A detail from The Story of Bern by Dorothy Iannone.

Frieze frame: graphic sex and female sexuality under spotlight at art fair

London show will explore works by nine radical feminists whose creations were once considered too explicit to be shown

Mark Brown
Tuesday 19 September 2017

Overlooked and rejected works from the 1970s and 80s depicting female sexuality, graphic sex and women as empowered objects of desire are to take centre stage at one of the world’s most important art fairs.

How Betty Tompkins confronts gender bias, armed with a spray gun and unshakable self-belief

Fiona Alison Duncan

Overlooked for decades, the New Yorker is now an inspirational figure for a new generation of feminists. Author Fiona Alison Duncan caught up with the artist in her SoHo loft

Famed for painting pornographic close-ups in the misty monochrome of an overcast sky, Betty Tompkins is a 74-year-old artist with, she says, ‘a 17-year-old career.’ When, in 2002, a body of work Tompkins painted between 1969 and 1974 premiered at Mitchell Algus Gallery in New York City, it was her first major solo show. Thinking about the American artist’s now-celebrated ‘Fuck Paintings,’ one can only wonder: Why weren’t they welcome in the artworld and pop culture until the 21st century? It certainly wasn’t for Tompkins’ lack of trying. A self-described ‘ambitious, stubborn, and persevering person,’ she never stopped making work intended to be shown.

‘I looked at my husband’s collection and said: That would make a great painting’ … Tompkins in her SoHo studio. 
Photograph: Ali Smith

Interview

Shunned, seized and now celebrated: the porn paintings of Betty Tompkins

Inspired by her husband’s porn stash, the artist’s explicit work horrified galleries and customs officials. Now the world can’t get enough. We visit her New York studio

Hermione Hoby
Wednesday 6 March 2019

B

etty Tompkins sits slumped in her chair, knees wide apart, cheerfully reading from the phone in her hand with an attitude of scoffing amusement: “‘The venerable’, ‘the brilliant’, ‘the incomparable’, ‘the great living legend’ … ” She breaks off to frown and mutter: “How old am I?” Then she continues: “‘The famous and infamous’, ‘inimitable’, ‘iconic’, ‘pioneering’, ‘mega artist’, ‘the fabulous’, ‘coolest old lady artist did not come to play.’” She looks up, grins and says: “I’ve been collecting these.”

Betty Tompkins

An Interview with Betty Tompkins

Julia Monte
October 6, 2017

New York artist Betty Tompkins creates powerful, photorealist paintings that have received an array of responses from enthusiastic to aghast. A gallery in Zurich that was showing her work once received a returned postcard sent out for Tompkins’s show with obscenities written all over it, clearly rebuking an invitation they found obscene. They were scribbled so deeply you can feel the indentations of where the pen angrily met the paper.