The Art Newspaper

Remembering Nancy Spero

A former curator of the National Gallery of Canada and close friend of the artist looks back on her life and work

By Diana Nemiroff | Web only
Published online 26 Oct 09 (Features)

Nancy Spero in her studio (Photo by Abe Frajndlich, 2003)

American artist Nancy Spero died on Sunday, 18 October, from complications from an infection. She was 83. Her health had been compromised for several years, yet, though increasingly frail, she continued to produce the politically engaged, feminist-inspired work for which she had become known over the course of an artistic career that spanned five decades. In 2007 her stunning Maypole/Take No Prisoners, featuring a multitude of anguished faces hanging from the colourful ribbons of a maypole, stood in a place of honour at the entrance of the central pavilion of the Venice Biennale like a chorus of furies from a Greek tragedy, a timely reminder of the perennial suffering of victims of war and injustice around the world.

The art for which Nancy Spero will be remembered—hand-printed and painted scrolls filled with images drawn from classical mythology and contemporary reportage, alongside sometimes poetic, sometimes horrifying texts memorializing the inhuman acts of all too human beings—was born of her deep empathy for others, but also of her own struggles. Afflicted with crippling arthritis, she was no stranger to pain. In the late 1960s, she abandoned the large-scale, darkly existentialist oil paintings she had been working on in Paris, where she and her husband, the painter Leon Golub, had been living. Back in the United States at the height of the Vietnam War, she was galvanised by media reports of atrocities to create a very different kind of work. Small paintings on paper in gouache and ink, her vivid War Series works offered a hard-hitting indictment of American engagement in Vietnam and set the stage for her future work.

The New York art world further politicised her. Struggling to establish herself as an artist in a milieu reluctant to take women’s work seriously, she joined other women in WAR (Women Artists in Revolution), and protested the discriminatory policies of the New York museums. In the early 1970s Spero found in the desperate and hallucinatory writings of the French poet Antonin Artaud a voice to express her own revolt against patriarchal society, but soon decided to tell only the stories of women. Her Torture of Women (1974-76) (now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada) combined eye-witness accounts of atrocities committed in the name of state security with mythological images of sheltering goddesses and terrifying beasts. Made of horizontal sheets of paper glued end-to-end, the scroll was a monumental witness to the inhuman treatment of women throughout the ages.

Spero’s later work frequently balanced this dark vision with a celebration of women’s strength and power to change the world. Her studio tables were full of cut-out paper figures of women running, laughing and dancing, part of the vast lexicon of images she used in her art. As a person, she bridled at injustice and was unstintingly generous in her support of just causes. She surrounded herself with young women artists, whom she directed in the creation of large projects that required a workshop of assistants, and though she could be demanding, she was also nurturing. In those who knew her, she inspired respect, devotion, and loyalty—in other words, love. Nancy Spero was predeceased by her husband Leon Golub in 2004. She leaves three sons, Philip, Stephen, and Paul, and a legion of friends.

The writer is Director of the Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa. As a curator at the National Gallery of Canada, she helped acquire the artist's Torture of Women for the collection and wrote on her work.

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