Remembering Jo Baer (1929–2025)

“The paintings are alive. They’re alive because they change if you walk. The white has this banding on it—it glows in a way that is more than just reflected light. I discovered that I could make portals of it. I could make a light that drags you in.”
—Jo Baer

Jo Baer. Memorial for an Art World Body (Nevermore). 2009. Oil on unstretched canvas

For the past 50 years, Jo Baer was an expatriate American artist, having left New York City shortly after a well-received survey show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975. In her mid-forties, she willingly traded the excitement of the Downtown art scene for the seclusion of a home and studio in an Irish castle; she settled permanently in Amsterdam about a decade later. When she died there last month at age 95, it was as an artist who had become newly visible, and vital, to scores of artists who were not yet born when she emerged in the 1960s as one of the most intrepid and fearless artists of her generation.

Baer’s departure from the US for Europe was not merely a matter of location: it brought, stunningly, an absolute turnaround in Baer’s artistic approach. The before and after were cleanly divided between paintings that were resolutely abstract—devoid of any narrative other than the phenomena of perception and awareness—and paintings that were radically figurative. The paintings’ stylistic distance perfectly paralleled the artist’s geographic distance from the mainstream.

MoMA’s 2009 painting by Baer, titled Memorial for an Art World Body (Nevermore), is an imagined commemoration that takes on new poignancy now that she really is gone. It is a self-portrait for which, Baer explained, she “‘took back’ images made of her by other artists” and set them within a complex iconography taking her from birth to eventual death. MoMA acquired the painting in 2018—our first from her years abroad—and the following year, Baer made a generous gift of nine studies involved in the elaborate process of its making.

Baer refuted the conventional narrative we furnish for an artist. What follows does not have to appear to build on what came before. One’s visual language is not a life sentence. Reactions from the market, the press, or museums—positive or negative—are not necessarily the marker of an artwork’s lasting power or an artist’s importance.

Now looking as strong as ever, Baer’s work offers inspiration to anyone seeking their own way to chart a lifelong path.
—Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture

Jo Baer. Double-Bar, Grey (Green Line). 1968. Oil on canvas

There are artists who, for me, suggest a way of imagining a world without constraint, hinting at how we all might find unexpected suggestions of the stars and the cosmos within the mundane symbols that overly determine who we are and how we move in the world. Jo Baer, across her shapeshifting lifetime of work, offered up just these kinds of possibilities, hinting at spectrums rather than binaries. Her early “Sex Symbol” works on paper, currently on view at MoMA in Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, are small-scale but highly potent meditations on how abstraction is a deep source for rethinking the symbols that define our everyday life.

Jo Baer. Juvenile Sex Symbol 4. 1963. Gouache on paper

Jo Baer. Sex Symbol. 1961. Gouache and pencil on paper

The shorthand symbols commonly used to suggest biological sex—the familiar circle with an arrow or a cross—have a history that is just as varied as the myriad strains of abstraction developed over the past century. As a taxonomist wrote in 1962, “The symbols ♂ and ♀ , so widely used in modern biology to distinguish male and female organs or individuals, have a long and complex history, which touches on mythology, astrology, alchemy, paleography, pharmacy, chemistry, heraldry and, as regards their biological application, the schooling and psychology of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–78).”¹ Linnaeus employed planetary signs to note the sexual organs of plants; ♂ (Mars) for male and ♀ (Venus) for female—leading to today’s common usage—as well as ☿ (Mercury) for plants with combined sexual organs.

Jo Baer’s Sex Symbol series concisely distills the ways in which these signs are both arbitrary and overloaded with meaning. In these gouache-on-paper works, the so-called female symbol is rendered in powdery blue, its circular form variously broken open, doubled, outlined, or filled in with black; Venus and Mercury are intertwined in close company. The symbols are at once anthropomorphic, or perhaps hieroglyphic, and minimal.

In Baer’s hands, this “scientific” symbol is shown to be abstract, endlessly mutable, and open to re-signification—anything but objective. I find her gesture to be a generous invitation to connect earthbound ideas to the realms of stardust.
—Lanka Tattersall, Laurenz Foundation Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints