Like all women and all art forms, Judy Chicago is many things. This summer, the 84-year-old American artist’s lifelong interest in exploring and subverting women’s history through storytelling, activism, and unapologetically feminine aesthetics and materials is revealed in two bold and moving European retrospectives.
In exhibition rooms in Britain and France, six decades of Chicago’s resolutely feminist work are on display in remarkable diversity. Minimalist sculptures, psychedelic spray-painted car hoods, landscapes billowing with plumes of smoke, and paintings of swirling, hallucinatory flowers fill the galleries with Chicago’s trademark bright colors and undulating lines.
Many of the works incorporate personal texts written in cursive, orderly, and looping script about gendered rejection, shame, desire, and anger. Tapestries, wall hangings, and monumental drawings on black paper present female bodies, including the artist herself, in states of ecstasy, abandonment, and dissolution—being born, giving birth, dying, and vanishing into the ether in rainbow swirls and spirals. These works foreground the female nude, its life-giving properties, and its implicit connection to the natural world.
One exhibition, “Herstory,” on view at the New Museum in New York last fall and currently at the LUMA Foundation in Arles, France, is a classic chronological presentation of Chicago’s work from the early 1960s to the present; the other, “Revelations,” at the Serpentine Galleries in London, focuses on the artist’s drawings. The London exhibition catalogue also includes an illuminated manuscript of the same name from the 1970s that Chicago produced in the course of her best-known work, “The Dinner Party” (1974–79), an installation that imagines a ceremonial banquet for 39 prominent women.
Now a mainstay of art historical scholarship, “The Dinner Party” has dominated understanding of Chicago’s career despite her prolific and varied output. The vast triangular table with its embroidered and ceramic place settings is the product of years of collaborative work with craftswomen and encapsulates a decade of archival and library research, where Chicago unearthed one after another figures who made groundbreaking discoveries in multiple disciplines but whose contributions have been erased from history. Each place setting in the banquet is dedicated to one of these women, each with its own embroidered cloth and ceramic plate.
“The Dinner Party” is not on view in Arles or London, but a handful of Chicago test plates and his painstaking pen-and-ink drawings for their designs are on display in both shows, along with what might be called a kind of vulva-in-flower motif. The artist has called this “central imagery,” an aesthetic that privileges the circular over the horizontal or vertical, the orifice over the phallus, the diffuse and evenly distributed over the singular and autonomous.
These ideas were so shocking at the time that when the University of the District of Columbia attempted to acquire “The Dinner Party” in 1988, a lawmaker denounced it as “3-D ceramic pornography” in the House of Representatives. (A 10-minute video clip of the two-hour debate, in which no women participated, is on view at the Serpentine.) The work was stored until 2002, when it entered the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, where it has been on permanent display since 2007.
The new book, “Revelations,” is a sprawling, five-chapter narrative of vivid vignettes chronicling the age-old struggle for power between men and women, including sections on primordial matriarchs and ancient goddess-worshipping societies. The longest chapter, “Myths, Legends, and Silhouettes,” provides brief background on some of the guests at the Chicago Dinner Party, including Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Artemisia Gentileschi, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and Georgia O’Keeffe.
Some of Chicago’s biographies are sentimental or caricatured, but the tales of courage in the face of rejection, violence, and humiliation form a litany that is both angry and astonishing, but not unfamiliar. By the end of the chapter, O’Keeffe emerges as a kind of 20th-century feminist patron saint, whose large, tight-edged, luminous, billowing flower paintings defied early-20th-century artistic fashions. “Here’s my flower, world,” O’Keefe writes in a 1939 exhibition catalog that Chicago cites in “Revelations”: “I’ll paint what I see—what the flower means to me—but I’ll paint it big, and they’ll be surprised enough to take the time to look at it.”
But the manuscript does not contain a sentence that O’Keeffe said next: “You have hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I thought and saw what you think and see about the flower—and I don’t.”
I like to think that this omission is due to the fact that Chicago knows that reality can be disappointing and full of rejection, but that is no reason to stop creating. In the artist’s work, femininity is a performance, with and against expectations, performed by each woman who struggles to be the author of her own destiny.
In both London and Arles, I found myself looking at works from the artist’s early, transitional period, before “Dinner Party,” when she struggled to fit into popular art movements of the day, like minimalism and land art, in which women were marginalized or simply unwelcome. (The curator Walter Hopps said that looking at the Chicago works was like watching a woman lift up her skirt, and John Coplans, the founding editor of Artforum, told him, “You have to decide whether you want to be a woman or an artist.”) But these works are truly—to use a taboo word in art criticism these days—beautiful.
At LUMA, three works from the series “Pasadena Lifesavers” (1969-70) sparkle and shine before the eye like Op Art candy. Each consists of four doughnut shapes in different color combinations on acrylic, applied with a spray lacquer so delicate and with such fine gradation that the flat forms seem to float, spin, and quiver. In the next room, a series of paintings from 1973 devoted to sovereign women (Queens Elizabeth II and Victoria of England, Queen Christina of Sweden) mesmerize like sacred visions, pure optical pleasures in pale pink, yellow, blue, purple, and cream. In London, the etchings and preparatory drawings from the series are equally ethereal and masterfully executed.
In both exhibitions, spaces are devoted to Chicago’s works, “Atmospheres” (1967–2022), which originated in the California desert. In the early works in the series, Chicago women walk through barren landscapes, their naked bodies painted in bright colors, setting off bombs of colored smoke. The photographs and videos of the performances are like abstract paintings in motion, the air vividly smeared with trails that come to life. They show the potential of a collective in motion to produce something as unpredictable as it is deeply moving.
Later works, by contrast, such as “What if Women Ruled the World,” with its gold-embroidered hangings originally made for a Dior haute couture show in 2020, are frustratingly literal. “Is the Earth protected?” the banners ask. “Is God a woman?”… “Is there violence?”… Maybe—and?
One of the many burdens of being a “feminist artist” is that your work is often condemned, whether you do it or not, because no piece of art, no matter how iconic, can adequately represent all of womanhood, femininity, or feminism. The most challenging art, like the best in Chicago, offers new ways of thinking and creating that you can also practice on your own terms.