Three artists (three women)

by Anne Middleton Wagner

"This is a book," writes Anne Wagner, "about three artists. In particular it concerns the character of their imagery, the paths of their careers, and the ways these were influenced, for good and ill, by one central circumstance: the fact that the artists were women.". The artists are Georgia O'Keeffe, Lee Krasner, and Eva Hesse. Their work is linked to three moments in the history of modernism in the United States - the utopian confidence of the 1920s avant-garde, the grimmer heroics of the New York School, and the all-or-nothing redefinition of art in the 1960s. They belonged profoundly to those moments, and believed that modernist practice offered them ways to make work that would speak directly to their bodily experience, their feelings, and their intellectual ambitions. Modernism for them above all meant abstraction or, better still, the possibility of operating between the figurative and the abstract, in a territory where bodily identities and mental orderings might be radically r