Miriam Schapiro: The André Emmerich Years, Paintings From 1957–76

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Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Miriam Schapiro: The André Emmerich Years, Paintings from 1957–76. Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015) is now well-known as a pioneer of the Women’s Art Movement, and for her contribution to the Pattern and Decoration Movement. She fused craft work, traditionally made by women, with modern painting in collages termed “femmage.” However, this exhibition will additionally shed light on her early Abstract Expressionist canvases, and her pioneering approach utilizing computer technology to create Hard Edge geometric painting in the 1960s. Spotlighting the legacy of this feminist artist, the exhibition will explore three stylistic phases, with significant examples from these two decades of Schapiro’s career.  

In 1958, Schapiro became the first woman artist to have a solo show at André Emmerich Gallery. (Helen Frankenthaler was the subject of a solo show at Emmerich in 1959.) It included the monumental painting Fanfare, now in the collection of the Jewish Museum, New York, as well as the painting Nightwood, which will be shown in the current gallery exhibition. These Abstract Expressionist canvases are energetic, lively, and gestural yet also rooted in the landscape, the body and maternal experiences. Dore Ashton reviewed the exhibition in the New York Times, praising Schapiro’s “vigorous, lusty translations of sensuous experience,” but noting her tendency to “mute” color and the “blending, softening, and melting” of the paint with the surface underneath. In retrospect, this language actually reflects Schapiro’s overarching commitment to reflect femininity and the female experience. Her early abstractions were often based on figurative source material like film stills and news photographs, and explore the roles women occupy: as wives, mothers, and hopefully, agents of their own careers. 

By the third solo exhibition at Emmerich in 1961, Schapiro was exploring the compositional format of a single vertical band through the center of the canvas, in which she incorporated shapes and symbols that were associated with the feminine. They included primary forms like a rectangle—which became an aperture or window, and also would develop into what she termed the “central core,” associated with a woman’s body. Along with more geometric forms, she also utilized bodily suggestive painterly gestures. Of one significant example, titled The Game, Schapiro wrote:

In 1960 I made a picture called The Game. The Game is the game of making a real world on canvas. The Game is also the game of knowing that the made world can never be wholly real. The Game was the first painting to use the box as a symbol. The box became a house. I could no longer live in the jungle. I built the house out of all things I was unsure of and certain about. I called it a “Shrine.”

Schapiro’s “Shrine” paintings of the early 1960s, which were the subject of a solo exhibition at Emmerich in 1963, eliminate the gestural in favor of illusionistically rendered, metaphysical compositions where symbols like an egg, personal items like paint tubes, or references to art historical paintings, are set within the apertures of a shrine form. 

In 1967, Schapiro moved to California for her husband, painter Paul Brach, to serve as the chair of the newly formed art department faculty at the University of California San Diego. Art historian Maddy Henkin writes, “In the male-dominated department, Schapiro had no colleagues with whom she could share her growing interest in the women’s movement. As a result, Schapiro retreated into her studio until she discovered collaborators of an altogether new kind: the scientific community.”