Opinion
A Woman in the Abstract
By Jennifer Landes
 Gertrude Greene’s “Gothic” was painted in 1956.
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(10/17/2007) It might be difficult from the vantage point of 2007 to imagine the challenges a woman in the 1930s had trying to create her own imprint on the modern art scene. Gertrude Greene, whose three-decade career of art making is on display at the Spanierman Gallery in East Hampton, is one of those pioneers.
While there was a contemporary fashion for social realism and surrealism, Greene instead looked back to the work of the Russian Constuctivists as a source of inspiration for her own geometric abstractions, with a dose of Piet Mondrian thrown in for good measure.
They are strong works and imply the presence of a forceful personality not afraid to take chances on the turf of the male artistic hierarchy of the day. Whereas many female artists tended to take their abstractions from nature, Greene went straight to the man and machine-made objects of the day that attracted the attention of artists such as David Smith in sculpture and Ferdinand Leger in paint.
A teacher for a time, she married Balcomb Greene in 1926 and the couple eventually began to devote more of their time to artistic pursuits while they traveled between New York and Europe.
The blocky “Female Forms” of the mid-1920s give way, in the 1930s, to the Picasso-esque “Project for a Sculpture” preparatory drawings that use mechanical forms to express a physical presence. The drawings bear notes in writing on how the objects should be constructed, offering evidence of a precise and exacting nature.
Although there may have been a time when the collages were more striking and the color contrast crisper, the construction paper collages are faded and disappointing. They seem to have been chosen more for the information they offer about the artist’s career.
In the 1930s Greene helped found the American Abstract Artists group with her husband, who served as its chairman for three terms. He went on to pursue a graduate degree in art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and then taught at the Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1942 until 1959. The couple commuted back and forth between New York and Pittsburgh.
“Black and White Construction,” from 1942, borrows the forms from the collage but examines them sculpturally, with wood instead of paper. The strong contrasts and measured voids and projections play with the essential qualities of the mediums she is traversing.
In 1947, Greene and her husband bought land in Montauk and began to spend time on the South Fork as well.
By the later 1940s, Greene was becoming more linear with her forms. The works in the show offer evidence of her breaking up the blockiness of the previous years with more skeletal frameworks in black and deep red. These forms continue to be visible in her work into the next decade, when she became more fluid and impressionistic in her abstraction.
Before she died in 1956, much of her work was done with a palette knife, offerring evidence of a synthesis between the earlier blocky forms and the more delicate linear constructions. In her paintings on paper, a real Abstract Expressionist aesthetic and approach is seen to be forming, while her canvases maintain a more formal approach.
Her “Structure and Space” series explores the tension between what is contained and what is looser and free. Contrasted with the less specific untitled works, they offer a view of the world that feels urban and modern, while the other works appear to refer to more organic forms. “Composition (White)” could be a waterfall or an expanse of ice on an outcropping of rock.
“Gothic” is a hybrid of both in which a more fluid application of paint helps define what it appears to refer to, a tall cathedral spire.
The looser works, including those on paper, can be very atmospheric, almost romantic. In other paintings, the subject matter is sterile and somewhat macho. Throughout, a strong use of color shows an artist very much in control of her medium.
The exhibit will be on view until Nov. 26.