Nancy Spero in her studio, age 82, 2008
"The personal and the political are indistinguishable."
The use of transparency in Nancy Spero's work, via layered line drawings and sometimes transparent media, seems to allow us to 'see-through' to a certain truth. Repeated figures blend into one, the individual morphs into a collective whole, power through unity persists.
As a socially concerned artist and early feminist, Spero was a member of several activist groups. The war in Vietnam was a primary concern portrayed in her War Paintings, 1966-1970.
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| Nancy Spero. Kill Commies / Maypole, 1967. Gouache and ink on paper; 36 × 24 inches. |
"I don’t want my work to be a reaction to what male art might be or what art with a capital A would be. I just want it to be art." - Nancy Spero
Spero was interested in making art which expressed the idea that the female figure could not escape the scrutiny of the male gaze. Inspired by imagery from ancient and classical art, which idealized the human form, she began to make works that were so expansive that some pieces could only be seen in peripheral vision. She often placed her figures in the extreme corner of a composition or room, or places on a wall that would be considered out of the line of direct vision to the viewer.
'The classical is so ostensibly timeless and beautiful and serene, you can’t see all the craft around it; you just see the surface thing," Spero says. "And so I disrupt that." Printmaking provided a flexible means for Spero to experiment with these ideas. "Each one is quite individual. And I can make another and another and another."
Nancy Spero, The Somnambulist, 1987
Nancy Spero, Mourning Women No.3, 1989
Nancy Spero, Artemis, Goddess and Centaur, 1983
"Although Spero’s work can be beautiful, that is not its primary goal. "A lot of my work has explosions of anger and violence," she says. “I want my work to be telling and strong, but not in a masculine sense. Strong,” she continues, “in that it has a certain message—and it can be a strong message.”
Says artist Kiki Smith, “Nancy’s work is radical. For people of my generation, she and Leon (Spero's late husband, artist Leon Golub) were role models as artists. There are very few people who represent their social beliefs in their work and lives, and they are two people who embody that."
-Phoebe Hoban, In Memoriam Nancy Spero, ArtNews, November 2009.
