5/1/2023 0 Comments Space age love song video![]() ![]() But more than a few of the 144 works here are a reach. I’ll put aside for the moment that Billings’s work isn’t really abstract - snaking tendrils of vine and stem bloom in distinct floral form after all, the show is about expanding boundaries, not hewing to them. Its titular “1741″ work is a woolen bed rug in black and deep blue by weaver Phoebe Denison Billings The show draws almost entirely from the Addison’s formidable collection, bringing out Indigenous basketry and weaving from centuries past to make clear that non-representational art is hardly a recent phenomenon. Wool worked on wool ground, 95 x 93 1/2 inches. Phoebe Denison Billings’s “Bed Rug,” 1741. Painted in gradient dark to light, it feels almost back-lit I don’t mean this as a compliment. Look left to the exhibition’s big main space and your eye can’t help but be caught by Deborah Remington’s huge “Axios,” from 1971, a crisp, silvery prism hovering amid soft forms in blue, red, and black. Its two bundles of chaotic, earthy-toned scrawls snarl into knots that feel to me like anxious fury. The show opens with “Sunflowers III,” 1992, a big, beautiful lithograph by Joan Mitchell, one of few women in the AbEx cohort to find fame comparable to her male peers. That last fact makes it inevitably uneven. It reminds us that collecting, frequently, is about placing bets, and that abstraction contains multitudes, less a unified movement than a sprawling category. The exhibition explores not just underexamined art history but the history of the Addison itself. A triumphant survey of her abstract work at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2018 helped confirm it abstraction may have been coopted by the Abstract Expressionists, a gang made up mostly of American men in the middle of the last century, but its genesis was with her. In a lovely twist, the debate appeared to be settled much more recently when fresh interest in the Swedish landscape painter Hilma af Klint revealed that it was most likely she - yes, she - who owned the title of the mother of abstraction, with paintings of delicately exuberant arcing forms she started making in 1906 that bore no relation to the real world at all. For years, most artistic genealogy - a contentious field - would trace abstraction’s genesis to a bunch of 20th-century men: Kazimir Malevich in 1915 František Kupka in 1912 Wassily Kandinsky in 1911 Francis Picabia in 1909, and a handful of others laying claim. ANDOVER - “Women and Abstraction: 1741-Now,” at the Addison Gallery of American Art, delights in a pair of contradictions. ![]()
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