A call to spring and nature rising in the heart of the gritty wintry city, Helen Frankenthaler’s “April Mood”, a luscious, watery extravaganza of stain-soaked pink, orange and blues, floats across the opening wall of the Whitechapel Gallery’s exuberant new exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970. The show closes as grandiloquently, with Joan Mitchell’s operatic colour tangles and brilliant dispersed light in “Rufus’ Rock” and “Untitled”, richly allusive yet taut compositions playing wild and free with landscape elements as evocations of emotion and memory. Between these masterpieces, 80 artists fill out the picture of how women across the world from the 1940s to the 1970s embraced non-figurative painting as gestures of liberation and self-expression. A mere seven years, but a sea-change in cultural sensibility, separates this ambitious exhibition from the Royal Academy’s colossal 2016 show Abstract Expressionism, which focused almost entirely on big boys Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko and co, and consecrated the movement as built on explosive American macho energy. Part of current impulses to rewrite established art-historical narratives, the Whitechapel show unpicks and expands this reading in terms of gender and, impressively, geography. The range is thrilling. In South Korea, Wook-kyung Choi saturated her canvases with swooping, ragged oranges, scarlets and ochres, a razzle-dazzle of green and blue stripes interspersed with scintillating white impasto — abstract marks at their most vibrant and apparently improvisatory, held within a just-ordered framework.
There are, however, under-the-radar New Yorkers here as tough and full of bravado as the men. Lee Krasner’s robust-voluptuous arcs and coils build wonderful compositions of controlled chaos — “Bald Eagle”, “Feathering”. Lesser known, the slashing dragged strokes in Judith Godwin’s “Black Pagoda” and “Black Cross” have an architectural heft and depth recalling those of her friend Franz Kline, but a dynamic, lighter quality inspired by the physical movements of another friend, dancer Martha Graham.
