Nancy Spero

Filmmaker Chiara Clemente’s new documentary Our City Dreams, 2008, takes a somewhat tepid look at five female artists and their relationships to New York City. There are no surprises in this film: Swoon, Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith, Marina Abramović, and Nancy Spero are shown where you might expect them to be, that is, in their studios, at openings, installing exhibitions and at home, often pictured alongside family. If not for its final act, the film would remain unremarkable; its few moments of interest (Kiki Smith bicycling through Union Square, silver tresses dancing; Marina Abramović performing a portion of Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim in 2005) are insufficiently satisfying to justify its having been made. Thankfully, the film finds its raison d’être when Nancy Spero comes into focus. The no-nonsense octogenarian, her frail form and gnarled arthritic hands unable to waylay her drive, is a force turning Clemente’s offcamera questioning about what it means to be a woman and an artist into charming tales about living and working in Paris with her husband, artist Leon Golub, in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

It is works from this period, in particular Spero’s “Black Paintings” made while in France from 1959 to 1964 and a group of related drawings created between 1954 and 1965, that constituted Galerie Lelong’s recent exhibition “Un Coup de Dent.” The 11 paintings in the main space are sombre and nightmarish in their pitch-black depths. All are painted on linen, with the raw material showing through at many of the picture planes’ edges. The limited spectrum of dirty pinks, blues and greys situates the anonymous reclining figures, the lovers and mothers, in perpetual overcast. The tenor here is tumultuous, agitated and haunted.

In the large horizontal work Nightmare Figure 1 – Les Anges, 1960, the outline of a creature’s hind legs emerges from the dark, matte ground of the painting. A second figure—an angel of death, a Thanatos or Odin, perhaps— haunts the work’s shadowscape, its shaky presence unnerving. Other works are less existentially traumatic but no less moving. In Mother and Children (2), 1956, a hulking female figure presides over two children depicted as miniature adults, much like Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Madonna and Child, c. 1300, or Piero della Francesca’s Brera Madonna, 1472–74. The mother is expansive, brusque, expressionistic, while the children are painted with an undue care that invests them with a gentle presence and wisdom. In Le Couple (Lovers xvi), 1961–63, the black-on-grey painting depicts two figures intertwining tenderly—an ear, a head, a hand, an arm disappear in dark fog.

It is clear that with these “Black Paintings,” Spero discovered the vocabulary that would serve her for the rest of her career. Her gestures are fiercely active, not far from the machismo of that moment’s abstract expressionism, and yet she intentionally depicts traditionally feminine subject matter, sources the boys wouldn’t dare go near. Indeed, this was—and, indirectly, still is—the wit and bravura of Spero’s methodology. At once rebellious, Spero’s peinture feminine (a term Spero herself has suggested epitomized her process) combines a fierce political foundation with motifs not necessarily understood as the iconographic equivalents of such ferocity. This is, perhaps, more apparent in Spero’s later work: in “War Paintings,” 1966–70, her scroll installations such as “Cri du Coeur,” the large panels of “Codex Artaud,” 1972, and Notes In Time On Women, 1979. What is clear here, however, is that she was determined to fight the male-dominated master narratives of what was and was not the acceptable subject matter for art. Spero’s break with tradition does not stop there, however. The additional power of these “Black Paintings” derives from her willingness—and perhaps need— to overturn the taboos of depicting a mother and child not, as one might assume, with palettes of celebratory, maternal light and in the midst of comfort and security, but rather in angst-ridden settings of unfathomable depths.

These works have not been shown comprehensively since 1985, a misfortune that is in keeping with the lack of attention Spero has suffered in North America. Case in point: the first major retrospective of her work, “Dissidances,” at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) from July 4 to September 24, 2009, will travel, but only to Madrid and Seville and not to New York City, where Spero has spent the majority of her career.

Un Coup de Dent, 1960, the show’s namesake drawing, is one of six beautiful works exhibited in the gallery’s small front room. This early material exploration shows a lighter, more spontaneous approach to composition, where gouache washes are cut with opaque layers of still dark colour. Oil on paper would later become a dominant working method for the artist, as would a rough, unrefined aesthetic. Roughly translated into English as a “biting remark or a slap in the face,” the colloquialism un coup de dent relays Spero’s resistance, activism, and is the stuff of her legend. As she recently said, “We really thought that we could change the world into a better place, especially for us women artists. If we didn’t do it, who would, really?”❚

“Un Coup de Dent” was exhibited at Galerie LeLong, New York, January 2 to February 21, 2009.

Julia Dault is a New York-based artist and writer.