Artists Women

Never mind the Rauschenbergs, Twomblys and Lichtensteins that beckoned contemporary art lovers to New York last week for a round of big-ticket auctions. Forget the Matisses, Chagalls and Monets to be offered in this week's sales of Impressionist and modern art. The star of the spring auction season is Frida Kahlo's 1947 "Self-Portrait With Loose Hair," which goes on the block in Christie's May 15 sale of Latin American art. The Park Avenue auction house expects the painting to fetch between $1.

Deborah Small has spent the past year investigating the murders of 45 San Diego women, reading pulp bodice-ripper romance novels and tracking down interracial love scenes in Hollywood movies. None of this has been just for pleasure: Small's work over the last decade has turned research into art, combining revisionist history and visual spectacle.

"I lead an extremely isolated existence and the fact that I'm a woman probably contributes to that--I can never be one of the gang, particularly in England" says Therese Oulton, a young British Abstractionist whose work is on view at the L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice through March 9. "The British art world is quite small and more sexist than the American art world," she adds, "and the highest of the high arts--painting, sculpture, poetry and music composition--are still heavily defended there.

A lot of people have been noticing a change in art gallery exhibitions during the last several seasons. I'm talking about the abundance of interesting new work by women, which is being shown in unprecedented numbers at Santa Monica and L.A. galleries. Many of the artists are relatively new to the scene.

This year's schedule at the Brand Library Art Galleries in Glendale reflects a fact that probably no other gallery in the Los Angeles area can declare: a sizable majority of Brand's one-person shows present the work of women artists.

Color has come back into abstract painting with a force that hasn't been seen since the 1960s. Bright, bold and out of this world, the palettes of many young artists are looking like super-charged versions of the synthetic spectra once favored by artists from the movement known as Color-field painting.

The late sculptor Louise Nevelson once said artists should never have children. A single parent herself, she said the conflict in responsibilities was too great. But then we wouldn't have the current exhibition mounted by the Los Angeles Printmaking Society at the Lankershim Arts Center in North Hollywood showing the work of artists who happen to be mothers and daughters.

Director Gillian Armstrong's "The Last Days of Chez Nous" is an oddly unsettling movie for one simple reason: It is a brutally unromanticized love story. All the players in this ill-fated triangle of intimacy are shown with warts-and-all honesty. Though Armstrong is known, much to her dismay, as a feminist director, the women characters in "Chez Nous" are as flawed and fatally human as the men. In fact, all the characters in the film seem to live in a state of bewilderment. On the surface, "Chez Nous," which stars Lisa Harrow, Kerry Fox and Bruno Ganz, chronicles the dissolution of a marriage.

Eminem is nothing if not rude, and Britain, of course, is the motherland of good manners, so it was probably never going to be an easy relationship. The 26-year-old white rapper's previous British tours raised a few eyebrows, but in the wake of his phenomenal success--a 10-million-selling album, "The Marshall Mathers LP," and four Grammy nominations--the prospect of his three-day blitz this week is making Britons stand up and take notice.