Killing Men and Dying Women: Imagining Difference in 1950s New York Painting

What did it mean to be a woman and a painter at the heart of abstract gestural painting in New York during the 1950s, if the iconic artist of that decade was Jackson Pollock, and the icon of Woman was Marilyn Monroe? Elaborating and explaining the relevance of theories of psycho-symbolic formations of sexual difference and their inscription in artistic practice, this book explores the 1950s triangulation Pollock–Monroe–Krasner, analysing how two painters of the two generations New York abstract artists, Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, negotiated this paradox artistically. Differencing a masculinized canon of Abstract Expressionism defiantly disseminated in recent blockbuster exhibitions, Pollock argues for a theoretically rich feminist reading of gestural abstract painting that centred the psycho-sexual body through gesture. She argues for a resonance with the cultural antithesis of New York gestural painting – its popular other – in the performance work of Marilyn Monroe, which exceeded the star’s iconic image of white sexuality. Igniting a still-urgent debate about difference, artmaking and artwriting, Pollock presents a transdisciplinary feminist intervention in the context of blockbuster exhibitions such as Abstract Expressionism (London and Bilbao, 2016–17) – which omitted almost entirely that school’s women members – and the women-only Women in Abstract Expressionism (USA 2018), Making Space: Women in Postwar Abstraction (New York, MoMA, 2018) and Women in Abstraction (Paris and Bilbao, 2021–22). as well as solo ‘rediscovery’ shows – Lee Krasner: Living Colour (London and Bilboa, 2019–20) and Helen Frankenthaler (Venice, 2019). 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. Front Matter 1 Contents 8 List of illustrations 10 Acknowledgements 16 Preface 18 Introduction 28 Prophecy, 1956 54 Five essays on sexuality (and art) 72 What did Greenberg not say, or dare to think? 104 Is the gesture male? 148 Is the artist hysterical? 172 Massacred women do not make me laugh, nor do the agonies of Marilyn Monroe’s body 184 Dancing space: Prophecy to Sun Woman I 200 Three memories: Rosenberg and Monroe 234 Appendix: Sexual difference 253 Notes 265 Bibliography 294 Index 308 This book explores how theories of embodiment, the gesture, hysteria and subjectivity can deepen our understanding of New York abstract painting. Providing readings of paintings by Krasner and examining images of Pollock and Frankenthaler at work, it builds a bridge between the New York artist-women and their other, Marilyn Monroe.