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

Through innovative techniques and bold experimentation with scale, color and material, the visionary artists in this traveling exhibition pushed Abstract Expressionism in new and often unexpected directions.

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.

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“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........

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