition,” she said. “One of the things we tried to talk about in the show is all of those visual scale risks and materials. She’s painting with a palette knife as opposed to a paintbrush.”

The exhibition is broken into four sections: “The New York School,” “San Francisco Early Years,” “A Tale of Two Cities: New York and Paris” and “Vocal Girls and Beyond.” (Some of the venues will also include cases with documents and didactic materials.) The titles are self-explanatory, save for the fourth, which we’ll get to soon, and the works are presented roughly chronologically within each section. Many of the artists have by now achieved renown, but some are still relatively unknown. The exhibition, the Levett Collection and FAMM aim to get these artists’ names back into the history from which they were omitted.

“The 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 works by 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. “A 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, Judith Godwin, Mary Abbott, Pat Passlof, Amaranth Ehrenhalt and Joan Mitchell.

“Vocal Girls and Beyond” was named for a 1960 Time magazine article that posited that while men of the movement often said the work spoke for itself, the women were more likely to engage in discussion and make it more accessible to viewers. Elaine de Kooning, who wrote extensively for what would become ARTnews, did just that, introducing the works of fellow artists. The group includes her, Frankenthaler, Deborah Remington, Alma Thomas, Bing, Howardena Pindell, nancy graves, Mitchell and Vivian Springford.

“The goal was to talk about not only the early development of the movement, its heyday, but also the continuing crosscurrents that go out later in the 20th Century and into other places beyond New York,” Wright said, noting that artists like Flack, Schapiro and Pindell took their roots in abstraction in very different directions.

It’s one thing to present a collection of works by top-notch artists. It’s another to gather top-notch works by those artists, as “Abstract Expressionists: The Women” does. With Nancy Graves’ bright, colorful Untitled #2; Howardena Pindell’s thoughtful, evocative 1971 Untitled; Étude in Brown (Saint Cecilia at the Organ), a softly smoldering Alma Thomas painting; and Vivian Springford’s rainbow effervescence Scuba Series, harmonies and differences enliven the show. Rare sightings include an early piece by Janet Sobel, the Brooklyn artist whose drip paintings, by his own admission, predated Jackson Pollock’s, and Lee Krasner’s Prophecy, a painting which proves that every picture tells a story.

Krasner and her husband, Jackson Pollock, were facing difficulties in their marriage when she painted this complex configuration of flesh-toned shapes squeezed into the confines of the canvas. It was a work in progress when she traveled to Europe in the summer of 1956.

“That’s one of the most important pieces in the show,” said Wright. Krasner discussed her unease about the image with Pollock, and it was still on her easel when she returned due to her husband’s death in a car crash. “When he died, she came back and finished the painting,” Wright explained. “She later realized that she started connecting it to her grandmother, who was rumored to have second sight. She felt that the 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 a need for a different artistic vocabulary. Abstract Expressionism didn’t just spring into being; it evolved from a search within. “The painting I have in mind,” Krasner once said, “painting in which inner and outer are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subjects and moves into the realm of the inevitable.”

Was it inevitable, though, that these women found their way into important museums, private collections and art history textbooks? Sadly, no. But the good thing about the canon of art history is that it is still being written. “Abstract Expressionists: The Women” is an important chapter in that revision.

“Abstract Expressionists: The Women” is currently on view at the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, Virginia, through 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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