Ms, March/April 1998

Ida Applebroog: Exposing the Personal

I never make benign images,” Ida Applebroog told me, as we worked together to prepare a major survey of her art from the past ten years for the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Applebroog is a master of understatement. As the exhibition’s subtitle, “Nothing Personal,” implies, her paintings offer a fierce portrayal of the often frightening social and psychological dysfunctions that dwell beneath the calm veneer of everyday life. The themes that have long possessed her – sexuality and power, the loss or corruption of innocence, guilt and penitence, and personal isolation in an intrusive world – also reflect contemporary issues of gender, sexuality, and individuality that preoccupy many younger artists working today. For more than 30 years, her art has projected a poignant, sharp-edged, and often indignant point of view. My association with Applebroog began in 1993, when I visited her studio while preparing the 43rd Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting for the Corcoran Gallery. I was immediately drawn to her work, especially the toughness of her content – her willingness to address such thorny issues as domestic violence and the problematic role of women in society – coupled with a painting style that is both economical and elegant. This past decade has been one of immense growth for Applebroog, but I felt that she was not receiving the nationwide recognition she deserved. Soon after the Biennial, we began to plan a survey exhibition of her work that would include paintings created from 1987 to the present.

She was born Ida Appelbaum in the Bronx in 1919, the year of the stock market crash. While the strictness of her Orthodox Jewish family provided discipline during that turbulent time, the deprivations marked both her life and her art. She entered art school in 1948, studying graphic design rather than fine art because she felt she “couldn’t make art without also making money.” By the next year, she was working at an advertising agency, the only woman in the “bull pen.” In those days sexual harassment was a day-to-day event. I held out in the ad agency for six months, then resigned,” she remembers.

In 1950, following a stint as a freelance illustrator of children’s books and greeting cards, she married and began working in the art division of the New York Public Library. She also attended night classes at City College of New York and continued to carve out time to create her artwork. By 1957 her family had grown to include three children. In order for her husband, Gideon Horowitz, to pursue his doctorate, the family moved to Chicago. Their fourth child came in 1960.

“I continued to make art, but had what Betty Friedan called ‘the problem that has no name.” I enrolled in TV classes offered by the local college. When my children were asleep, I would sit in front of the TV and ‘attend’ classes. I submitted term papers and took exams, trying to build up credits to get a B.A.,” she says. She began studying full-time for a degree in art education, because, as she explains, “I still didn’t feel I could make art without making a living from it, so I decided to go into art education.”

In 1968, Horowitz secured a teaching position at San Diego State University and the family uprooted again. “It was the late 1960s and everyone was pushing west – it was a time of campus unrest, the Vietnam war, a burgeoning feminist movement, four children, and the growing need to be a full-time artist,” she says.

The last sixties also brought Applebroog a brief hospitalization for depression, but by 1970 she was back at work in her studio in downtown San Diego, creating sculpture – large, modular, biomorphic forms made from fabric. Suspended from the ceiling, they hung in groups, like figures clustering on the street. The next year, Applebroog attended the first Feminist Artists Conference at California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, and joined a group of women artists who worked together at the University of San Diego. These colleagues encouraged her to think of herself as a professional artists operating within the framework of social activism.

The family returned to New York in 1974, and Applebroog formally changed her name from her married name of Horowitz. “In my dreams I would introduce myself by slurring and putting together Appelbaum and Horowitz. What came out sounded like Apple-broo. So I decided to take on that name; it became Applebroog.” As Ida Horowitz she had won recognition for her abstract sculpture; as Ida Applebroog she began to develop her own signature artistic style with a series of cartoonlike figures that merged the comic-strip format with the advertising industry’s use of story-boards to explain a concept. She began by creating small books that repeated a single image, binding the pictures with a suggestive but enigmatic caption. She sent these to artists, collectors, and curators, who generally received the unsolicited, hand-held visual poems in the spirit of their making – as unanticipated but seductive intrusions.

Later, she exhibited her sequences as large “shadow play” paintings. The texts in these paintings seem innocent enough – “I threw it away” or “Sure I’m sure” – and the same can be said for the associated pictures, which might show a couple hugging or a man taking off his coat while addressing a woman lying in bed. But presented as if seen from afar, through a window, these juxtapositions of image and text place the viewer in the ambiguous position of furtively glimpsing the activities and hearing the conversation fragments of strangers. “I need to see how people live,” says Applebroog.

In 1975, she met art dealer Ronald Feldman, who, by providing her with exhibition opportunities and introducing her work to curators and collectors, helped her break through the economic barriers that hindered women artists in establishing their careers. What followed was a period of fertile creativity, marked by exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad. In 1988, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired a major painting, Beulahland. Soon, her scenes from daily life expanded into cinematic panoramas on a monumental scale. Paintings such as Camp Compazine 91988), Idiopathic Center (1988), and Emetic Fields (1989) are couched in enigmatic metaphors and combine many mythological allusions, art historical references, and images from popular culture. The title Emetic Fields, for example, alludes to invasive medications and troubled physiological states, and her images in this painting refer to such diverse sources as the Garden of Eden, the British Royal Family, and the American Medical Association. Collectively grouped under a series title of Nostrums, these paintings acknowledge the artist’s conviction that there are no magic remedies to cure our ills.

Applebroog’s growing professional recognition paralleled her increasing political activity. In 1991, the year after she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was the subject of major museum exhibitions, she helped found the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) in New York City. “I remembered the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial – sometimes rage is the appropriate response to certain events.” WAC, which eventually numbered hundreds of members and fostered offshoots in other cities, dealt with many of the same issues as Appleboog’s art: violence against women, health and social problems, power and oppression. Members picketed museums to protest the exclusion of women artists and joined pro-choice demonstrations as well.

Following this intense period of political and aesthetic activism. Applebroog increasingly focused on the psychology of childhood. In the series she calls Tattle Tales, the subject is fairy tales and other mythological stories, and the images hover somewhere between the brightness of a fantasy and the brutality of a nightmare vision. Applebroog illuminates the undertones of anxiety: fear, devilishness, and monstrousness that inhabit childhood tales.

Like all of her art, Tattle Tales consciously develops dualities in form and content. At first glance, everything can seem almost all right in Applebroog’s narrative, but there is always something off, like a well-dressed couple with bird heads that give new meaning to “billing and cooing” in “I’m rubber, you’re glue.”

Applebroog is standing in the middle of the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts gallery in New York, surrounded by six large-scale paintings from her recent series, Living. She has appropriated her title from Martha Stewart’s lifestyle magazine, that quintessential roll call of hyperbolic domesticity for the have-it-all “perfect woman.” “How could we have gone through 30 hears of progress and then totally succumb to this 1990s yearning nostalgia for the typical 1950s home-style?” she asks. In this series, Applebroog replaces Stewart’s monthly calendar of domestic events with what she refers to as “schizoid notations.”

In the painting 1944, it is July, and her memos remind us to “cook out: roast rat in seaweed” and “organize Switzerland.” Meanwhile, myriad images occur in the painting: to the left of the canvas, a suited man sports a signboard reading “good boy.” There is a tangle of legs, a man straddling a woman in an ambiguous encounter: are they engaged in an amorous adventure or a violent struggle? As usual, Applebroog poses more questions than she answers, leaving viewers free to complete the narrative in their own way.

Applebroog has also recently completed a new series of smaller works, painted entirely in deep red, and filled with intensity. “The red paintings were such a relief from the Living calendars,” says Applebroog. “They are so much more direct.” If meaning is coaxed from the poetic veils of imagery in the Living series, the red paintings deliver brisk sentences: “Do this,” “Look at that,” “watch me.” Viewing these images is like entering a world where the most benign images are erotically transformed.

Laced with passionate, often subversive, social critique, Applebroog’s work is an emotional landscape that charts the breakdown of social cohesion and the unity of a shared language. It challenges the clarity of our own cherished individual states. For Applebroog, individuality is achieved through daily experience rather than the grand sweep of a “big picture” or the certainties of faith. In essence, Applebroog’s relentless profusion of images reflects her own frustrated but persistent idealism. Her images acknowledge that the gap between what we wish our lives to be and what we are willing to settle for is often very wide.

TERRIE SULTAN