Art Movements

In 1973, gallerist Tibor de Nagy gave Joyce Kozloff a call. His voice quivered as he told her that Clement Greenberg had just left the back room after giving a searing review of her latest work. Greenberg had scoffed at the artist’s “Three Facades” (1973), a painting based on the rich tapestry of interlocking bricks and tiles on Churrigueresque church facades in Mexico, and said that it “looked like ladies’ embroidery” — as if that was a bad thing. Kozloff told us that “Tibor freaked out” and asked her “to take it away.”Greenberg had unwittingly dismissed the first of the artist's paintings in a major art movement of which she was a key founding member: Pattern and Decoration, also known as “P&D,” which grew out of the flowering folk revival and feminist protest era of the 1970s. Fed up with hard-edge abstraction and minimalism favored by the White men who dominated the art world, P&D leaned into lush decorative surfaces, cultural adornment, and unapologetically crafty aesthetics. Of course, it was cr