The Warriors

The question of violence is a recurrent theme in the work of Nancy Spero (1926-2009): the violence of war (her memorable War Drawings at the time of the Vietnam War), symbolic or physical violence against women and minorities (she was one of the first to fight publicly for the place of women in the art world), the legitimate violence of resistance movements (against the Nazis, against Pinochet) and poetic and expressive violence (Artaud). Whether she was evoking a specific conflict or producing a transhistorical summary, Nancy Spero knew how to assemble and combine images taken from a variety of sources to produce dynamic works with a force that has remained intact and has now become part of art history.