SFMOMA, Part 34: Floor 2, 1900 to Now. Astrazione No. 1 (Virginia Admiral, 1941).
Thirty-four by twenty-eight inches of thick pink ground, scraped lines, fine brushwork — paint moving between figuration and abstraction, neither one resolved. Astrazione No. 1, 1941, oil on canvas, a gift of Peggy Guggenheim in 1966. The word astrazione is already the argument: Italian, because Guggenheim's circle spoke that language; abstraction, because Admiral was living the question she was painting.
Virginia Admiral, 1915–2000. Painter, poet, independent publisher. Studied at the Art Students League and, crucially, at the Hans Hofmann School, where she held a monitorship — Hofmann's teaching assistant tier. Co-founded The Tiger's Eye and Broadside. Married the painter Robert De Niro Sr.; their son is the actor Robert De Niro. That fact has swallowed her biography in every headline — "Robert De Niro's mother" — which is exactly why this painting matters. MoMA bought one of her paintings in 1942 for $100. Pollock's first MoMA sale didn't come until 1944. Admiral got there first.
The pink ground
Astrazione No. 1 is 1941 — the year before the MoMA sale, the year American abstraction was still deciding what it was. The thick pink ground is almost bodily; the scraped lines are like writing or etching; the fine brushwork decorates and disturbs. There's no composition to solve, only a field to move in. Hofmann's influence is there in the push-pull — but the surface is hers, worked and reworked, the pink glowing through the scratches like skin under a tattoo.
Guggenheim gave it to SFMOMA in 1966, and that provenance isn't neutral. Guggenheim knew Admiral through the New York scene; the gift carried the weight of the Art of This Century years, when Guggenheim was the patron who mattered most to Pollock, to Baziotes, to the whole generation Admiral belonged to.
The poet-publisher
Admiral didn't stop at painting. She was a poet and an independent publisher, and that life kept intersecting with the one SFMOMA's Floor 2 is also telling: she co-published Epitaph with the poet Robert Duncan. Duncan, of course, is the other half of Jess — the painter whose The Cast of Dice (Part 39 of this series) hangs not far away. Admiral → Duncan → Jess: a line connecting two generations of Bay Area poetry and art, drawn through one woman's publishing life.
Epitaph is dated 1938 in Admiral's memoir, not 1928 as some records have it. She told the story of the title fight: "He wanted to call it Ritual; I wanted to call it Epitaph. I won." It reads like a joke but it isn't — it's a portrait of a woman who held her ground in rooms full of men who'd already decided her story. She won the title. She sold to MoMA before Pollock. The pink ground of 1941 was already an argument about who got to be an abstract painter.
So here's the thesis: Astrazione No. 1 is the painting of a woman who arrived first and was remembered second — scraped pink ground, 1941, MoMA purchase in 1942, before Pollock, published Epitaph with Robert Duncan, and the world filed her under her son's name. She won the title argument with Duncan: "He wanted to call it Ritual; I wanted to call it Epitaph. I won." She should have won the other argument too — the one about whose career counted. The scraped lines in the pink ground are still there, 1941, still arguing. 🌁
Timeline — Virginia Admiral
1915 — born February 4, The Dalles, Oregon
1930s — Art Students League; Hans Hofmann School monitorship
1938 — co-publishes Epitaph with Robert Duncan
1941 — paints Astrazione No. 1
1942 — MoMA buys a painting for $100, before Pollock's first sale
1966 — Peggy Guggenheim gifts Astrazione No. 1 to SFMOMA
2000 — dies July 27, New York, age 85