ABSTRACT
The imperfect nature of this distinction – the fact that any modernism worth the name exists somewhere within the gap between artistic and mass production – has hardly seemed like justification for a life’s work passed deep in the latter’s embrace. On the few occasions art historians have paused to consider Piper, they have preferred to avoid such questions. It has seemed more prudent to remain with the early paintings, to consign both the fabrics and the late work in which she reflected upon them to oblivion. The drawbacks to this kind of affirmative criticism, which identifies a clear set of political motives by abstracting out historical detail, are in its blind spots. The paintings Piper exhibited at RoKo were complicated objects. Each was a departure from her training. A product of the Art Students League, like so many American artists who came of age in the 1940s, her roots were in social realism.
