Description:

The “Subway Madonna” by Ina Specter is a color woodcut print that is a few inches taller and wider than a standard piece of printer paper. When I viewed the piece for the first time, I was drawn in by the evident texture of the woodcut, and the artist’s use of many neutral and natural ink colors (greens and browns), as well as the warm wooden background, to create the shading which forms the image of a mother and child; the imagery immediately felt familiar. The colors also display some texture, and they aren’t very bright but rather muted and kept fairly simple. I found this to be an interesting choice, as the natural colors contrast to what one would normally expect of the colors and feel of what one encounters on a subway (cold, metallic tones). While it was easy to identify the familiar theme, I was struck by Specter’s use of woodcut as a medium and her modernist style to recreate such a classic scene. Furthermore, the Madonna and child depicted here are in a warm embrace which seems to be a far more intimate iteration, which is different from many other traditional or classical portrayals of the Madonna where both are faced towards the viewer.

Caption:

Ina Specter was not a very prominent artist, and it seems there is not much information available to identify her or this piece. I have found two of her other pieces online—both woodcuts, and the same style to the one she employed here. Specter’s work is quite modernist, and her work fits well into the revival of woodcutting’s popularity in the 1950s. While we don’t know anything about Ina Specter as an artist, we ought to consider her work in the context of the time it was produced, and within the Avant-Garde movement it was likely a part of or inspired by. During the 1940s to the 1950s, a group of about sixty women known as the Atelier 17 (based in a New York City studio) were producing avant-garde work from a printmaking workshop, and taking it on art tours around the country [1]. Printmaking provided a unique way for women’s work to travel as it was a lightweight medium and could be transported or reproduced with ease, and printmaking provided an artistic networking opportunity for women who found their other work was not being taken as seriously as they’d have liked in other circles [2]. Since “Subway Madonna” by Specter was presumably produced in the 1950s, I think it’s useful for us to think of her art as influenced by the postwar popularity of printmaking, especially in the context of the printmaking women of Atelier 17 since their work traveled far and wide, and was influenced by, and in turn influenced, modernism in the United States Avant-Garde movement [3]. The rising popularity that printmaking saw in the 1940s and 1950s no doubt influenced and informed Specter’s own work, as it was a form of art that was easily replicated and disseminated to the American public which allowed for its popularization. It was also common for the women artists in this movement to exchange their works across geographies in order to network and promote their work, bolstering women artists of the time and ultimately contributing to the burgeoning feminist art movement in the 1960s [4]. The popularity of printmaking amongst women artists makes me wonder if Ina Specter chose women as the subjects of her art in order to use a modern lens through which one could view women at the time—her Subway Madonna shows a traditional theme of motherhood in an unexpected and modern way (both thematically and stylistically).

I could only find two of Specter’s other pieces of art online—one, a woodcut print of two people in the same style she used for the Subway Madonna, and the other, a woodcut of the Provincetown Seascape in a different—but still modernist—style. Both pieces were for sale online through sites like Etsy.com—this reminded me think of the allure and appeal of prints and woodcuts, since as a medium it proved its portability and mailability for exhibits and the like (as seen with the women of Atelier 17). Furthermore, in my research I learned of another woman artist, Mabel Hewit, who was a prominent woodcut and modernist artist and whose work reminded me of Specter’s. Hewit had traveled to Provincetown, Massachusetts early in her career to learn woodcutting techniques from Blanche Lazzell, a talented artist who had mastered the white-line woodcut technique [5]. Some of Hewit’s woodcut pieces depict scenes of Provincetown, which instantly reminded me of the scene of Specter’s ‘Provincetown Seascape’—what led Specter to create this piece (one so different from her other two)? It made me think that perhaps she was emulating Hewit’s work, especially considering the shareability of prints, themes, and ideas among the women in this movement at the time. Specter’s inspiration and work remains largely a mystery, as does her identity as the artist, but putting her in conversation with her peers helps us to imagine her and what motivated her contributions to the Avant-Garde.