Philippine Butterfly

Posts Tagged ‘nancy spero’

It’s always difficult when a brilliant artist’s life comes to an end, even if it was full, and even if it was long. Nancy Spero had a magnificent career, with a lifetime of very provocative work that made art lovers wake up, and generations of artists inspired to follow their own inner vision. She was in her 80s when she passed last winter, and her artistic output still didn’t seem to be wavering, and perhaps that’s the most tragic part.

Mortality is a part of the ride, but when there’s work inside an artist that’s unfinished, the world recognizes that it will never come to be. Perhaps that’s perfectly suitable for a woman who had adopted Antonin Artaud as one of her personal heroes. An unlikely choice for a hero, but somehow manages to make it on a lot of visionary lists, Artaud’s own ideas about mortality come close to rivaling the spookiness of death itself, and Spero’s work was singularly unafraid to look into the eye of the haunted without blinking.

Born in 1926, she studied in Chicago and Paris before moving to New York in 1964. This was at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and the Viet Nam War was well underway, and both of these gave her a lot of material to work with. This was the period when she would start to integrate the themes of war in contemporary culture into her paintings, and it’s something that would characterize her work for the next four decades.

She was a true visionary artist, and broke ground for many others to follow, and also walked in well-traveled paths accompanied by the inspiration of the artists of the past. That might be one of the things that distinguishes a real genius, the ability to position oneself in a present as well as a past, and find one’s way in their particular continuum. It is artists like her that bring people to the city, to book nights in New York luxury hotels , and touch the city that inspires and challenges, holding mortal bodies that make immortal works.