Mary Heilmann, Who Revivified Abstract Painting, Dies at 86

People Mary Heilmann, Who Revivified Abstract Painting, Dies at 86 By the early 1980s, 'my clothes were out of style,' she said. 'I’d lost my timing.' She found a way forward. Mary Heilmann redirected the flow of painting. For six decades, after jettisoning a promising career in sculpture, Heilmann made indelible abstractions by plumbing high modernism, plucking what she pleased for her own ends, at once insouciant and sincere. The grid and the monochrome, the dot and the square, lines and drips take on unexpected emotional weight and personal resonance in her disarming and multi-layered art. Her pictures can look simple, even slapdash. They are. They also are not. “Each of my paintings,” she once wrote, “can be seen as an autobiographical marker, a cue, by which I evoke a moment from my past, or my projected future, each a charm to conjure a mental reality and to give it physical form.” Heilmann’s approach—her expansive vocabulary, her wry riffs on her forebears, her casual inventiveness—has been so influential that there is always a risk of forgetting how shocking it once was, and how improbable it was that she would become not only an artist’s artist but also a bona fide commercial success story. Her death, on Friday at a hospital in Riverhead, New York, ends one of the defining art practices of her era. The cause was complications from a fall, her studio said. She was 86. Mary Ann Heilmann was born on January 3, 1940, in San Francisco. Her father, John Sherman Heilmann, was a civil engineer who died when she was 13. Her mother, Mary Florence Webb, was a nurse who once told her daughter that if she pursued a life as an artist she would “starve in a garret,” Heilmann told the video program Art21. “In my mind, I thought, ‘Yes!’ That’s exactly what I wanted,” she said. While studying literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Heilmann took classes in pottery, which she later pursued at San Francisco State University and the University of California, at Berkeley, with the great Peter Voulkos. Heilmann became aware of the offhand sculptures of Bruce Nauman, who was still a student at the University of California, Davis, where William T. Wiley was one of his teachers. She went to visit. “They were reticent men, and that was fine with me,” she wrote in an artist’s book, The All Night Movie (1999). “The more strained and difficult an encounter, the more I liked it.” She decamped for New York in 1968, determined to make it big, and quickly fell in with the hothouse avant-garde that met late at night at Max’s Kansas City on Union Square, including Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, Lee Lozano, and Tina Girouard—all gone now. Heilmann was making rough, raw, crafty sculptures, Post-Minimalist pieces with an undisguised pathos. (A few were recently on view at Dia Beacon in upstate New York.) But after not being included in “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials,” a landmark 1969 Whitney Museum of American Art show look surveying that nascent movement, she, “as a rebellious move, switched to the much-maligned practice, painting,” she wrote in The All Night Movie. (It’s a phenomenal read; originally published by Hauser & Wirth, it was reissued in 2022 by Primary Information.) “Being a female was definitely a disadvantage in those days when girls weren’t supposed to have fun,” she wrote. “They were supposed to be fun.” Heilmann worked first in a Color Field mode. She lived in a rundown building on Chatham Square in Manhattan’s Chinatown, making art, debating art, and partying with fellow artists. “I mean who really knew all the details of what went on?” she wrote. “It was the ’70s, it was New York, the stakes were high, and it was an intensely cliquey, factionalized, competitive, heady time. But it was basically a pretty sweet scene.” That scene began to fade. Norman E. Fisher, a magnetic art and drug dealer, died of cancer in 1977, at 39. The artist Gordon Matta-Clark died in 1978, also of cancer, at 35. That year, Heilmann made a pivotal painting: a yellow rectangle with a dark-red square sitting atop it, a few splashes of that blood color marring the field. She titled it The End. “It was a requiem,” she wrote. “It honored Norman and Gordon and all the people I had loved and lost.” “Instead of working out of the dogma of modernist non-image formalism,” she added, “I began to see that the choices in the work depended more on content for their meaning. It was the end of modernism and, though I hadn’t heard the news, the beginning of postmodernism.” By the early 1980s, she was out of the loop, in her view. She was in her early 40s. Another close friend died. “I was no longer included in the downtown scene,” she wrote. “I saw that I needed to abandon drinks and drugs, and with no drinks and drugs, my moves became very limited. I wasn’t very funny any more. My clothes were out of style. I’d lost my timing.” She found it. The paintings from these years still astonish. Rosebud (1983) has just a few quick, red daubs on white. Robert’s Garden (1983) floats awkward black rectangles atop light cream. Sea Wall (1986) has only two hesitant patches of baby blue atop white, perhaps conjuring a hazy memory along the water in two colors. The taste-making dealer Pat Hearn, who was a generation younger than Heilmann, staged the first of the artist’s seven solo shows at her gallery in Alphabet City in 1986. Hauser & Wirth came aboard in the 1990s. Some artists go on autopilot when they hit a mid-career stride, playing the hits. Heilmann, instead, kept uncorking strange delights. She combined two or more unrelated canvases, and she appeared to overlay more than one composition on a single canvas with low-key grace. A black-and-white grid, for instance, is being overtaken by a red morass in Half Jack (2005). Heilmann’s trajectory should offer solace to any artist still awaiting their moment. She did not have her first proper solo museum show in the United States until 2007, the year she turned 67. (She drew slightly earlier institutional attention in Europe.) “To Be Someone” toured the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, the Orange County Museum in Newport Beach, California, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in her adopted hometown. More high-profile exhibitions followed. She was a lodestar for many younger artists, and moving tributes filled social media this past weekend. Writing about her paintings in a poetic essay published in 1999, Jutta Koether wrote of “beautiful individuals hanging out chatting, dancing, and working together, bringing up the subject of knowledge and non-knowledge, making laughter happen.” “Mary Heilmann’s paintings contain a joy so contagious one smiles upon seeing them,” Ross Bleckner wrote in an introduction to his interview with her in Bomb magazine in 1999. “The big boys just totally marginalized Mary because she was turning the whole construction of hard-edged geometry inside out,” the artist Marilyn Minter told the New York Times in 2008. Even now, we are still coming to grips with Heilmann’s feats, which scramble outmoded ideas about an uninterruptible march of progress in art. In that Bomb interview, Bleckner gingerly asked if there was “something a little retro” about the way she mined earlier art. “Yes, a little sentimental and a little nostalgic, as well,” she said. “When you speak of this work as being light—I’m walking on thin ice here—you could go towards corny, hackneyed and familiar. I like to tread on the edge of that. I’ve said this before, I like to get at deep sentiments through sentimentality.” That is a high-wire act, still. She had a proudly unpolished touch, and an absolute disregard for fashion—a plainspoken art that insists on remaining elusive. Speaking with the Archives of American Art a few years ago, she recalled the kind of art that she made before coming to New York, before college, when she was still young and in school. “I was considered very bad as an artist because I always scribbled all around, and I think that’s kind of interesting, because it’s kind of what I do now,” she said, laughing. “I kept it up.”