Judy Chicago 'Revelations'

 Judy Chicago ‘Revelations’ 2024  published by The Serpentine Gallery and Thames and Hudson to accompany her exhibition, which runs in London May 23-September 1st.

Judy Chicago has been a famous feminist artist since the exhibitions in the 1970’s of her ‘Dinner Party’ which commemorated women’s achievements through history. Controversially most were represented by vaginal imagery on plates around a triangular table.

This book gives us her writings which, ‘challenge the myth of a male god’ through her own fantasy narration using many myths and historical figures. She wanted it to be like an illuminated  manuscript with her own illustrative colourful flourishes, saying ‘drawing is like breathing for me.’

I respect her tremendous efforts, her tackling of new subjects for art such as birth and the holocaust and the topic of the use of many trees to make breast cancer treating tamoxifen.
She has thought big but now acknowledges the small, she admits her early work lacked inclusion of black women, and her hopes for a future of equality of the sexes are admirable.

Judy Chicago tells us , ‘I’m a very direct, honest,vulnerable and fragile person, which comes across in my work’, and she insists she early on developed  ‘an egalitarian and empowering studio environment, unusual at the time’.

She is certainly a phenomenon. She tries to counter early criticism of herself as exploiting her collaborators and gives credit now to her longtime helper Diane Gelon and husband Donald Woodman.

However I remember vividly how critical an audience of her attitude to her embroiderers and ceramicists was at her lecture in London in 1971 as she strode about on stage proclaiming that she had to help these women carry out her great ideas and that she was the genius and they the craftswomen. At the time she seemed to many of us overconfident and strident, egotistical just like any male master with his assistants.

Then there is her style - to me her use of form and colour is over decorative and stuck in a stylised ombré  pastel insipid sweetness reminiscent of illustrations in a magazine proclaiming the faith of Jehovah Witnesses.
Her philosophical tales have old fashioned biblical cadences and her beloved cursive handwriting is bland and characterless.
Her Revelations are inspired by Blake although opposed to his visions but lack his subtleties of poetry and expressive art.
Hers is an essentialist view - a feminism of women exalted in a sort of uncritical religious way.

I’m left torn between wishing Judy Chicago were more wonderful than she is and being glad she has done what she has.

 

'Female Rejection drawing from Quintet'