A later painting, Medina, presents a disparate jumble of veiled, almost phantom-like women, silently inhabiting the space of the canvas. Created sometime after her and her husband’s first trip to Morocco, she was unhappy with the original result. As Browning remarks in the exhibit’s catalog on the artist, in order to correct what she saw as a labored failure, “I painted the whole canvas out in a rage with thick white paint — and lo, and behold, there was the muted, mysterious, and compressed atmosphere that I was searching for.” Another painting, both in subject matter and execution, reeks of sophistry. Clairvoyant shows the psychic in the midst of her reading against a hot orange background, with the crown of her hair and her fingertips emanating a blue light.

An interesting mystery surrounds Browning. Art historian Philip Eliasoph revealed in his 2011 publication Colleen Browning: The Enchantment of Realism that she was born in 1918 in Shoeburyness, England and not 11 years later in County Cork, Ireland. He sees this as Browning’s reinvention of herself before her arrival in the States in 1949. “Possibly a foible of vanity,” he speculates, “or more calculatingly, a strategy to advance her career, she somehow masked key elements of her identity.”

In syncopation with Eliasoph’s assessment, the artist was not beyond taunting us with her own enigmatic self-image. In one, there is a soft, doe-eyed confrontation with the viewer, a still pretty young woman clasping a small bouquet, her dress and the coral background splattered with more floral patterns. But make no mistake. The person, arms folded, who confronts us as the artist is self-assured and certain of her own powerful allure.

When confronted with Nine Times One, another self-portrait in nine panels, the angle of the head pose is the same. But all similarity stops there. The age of our subject subtly shifts. The individual squares isolate and the different colors and tones emerge as disconcerting portraits of the same woman. Was she experimenting with the kind of multi-image portrayals of celebrities that Warhol made so famous around the same time? One thing is for sure — the scope of Browning’s work could encompass endless subject matter, from a storm over the Andes to the storm within.

A National Academy member of note, she held office as well as teaching on their faculty. A generous bequest through the estate of her husband, Geoffrey Wagner, enabled a comprehensive renovation to the Academy and a fourth floor gallery has been named in her honor.

From Protest to Process: Recent Gifts by 30 Contemporary Women Artists

This is a colorful piñata of paintings and assemblages, and all you can really do is stroll about, take a virtual swipe at the whole business, and let the swirl of images descend upon your eye like so many pieces of candy. Don’t look for correspondences. The assorted ages and artistic proclivities of their creators are too diverse to easily categorize. In the final analysis — if there is one to be had — a seriousness of intent wins out.

One of the most hypnotic canvases to confront head-on is Julie Heffernan’s Millenium Burial Mound. Bursts of colors, like a Fourth of July celebration gone wild, are splayed across the background and in the foreground an angry, teeth-bared trove of animals pours out of what appears to be a Chinese pagoda. If you think Hieronymus Bosch as created by an elementary school art class, you wouldn’t be too far off. It does grab the attention.

Another contemporary of Heffernan’s, born in the late ’50s, is Diana Horowitz. She creates photo realistic landscapes of Manhattan that are beautifully serene and captivating. Governor’s Island and Battery Park from 47 I is one of two renderings in oil on linen not to be missed.

Sarai Sherman’s Up in the Sky from 1969 brings Jimmy Hendrix, the rock ‘n’ roll icon, front and center. Seven etchings in color and aquatint from the deafening, psychedelic world of the late ’60s show the artist’s fascination with the musical stars of the period. One of the most memorable is Blackbird, a harrowing black and gray image of Janis Joplin bursting out of a dark whirlpool, clutching the mike to blare out her screaming refrains.

Some of the artists represented have experimented outside the two-dimensional frame of perception. Lesley Dill’s Threaded Poem Face #3 is a silkscreen image on tea-stained muslin that portrays a man, Rapunzel-like, frozen in a window. The long threads of hair from his head streaming down and out of the picture cry out for our attention. Another construction that is so mundane in its presence that it might be entirely overlooked is Tourist Cabin (Pensacola) by Donna Dennis. It’s a rickety little cabin that brings to mind the childhood hide-outs, too modest in scale for adults to enter, that intrigued us all at one time. Maybe that’s the point.      

It’s important to remember that these compilation of works are gifts from the artists to the Academy and do not necessarily represent a curator’s particular choice in assembling, nor do they necessarily represent the most seminal or significant examples of that artist’s output.

May Stevens’ Big Daddy Series

One of the smartest decisions from the Academy’s curators was to let May Steven’s powerful activist images line the first floor entryway. Arriving and departing, there is no denying the sway the Big Daddy Series has on the viewer. In Big Daddy Paper Doll from 1970, Stevens has presented a lineup of policeman confronting us — the executioner in his ominous black hood, the soldier, headless but uniformed, the policeman, and the butcher in his blood-splattered white jacket — all unapologetic, all menacing to this extraordinary front-line feminist artist. The central image of the pasty-white, phallic-headed policeman against the signature intense acrylic blues that Stevens has chosen etches itself on the brain.

In another portrait, entitled Reversal, the painter portrays a bullish bulldog, obscenely pink tongue extended, riding atop its owner’s head. Such in-your-face representations may repel some, but there can be no questioning Stevens’ political obsessions. She rejects racism, imperialism, war and sexism. In a long career, she has nourished what is waiting to be expressed.  In a recent interview by Persimmon Tree Magazine, she explained it this way: “The way the world outside of us, of ‘ourselves,’ makes its own decisions, goes its own way— ripens in its own time. And the world within us also ripens in its own time…and something new is born.”

The National Academy has proven once again its long commitment to women artists in this multi-layered exhibition. “Nice work if you can get it, ladies.” But don’t worry about these women. They got it.

Women’s Work will be on display at the National Academy Museum, 1083 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY  10128, until August 26, 2012. For more information visit www.nationalacademy.org or call (212) 369-4880.

Cincopa WordPress plugin