Something New In The Arts

In 1968 Paula Cooper established her gallery south of Houston Street, in a neighborhood fast becoming a destination for contemporary art, indeed, one that arguably defined the very idea of “contemporary” versus modern. At that point, the designation ‘SoHo’ was barely five years old, and it was there, in the heart of this fledgling community of art and commerce, that Cooper launched the careers of artists Lynda Benglis, Jackie Winsor, Jennifer Bartlett, and Elizabeth Murray.

In 1965, Cooper joined Park Place, a cooperative gallery comprised of predominantly West Coast artists including Mark di Suvero, Forrest Myers, Tamara Melcher, Leo Valledor, Dean Fleming, and Peter Forakis, along with British artist Anthony Magar, and Americans Edwin Ruda and Robert Grosvenor.

The gallery took its name from 79 Park Place, where it opened in 1962, before moving to a ground floor space just north of Houston Street at 542 West Broadway (now La Guardia Place).[i] In addition to mounting art exhibitions that showcased works by member and non-member artists alike, the Park Place gallery also hosted performances and events. Cooper described Park Place as the most “open situation … They probably showed work by more different artists than any other place.”[ii]

The gallery’s inaugural show: Benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (October 22–31, 1968), featured artists associated with so-called Minimalism—Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Sol LeWitt. While many SoHo chroniclers have emphasized this exhibition in the Paula Cooper Gallery’s origin story, my research instead argues that she made her main mark—of lasting importance—in the subsequent decade.

In the 1970s, Cooper devoted her energies to her stable of emerging artists whose artwork and methods could not be reduced to a single “ism” or trend, in a prescient take on the freedom of creative possibilities that defined the post-“ism,” post-modern era. These artists included Jennifer Bartlett, Lynda Benglis, Jonathan Borofsky, Robert Grosvenor, Elizabeth Murray, Joel Shapiro, Alan Shields, Richard Van Buren, Jackie Winsor, and Kes Zapkus.

Working in tandem with their respective pace of production, she gave them regular solo exhibitions while also placing key works in thematic group shows. Cooper ensured that their works entered museum institutions, were bought and appreciated by private collectors (of varied economic means), and determined that reviews of their exhibitions would compete favorably with the coverage received by their male peers.

Today, each of these artists has a secure place in the histories of late-twentieth-century art for their innovative materials and processes, signature imagery, contributions to post-minimalism, and resurgent figurative idioms.

– Lynda Benglis speaking about Paula Cooper, 2018 [iii]

In 1969, Cooper included Benglis’s multicolored poured floor painting or ‘mat,’ Contraband (1969), in a three-person exhibition: Lynda Benglis, Gary Dubosen, Alan Shields (September 20–October 15). Soon after, the Whitney Museum included her in the 1969 Annual Exhibition (the annual iteration of what became the Whitney biennial; held December 16, 1969–February 1, 1970).

Life magazine published photographs of Benglis in her studio, pouring neon-colored liquid from large buckets in the article “Fling, Dribble, and Drip,” in an obvious allusion to the photo essay on Jackson Pollock in the same magazine, some 20 years earlier.

The point was not only that a woman was now flinging the paint: it threw the spotlight on Benglis as one of the leaders of a new artistic movement that focused on process and formless material, a pivot from the geometric and industrially manufactured forms of 1960s Minimalist artists.

– Jackie Winsor, 1979 [vi]

When the Paula Cooper Gallery moved from Prince Street to 155 Wooster Street in 1973, Winsor enjoyed one of the first solo shows in the space (October 20–November 14). Along with Bound Square, Cooper presented nine other sculptures made by wrapping twine around solid forms or manipulating, nailing, and gouging plywood.

James Mellow’s favorable review in the New York Times read, “What makes this work more enterprising than that of many sculptors of similar persuasion, is that Miss Winsor does not stop short with the oddness of the materials, but draws upon their qualities of color and texture to very good effect.” [vii]

In 1979, MoMA presented the mid-career survey Jackie Winsor, curated by Kynaston McShine. It was the first exhibition of a female artist organized by MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture since 1946 and one of only thirty solo exhibitions of women artists since the museum opened in 1929. [ix]

From 1976 to 1979, Rhapsody was included in at least ten prominent museum exhibitions, generating continued publicity and increased viewing of Bartlett’s first major achievement. In 1977 the Whitney purchased, through Cooper, a twenty-foot-long, multipart painting: Falcon Avenue, Seaside Walk, Dwight Street, Jarvis Street, Greene Street (also from 1976).

– Elizabeth Murray, 2005 [xii]

As was typical, Cooper included Murray’s work in at least three different group exhibitions before presenting her solo. In November 1976, Elizabeth Murray: Paintings opened at the Cooper Gallery, followed by a second solo show held from October 7–November 4, 1978. New York Times critic John Russell wrote that Murray’s “paintings are worth puzzling over.”[xv]

Roberta Smith (no longer working at the Cooper gallery) observed, “The abundance of personality makes it look like Murray is working backward from abstraction toward representation, not in terms of imagery per se, but in terms of energy; some shapes seem ready to jump right off the canvas and strut away.”[xvi]

In the early 1970s, Cooper presented Benglis, Winsor, and Murray’s first New York and commercial gallery solo exhibitions and Bartlett’s second, which introduced their radical reinvention of traditional ideas of painting and sculpture to collectors, critics, curators, and other artists. That they also happen to be women artists, one might argue, was due to the “same and equal” attitude of their dealer, one who neither publicly promoted nor denied gender difference in the making or showing of art.

Cooper did not programmatically refer to the four as “women” artists; nor did they categorize her as a “female” dealer, even if the issue of their sex was always a reality in the art world, and even as Cooper’s gallery hosted events associated with politics, including those devoted to the feminist movement. Though not self-identified as such, Cooper and her gallery stood for the advancement of women artists.