Ida Applebroog, 93, feminist artist who shattered taboos
In 1969, the artist now known as Ida Applebroog was living in San Diego, far from the art scene in her native New York. It was the year she turned 40. She was married with four children and was deeply unfulfilled —“like an empty house,” she said, “inhabited by hungry tenants.”
Fearing that she might turn to suicide, Applebroog — at the time she went by Ida Horowitz — checked herself into the psychiatric ward at Mercy Hospital in San Diego, where she spent weeks immersed in her sketch pad.
The drawings she made during her hospitalization, many of them abstract in style but some identifiable as self-portraits, did not represent the beginning of her career. She had been attracted to the art world for years, even before that world had fully accepted her. (A male instructor had once praised her work as being “as good as a man’s.”)
But Applebroog’s hospital drawings marked a rebirth of sorts. In the early 1970s, she attended a conference of feminist artists at the California Institute of the Arts. She soon returned to New York, shed her married name and adopted a variation on her maiden name. As Ida Applebroog, she made her entrance on an art scene that finally, it seemed, was ready to receive her.
Applebroog, a widely exhibited artist whose disquieting, sometimes graphic work challenged taboos in its exploration of the female body, female experience and the power structures that govern society, died Oct. 21 at her home in Manhattan. She was 93. Barry Rosen, a friend and adviser, confirmed her death but did not cite a cause.
“To me she was one of the most important artists of the 20th century, mainly because she had such an uncompromising feminist vision,” Julia Bryan-Wilson, a professor of contemporary art at Columbia University, said in an interview, describing Applebroog as “incisive and lacerating [in] thinking through questions of gender and power in artistic from.”
During a career that spanned half a century, Applebroog created sculptures, drawings, paintings, films and installations. She was an early member of the Heresies collective, a group of feminist artists in the 1970s, and her work frequently depicted women and domestic life. But she resisted her frequent designation as a feminist artist.
“I don’t want to be placed in that crack,” Applebroog told the publication Art21. Such a label “ghettoizes the entire way of thinking about who’s making art, how art is made,” she continued. “You can make art from today until doomsday, and if they only place you in a show that is about women artists . . . we’re in trouble. It feels like tokenism again. And it really distresses me.”
Applebroog produced the core elements of one of her most noted works shortly after her hospitalization.
Day after day, she ensconced herself in her bathroom. With the aid of a mirror, she made more than 150 drawings of her vagina using India ink and crowquill pen. The drawings were not sexual, she said, but rather an attempt to find pieces of herself that had been “hidden away.”
Those drawings were physically hidden away for decades before Applebroog recovered them from storage and repurposed them for an installation, called “Monalisa,” that opened at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York in 2010.
Enlarged on translucent paper, the drawings formed the exterior of a house-like structure that invited viewers to gaze inside.
Within the house was a portrait of a dissolving figure called Monalisa, an apparent play on the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of an enigmatic woman that is one of the most celebrated works in Western art. On the outside of the structure was the image of a menacing, vaguely male figure.
“The home is not a stable location but an unfixed nexus of sexist violence, perversion and thwarted safety, as well as tenderness, secret stolen moments, bodily pleasure and honest labor,” Bryan-Wilson wrote in an essay about the installation.
Another exhibition, “Modern Olympia (after Manet),” presented at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York in 2002, featured paintings inspired by Édouard Manet’s 1863 work “Olympia,” a portrait of a courtesan that scandalized Paris in its time. Applebroog’s paintings, many of them nudes, fought against prevailing notions of female beauty, sexuality and shame.
Applebroog said she did not wish to be known as a political artist — she rejected labels of all kinds — but she frequently engaged with current affairs.
She painted a portrait of the violinist Isaac Stern after he made international news in 1991 by remaining onstage to perform before Israeli listeners who were forced to don gas masks during an Iraqi Scud missile attack in 1991.
Applebroog received honors including a 1998 MacArthur Foundation fellowship, popularly known as a genius grant. Her works were exhibited at institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York City, and at the National Gallery of Art in
Washington.
Ida Applebaum or Appelbaum — her maiden name was recorded both ways — was born in the Bronx on Nov. 11, 1929, one of three daughters in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family. Her father, a furrier who at various points also sold salt and groceries, and her mother, a seamstress, were immigrants from Poland.
Applebroog grew up in a tenement where her home life, she recalled, was unhappy and at times even repressive. “I learned very early on,” she said, “how power works.”
Over the objections of her father, she studied graphic design at what was then the New York State Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences. She found work at an advertising agency but was driven out by what she described as flagrant sexual harassment.
She later did freelance illustration and design work and worked in the New
York Public Library’s art division.
In 1950, she married Gideon Horowitz, a Viennese-born psychotherapist. They had four children and lived in Chicago, where Applebroog attended the school of the city’s art institute, before moving to
San Diego.
She formally changed her surname to Applebroog in 1975, later saying that she had “no idea” where she got the “broog.”
Applebroog’s husband died in 2015. One of her daughters, a filmmaker known as Beth B, made the 2016 documentary “Call Her Applebroog,” about her mother’s artistic career.
Besides her daughter, survivors include three other children, Paul Horowitz, Ned Horowitz and Debra Dodd; a sister; five grandchildren; and a greatgranddaughter.