Vitruvian Woman

 

After leaving graduate school in Illinois in 1965, Fishman moved to New York to become an artist; or, in Catherine Lord’s apt phrase, “to become one of the boys.”[1] In New York, Fishman immersed herself in the ferment of Women’s Liberation, and in the equally tumultuous, emergent movement for lesbian and gay rights. She attended consciousness-raising groups organized by the radical feminist Redstockings, whose members contributed to some of the central polemics of first-wave feminism. Towards the end of the 1960s, a filmmaker friend directed Fishman to groups that, in Lord’s words, were “well stocked hunting grounds” for women who wanted more lesbians in their lives. By the time Fishman met the queer anthropologist, Esther Newton, at a party in the West Village (they danced; eventually Fishman moved in), she thoroughly identified with lesbian feminist life and politics. Her next challenge would be to figure out how to reconcile those social struggles with her art.

Unable to see how her paintings could speak to the social upheaval of the early 1970s, Fishman gave up painting and embarked on a period of experimentation, creating whatever seemed to make sense at the time, whether it be works made with liquid rubber (evidence of a brief acquaintance with Eva Hesse), or drawings on graph paper, each of which Fishman inserted into a baggie to be hung on the wall by a pair of pins. In 1970, after pondering the stained grid paintings she had been making since the late 1960s, Fishman decided to cut them up and incorporate the remnants into works that sometimes assumed the form of wordless, stitched-and-stapled canvas books; or sometimes she would punch holes in canvas and thread rope through the holes to create a tactile grid. Sometimes she soaked the pieces of canvas in a bath of diluted black acrylic paint, and then stitched and/or stapled the parts together to form objects suggesting feminist Arte Povera. Combining an act of symbolic self-mutilation (cutting up her own paintings) with a foray into the domestic arts, Fishman’s gesture also related to fellow Redstockings member Patricia Mainardi’s 1970 polemic, “The Politics of Housework.”

Fishman maintains that she felt “jealous of the writers’ camaraderie, of their ability to write doctrine and keep journals.”[2] In 1973, she gave poetic shape to those longings, and to the anger and frustration that accompanied them, in a series of forceful paintings on paper that were dominated by the word “ANGRY,” which Fishman followed with the given name of one or more women she either knew directly or knew

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Angry Harmony, 1973 Acrylic, pastel, pencil, charcoal on paper 26 1/2 x 40 1/4 inches

about. “ANGRY HARMONY” is therefore painted, emphatically, in acrylic, pastel, pencil and charcoal. Fishman painted each word inside one of two vigorously painted rectangular quadrants that together suggest the pages of an open book. “Harmony” refers to Harmony Hammond, a compatriot from the women’s artist group that Fishman had joined after realizing that belonging to the other women’s groups had helped her personal development, but it was not helping her to develop as an artist. “ANGRY RADCLYFFE HALL” contains more words than most of the other “angry” paintings and is rendered in an especially stark and emphatic a way. As such, it persuasively conveys both the youthful lesbian’s yearning for a historical and cultural past she can identify with, and her repudiation of the powerlessness embodied in Radclyffe Hall’s pioneering, though anything but liberated, novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928). Beneath the words “ANGRY RADCLYFFE/HALL THE LESBIAN/ANGRY LESBIAN,” Fishman scrawled the title, “WELL OF LONELINESS,” only to strike it out with a staccato row of black notches, all above two final words: “LESBIAN FURY.” Responding to the boldness of these text paintings, Lord maintains that “the ‘Angry Paintings,’ with their confusion of letters and color, their overlays of slashes and loops, their fields of muddied pigment, their rough edges and archaeological slices, were Fishman’s route home. The choices she would follow in her later work are almost all prefigured here. It may fairly be said that the explosions recorded in the series enabled Louise Fishman to return to painting.”[3] However, it would take Fishman another five years before she would again take up painting on stretched canvas; and almost three decades before she would finally claim as her own the daily practice of monumental gestural abstraction.

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Throughout much of the 1980s, Fishman had been showing intensely textured, modestly scaled, jewel-like abstractions—until the spring of 1988. In March of that year, she accompanied Valerie and Frank Furth—collectors who are also Holocaust survivors—on a trip to Warsaw,

	Sargenes, 1988 Oil on Linen, 56 x 40 inches.

Prague, and Budapest, but also to Auschwitz and Terezin. That pilgrimage proved transformative to Fishman’s life and art. 

Fishman reports having been far more deeply affected by her visit to the camps than she could ever have imagined, or prepared herself to be.[4] It wasn’t that she hadn’t thought about her Jewish identity. Throughout the late 1970s, Fishman had been reading Holocaust literature. She also had colorful stories to tell about her grandfather, whom she never met but after whom she is named. Louis Fishman lived in a village in the Ukraine until he fled the Cossacks and emmigrated to Buenos Aires. There, the former “Talmudic scholar” became a cowboy: one of, apparently, many such Jewish gauchos who worked on the pampas throughout the early 20^th century.

 After returning from Auschwitz, Fishman could no longer paint her intense little abstractions with their delectable, palette-knifed surfaces. But contrary to Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum that after Auschwitz there can be no lyric poetry, Fishman was able ultimately to produce an important cycle of nineteen paintings, each of which she named for some aspect of the Passover Seder (i.e. Haggadah, Four Questions, Diyanu, etc.), which commemorates the enslavement of Biblical Jews in ancient Egypt, marks their liberation, and asserts the continuity of Jewish identity and tradition throughout the Diaspora.

Adding to the profoundly somber effect of these paintings of “remembrance and renewal” is the fact that each of them contains a small amount of silt that Fishman removed from the Pond of Ashes at Auschwitz.[5] After returning to New York, Fishman combined the silt—remains of those who perished in the crematoria—together with pigment, medium and a small amount of bees wax, and with this mixture set about painting the dark, warmly colored works whose sturdy, block-like, abstract compositions and largely uninflected, slightly grainy surfaces contrasted sharply with anything she had ever produced.

It would take another decade before Fishman would find her way to creating the monumental gestural abstractions that opened my eyes to her work in 2000. After returning from her trip to Eastern Europe, and producing the cycle of Passover paintings, Fishman experimented, tentatively creating smallish paintings and works on paper that revisited familiar schemas, most notably the enduring grid; she even produced a few intimate sculptural works out of bent and painted cardboard as well as bronze. Having the courage to respond in painting to her visit to the death camps of Eastern Europe, it is perhaps not surprising that Fishman would finally and fully lay claim to the virile American postwar painting tradition that historically excluded women.

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Using a method that you couldn’t have known then, I can stir up memory In countless elements. Traces of blood are forever. Lies shine. Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light   From “Archeology,” by Wislawa Szynmborska[6]

 

Since 1998, Fishman has been creating and showing mostly large-scale paintings that are astonishingly self-assured in their engaging physicality, coloration, and carefully calibrated play of line, plane, light and space. The current exhibition and catalogue, which includes works dating from 2003-2005, is no exception. Fishman’s paintings do not lend themselves to easy categorization. That said, she continues to construct variations on the grid. Paintings such as My City (2002), Pink and

Blue and You and The Art of Losing (2003) build on, and deviate from, that armature. My City (2002) is a big, handsome, blonde painting in which brown and green lines—some more or less straight, others loopy—map out a shallow pictorial space that is, nonetheless, deeper than most in Fishman’s oeuvre. The newer works further distill and build on that armature. In Pink and Blue and You, for example, the linear network has thickened, and close examination reveals that its individual “lines” are comprised of more than one stroke of the brush. Loaded with a shade of turquoise blue that is at once luminous and dense, these linear elements function as attenuated forms in their mazelike standoff with the picture’s fleshy zones.

This deceptively simple work emits an unusual, opalescent light that is hard to describe, so strange is the overall effect of the two colors’ combination of luminosity and chromatic density. Equally slow to reveal itself to the eye is the fact that the ostensibly flat areas of pink actually consist of multiple layers of pink, blue and white, which accounts for the painting’s vivid, opalescent harmony.

Experiencing this painting in person, the scale and materiality of the blue strokes fully conveys the effect of the intuitively choreographic, brush-wielding arm as it reaches, arcs, loops and licks the surface to arrive at a balanced, asymmetrical configuration that is inspired, in part, by Fishman’s enduring interest in Chinese philosophers’ stones. Most of Fishman’s paintings are vertical, perhaps precisely because that orientation provides her with the opportunity to deploy her painting arm in its most natural, full range of motion, resulting in paintings that represent the artist’s body in motion.

Responding to Fishman’s paintings in 2000, John Yau noted that she ”transformed the post-Cubist, figure-ground relationship conveyed by de Kooning’s supple strokes and hard slashes of thick, viscous color into a very different proposal. She merges figure and ground, so that the painting becomes both a body and a field.”[7] At its most developed, Fishman’s tendency to thicken the linear network can produce a cloisonné-like effect, in which line and color-saturated planes, though optically fused in the manner Yau describes, are also almost segregated. This is the case with Moon and Movies (2003), a painting in which shapes coalesce to read as both body and field; or perhaps, more accurately in this case, animal and cityscape. The thickened strokes that plot the shallow pictorial space in Green in the Body (2004) alternately bring to mind the mask-like compositions of the early 20^th century Russian artist, Alexei Jawlensky, or, again, Georges Rouault’s heavily textured and segmented paintings of kings, clowns and whores; unless, that is, one experiences Fishman’s painting in person, in which case the scale, materiality and sculptural effect of her deployment of line and plane insist on the abstraction to which Fishman is clearly committed.

If at one end of an imaginary spectrum, Fishman is a painter of meticulously structured compositions anchored by a grid, at the other end her work can come close to falling apart. Ramon de la Vida Loco (2005) is one painting that courts disaster in this way. To be sure, this big, risky, horizontal painting also contains vestiges of the grid—this time rendered as broad swipes of brown and green brushed vigorously over a ground of pale, luminous peach. It looks like Fishman used a rag to rub out large areas of the brown and green brushstrokes, especially in the upper half of the painting where it produced large masses, in which the two earthy colors commingle to form muddy clouds that block visual access to the peach ground. That this painting ultimately holds together is due to the fact that Fishman has maintained smaller areas of luminous clarity throughout, providing just barely enough of this much-needed counterpoint to offset and balance the smudgy masses and let the painting breathe.

	Residue of A Gaze, 2005 Oil on Linen 88 x 70 inches

Between orderly works like Green in the Body and the high-risk Ramon are several paintings whose elegance suggests monumental, rugged takes on Ad Reinhardt’s modestly scaled, supremely stylish paintings of the mid-1940s. An Appearance of Again, No Way of Telling, and Residue of a Gaze (all 2005) are comprised of many layers, the archaeological result of Fishman’s method of constructing paintings through an intuitive process of painting, scraping, sanding, and painting again. Closest to the surface of An Appearance of Again, is a network of dark blue-green and black brushstrokes that together read like distant relatives of the Cubist views though trees in a forest that Mondrian made during the 1910s.

The “ground,” which at first reads as a light yet dense putty color, is deceptive, appearing as it does to have been applied over layers of the blue-green paint. In fact, large passages of that blue-green underpainting have been excavated like translucent veils wherever Fishman has scraped away portions of the earth tone with her serrated trowel. Clearly visible amid all the painting, scraping and sanding are luminous glints of bright peach, orange, turquoise and green, which Fishman keeps fresh to further enliven one’s experience of the painting.

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Being in the presence of Fishman’s paintings provides the viewer with a sense of perceptual and cognitive fullness, a temporary state of grace in which I find myself thinking about the maturity of her work, by which I refer less to its undisputed artistic mastery than to the integration that it represents for me. To be in the presence of such paintings is to realize how fully they embody the symbolic resolution of the most significant conflicts and contradictions that have marked Fishman’s experience and sense of self.

Back in the late 60s and early 70s, Fishman’s early identification with both the feminist and lesbian and gay rights movements were empowering experiences at the level of personal development; but the same process of coming to critical consciousness and political commitment also generated profound self-doubt and uncertainty about how she—an artist with a strong commitment to abstract painting—could shape her work in a manner that adequately embodies that social and subjective experience. Having successfully laid claim to the male-identified idiom of gestural abstraction since 1998, Fishman has achieved that goal of integration, in essence by defying patriarchal culture and the gender roles that it imposes. In “The Woman-Identified Woman,” a collectively authored manifesto and cornerstone of lesbian feminist thought, its authors maintain that the “grudging admiration felt for the tomboy, and the queasiness felt around a sissy boy, point to the same thing: the contempt in which women—or those who play a female role—are held. And the investment in keeping women in that contemptuous [sic] role is very great.”[8] In art, one of the ways in which that misogynistic contempt has been maintained is through the perpetuation of a critical discourse that honors only art whose greatness, like that of Abstract Expressionism, is thoroughly encoded as masculine. Many artists of Fishman’s generation responded to this patriarchal construction by exploring the expressive potential of making art from precisely those practices that historically were encoded as feminine, such as the domestic and decorative arts. In a beautiful short text, Roni Horn writes, “pronouns detain me.”[9] This refutation of pronouns for limiting women’s freedom attests to the artist’s refusal to be held back by discourse. And in that sense, Louise Fishman’s paintings testify boldly to her own, hard-won liberation.

 

© 2005 David Deitcher