Art: Bringing women pop artists into the limelight

The more the pop art phenomenon recedes into the past, the easier it is to appreciate it as a critique of the consumerist society that emerged in the United States in the 1950s.

First readings of pop images tend to fix on their deadpan humor, irony and valorization of the banal, but the most incisive pop probes deeper.

This is particularly true of pop art produced by women. Unfortunately, female artists were still confined to the closet during the pop era, so that fact has been difficult to appreciate, even today. But yes, Virginia, there were female popsters.

"Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968," a landmark exhibition at University of the Arts, finally allows these stifled voices to be heard, albeit on a limited scale.

Sid Sachs, the university's director of exhibitions, has long been committed to raising female popsters out of obscurity. Six years ago he organized an exhibition at UArts for Rosalyn Drexler, one of the 20 women represented in "Seductive Subversion."

This show goes well beyond simply bringing to public attention some of the most prominent (in their day) artists whose work was either straight pop or pop-inflected. Besides correcting the impression that all accomplished pop artists were men (Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg), Sachs seeks to demonstrate that female pop possessed a distinctive character, and that women were as innovative as their male counterparts.

This he achieves, to the extent that his resources allow. To my eye, the examples of female pop that he has brought together are generally sharper and more socially analytical than work produced by men. This might be because the advent of the consumer age affected women more directly, through household products and appliances, than it did men, who, after all, were mainly interested in automobiles.

You can go through this exhibition of 56 works without being conscious that you're being shown pop art. This is partly because some of the art doesn't look at all like pop as it's traditionally defined. So you either have to broaden your conception of what pop is or can be, or classify these works as, at best, pop-influenced. Either way, your eyes will be opened.

"Seductive Subversion" is a museum-scale concept crammed into three gallery spaces - Rosenwald-Wolf, Hamilton, and the Borowsky gallery in Gershman Hall, all at Broad and Pine Streets. Splitting the hanging might have been necessary, but it means that the full force of discovery is somewhat dissipated. Also, viewers can't readily cross-reference or compare artists.

Still, Sachs deserves plaudits for making this show happen, because it couldn't have been easy to track down art that for the most part has been neglected for more than four decades. Nearly half of the 20 artists are dead, and in one case a fiber piece had to be replicated because the original fell apart.

Unlike exhibitions of male pop, "Seductive Subversion" presents mostly unfamiliar names. Perhaps the best known, at least among art insiders, are Marisol, Chryssa (both of whom use only one name), Niki de Saint Phalle, Vija Celmins and Drexler, who also achieved success as a novelist and playwright.

For the record, here's the rest of the lineup: Evelyne Axell, Pauline Boty, Letty Eisenhauer, Dorothy Grebenak, Kay Kurt, Mara McAfee, Faith Ringgold, Martha Rosler, Marjorie Strider, Idelle Weber, Joyce Wieland, May Wilson, Yayoi Kusama, Barbro Östlihn, and Alina Szapocznikow.

The show's most iconic work, the one people of my generation are most likely to recognize, is Marisol's sculpture of John Wayne. It's typical of her method in being assembled from blocks of wood, some parts painted, some drawn on, some left raw. It's pop in its depiction of a mass-media celebrity but it's also wickedly satirical in its attitude toward the Hollywood idol - he's riding a carousel horse too small for his body.

I never thought of Marisol as a pop artist per se, in part because of such irreverence toward popular culture. Pop art seemed more interested in irony and subversion of high art than in looking askance at populist values.

Yet in the final analysis, does it really matter how we classify Marisol or any of the other artists in this show? I think not; what matters is how effective individual works are as art.

For pure pop, look to Grebenak's hooked rugs - the front of a Tide soapbox (this is the replica), a Babe Ruth baseball card, a $2 bill. These are fraternal twins to Warhol's Brillo boxes; all were created about 1964.

Look, too, to Marjorie Strider's painting Green Triptych, a full-length Esquire-style pinup in a green bikini, but with projecting breasts and buttocks, and a similar high-relief painting of white lilies that seem to explode into the room.

Drexler's paintings, which refer to films (Chubby Checker's Twist Around the Clock) and film stereotypes (gangsters and King Kong), also fit comfortably into the pop pigeonhole. So do Martha Rosler's photo montages, with their barbed commentaries on domestic servitude and feminine rectitude: The Pat Nixon piece in particular is a treasure.

Pauline Boty's portrait of Chicago mobster Big Jim Colosimo is much closer to pop than her Countdown to Violence, a 1964 painting with montage-like references to the John Kennedy assassination and police attacks on civil rights activists in the South - that is, closer to Rauschenberg than to Rosenquist. Evelyne Axell's Campus, a denunciation of the Kent State shootings, is graphically pop but in spirit closer to social protest.

At the far end of the pop spectrum sits Kay Kurt, with a billboard-scale bird's-eye view of a box of pastel candies. I thought first of Wayne Thiebaud's cakes and pastries, but then reconsidered; Kurt is, or was, in 1968, more a new realist like Janet Fish than a popster, the candy notwithstanding.

The fun in this exhibition is the opportunity to make a number of such evaluations on your own, to judge whether a particular artist belongs in the pop salon, or in the anteroom, or in the foyer. None of these judgments are worth becoming overheated about; the work is rewarding on its own for the discoveries it offers.

For instance, Chryssa is represented by a 1965 neon sculpture, Ampersand IV (Bruce Nauman evidently didn't invent neon art) and two luscious oils, one of repeated tire tracks, the other of newspaper advertisements. Their DNA is pop, but their spirit is a different aesthetic entirely.

Nearby is a 1963 soft sculpture by Yayoi Kusama. Oldenburg became famous for stuffed fabric objects, but, as this piece indicates and as Sachs declares in his catalog essay, women were present at the creation of this genre.

It's such crosscurrents that make the exhibition so rewarding. At the very least, you come away realizing that what you've believed about pop art all these years is inadequate, or downright wrong. Prepare to have your consciousness duly expanded.

"Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968" continues in three galleries at University of the Arts, 333 S. Broad St., through March 15. Hours are from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, to 8 p.m. Wednesdays, and from noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Free. Information, 215-717-6480 or www.Uarts.edu/ newsevent/6322.html.

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