Known for Her Performance Art, Carolee Schneeman Was First and Foremost a Painter

Carolee Schneemann was a trailblazing feminist artist whose work defies easy categorization. Known predominantly as a provocative performance artist, she was adamant throughout her life that she was first and foremost a painter. The sheer diversity of work in “Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics”—on view through January 8, 2023, at the Barbican Centre in London—may make viewers query that assertion. However, Schneemann challenged the constraints of the painting medium in much the same way that she challenged the limitations society sought to impose on her as a woman.

In Schneemann’s early gestural paintings, viewers can see the influence of Abstract Expressionism and the work of Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, which Schneemaan discovered as a young woman. For example, Aria Duetto (Cantata no.78) Yellow Ladies (1957), named after a piece of choral music by Johann Sebastian Bach, features a languorously reclining female nude enmeshed in a sea of dancing, vibrant brushstrokes. They sweep across the canvas as if Schneemann was painting to the rhythm of the song. And in Sir Henry Francis Taylor (1961), an eccentric array of materials—including underpants, metal chains, and a photograph of the subject—emerge from thick swirls of paint. Oftentimes, the canvas exists more as a surface to be transformed.

Schneemann soon sought to expand her work beyond the frame. Her “painting constructions,” as she called them, feature embellished surfaces that frequently push out into the viewer’s space. In the case of Colorado House (1962), the work takes on an almost sculptural form. With ripped and slashed segments of what Schneemann considered to be failed paintings acting as the foundation, the artist added elements from her daily life, such as a whiskey bottle label, broom handle, pieces of fur, and paint brushes. A piece of painted canvas, fashioned into a flag, flies above, as if celebrating the artist’s newfound format.