The Power of Abstraction: Five Midcentury Artists to Know

Breaking from artistic traditions of the past, they began to use color, form, shapes, and gestural mark making to convey complex emotions and ideas and challenge established worldviews. However, abstraction was not a complete rupture from realism or figuration: artists still looked to the world around them as they expanded the possibilities of what art could be.

Beyond Form: Abstraction at Midcentury unites works on paper by 65 artists in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection, half of which are on view in our galleries for the very first time. Together, they represent more than 23 countries—places where they were born and those to which they traveled or relocated, some voluntarily, others through forced displacement or exile. As artists moved around the globe at midcentury, they encountered new opportunities for collaboration, resulting in an international expansion of techniques, movements, and styles, including minimalism, collage, spontaneous mark-making, burning, and tearing. Through this cultural and artistic exchange, abstraction became a powerful force for deepening understanding and fostering acceptance of diverse realities and experiences.

We invite you to get to know a few of the featured artists and their varied approaches to abstraction—along with five exemplary abstract works making their Art Institute debut.

Pennerton West 

A direct descendent of American painter Benjamin West, Pennerton West demonstrated incredible artistic talent and drive from a young age. At 16 years old, she changed her first name from Dorothy Ann, assembling a new name from her favorite letters, which she considered her first creative act. A rebellious person by nature, West left her home in New York City to find her calling in Hollywood and then Mexico before returning home to become one of New York City’s first female taxi drivers (a fact she was incredibly proud of). Driving a cab allowed her to return to making art in her spare time, and in the 1930s she went on to study with Hans Hofmann and trained with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17, an experimental printmaking workshop.

In Untitled, she channeled these myriad influences and her independent spirit through layered ink and graphite lines punctuated by bright passages of crayon, creating a drawing that reflects the vibrancy and dynamism of the artist herself.

Jacqueline Lamba

Part of the Surrealist circle in Paris, Jacqueline Lamba was close friends with Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and even Frida Kahlo, whom she visited twice in Mexico. Lamba was a wild and free spirit: she exercised on a trapeze swing, wore necklaces of tiger’s teeth, and put shimmery bits of glass in her hair, which she occasionally dyed green. Picasso depicted the green-haired Lamba in the upper-right corner of his 1939 painting Night Fishing at Antibes.

A few years later, in 1941, Lamba fled war-ravaged France on a boat because the Nazis had labeled her and her circle of friends “degenerate” for their political views and Surrealist practices. Untitled depicts the night sky during her journey across the ocean: In the upper-right corner, a sunrise (or is it a sunset?) hovers above the water while surreal, organic forms, some dotted with hair, swirl through an expanse of shadowy graphite. 

Tanaka Atsuko

Born in Osaka, Japan, Tanaka Atsuko was the youngest of nine children. When she was 13 years old, Japan surrendered to Allied forces, signaling the end of World War II, and Tanaka found herself inspired by artists who were commenting on the social conditions of postwar Japan. Tanaka would herself become part of a small collective of experimental artists in Japan known as the Zero Society (Zero-kai)—along with her husband Kanayama Akira (whose work will also be on view)—that sought to begin “from zero,” creating nonrepresentational art that was entirely original. 

In this print, Tanaka employed a series of circles entangled within a network of looping lines to evoke electric circuits and systems of connection, reflecting Japan’s rapid technological reconstruction and industrialization in the years following World War II. A few years earlier Tanaka had created Electric Dress, a wearable sculpture composed of colorful lightbulbs and cords, which she said was very hot.

Deborah Remington

In 1956, after graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute, Deborah Remington moved to Japan, where she would live for two years with a host family, learning Chinese and Japanese calligraphy and sumi-e ink painting. Remington explained that she moved to Kyoto and Tokyo to distance herself from the United States and, as she said, “stand on the other side of the fence and assess myself and my culture.” To support herself during this period, Remington worked as an English teacher, a nightclub hostess, and even an actress in small roles for television and movies.

Upon her return to San Francisco, and inspired by her study of Chinese and Japanese characters, Remington rubbed soot from her fireplace onto muslin, a lightweight fabric, to create a velvety, deep-black background that surrounds a solitary symbol floating in the center in Soot Series #1.

Otto Piene

A former German antiaircraft gunner and philosophy student, Otto Piene cofounded ZERO, a group that sought complete freedom from earlier forms of artistic expression, in 1957. Rather than staging exhibitions in a gallery or museum, the group organized “happenings,” loosely structured events that took place in the city streets or countryside and in which the active participation of the viewer was crucial. Piene, in particular, coordinated “Light Ballets,” in which he projected light through beams and grids around his loft.

This interest eventually culminated in his “fire paintings,” which combined performance and chance in the barely controlled burning of the picture plane, as he poured liquid solvent onto the sheet and set it on fire. Piene once remarked, “What is all this, image, color, light, vibration, pure energy? Life. Life in freedom.”

With 67 works on display in this exhibition, there is even more to discover in person. We hope you’ll join us in the galleries of Beyond Form this summer to encounter new artists, unique perspectives, and unexpected materials and modes of expression.

—Mel Becker Solomon, associate research curator, and Chloé Glass, research associate, Prints and Drawings

Sponsors

Support for Beyond Form: Abstraction at Midcentury is provided by the Allan McNab Endowed Fund.

Topics

• Collection
• Exhibitions
• Artists
• From the Curator
• Prints and Drawings