The War Series

In 1964, American artists Nancy Spero, Leon Golub and their family returned from five years in Paris steeped in modern European art and cultural traditions. Spero soon used gouache and paper as a format to, in her words, deflate the “grand gesture” of large-scale American abstract painting. Her subject matter, though, was the war in Vietnam with its intensely masculine character and often-phallic symbolism.