http://www.chicagotribune.com

Detailed portrait of uncommon feminist artist Judy Chicago
Demanding, provocative, passionate and blunt, with no compromises allowednt [on line]

By Donna Seaman, April 8, 2007
Becoming Judy Chicago.

By Gail Levin [Harmony, 485 pages, $29.95]

Dark hair shorn close, mouth set, gaze cool and assessing, a small, intense woman wearing satin shorts, boxing gloves, laced boots and a sweatshirt emblazoned with "Judy Chicago" leans on the ropes in the corner of a boxing ring. The year is 1970, the gym is in Los Angeles, and the woman is an artist who has just legally changed her married name, Gerowitz, to the name of her hometown.

Women were barred by law from the ring, and Judy Chicago was in training for a long fight against all the rules, traditions and attitudes that relegated women to the margins of life. Within a decade after this provocative photograph was taken, Judy Chicago had become one of the most influential and controversial artists of her generation, thanks to her radical feminism and commitment to feminist art.

Reading and writing have always been integral to Chicago's creativity, and she has chronicled her artistic and political quest in two memoirs, "Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist" (1975) and "Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist" (1996).

Now, in "Becoming Judy Chicago," Gail Levin presents a microscopically detailed and fluently psychological chronicle of the making of this uncommon artist. The author of "Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography" (1995), in which she reveals how Jo, the great painter's wife, sacrificed her own artistic dreams to assist Hopper in his work, Levin not only whole-heartedly embraces the story of a female artist who, now in her seventh decade, has always refused to compromise, she also recognizes that Chicago's struggle and achievements make up a compelling and significant chapter in art history.

Born Judy Cohen in Chicago in July 1939, she was the granddaughter of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the daughter of social activists steeped in "altruistic Judaic humanism." Her mother, May, was an aspiring dancer who hung up her dancing shoes to devote herself to social work. Her father, Arthur, a descendant of a notable Orthodox rabbinical line and an advocate for women's and civil rights, worked the night shift at the main post office in downtown Chicago, becoming active in the postal workers union and joining the Communist Party.

Precocious and gregarious, Judy began taking classes at the Art Institute of Chicago at age 5. She always knew she was destined to be an artist, and because she also inherited her radical parents' " 'Jewish ethical values,' " she became an artist of conscience determined to make the world a better place in accordance with the Jewish " 'concept of tikkun, the healing or repairing of the world.' " Chicago never wavered in her idealism, even though her parents suffered for their convictions. Investigated by the FBI during the McCarthy era, her father lost his job and, afflicted with depression and stomach ulcers, died soon after at 43, when Judy was 13. The FBI started a file on Judy in 1959 after she joined the NAACP while attending UCLA.

Petite but mighty, Chicago possesses boundless energy, passion, drive and discipline, but her zeal and resolve were grievously tested by another shocking loss when her husband, Jerry Gerowitz, died in a car crash in 1963. The young widow managed to complete graduate school, where she made large-scale geometric works that combined sculpture and painting, becoming a "pioneer of Minimalism." But much to her male instructors' consternation, Chicago's hard-edged images began to soften into biomorphic shapes suggesting breasts, wombs and, in the carnal iconography that still makes her a pariah in some quarters, female genitalia.

Remarried and teaching at Fresno State University in the late 1960s, Chicago came across as demanding, blunt, mercurial and vivid. Revered and reviled, controlling and empathic, she fostered an atmosphere of excitement and confrontation, as Levin's numerous and at times gossipy interviews with former students and colleagues reveal. Determined to confront sexism and revolutionize arts education, Chicago, working with artist Miriam Schapiro, established the first feminist art and women's studies programs. In her journal, Chicago articulated her intention to " 'expose what it really was to be female in a society that held the female in contempt.' "

Chicago's most-famous and most-maligned work, "The Dinner Party," is a bold variation on the Last Supper, which was based on the Jewish Passover seder, a celebration of emancipation (the Jews' escape from slavery in Egypt). An extraordinarily complex and monumental collaborative multimedia creation, "The Dinner Party" showcases traditional women's crafts, most notably needlework and china painting. Constructed by nearly 200 people, most of them women, "The Dinner Party" consists primarily of a grand triangular table and 39 elaborate place settings designed to pay homage to mythic and historical women who struggled against sexist discrimination and tyranny.

The most notorious elements of this intricate installation are large ceramic plates representing such luminaries as Hildegarde of Bingen, England's Queen Elizabeth I, Sojourner Truth and Virginia Woolf, with daring variations on a butterfly/vagina motif. Levin carefully traces the genesis of Chicago's provocative -- some would say scandalous -- imagery and eloquently defends it, noting the acceptability of phallic imagery in Western art and the prevalence of images of female genitalia in non-Western cultures. Yet if one aspect of the feminist mission is to redress the objectification of women, Chicago's anatomical focus, however symbolic and empowering, is bound to be problematic.

Still, there is no denying the power of "The Dinner Party," an unprecedented tribute to women's sacrifices and contributions to civilization, and a lodestar for the women's movement. Levin sums up the work's paradox and triumph:

"The ambitious scale of the piece, its employment of traditional female crafts, and its audacious rewriting of history to foreground women would have provoked controversy even without her chosen metaphoric ground, but not at the visceral level it did. Yet without the resultant notoriety, 'The Dinner Party' could not have achieved its revolutionary impact and might well have met the fate of so much past art made by women: impotent to counter male hegemony, ultimately irrelevant -- just voided, sterile, erased."

As "The Dinner Party" debuted at the first stop on an often-grueling national tour in San Francisco in 1979, press coverage ranged from appreciative to derisive, ecstatic to malicious. Yet for every in-print condemnation, tens of thousands of people lined up to see "The Dinner Party," which in some locations was displayed only as the result of grass-roots efforts when museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, declined to exhibit it.

Chicago also had to contend with detractors from within, as some who worked on this labor-intensive piece claimed to have been exploited and subjected to a cult-like atmosphere (wearing makeup and shaving one's legs were frowned upon). But Levin quotes an equal number of participants who found working with Chicago positively, even profoundly, life-changing. Certainly the artist had no trouble finding people to help with her next ambitious and risky undertaking, the Birth Project, which "explored themes of creation and birth." Willing to tackle the most vexing and sensitive of issues, Chicago went on to create the Holocaust Project, an attempt " 'to commemorate the uniqueness of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust while examining its universal meanings for human existence."

Patiently extracting gold from the dross of a daunting amount of material both private and public, Levin concentrates on the emotional, moral and political dimensions of Chicago's ambitious and risky artistic explorations. Despite crushing adversity, Levin observes, Chicago has repeatedly "rallied in the face of rejection and turned anguish into art."

But has Chicago's sense of social obligation overwhelmed her artistic sensibility? Has her mission to work with others to raise consciousness interfered with the intense solitary communion art requires? A deeper reading of Chicago's choices and oeuvre will require the perspective of time. In the here and now, what Levin's comprehensive and invaluable living portrait makes clear is that in life and art, Judy Chicago has illuminated the undeniable truth that there can be no wholeness and no justice in the world without women at the table.
----------
Donna Seaman is an associate editor for Booklist and host of "Open Books" on WLUW 88.7 FM. Her author interviews are collected in "Writers on the Air: Conversations About Books."
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune < http://www.chicagotribune.com/ >