Judith Linhares (born 1940) is an American painter, known for her vibrant, expressive figurative and narrative paintings.Pagel, David. Judith Linhares: Divine Intoxication, Orange, CA: Chapman University, 2006.Smith, Roberta. "As Chelsea Expands, a Host of Visions Rush In," The New York Times, June 1, 2001. Retrieved October 24, 2018.Johnson, Ken. "Judith Linhares," The New York Times, April 14, 2006. Retrieved October 24, 2018. She came of age and gained recognition in the Bay Area culture of the 1960s and 1970s and has been based in New York City since 1980.Adam, Brooks. "The Labyrinth of Judith Linhares," Dangerous Pleasures: The Art of Judith Linhares, Survey catalogue essay, Sonoma, CA: Sonoma State University Art Gallery, 1994, p. 7–30.Saltz, Jerry. "Judith Linhares," The Village Voice, April 5–11, 2006, p. 73.Linhares, Philip. Adeline Kent Award 1975, Essay, San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Art Institute, 1976. Curator Marcia Tucker featured her in the influential New Museum show, "'Bad' Painting" (1978), and in the 1984 Venice Biennale show, "Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained: American Visions of the New Decade."Tucker, Marcia. 'Bad' Painting, Catalogue, New York: The New Museum, 1978. Retrieved October 24, 2018.The New Museum. "Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained: American Visions of the New Decade," Organized by Lynn Gumpert, Ned Rifkin, and Marcia Tucker. Exhibitions. Retrieved October 31, 2018. Linhares synthesizes influences including Expressionism, Bay Area Figuration, Mexican modern art and second-wave feminism, in work that flirts with abstraction and balances visionary personal imagery, expressive intensity, and pictorial rigor.Cameron, Dan. "Judith Linhares Weaves a Spell," Arts Magazine, Vol. 60, No. 4, December 1985, p. 76-9.Berwick, Carly. "Judith Linhares", ARTnews, Summer 2006, p. 181.Egan, Shannon. "A Venus of Wild Nights: The Female Nude in Paintings of Judith Linhares," The Gettysburg Review, Autumn 2009, Vol. #22, #3, p. 413–416.Bell, Madison Smartt. "Judith Linhares by Madison Smart Bell", BOMB Magazine, Fall 2006, p. 78-85. Retrieved October 24, 2018. Art historian Whitney Chadwick wrote, "Linhares is an artist for whom painting has always mattered as the surest path of synthesizing experience and interior life," her works "emerging as if by magic from an alchemical stew of vivid complementary hues and muted tonalities."Chadwick, Whitney. Sweet Talk, Catalogue essay, New York: Edward Thorp Gallery, 2001. Critic John Yau describes her paintings "funny, strange, and disconcerting,"Yau, John. "Judtih Linhares, "Riptide," The Brooklyn Rail, March 4, 2011. Retrieved October 31, 2018. while writer Susan Morgan called them "unexpected and indelible" images exploring "an oddly sublime territory where exuberant bliss remains inseparable from ominous danger."Morgan, Susan. "Judith Linhares," Catalogue essay, Flora and Fauna, New Berlin, NY: Sam & Adele Golden Gallery, 2015.
Linhares has been recognized with more than forty-five one-person exhibitions, major awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters"American Academy of Arts and Letters Announces 2008 Art Awards," Artforum, March 18, 2008. Retrieved October 24, 2018. and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation,John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. "Judith Linhares". Fellows. Retrieved October 12, 2018. among many, and acquisitions by numerous public collections.Edward Thorp Gallery. Judith Linhares: Riptide, Catalogue, New York: Edward Thorp Gallery, 2011. Critics, such as The New York Times' Ken Johnson identify her as a key forerunner to and influence on several waves of younger figurative artists.Brody, David. "Hippie Edenists Adrift: Judith Linhares at Edward Thorp," ArtCritical, March 23, 2011. Retrieved October 24, 2018.Dunham, Judith. "Quiet Mentor: Reviews from San Francisco". Vanguard, Volume 11, September 1983.Desmarais, Charles. "In the galleries, 3 women's approach to art and authenticity," SF Gate, February 2, 2018. Retrieved October 24, 2018. Jennifer Riley wrote, "Linhares has practically invented the genre of imaginative figure painting largely populated by confident women engaged in activities ranging from the banal to the idiosyncratic, thus paving the way for artists such as Amy Cutler, Hilary Harkness, and Dana Schutz."Riley, Jennifer. "Judith Linhares," The Brooklyn Rail, April 10, 2006. Retrieved October 24, 2018.Yau, John. "In Judith Linhares’s Sinless World," Hyperallergic, February 24, 2019. Retrieved April 6, 2022. Linhares is represented by Various Small Fires (Los Angeles),Various Small Fires. Judith Linhares, Artist page. Retrieved October 24, 2018. P.P.O.W. Gallery (New York)P.P.O.W. Judith Linhares, Selected work. Retrieved October 24, 2018. and Anglim Gilbert Gallery (San Francisco).Anglim Gilbert Gallery. Judith Linhares, Retrieved October 24, 2018. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Life and career
Linhares was born in Pasadena, California in 1940. She began as an artist in her teens, hanging out in the beatnik world of Malibu Beach. In 1958, she moved to Oakland to attend California College of the Arts (CCA), where she earned an BFA (1964) and MFA (1970). Linhares was active in a vibrant Bay Area culture that embraced second-wave feminism, the hippie scene, underground comic artists S. Clay Wilson and Robert Crumb, assemblage artists Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner, and Funk and Outsider art; those influences turned her in a more populist direction, from abstraction toward figurative and narrative art.
After CCA, Linhares lived in San Francisco, taught art at area colleges, and exhibited at venues such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.Linhares, Philip. Four Women, Catalogue essay, San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Art Institute, 1974. In 1975, the San Francisco Art Institute recognized her with the Adaline Kent Award for promising California artists. In 1978, she received the first of three National Endowment for the Arts grants, and was included in Marcia Tucker's seminal New Museum exhibition, "'Bad' Painting," which brought her wider recognition as an avatar of a nascent Neo-Expressionist figurative turn in art. In 1980, she moved to New York City, continuing to exhibit on both coasts. In subsequent years, Linhares has taught extensively, notably at the School of Visual Arts (1980–2014) and New York University (1986–2006), and exhibited throughout the U.S., including major shows at Edward Thorp Gallery (New York) and Gallery Paule Anglim (San Francisco). Retrospectives of her work have been held at Sonoma State University and the Greenville County Museum of Art ("Dangerous Pleasures," 1994).Sonoma State University Art Gallery. Dangerous Pleasures: The Art of Judith Linhares, Survey catalogue, Sonoma, CA: Sonoma State University Art Gallery, 1994.
Work Critics identify several enduring characteristics in Linhares's work, even as it has evolved considerably over five decades. One is her intense commitment to art as a process of self-discovery through which she synthesizes personal experience and, more broadly, female subjectivity. Those impulses fuel her visionary imagery and expressive color and brushwork, which sit in tension with an equally formidable commitment to the Gestalt of pictorial integrity and sharp economy of means.Cohen, Ronnie. "New York Review", ARTnews, Volume 82, October, 1983, p. 176.FitzGibbon, John. "L is for Linhares," California A to Z, Catalogue essay, Youngstown, OH: Butler Institute of American Art, 1990. In Linhares's "Dangerous Pleasures" retrospective (1994) catalogue, critic Brooke Adams called her work a "strange, luminous, hard-won pictorial universe." In 2006, Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel wrote, "This give and take—between singular, iconic image and scattershot, freewheeling chaos—endows Linhares's art with moxy and verve."
Linhares's ability to reconcile these tensions derives from her absorption of a dizzying array of traditions—from Symbolism to Abstract Expressionism to California Funk—whose strategies she turns to her own idiosyncratic aims.Morris, Gay. "Judith Linhares: Strange Pleasure", Art in America, November 1994, p.139. Adams called her "a vanguardist in the reassessment of Mexican influence and spirit in modern art." Pagel wrote that her work revisits German Expressionism, "recuperating its original animal innocence (and playful verve)," sans the recent layers of irony, aggression and bombast added by various Neo-Expressionisms. Linhares cites expressionists Max Beckmann, James Ensor and Edvard Munch, artists negotiating "the line between figuration and abstraction" such as David Park and Bob Thompson, and surrealists Remedios Varo and Toyen, who depicted powerful, sexual women, as key inspirations. In light of the complex welter of influences, critics consistently note Linhares's "evocative magic act"Van Proyen, Mark. "Eccentric Allegories", Art Week, February 18, Vol 15. No.7, 1984. of pulling off work that appears deceptively nonchalant,Wilson, Michael. "Judith Linhares," Artforum, February 2011. Retrieved October 24, 2018. breezy, and improvisational in its "easy virtuosity."
Early work In the early 1970s, Linhares created narrative drawings and assemblages that appropriated commonplace or "craft" materials and feminine imagery (flowers, eggs, swan feathers, domestic scenes), pushing back against passé notions of "women's art."Samet, Jennifer. "Beer with a Painter: Judith Linhares," Hyperallergic, November 10, 2012. Retrieved October 24, 2018.Judith Linhares website. Archive: 1970–1979. Retrieved October 24, 2018. Her "At Home in San Jose" drawing series was noted for startling, often humorous, imagery developed through introspection, which juxtaposed skeletons, devils and women in scenes of cozy domesticity or macabre religio-erotic fantasies.Frankenstein, Alfred. "Bold and Macabre Drawings", San Francisco Chronicle, May 17, 1972. San Francisco critic Alfred Frankenstein recognized them most for their "meticulous draftsmanship" and elegant design sense, calling her a successor to renowned Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada";Frankenstein, Alfred. "She's Somebody to Watch", San Francisco Chronicle, January 16, 1973, p. 44.Frankenstein, Alfred. "Judith Linhares Show: Facing Down Death and the Devil", San Francisco Chronicle, January 16, 1976, p. 44. others compared their spiky, linearity and ghostly imagery to the work of Aubrey Beardsley.
Figurative painting: 1976–1999 Linhares and critics, such as Dan Cameron, mark a four-month sojourn in Guanajuato, Mexico in 1976 as a turning point that refocused her on painting and integrated her subconscious imagery, painterly and narrative impulses, and Jungian, Surrealist, and Mexican and Outsider Art influences.Weeks, H. J. "Judith Linhares at Paule Anglim", Art Week, 1977, p. 58. This evolution was perhaps first realized in the 1977 painting Turkey (featured in the "'Bad' Painting" show), which fused archetypal forces in an uncanny, iconic image.