Women stars of abstraction were rare in New York in the 1940s, but one of the few names to stand out among the many men who saw success was Esphyr Slobodkina. The Russian-born artist pioneered a language of dynamic abstraction in New York long before it was commonplace. Yet today, she is most widely remembered for her 1940 children's book Caps for Sale, which she wrote and illustrated. The book has sold millions of copies to date. While the wide-ranging impact of her wider artistic practice has largely been overlooked, today, Slobodkina seems to finally be making her comeback.
This week, New York’s Rosenberg & Co. opens “An Unbound Creativity,” an exhibition of Slobodkina’s works, on view through November 14th. The exhibition marks the largest gallery show of the artist’s work in New York since she passed away in 2002. The exhibition builds on the gallery’s recent presentation of her works at Independent 20th Century in September. Slobodkina’s works are also currently on view alongside those of Louise Nevelson in the traveling museum exhibition “Architects of Being” on view at the New Britain Museum of American Art.
Copper Interests (Copper Treasures), 1948
Esphyr Slobodkina
Rosenberg & Co.
Nocturne No. 1, 1958
Esphyr Slobodkina
Rosenberg & Co.
During her own time, Slobodkina received plenty of acclaim. Legendary dealer Peggy Guggenheim included her in the pivotal “Exhibition by 31 Women” at Art of This Century gallery in 1943, alongside works by Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington. Her work had been recommended to the Guggenheim by Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art. A year before that, the influential collector and artist A.E. Gallatin gave her a solo exhibition at the Museum of Living Art, the first modern art museum in America.
“An Unbound Creativity” at Rosenberg & Co. is a condensed survey of Slobodkina’s life and her seven-decade artistic career, showcasing, as gallery director Kadie Ross put it, “from early academic studies, her persistent devotion to abstraction, and her exploration of multi-media works in two and three dimensions.”
The earliest work in the exhibition is a 1929 sketch titled Dianna, made soon after the artist’s arrival in New York City. Born in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 1908, Slobodkina and her family relocated to Harbin, Manchuria, around 1919 to 1921, fleeing the Russian Revolution. By 1928, she had moved to New York and enrolled at the National Academy of Design. The latest work in the show is Flying Objects Immobilized (1998), an oil, pen, and ink work of intersecting geometric forms, some resembling paper airplanes. It’s an energetic work, made just four years before her death in 2002 at the age of 93.
Untitled (Oval #4), 1991
Esphyr Slobodkina
Rosenberg & Co.
As the dozen and a half works on view in the exhibition make clear, throughout her career, Slobodkina embraced a dazzling range of materials, including drawing and painting, collage and assemblage, textiles and clothing design. She supported herself as a seamstress during the Great Depression, following the failure of her first marriage to artist Ilya Bolotowsky. Slobodkina was also a prolific author and illustrator, publishing between 22 and 24 children’s books in her lifetime, and illustrating several books by famed children’s author Margaret Wise Brown.
Slobodkina remained a lifelong proponent of “non-objective art,” non-figurative work which embraces pure colors, shapes, and lines, no matter where life brought her. She was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists Group, an artist-run organization established in 1936 to promote and support abstract and non-objective art. She later served as its president from 1963 to 1966.
While her paintings can feel playful and immediate, the works were the result of a complex system of composition. Her paintings began with small sketches, traced from photographs or diagrams. She overlaid images until a composition satisfied her, then scaled it up and transferred it onto a gessoed board. “This [process] allowed the artist a degree of control over the finished work but also encouraged the free play of shapes to assert their own logic,” Ross said. Though her work is often contrasted with the spontaneous approach of the Abstract Expressionists, Ross notes that “Slobodkina’s process similarly drew from notions of impulse, discovery, and intuition.”
Flying Objects Immobilized, 1998
Esphyr Slobodkina
Rosenberg & Co.
Nails, 1978
Esphyr Slobodkina
Rosenberg & Co.
Slobodkina stayed an influential force in the arts late into her life. In the 1970s, she experienced a creative renaissance, creating assemblages and paintings often with a wry edge. Ross pointed to Offshore Installation (1974), an assemblage inspired by magazine images of oil rigs that reflects Slobodkina’s fascination with machinery. Collages such as South American Love (1970) and Celebration No. 2 (1970) use her own polychrome silk fabric designs from the 1930s as their foundation. How then did such a figure fade from view? “For a long time, I think the art world—and the art market—wanted to place an artist within a defining style or movement” said Ross, “Slobodkina resisted that kind of classification.” Ross added that “her highly constructed visual language did not fit comfortably within the narrative” of Abstract Expressionism that came to dominate the memory of postwar American art.
Gallery founder Marianne Rosenberg describes Slobodkina as someone who “defied any particular descriptive art label and was a free spirit focused on her work and not on the expectations of others.”
The recent resurgence of interest, Ross says, ties into a wider reevaluation of women artists’ practices. “Contemporary audiences seem more receptive to artists whose careers do not resolve into a single movement, medium, or signature style,” she said. “The very multiplicity that may once have made Slobodkina difficult to categorize makes her feel remarkably current.”
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/6JYgbF4
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