PDNB Gallery is featuring works by women artists from Texas that were included in the 2021-2022 international traveling exhibition, Women in Abstraction, at the Centre Pompidou.
Recently the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, have featured exhibitions featuring women artists that practiced abstraction in their art. The current Whitney show, Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction, covers the period, 1930–1950, when abstraction thrust itself into the American art scene. The exhibition in Paris, Women in Abstraction, and now at the Guggenheim, Bilbao, covers abstraction in dance, film, textiles, painting, sculpture and photography. The three Texas women represented in the Pompidou exhibition: Carlotta Corpron, Ida Lansky and Barbara Maples.
The Bauhaus had its tentacles in both museum shows. The Bauhaus school taught all artistic disciplines from theater to decorative arts to photography. It was all about experimentation, which provided the wheelhouse for abstraction.
PDNB Gallery addresses this subject of women in abstraction in the upcoming exhibition, The Bauhaus in Texas. The theme of the show is the influence of the Bauhaus in Germany, and the New Bauhaus in Chicago. The Direct tutelage of three great artists, László Maholy-Nagy, György Kepes (featured in the PDNB show), and the Texas artist, Carlotta Corpron, influenced a whole generation of female students at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. TWU had the first studio art program in Texas.
Carlotta taught photography at Texas Woman’s University from the 1940’s – 1980’s. She and her students, Ida Lansky, Barbara Maples, Beverly Wilgus are included in PDNB’s show. Their approach is reflected in photographs by Bauhaus mentors Maholy-Nagy, Kepes who both taught briefly at the college, and Corpron.
Abstraction in these photographs is revealed through experiments with light, solarization, exposures, and photograms. This exhibition features examples of all of these. The works cover 1930 ‘s to the 1970’s. The inclusion of these Texas artists in the expansive Pompidou exhibition states the importance of not only the threads of the Bauhaus and abstraction in our state in the 1940’s and 1950’s,
