Judy Chicago: Revelations – an ‘absorbing’ show from a pioneering feminist artist

TheWeek The Week US Edition US UK SUBSCRIBE & SAVE Less than $3 per week × Search Sign in View Profile Sign out The Explainer Talking Points The Week Recommends Newsletters Cartoons From the Magazine The Week Junior More Politics World News Business Health Science Food & Drink Travel Culture History Personal Finance Puzzles Photos All Categories Newsletter sign up Newsletter Home Culture & Life Art the week recommends Judy Chicago: Revelations – an ‘absorbing’ show from a pioneering feminist artist The new exhibition contains some 200 paintings, drawings and installations Newsletter sign up Newsletter The exhibits tear ‘into men and their history with unconfined zest’ (Image credit: Stephen Chung / Alamy Stock Photo) By The Week UK published 7 June 2024 For 60 years, the American feminist artist Judy Chicago has been making “thunderous art driven by the certainty that men are bad and women are good”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Born Judith Cohen to liberal Jewish parents in Chicago in 1939, she adopted the name of her home city “as an act of American camouflage” and, from the 1960s, sought to create a form of art that went against the grain of tasteful, male-dominated modernism. Once derided by the art establishment, Chicago’s angry, unsubtle and frequently thrilling work is finally getting the recognition it deserves. This new exhibition confirms her as an artistic “pioneer” possessed of a “particularly intense” imagination. Taking as its starting point an unpublished illuminated manuscript from the 1970s that retells the “Book of Genesis” from a feminist perspective – it begins in a paediatric unit – the show contains some 200 paintings, drawings and installations created over the course of her career. Its exhibits tear “into men and their history with unconfined zest”; the result is a “weird” and “impactful” event. “Intense” is the operative word here, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Much of the work in this “absorbing” show revolves around childbirth, an “iconographic void within art history”, which Chicago “admirably sought to fill”. A case in point is 1982’s “In the Beginning”, a 32ft-long “primordial panorama” in which “a newborn suckles on lava-coloured nipples” and tiny creatures “spew from a suggestive chasm”. Or there’s “The Crowning” (2010), a work at once “like a vorticist painting and a Mayan relief”: an “unforgettable” vision of a baby’s head emerging during birth. This is a sometimes “mesmerising” show, even if Chicago’s depictions of men as “grimacing, nose-picking, sloppily urinating horrors” are “caricatured and ludicrous”, and her thoughts on climate change “have the nuance of a placard”. Subscribe to The Week Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives. SUBSCRIBE & SAVE Sign up for The Week’s Free Newsletters From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. Sign up Chicago can be “crude” and sometimes unforgivably “twee”, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. “What if Women Ruled the World?” (2023), for instance, is a vast, winsome series of quilted hangings that imagines a planet governed by “peace, love and female understanding”. Yet, by and large, her aesthetics and her graphic style are insistently compelling throughout. Early works such as 1974’s “Peeling Back” are “trippy, psychedelic, glowing with vibrations, yet immaculately graphic”, her “beautifully smooth gradations of colour” and “distinctive cursive script” a delightful expressive reaction to 1960s minimalism. A series of silhouette drawings, meanwhile, is “terrific, hazy around the edges, pin-sharp with the shapes of women in labour, or childbirth”. Perhaps most importantly, Chicago’s art always “holds itself open to dispute”: my advice is to “take a friend”, consider what you see, “then go ahead and argue”. Serpentine Gallery, London W2. Until 1 September Explore More Exhibition Feminism From The Magazine To continue reading this article… Create a free account Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month. register for free Already have an account? Sign in Subscribe to The Week Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more. Subscribe & Save Cancel or pause at any time. Already a subscriber to The Week? Unlimited website access is included with Digital and Print + Digital subscriptions. Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access. Not sure which email you used for your subscription? 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