Claire Falkenstein, Untitled, 1946. Oil on canvas wrapped panel in artist's wood sculptural frame, 14 ¼ × 17 ¼ in. (36.2 × 43.8 cm). Courtesy of the Levett Collection and FAMM. Photo by Fraser Marr

Abstract Expressionists: The Women presents a fresh look at important contributions U.S. women painters working in New York, California, and Paris made to Abstract Expressionism from the early 1940s through the 1970s. The show features approximately fifty works from The Levett Collection by over thirty women artists, offering audiences a more in-depth understanding of a singular aspect of twentieth-century American art, one whose significance has only just begun to receive proper recognition.

Until recently, the historical and critical reception of Abstract Expressionism—an American postwar artistic phenomenon—has almost uniformly marginalized its women practitioners. The development of expansive, gestural paintings with a radical approach to scale, surface, and process has historically been associated with male creativity, invoking a New World “heroic” masculinity that defined the American post-war era. Abstract Expressionists: The Women upends this gendered narrative, demonstrating that women artists working in the Abstract Expressionist style were not merely acolytes or interpreters, but ambitious innovators all their own. Concurrent with their more celebrated male peers, many of these women experimented with spontaneity and immediacy in their large-scale compositions, also exhibiting the automatic techniques and extemporaneous characteristics associated with “action painting.” Focusing on the talent, commitment, and ingenuity of more than two dozen women artists, this exhibition reveals the vital impact made by women painters on the first truly avant-garde artistic movement to originate in the United States.

Abstract Expressionists: The Women is organized by the American Federation of Arts from the Christian Levett Collection and FAMM (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum), France, and curated by Ellen G. Landau.

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