Study for Pasadena Lifesavers Yellow series

Judy Chicagos Study for Pasadena Lifesavers Yellow series from 1968 is a colored pencil drawing over graphite that documents the development of the abstract compositional vocabulary that would define the artists early career and that contained the coded feminist content she would later make explicit. The Pasadena Lifesavers series, named after the ring-shaped candies and the city in Southern California where Chicago was then living, consists of geometric compositions of concentric forms that suggest both the circular candy and the anatomy that Chicago would begin to celebrate openly in her later work. The yellow of the title refers to the chromatic scheme of this particular study, one of several color variations that Chicago produced as she explored the visual possibilities of the concentric ring composition. The colored pencil medium, applied with the precision that characterizes all of Chicagos early work, allows her to create the smooth tonal gradations and sharp edges that define the Hard-Edge aesthetic while simultaneously suggesting the bodily references that the title encodes. The year 1968 places this study in the period immediately before Chicagos formal embrace of feminism, when she was producing abstract works that were simultaneously contributions to the Hard-Edge painting movement and subversive challenges to its masculinist assumptions. The study format, with its traces of graphite visible beneath the colored pencil, reveals the working process of an artist who was beginning to question the assumptions of the art world in which she had established her reputation.

The Pasadena Lifesavers series is a key work in the history of feminist art, demonstrating that Chicago was encoding feminist content in abstract form before she explicitly declared herself a feminist. The series influenced the development of feminist abstraction and the Central Core imagery that Chicago would develop in The Dinner Party and later works.

A 1968 colored pencil study for Chicagos Pasadena Lifesavers Yellow series, documenting the development of the concentric ring compositions that encoded feminist content within Hard-Edge abstract vocabulary before her explicit feminist turn.