Nancy Spero and the Art of Refusing Silence

From The Book of the Dead to Medieval illuminated manuscripts, this American artist invented a visual language that takes inspiration from the past to comment on the present. Her techniques and materials evolved as she immersed herself in the relationship between art and activism across the ages. Across her career, we see the use and variety of bold colours and paper, from oil paints to text and collage. The imagery that inspired her served as the framework for her most important body of work, named ‘War Series’. Nancy Spero forged a grotesque and furious visual language that confronted America’s violence and patriarchy throughout the second half of the 20th century, a language that still resonates today.

Spero’s career spanned from the 1940s, when she was training at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, until her death in 2009. Even from her time at school, she felt connected to what she called ‘outsider art’. For Spero, this involved German Expressionism, Insane and Primitive Art — movements that were generally dismissed as they did not meet the standards of the West. Spero’s connection makes sense: she herself was marginalised within the male dominated art world. Her ability to find a relatability within other forms of painting and drawing, and to be able to weave that into her own artistic expression, is what makes Spero so extraordinary. By the 1950s she had moved to New York, and around ten years later had left. She and her fellow artist husband, Leon Golub, travelled around Europe before settling in Paris from 1959 to 1964. This was when her practice finally evolved. Paris gave Spero the artistic freedom and recognition that she hadn’t found in New York. The new city gave her the support to continue rejecting the traditional forms that she was taught in Chicago. With the ‘fine art look’ on the sidelines, Spero began to embrace influences, forms and styles from periods such as Ancient Greece, Etruscan Italy, and Medieval Europe, and reworking them into something new. She said herself that she hoped for multiple interpretations of her work, wanting to avoid being restricted by one definition. She refused to be boxed in, with the determination to prove that no one is defined solely by one thing. We are all shaped by an infinite web of relationships.

By the mid-sixties, Spero and her family had decided to move back to the Big Apple. This is the moment when her art style took a dramatic turn. Witnessing the horror of the Vietnam War, America’s actions abroad shocked Spero to the core. This event acted as a catalyst for her change in form, style, and tone, committing herself to a lifelong endeavour of activism, as well as joining the Art Workers’ Coalition and Women Artists in Revolution. This is where the War Series was born. Her work from 1966–70 became her personal manifesto: a searing critique of American imperialism and a rejection of masculine power. In the ‘War Series’, grotesque, sexual parodies were abundant, created with the intention of exposing “the collusion of sex and power — the aggression and nastiness of phallic power.” Graphic imagery of beastly helicopters, dismembered bodies, and phallic shapes encapsulates Spero’s message: war is obscene. Why penises? you may ask. Historically, the phallus has been a symbol of many things, including fertility and evil. The phallus can be found in many depictions of Hell and of the Last Judgement as far back as the Middle Ages, acting as a symbol of the devil, sinners, and chaos etc. Spero reworked that vision, illustrating the phallus as a grotesque emblem of war. Her anthropomorphic machines echo Medieval visions of Hell, where the Vietnamese people reflect the damned who are desperate for salvation from war. 

For Spero, her turn to art for activism was only natural. “Most art in most societies is political,” she once said, “as Medieval art is political in the religious sense of control and destiny.” Just as Medieval illumination warned of divine judgment, her images warn of earthly catastrophe — another apocalypse if you will. Spero’s visual language doesn’t simply borrow from the past, but channels the same urgency, the same didacticism from 1,000 years ago. The change to gouache and paper was a pivot that defined Spero’s career. She expertly shows us that history is not a distant artefact but a cycle that never stops. Violence and injustice constantly evolve. Spero’s work acknowledges this fact while centering on the most often silenced: the people of Vietnam, the women of Vietnam, and the women elsewhere who bore other violences.

Her message is still as important today. We see it in the suffering of Palestine — in its children, its journalists, its women and so many more. Spero reminds us that we cannot dismiss history. The past will follow us until we break the cycle. Hopefully, one day, we will learn.

 I’m Jaz, I love art, history and films. My goal in my writing is to give women the recognition that they deserve and to never stop learning. Everyday there is something new to discover and that’s the beauty of life!