'Action Gesture Paint' (Whitechapel Gallery until May 7 2023): A Festival of a Show

 

Behjat Sadr, Untitled, 1956, Oil on wood, © Behjat Sadr Estate

I was in two minds about the Whitechapel's show, Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–70. A safe space for women artists? Not only should that not be necessary, but it seems unhealthy and counterproductive. The very people who need persuading that the male dominated canon must be broken apart are the least likely to make the trip to the wrong end of town. Those doubts melt away very quickly. This is an expansive, joyous celebration of a show. While the RA's Making Modernism, gave a meagre three rooms to a handful of German Expressionist women, here you have two floors, space and 80 artists. Many of the works are big and the hang is intense, but it never feels cluttered. Instead you get long vistas and intimate corners which set up interesting dialogues, some polite, some more like shouting matches. It's invigorating but never overwhelming.

More than any other artform, Abstract Expressionism - the exhibition avoids the label, probably because of its white, male, American associations, but that's what we have here - has to be experienced. Reproductions never do justice to the textures, the colours, the scale and the subtleties. But more importantly, this is the ultimate performance art: action, gesture and paint directly communicated between artist and viewer with all the energy of live music. So this show is Glastonbury - multiple stages, multiple performers, multiple styles all celebrating the joy of creativity. Because the other thing about Ab Ex is it's infinite variety. There are quiet acoustic moments, quirky indie ink blots, brassy cacophony, diaphanous lyricism, tight rhythm, repetition and line, deep immersive pools of colour. And there are so many materials and techniques, from staining to marble dust, from ripped canvas collage to household gloss.

Janet Sobel Untitled  c1948

This cornucopia causes problems. The exhibition has a global approach over a thirty year timeframe but there's no geographical or chronological framework. There are a number of American artists included - and they are some of the most familiar names: Krasner, Frankenthaler, de Kooning, Sobel. But I left no nearer knowing whether abstraction had spread out from the USA, or developed independently in other continents, or what role the curators thought Art Informel played. I can't tell you whether South American abstraction is significantly different from Asian. Equally there is no interest in charting change (if indeed it happened) over time. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but the thematic organisation that the exhibition does choose, seems woolly and unhelpful. It leads, for instance, to Frankenthaler appearing in three different sections.

If you go to the Whitechapel to make an in-depth study about global, women's abstraction you might come away frustrated. But perhaps that's not the point of the show. The last big Ab Ex exhibition I remember in London was the RA's 2016 'blockbuster' in which women artists were thin on the ground. It was just a little bit stale. This is big and wild and joyful and it leaves you in no doubt that women can 'do' abstraction and that abstract art itself is inclusive and inventive; alive and kicking. A number of artists here worked in a range of styles, some abandoned abstraction, some stopped painting altogether. And they weren't being feted as celebrities or making a ton of cash. So what's here is personal. It mattered. It was deeply felt. 

I arrived wishing this wasn't a show just about women. I left glad that it was. You don't want Pollock, Rothko and Willem de Kooning to crash this party. They're just not needed.