Thought Portal

In 1975, Barbara Visser was a nine-year-old kid on a school field trip to the Stedelijk art museum when she first saw a painting titled Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III by the American post-war artist Barnett Newman.

What she saw was a massive canvas, nearly 18 feet wide and eight feet tall. On the left side, a small strip of blue, and on the right, a small strip of yellow. But the rest of the surface was painted entirely red. “And I got very angry,” says Visser, “I ran out of the museum. I sat on the steps and was determined not to go in again.”

This was a painting that produced such strong reactions in people that it drove them to action. Visser struggled with the painting her entire life and made a feature-length documentary about it called The End of Fear, which inspired this story. It’s about a reaction the painting received that was so intense, so violent, it set off a chain of events that shook the art world to its core.

This episode focuses on the Women of Abstract Expressionism exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. Curated by Gwen Chanzit, the show is full of wonderful works, highlighting what has largely been overlooked in the history of the movement. But the bigger question I explore in this episode is: why were the women largely left out of the history books on Abstract Expressionism?

We talk to Denver Art Museum curator Gwen Chanzit about her important exhibition, speak with the artist Judith Godwin — an Abstract Expressionist who has largely been ignored in the history books, I travel to the Upper West Side to get feminist art historian Linda Nochlin’s thoughts on the matter, and finally I chat with curator and critic Karen Wilkin, who was friends with Helen Frankenthaler (one of the leading Abstract Expressionist artists).