Will Heinrich

A mix of published and unpublished shots and the contact sheets from exactly one photo essay by each of these six make up “Life: Six Women Photographers” at the New-York Historical Society’s Center for Women’s History.

On the face of it, it’s a slender, though worthy enough, premise for an exhibition: half an excuse to air some historically accomplished and gorgeous silver gelatin prints from the Life archives, many never before published, and half a broad hint about how much talent we’ve lost to discrimination over the years. (It’s worth mentioning, too, that all six, though otherwise a fairly disparate group, were white.) But the dissonance between the kind of stories Life published and the images that the curator, Marilyn Satin Kushner, chose to highlight (and the female bylines that accompany them) make a more thought-provoking point: that the actual mechanics of discrimination tend to be more complicated than they may appear from a distance.

Margaret Bourke-White’s photo of Montana’s then-new Fort Peck Dam, in which giant concrete pylons recede into the distance like so many Egyptian gods, deserves the fame it won as the cover of Life’s first issue in 1936. Her pictures of the Public Works Administration personnel who built it, and of the town that sprung up around them, are equally good. Wheeler, Montana, looks as gritty as an old penny, but the workers, caught socializing in a local bar, are as monumental as the dam itself.

Hansel Mieth, a native of Germany who adopted her unusual nickname to pass as a boy while traveling with her future husband in the 1920s, produced lush and alluring views of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union’s summer retreat to the Poconos in 1938. In 1956 Life sent Lisa Larsen, who had fled Germany after Kristallnacht, to document Marshal Tito’s visit to Moscow, and she produced some genuinely astounding crowd shots. Neatly coifed heads fill one unpublished photo like so much black caviar, while “Crowd in Station (Tito as Soviet Hero),” in which people climb girders for a better view, transmits both the heroic scale of Moscow’s Kiyevsky station and what it feels like to be dwarfed by it. It’s the perfect metaphor for being present as a bystander at a historic event.

But the show’s real conceptual action is provided by two stories about women joining the workforce: Marie Hansen’s images for the 1942 story “A WAAC’s Work Is Never Done,” about the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, and Nina Leen’s “American Woman’s Dilemma,” from 1947.

Hansen followed a former paper factory employee as she had her hair shortened by a civilian hairdresser, presented her stocking seams to a male superior for inspection and otherwise prepared to join the American war effort.

Leen asks whether it’s better for a young woman to work outside the home, missing her children’s earliest days, or to stay with them and risk leaving herself intellectually unprepared for the idleness she’ll face once they’re grown.

While Hansen plays it straight, shooting with verve and a sense of fun, it’s hard not to read some amusement in Leen’s immaculately constructed photographs of women vacuuming or reading a book at a milk bar. But knowing, in both cases, that these carefully nonthreatening stories about working women were constructed by women who were themselves successful professionals makes one wonder just whose reality was being depicted.

Martha Holmes’ famous shot of singer Billy Eckstine in an interracial embrace amplifies the point: It caused him, and the magazine, no end of trouble when it was published in 1950 — but her colorblind image also demonstrates that neither Eckstine nor his young white fan saw anything remarkable about it.

‘LIFE: Six Women Photographers’

Through Oct. 6 at New-York Historical Society Museum &amp; Library, 170 Central Park West, Manhattan; 212-873-3400, nyhistory.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/arts/design/-life-magazine-women-photographers-new-york-historical-society-.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — From the depths of the Depression to the height of the Vietnam War, the photo essays in Life magazine told Americans how to see themselves. But in the 36 years that the magazine was published as a weekly, only six of its full-time photographers were women.

The female gaze behind life magazine

<h1>NEW YORK — The best thing about the Art Show, the annual fair sponsored by the Art Dealers Association of America in the Park Avenue Armory, is that ticket sales benefit the Henry Street Settlement, which has been bringing art and culture to the Lower East Side since 1893. The second best thing is that all 72 exhibitors are in a single room, albeit a large and drafty one: You can take it all in with a leisurely stroll.</h1>

What you’ll find this year is a program dominated by uncompromising female artists. The very best of them are two joint presentations: painter Judith Linhares with sculptor Annabeth Rosen at PPOW and Anglim Gilbert, and Alice Neel’s paintings with photographs by Diane Arbus, brought together by David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery.

Be on the lookout as well for a survey of work by turn-of-the-century African-American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner (Michael Rosenfeld, booth A16); the mysteriously magical paintings of Markus Lüpertz (Michael Werner, C8); Gordon Parks’ amazing color photograph of a tightly packed, jubilant crowd at the 1963 March on Washington (Howard Greenberg, A12); Rackstraw Downes’ pocket-size oil painting “Vent Tower and Salt Shed,” in which two Department of Sanitation structures become found abstractions in a quiet city scene (Betty Cuningham, D18); and the disconcerting spot where Seth Price’s large-scale, lightbox images of human skin (Petzel, B4) face off against Roberto Cuoghi’s bird corpses cast in agar-agar and pork gelatin (Hauser &amp; Wirth, B3).

Here are some especially notable booths.

PPOW and Anglim Gilbert (C10/D11): Judith Linhares, who uses thick, glowing lines to depict titanic female figures, brings out the color in Annabeth Rosen’s work — wire-wrapped ceramic assemblages that evoke seashells, ballast or construction sites on the moon. In this presentation, both artists present a muscular and unapologetic femininity that feels not only welcome right now but necessary.

Fraenkel Gallery and David Zwirner (A6/B5): San Francisco’s Fraenkel Galleryand New York’s own David Zwirner, which co-represent the estate of Diane Arbus, mount an extraordinary pairing of Arbus’ portrait photographs with paintings by Alice Neel in these conjoined booths. Uncanny formal similarities, such as the way Neel’s “David Sokola,” from 1973, and Arbus’ “Norman Mailer at home, Brooklyn, N.Y. 1963” both sprawl in their armchairs, make for a fascinating typology of posture and performance. One juxtaposition, of Neel’s 1932 “Danny Lasser” with Arbus’ “Boy in the subway, N.Y.C. 1956,” goes even further: The two little boys with blank stares, one sadder, one more distant, suggest an infinite continuum of emotion.

Susan Inglett Gallery (A9): The fair’s most stunning display is at Susan Inglett Gallery, where four large paper cuttings by William Villalongo, a Brooklyn-based artist working in painting, printmaking and installation, neatly fill the booth’s gray walls. Each features a storm of decorative slivers cut into black velour paper. Accented with collaged-in photos of jewels and African sculptures, or painted arms and legs, these storms become ingenious summations of black American identity: They’re bodies composed of innumerable traumas that somehow hold together — and even look good.

Washburn Gallery (A10): A full booth at the Washburn Gallery is dedicated to painter Alice Trumbull Mason (1904-1971), with a focus on drawings and paintings from the 1940s, whose surfaces are broken into rhythmic showers of narrow shapes. In “Bearings Charted With Yellow,” from 1946, the overlapping rhombuses have a dizzying effect, suggesting a teasing motion that doesn’t actually get anywhere, while “Bearings in Transition,” beside it, is as still as the grave.

Casey Kaplan (A14): Six large oils by Jordan Casteel, painted from snapshots taken on the subway, manage to capture the MTA’s loud colors and distinctive surfaces without overlooking its moments of hidden repose. Though her subjects’ faces are cropped, hidden or turned away, the artist’s sympathetic interest imbues them with life.

Alexander Gray Associates (D4): Two large oils by Joan Semmel at Alexander Gray overpower diffident abstractions by Betty Parsons in another compelling two-woman presentation. A precisely rendered view of Semmel’s naked body anchors “Beachbody,” 1985, a windblown scene of unruly brush strokes and tilting horizon. In the almost identically composed “Weathered,” 2018, the artist lets this torrent of visible strokes invade her arms.

Julie Saul (D29): The small gouaches by Maira Kalman that ring Julie Saul’s booth are illustrations for a forthcoming reissue of “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” by Gertrude Stein. Starting with a portrait of Toklas, her chin sharp and uneven, her nose hanging down like a bloated sardine, they continue through scenes of the couple’s famous friends and glamorous life abroad to a portrait of Stein seated under Picasso’s portrait of her. You can’t help but be charmed by Kalman’s detailed, slightly wonky drawing. Her palette of dark greens, pale blues and rosy pinks, meanwhile, is like German expressionism made friendly.

Castelli (D10): The 62-year-old Castelli Gallery, which helped found the Art Dealers Association of America but hasn’t shown in its fair for two decades, reappears with a brilliantly minimal group of notebook-size colored-pencil studies by Roy Lichtenstein. The chance to see hand-drawn lines by an artist known for clean edges feels like an illicit pleasure.

Venus Over Manhattan (C12): Here are six decades’ worth of boxes made by 17 artists, from Joseph Beuys’ 1968 “Intuition Box,” a shallow wooden tray that hangs on the wall like an empty frame, to Damien Hirst’s cheeky 2005 “Pharmacy,” very much like a medicine cabinet but more expensive. John Dogg’s 1986 “Untitled (Classic Belted),” a round tire circumscribed by a square box, and a 1975 paintbrush in a box by H.C. Westermann express a similar insight, somewhere between banal and profound. John McCracken’s 1988 “Alpha-6,” a mirror-polished steel block, is hypnotizing.

The Art Show runs through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory, Park Avenue at 67th Street, Manhattan; artdealers.org.

This article originally appeared in <a id="f005caa4-c57d-4033-977c-5d0f36ad97ac" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/arts/design/the-art-show-park-avenue-armory.html">The New York Times</a>.

What you’ll find this year is a program dominated by uncompromising female artists.

Women win at the art show

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Will Heinrich

Articles written by the author

The female gaze behind life magazine

Women win at the art show