Nancy Spero painted large themes on small pictures: The US-American artist created a universe of women, which she positioned as embodiments of peace against the male-characterisation of war. She is regarded as a feminist icon who, with her paintings and collages, sought an independent female position in a world characterised by male violence and sexuality.
(...) Continue readingNancy Spero studied under Kathleen Blackshear and André Lothe
Nancy Spero was born in Cleveland, Ohio on 24 August 1926, but her family moved to Chicago shortly after her birth, where Spero spent her childhood. She attended New Trier High School, studied at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1944 to 1945 and obtained her bachelor's degree at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949 under modern sculptor Kathleen Blackshear (1897-1988), under whose influence she studied the artefacts on display at the Field Museum of Natural History. A lecture by the French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) strengthened Spero's interest in the totems of indigenous cultures. During her studies, she met the young GI Leon Golub (1922-2004), who had returned from the Second World War, and both exhibited with the group The Monster Roster at the Hyde Park Art Centre. Spero went to Paris in 1949, where she studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts des Paris and in the studio of the Cubist painter André Lothe (1885-1962) until 1950.
Processing of social and political themes
In 1950, Nancy Spero returned to the USA and married her university friend Leon Golub; the marriage lasted until his death in 2004 and the couple had three sons. In 1959, the young family moved to Paris, where Spero and Golub found the art scene to be more diverse and inclusive than in New York at that time. During stays in Florence and Ischia, Spero developed a fascination for Etruscan and Roman frescoes and sarcophagi, which was reflected in her artistic work, and used turpentine to achieve an antique effect. In Paris, she created the Black Paris Paintings, expressive figurative oil paintings that dealt with themes such as motherhood, prostitution and love. From 1964, Nancy Spero and Leon Golub lived in the USA again and encountered a heated and tense political atmosphere during the Vietnam War. Inspired by the unrest on the streets and the television images of the war, from 1966 to 1970 Spero created quickly executed gouache and ink paintings on paper, with which she denounced the obscenity of the war.
Icon and early advocate of feminist art
From the very beginning, Nancy Spero saw her art as political and was a strong advocate of feminism. In 1974, she stopped painting men. Only women appeared in her paintings, but they could also stand for all of humanity. She made women dance with dildos, denounced the misery of female torture victims, and searched for a new formulation for female identity. Despite this, she also referred to male artists in her work: her text-laden collages in the Codex Artaud series were dedicated to the French actor Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), while a text and image installation for the Jewish Museum in New York drew on poems by Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and Nelly Sachs (1891-1970). However, the outsider was only able to reach a wider public with her work when she co-founded the A.I.R. Gallery, where only women were exhibited.
Nancy Spero died in New York City on 18 October 2009.
Nancy Spero - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
