Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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Before the women’s liberation movement entered wider public consciousness in the early 1970s, women artists were creating an early feminist aesthetic and imagining new fields of possibility for themselves and their work. For historic Surrealists, the radical juxtapositions made possible by collage were appealing for their apparent capacity to communicate unconscious thoughts and desires. For the protofeminists of the 1960s, collage offered a way to highlight the myriad social, political, and psychological expectations imposed on women. This technique allowed them to combine abstraction with representational forms in order to convey the complexity of their personal experiences. Although the presence of sexual content meant their work was often sensationalized as “erotic art,” such artists held an expansive set of concerns, from gender and sexuality to objectification and artifice. As the experimental filmmaker and photographer Barbara Hammer would later reflect: “I was swept up with the energies and dreams of a feminist revolution. We could make a new world where everyone was equal. We believed it, and we tried our best to live it.”

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Several nude figures in various colors lie on a colorful surface, with a table, flowers, and art supplies in the center.

To create the large-scale works that constitute her Flesh Wall series, Martha Edelheit typically painted from individual live models whose bodies she combined in the final composition. Flesh Wall With Table is a rare exception. Painted entirely from the artist's imagination, this colorful tangle of women's bodies seems unselfconscious and unbothered by the male gaze. Edelheit inserts her own self-portrait and worktable into this utopian landscape, as if to reinforce that the artist's hand and eye are responsible for this vision. Seen from behind in a rectangle of black and gray, Edelheit appears intent upon painting herself into this brighter, freer world.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

The Big Rip-Up

9

Martha Edelheit, Flesh Wall with Table, 1965

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