Action, Gesture, Paint at the Whitechapel Gallery review – a real journey of discovery

In a crowded field, the story often told of post-war abstract painting is arguably the most crudely reductive in art history. The contemporary American painter Amy Sillman expressed it best when she described it in Artforum magazine as “bad politics steel-welded around a chassis of machismo”, where “the paint stroke… is equivalent to a phallic spurt, to [Jackson] Pollock whipping out his dick and pissing in [art dealer] Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace”. Not only is that myth all about men, but American men – nay, New York men.

This exhibition and the book accompanying this exhibition are a welcome riposte; a revisiting of Abstract Expressionism from a feminist and international perspective, with around 150 works by 80 women artists working in abstraction from across the world. Many of them were shown and written about in their lifetimes, only to be denied a presence in the official histories. Others never achieved the level of recognition this and other shows are now beginning to give them.

It demonstrates that in one of the most turbulent geopolitical periods in human history, the 1940s to 1970s, an ungendered painterly language emerged in multiple global artistic centres. It centred upon an often spontaneous and emotional expression (or series of gestures) that used the canvas not to create an image or depiction of something but as a space – “arena” is the term often used – to perform actions.

While it’s a survey, it’s also a gathering of 80 voices, and that’s both its strength and weakness. It manages to convey the sheer breadth of abstract experimentation with real rigour. The Japanese artist Yuki Katsura produced fields of colour with almost vein like textures, Wook-kyung Choi from South Korea created highly coloured and densely layered collages of paint; both brought their singular languages to New York.

Sarah Grilo, an Argentinian artist, made paintings as walls teeming with graffiti. A huge range of US artists feature and run the gamut of possible styles and moods, from Helen Frankenthaler’s lightness and luminosity to the expressive lyricism of early Joan Mitchell and tumbling movement of Lee Krasner’s collages and canvases.

Having so many artists grouped by theme rather than location also allows productive correspondences across geographies, whether that’s the ruminative poeticism of Sarah Schumann in Germany and the Chinese artist Lifang, or an earthy, existential darkness in Marta Minujin in Argentina, Sandra Blow in the UK and Juana Francés in Spain.

But it’s also a limit; too often we only glimpse an artist’s achievements. There’s only one work by Alma Thomas, one of the great abstract painters, for instance. Arguably, the catalogue, with all its context, is more enjoyable than the show, which would have benefitted from a sharper, deeper focus on fewer artists.

There’s also simply too many works, so the hang is problematically dense. I understand that the curators may want to subvert another orthodoxy here: that abstract art needs vast, white space to work its magic. But with works jamming the walls cheek by jowl, they don’t breathe as they should – sometimes they destroy each other. Worst, Mitchell’s Rufus’s Rock, a magnificent cluster of heavy black and blue paint with hints of violet, is shoved into a small space next to the exit door.

There’s much to love about this project. It’s genuinely revelatory, a real journey of discovery for any visitor. But in being so exhaustive, in having so much to say, the Whitechapel has given us a cacophony; an unfortunate, if understandable, flaw.

Accompanying Action, Gesture, Paint is a small but excellent related show, Action Gesture, Performance, where we see the performative tendencies within the painting of the period unleashed beyond the canvas. Highlights include Ana Mendieta’s video Butterfly, where she appears as a winged figure, almost a hallucination of morphing colour.

There’s also footage of Niki de Saint-Phalle’s shotgun painting, where she literally shoots bags of paint stuck to collaged canvases, and two fantastic films of Martha Graham’s choreography, which still astounds even on grainy old film, nearly a century on.

Whitechapel Gallery, from February 9 to May 7; whitechapelgallery.org