Pat Lipsky is perhaps today’s most distinguished abstract painter continuing to explore the language of color and form.
In a singular examination of art world mechanics, Pat Lipsky, in a Tablet article, lays out her first-hand, fifty-year witnessing of the unglamorous lives of women artists. Lipsky chronicles a long list – naming the names – of women artists whose liaisons with powerful men or self-sexualizing furthered their careers.
Right after college Helen [Frankenthaler] got involved with Clem Greenberg. who then introduced her to Pollock and other trailblazers of that moment. …She then moved on to white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Robert Motherwell—the only abstract expressionist to have had an independent income.
Some women tried to break into the scene through more unorthodox methods. Hannah Wilke and Lynda Benglis were two of my contemporaries in SoHo. The former, at the time Claes Oldenburg’s girlfriend… Benglis continued her vulva theme. In her first exhibition, she arranged to be photographed nude with a double-pronged dildo coming out of her vagina
This goes back of course to Stieglitz’s early photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe nude, which were first shown in 1921 and made her instantly famous.
An amusing recent star is the 25-year-old realist, Anna Weyant, whose prices, after only a few years of showing, have reached the low millions. Turns out she’s the girlfriend of the 71-year-old international art dealer Larry Gagosian.
Lipsky’s work is discussed in Abstract Painting: Concepts and Techniques.
See more of the work of Pat Lipsky here.