ABSTRACT
In 1973, an openly lesbian abstract painter, Louise Fishman, created The Angry Series, thirty text-based portraits in which a woman's first name is preceded by the adjective "angry" written in capital letters and surrounded by calligraphic paint slashes, rendered so that the image appears to be screaming at the viewer. The series includes activists such as "Angry Jill" (Johnston), the flamboyant Village Voice columnist whose book Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution served as a rallying cry for the separatist movement, and "Angry Ti-Grace" (Atkinson), author of Amazon Odyssey: The First Collection of Writings by the Political Pioneer of the Women's Movement. Fishman's series contains artists such as "Angry Djuna" (Barnes), an American ex-patriot who penned Ladies Almanack, a roman a clef about Nathalie Barney's famed Sapphic salon in Paris; "Angry Yvonne" (Rainer), choreographer, filmmaker and member of Judson Dance Theater; and "Angry Sue" (Perlgut), co-founder of It's All Right to Be Woman, one of the first feminist theater collectives In the Unites States. The portraits also include scholars who would go on to produce some of the foundatlonal texts In feminist and queer theory, like Fishman's then-lover "Angry Esther" (Newton), a graduate student In anthropology at the University of Chicago whose dissertation on drag queens would become Mother Camp: Female Impersonation in America. Fishman's series also hails non-lesbian feminists, for example: "Angry Phyllis" (Chesler), a psychotherapist and professor who taught one of the first women's studies courses In the country and co-founded the Association for Women in Psychology; "Angry Lucy" (Lippard), artist and critic; and "Angry Jane" (Alpert), a member of the militant leftist organization The Weather Underground. Straight female icons such as "Angry Marilyn" (Monroe) and "Angry Billie" (Holiday) also grace the portraits. While heterosexual women are included In the series, the majority of the canvases celebrate out lesbians. The most outraged lesbian in this series is "Angry Radclyffe Hall the Lesbian Angry Lesbian Well of Loneliness Lesbian Fury." Fishman's homage to Stephen Gordon, the self-loathing protagonist of the novel The Well of Loneliness, screams what the alienated Invert herself could
not articulate because she lacked an adequate affective vernacular: anger turned inward produces debilitating depression.1
