Background

Nancy Spero was born on August 24, 1926, Cleveland, Ohio, United States. She was a daughter of Henry Spero, a businessman in purchasing and selling print presses, and Sadie Susselman. Spero's parents came from the United States. Spero had one sister named Carol Newman.

Education

According to the artist’s own words, Nancy Spero made a decision to became an artist because painting and drawing were the only things she really wanted to do. Her parents didn’t share her artistic ambitions.

Spero attended New Trier High School before studying at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1944 to 1945. The same year, she entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Four years later, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts.

Then, Spero came to Paris where she spent one year at the École Nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National School of Fine Arts) and at the Atelier of Andre Lhote.

Career

Nancy Spero and her husband Leon Golub settled down in Chicago in 1950. Seven years later, dissatisfied with the dominance of Abstract Expressionism in the country, they relocate to Italy searching for new areas of expression. While there Spero explored Etruscan, Roman frescoes and sarcophagi which later influenced her works. In 1959, the artistic couple moved to Paris where they lived till 1964. During the stint, Nancy Spero produced her first mature works, including the Black Paintings series focused on mothers and children, lovers, prostitutes, and human-animal forms. These and other paintings of the period were exhibited at Galerie Breteau in 1962, 1964, and 1968.

Spero and her family came back to the United States in the time of political crisis when the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement occupied the top positions of broadcasting. It had a great impact on Nancy who initiated in 1966 her War Series consisting of small gouache and inks drawings which transmitted the artist’s strong opposition to the conflict and showed the obscenity of war.

It was the same time when the artist felt the necessity to express her antipathy with ‘victimage’ of women not only through the paintings depicting the stories of female subjugation she witnessed but in a more active way. Searching for ways to express her feminist views, the artist attended the meetings of such groups as the Art Workers Coalition, Women Artists in Revolution, and finally Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists. As the member of the latter, in 1972, Spero was among the founders of the A.I.R. Gallery aimed to promote the artworks by women. Spero’s own creations of the time included Artaud Paintings, Codex Artaud series, Torture in Chile and Torture of Women. Women's representation in various cultures, as participants in history and as symbols in art, literature and myth with an accent on the crimes and assaults on them became the main subjects of her art this time. Spero took inspiration from different eras and cultures including such personages as Lilith, Medusa, and Sheela-Na-Gig. She also incorporated language into her work, using a variety of sources.

At the end of the 1980s, Nancy Spero set up the traveling retrospective exhibitions around the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world where she represented her wall installations as well. She moved her printed pictures from the canvases right on the walls of the art spaces using primary stamps rather than paint. In 1993, the artist made one her installations at the opening of the restored Jewish Museum in New York City.

Although Spero had rheumatoid arthritis which limited the mobility of her hands at the end of her life, she continued to work with the help of assistants.

Achievements

• Nancy Spero is considered as one of the most preeminent women artists of her time.
  
  As an avid feminist and activist of women rights, Nancy Spero was among the founders of the first women's cooperative gallery, A.I.R. Gallery.
  
  The artist’s wall installations showing the individual figures in the urban space remind the art of contemporary street artists such as Englishman or Banksy. Nowadays, the simple framed artwork has no such popularity in modern design as the process and the result of producing a captivating art world. The lifelong attachment of Spero to feminine topic influenced the work of such artists like Kiki Smith and Jean Thompson.
  
  During her career, Spero was a recipient of such awards as Skowhegan Medal from Hiroshima Art Prize, Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association, Honor Award from the Women's Caucus for Art, and others. The ‘War Series’ by Spero is characterized as one of the most powerful works which denounce the war and its destructive consequences.
  
  Nowadays, the art of Nancy Spero is acquired by many art galleries of the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, the Tate Gallery, London, and Uffizi Gallery Florence, Italy. Her mosaic “Artemis, Acrobats, Divas, and Dancers,” is used as the decoration at the 66th Street/Lincoln Center Subway Station in New York City.
  
  In 2010, one of her works was sold at Christie's in Paris for $52,628.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Search and Destroy

  • Female Bomb

  • War, birds of prey
  • Sheela dancing
  • P.E.A.C.E., Helicopter, Mother + Children
  • Bomb, Dove and Victims
  • Artaud Painting – "Je ne touche plus..."
  • I suffer from a frightful...

• print

  • Art Against Apartheid
  • The somnambulist

• work of art

  • Licit Exp
  • oT
  • explicit
  • Maenad Circle, Circle blau
  • The Modest Orgasms of the Middle Class
  • Chorus Line I
  • Masha Bruskina/Vulture Goddess
  • Artemis
  • Athena - Leda - Diana - Victoire
  • Lilith
  • Airborne from Exit 8
  • Parade III
  • "Thou Shalt Not Kill" (The Sixth Commandment)
  • Untitled

Views

Nancy Spero was an avid pacifist and feminist throughout her entire life. Her artworks took up the questions of social injustice and violence.

Quotations: "I used to think that the artist was powerless. The art community is small but if the artist gains a voice you reach some people who transmit ideas into the world."

"I've always sought to express a tension in form and meaning in order to achieve a veracity."

"For me, the spoken words were part of the body, as if whatever I was trying to paint, and my own awareness of pain and anger – you can call it the destruction of the self – was an integral part, that duality. Things get split up right in the middle, which I was very much interested in at that moment in my life."

Membership

In 2006, Nancy Spero was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was also a member of Art Workers Coalition, Women Artists in Revolution, and Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists.

• American Academy of Arts and Letters , United States

  2006

Personality

Physical Characteristics: At the end of her life, Nancy Spero suffered from rheumatoid arthritis which didn’t allow her to take control on her hands.

Quotes from others about the person

• “She is a major 20th-century artist. I think that she is now assuming her proper role and getting her critical due.” Jo Anna Isaak, Fordham University professor of art history

Interests

• Writers

  Antonin Artaud, Simone de Beauvoir, Helene Cixous

• Artists

  Jean Dubuffet

Connections

Nancy Spero met her future husband, a painter, Leon Golub, while she was studying art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago at the end of the 1940s. Nancy and Leon married in 1950.

Spero and Golub were not only partners in life but partners in art too. Together, they worked on several pieces of art.

The family of the artist produced three children named Stephen, Philip, and Paul who became an actor.

Father:

Henry Spero

Mother:

Sadie Susselman

Sister:

Carol Newman

husband:

Leon Golub

Son:

Stephen Golub

Son:

Phillip Golub

Son:

Paul Golub

References

• After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art Following a comprehensive essay that looks back at the recent history of women artists, the authors examine the careers of an international selection of artists considering each figure's accomplishments and her influence on contemporaries and younger artists
  2007