Suzanne Hudson on Blythe Bohnen

WRITING IN 1973 for Art International, Douglas Crimp reviewed Blythe Bohnen at New York’s A.I.R. (Artists in Residence Inc.) Gallery, the landmark women’s cooperative that opened in 1972, of which the artist was a founding member. That same year, she completed her MFA at Hunter College and was included in the “Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Painting” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Brushstroke,” the near-taxonomic series that Bohnen had started in 1968—and which included 48 Brushstrokes, 1971, a matrix of gesture, instantiated and recalled, that was reproduced on the announcement for A.I.R.’s first season of programs—was abandoned by the artist shortly after its completion four years later. In what became a common point of differentiation, Crimp invoked Roy Lichtenstein’s stylized renderings of brushstrokes from 1965–66 to argue for Bohnen’s eschewal of the sign in favor of its heuristic function as “an object of investigation.” If Lichtenstein registered the passage of expressionistic cipher into hard-edge, commercial vernacular (he sourced his smears from “The Painting,” a tale printed in the October 1964 issue of the comic book Strange Suspense Stories), he retained its iconicity as differently autographic. In “Notes on Brushstrokes,” an unpublished document from the early 1970s, Bohnen described an extra-analytic activity twinning circumstance and consequence, involving “the forms created by brushstrokes in reaction to a given situation . . . the nature of human response . . . [and] ideas of relationship [that] are based on the feeling that every act, no matter how freely conceived, really takes place within a fairly restricted set of possibilities.”

Shown again at A.I.R. this month—almost a year after Bohnen’s death in October 2022—some twenty works from the series, in storage for half a century, will demonstrate the breadth of her project and the variability of her tools: particularly, the widths of the brushes she used, in conjunction with the contingencies of pressure and tilt from her body more generally. One can trace in “Process Is Life,” curated by David Hall, Bohnen’s push through initial allover compositions that acknowledge the impossible proximity of Jackson Pollock (his revival in the context of a Museum of Modern Art retrospective was well under way when Bohnen moved to New York from Boston in 1967). In these works, we see the artist driving paint from edge to edge, stopped only by the physical boundary of the support. They are rich with dense, wriggling fields and competing striations that arc or turn in on themselves. Other pieces center single, serpentine outlines or enumerate, in tidy rows, more atomized traces of the movements—the artist’s disciplined private choreography, trained by Pollock and increasingly conversant with the examples of Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer—of a subject shaping matter. No longer overlapping, the strokes in smaller studies (such as Brushstrokes Navigating a Quadrant Grid, ca. 1970) become holistic entities, each gray nub a ridged and palpably sinuous mark. The grid holds these individuations in place but does not so much rationalize them as admit to its own status as external as well as internalized restraint, a legitimizing construction against which such articulations have come to exist.

This lattice is a bulwark in trials like Brushstroke Series, Silhouettes, ca. 1970, which Bohnen took into the shower to abrade its pigments after the acrylic had begun to congeal but before it had fully set. Heavily rinsed, the works feature evanescent silhouettes that Jacqueline Moss, writing in a piece with an explicitly forensic title, “Anatomy of a Brushstroke,” would describe in 1974 as “strikingly ghostlike.” Seen at close range, these sluiced surfaces are caught between emergence and disappearance, portending forms so delicate that they seem on the verge of evaporation as they steadfastly cling to the ground. Even absent Bohnen’s language of causality, these pieces model the ways in which asemic marks nevertheless come to signify and reveal themselves as already imbricated in a durational, as well as creator-driven, narrative of making. The serial application of new paint across the rows threatened to compromise the viability of marks already executed and thus the integrity of the whole. Coating and dousing and repeating the cycle as she moved across a given piece meant courting failure with each transition. Indeed, for Bohnen, these paintings were not characterized by some wanton spontaneity but were, in her words, “isolated irrevocable choices.” Despite this, she did scale up—with curator Marcia Tucker’s encouragement, one work grew to an epic six by eight feet, lined with 1,200 singular figures—in a performance that Bohnen justifiably described as “high risk.” Once in place, though, the strokes—there and across the series, but most cannily in these last efforts—serve as evidence of this course, like mnemonics chronicling, or literally indexing, the passage of time and our implacable distance from so many originary moments.

For Bohnen, these paintings were not characterized by some wanton spontaneity but were, in her words, “isolated irrevocable choices.”

Blythe Bohnen, untitled, ca. 1968, acrylic on paper, 6 1?8 × 12 1?4″. From the series “Brushstroke,” 1968–72.

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As it happened, with the culmination of the “Brush­stroke,” Bohnen left painting behind. One might read this foreclosure in relation to certain period prohibitions, especially those then consolidating within Artforum. (In an issue from 1975 devoted to painting’s assumed obsolescence, artists were exhorted to work in “any material but paint.”) Bohnen was well aware of this milieu; the magazine’s offices were on the first two floors of the building at 205 Mulberry Street, where she lived with the artist Alan Sonfist, the pair acting as the publication’s landlords. In 1976, Lawrence Alloway penned a text on her in these pages, where he highlighted a selection of graphite drawings that Bohnen had been making since 1973—featuring horizontal, vertical, or diagonal bars that the artist torqued from within—to positively argue for her engagement with “process and kinesthesia[, which] make the term ‘abstract’ seem marginal now.” Yet he did return to the unit of the stroke, and the “Brushstroke” brackets the essay. He sees in them the “continuity of gesture and image” that courses through her various modes of working. In any case, alongside the painting, Bohnen had already begun to experiment with an array of media. In the early ’70s alone, she was making drawings on film, photographs of pencil dots enlarged by microscopes, and “thermograms,” works that captured the artist’s movements via medical-imaging machines as she drew on sheets of Mylar. Bohnen’s arrest of motion beyond the iconography of the stroke became focal enough that in 1984, a group of life-size gelatin silver prints begun in 1974 (self-portraits the artist made using slow exposures to facilitate blurring and distortion) were paired with comparatively crisp movement studies by Eadweard Muybridge at New York’s Light Gallery.

Still, the lessons of the “Brushstroke” series remained central throughout Bohnen’s oeuvre in their more direct keying of self to deed. The works importantly attest to how starkly she grasped not only formalism as a putative by-product of then-ubiquitous “process,” but the institutions of its rebarbative if less acknowledged conditioning. Nineteen seventy-two was also the year of the grid—Bohnen’s primary structure too—what with Suzanne Delehanty’s exhibition “Grids,” at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, and John Elderfield’s Artforum essay titled “Grids” (a response to Lucy Lippard’s characterization, in the ICA catalogue, of the construction as “merely an armature” for dissimilar means and ends). By the end of the ’70s, Rosalind Krauss had offered her influential summary, likewise titled “Grids,” writing of the framework’s foundational role within modernism as it “declares the space of art to be at once autonomous and autotelic.” Bohnen, however, thought otherwise. Evoking theorist C. Wright Mills’s famous diagnosis of the crisis of the “sociological imagination”—the mistaking of personal limitations for broader structural circumscriptions—another unpublished ca. 1974 manuscript from the artist, “Comment on Women’s Work,” reads, “Moreover . . . formal dynamics may have evolved out of grappling with feminist issues. Life experienced as a woman may have been generalized into art that is expressive of confinement, conflict or other aspects of women’s experience.” Even the thermograms, for example, were inspired by the thermograph’s initial application: breast-cancer screening. But the larger point is a recognition of the impossibility of autonomy in grids, as elsewhere. In Bohnen’s tracings of a life, put down and washed away yet still tenaciously present, another kind of sovereignty remains.

Suzanne Hudson is a professor of art history and fine arts at the University of Southern California.