Excerpt from Compressed Expressionism: Louisa Chase in the 1980s
By Michael Auping
I like to think the female abstract and semi-abstract painters of SoHo and Tribeca in the late 1970s and 1980s were my generation’s version of the Ninth Street Women, or at least a new wave of women at a time when painting needed some new viewpoints. Of course, it’s not a perfectly fair comparison. The conditions had changed. There were more women in the art world of the 1980s, and many of them were university-educated. They were in larger, mostly renovated lofts, and they generally had hot water. The precedents of their female elders had paved the way for their turbocharged ambitions.
The names Louisa Chase, Louise Fishman, Mary Heilmann, Marilyn Lenkowsky, Marilyn Minter, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff, Susan Rothenberg, and Joan Snyder, among others, are still burned into my memory as part of a loose female avant-garde of 1980s painting—an avant-garde that was stretching the form and content of painting in that moment. Despite art magazine headlines dominated by the names of Georg Baselitz, Francesco Clemente, Peter Halley, Julian Schnabel, and David Salle, et al., painting in the 1980s had a far more diverse gender mix. The male painters went big and bold, seeking a muscular iconicity that was energized and startling, particularly in the beginning, but it soon became a little predictable and impersonal. The women offered broader and more complex psychological and formal alternatives. It was not, however, a contrived group effort. They were fiercely individual artists who generally didn’t identify with “style.”
In this regard, Louisa Chase played a unique role. She operated in her own formal and intensely personal zone. Rothenberg introduced me to Chase and her work in the early 1980s. She said Chase was a good painter, “emotionally complex,” but didn’t fit into what was going on. By what was going on, she meant the New Image Painting movement, which was as much a style as a movement— one that strategically grafted minimalistic figuration onto simple backgrounds to affect a transition in painting from Color Field abstraction to a new type of figuration. The flip side was Neo- Expressionism, which was big and theatrically baroque. Both were stylishly self-assured, but didn’t suit Chase’s personality. She seemed to stand between the two movements, exploring a fascinating combination of vulnerability and emotional toughness.
