Don't Fuck With Betty Tompkins

“I was an accidental dissident.”

Betty Tompkins is talking about her rocky beginnings in the New York art world of the early 1970s. Although she may not have set out to become a feminist renegade, her comment comes across as a surprising understatement, given that her entire practice has been a case study in the assertion of free speech—against the pieties of government watchdogs, art-world gatekeepers and factions within the feminist mainstream. And though Tompkins is a prolific artist who continues to push the boundaries of political correctness, her decision to appropriate hardcore pornography as her primary source material resulted in a revolutionary position on one of the most controversial aspects of First Amendment law.

In 1969 Tompkins embarked on a series of photorealist works she audaciously titled Fuck Paintings. Rendered in airbrush on monumental canvases, the paintings portray tightly cropped scenes of intercourse based on her first husband’s collection of explicit photographs. Over five years, she made nine seven-foot-tall canvases that unapologetically depict penetration.

“The porn came with him,” Tompkins says, reflecting on her ex-husband’s contributions. “What I was doing, when I look back on it, was outrageous. A decade before we met, he would see ads for photos in the back of girly magazines. They were about two by three inches.” Because it was then illegal to send pornographic material through the U.S. Postal Service, her husband rented a mailbox in Vancouver, Canada and would drive there from Washington state to procure his clandestine stash. “He had to hide them in the cushions of his car crossing the border,” Tompkins recalls. Although such images are no longer prohibited by law, Tompkins’s compositions still manage to startle. Her Fuck Paintings are simultaneously abstract and figurative: She transformed the graphic punctum of pornographic penetration into portraits of sexual free speech.

Little could she anticipate how these paintings would become flashpoints in the feminist sex wars that would rage throughout the 1970s and 1980s and up to the present. The Fuck Paintings weren’t specifically made to address shifting social attitudes toward sex, but the work was developing in tandem with major political and legal debates around the definition of obscenity. After numerous court rulings led to the progressive relaxation of strictures on sexual speech in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the so-called golden age of porn bloomed—a period often cited as beginning with the 1969 release of Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie and continuing with the widespread distribution of X-rated films such as Deep Throat. Pornography polarized the women’s movement: Feminist discussions about women’s sexual agency, as well as polemics around porn’s supposedly inherent misogyny, divided women into opposing factions.

Tompkins hadn’t set out to take sides with her Fuck Paintings. “At that time,” she recalls, “I was totally unaware of all the prejudices in the art world toward the young and toward women.” The catalyst for her subject matter was her boredom with the art that New York galleries were championing, later fueled by her disgust with the blanket rejections she received from those same galleries when she spoke to them about exhibiting her work. “Nobody even said maybe; it was no! Even the women dealers refused me,” she says, the emotion in her voice rising as she reminisces. “When I questioned them, they all said, ‘We don’t show artists your age.’ Then they would say, ‘Don’t come back at all; we don’t show women.’ It was shocking, and it was also totally liberating.” With nothing left to lose, Tompkins sat in her small bedroom studio and plotted her next move.

Fuck Painting #1 (1969) took shape as she rummaged through her husband’s photography collection. “I started cropping with my fingers, then ripped up pieces of paper to find exactly what I wanted.” She removed the models’ faces, hands and feet, a gesture that sparked her radical breakthrough in a humble space “about five feet wide between my bed and the wall.” Using an airbrush loaded with white and black acrylic to achieve a hyperreal effect, she created her first Fuck Painting: a seven-foot-tall vertical canvas depicting vaginal coitus with the female on top—a fitting position for Tompkins’s prefiguration of sex-positive feminism. The anonymous woman’s ass, offset by dark shadows and some wisps of her partner’s pubic hair, dominates the composition; the man’s spread thighs, scrotum and part of his erect penis take up the bottom half of the canvas. Removing all traces of the couple’s identity, rendering their flesh in gradations of gray, Tompkins bypassed the soft-core tropes of commercial erotica to focus on pointblank phallic penetration. Unfettered by a need to please, she began to explore the provocative iconography that became her signature preoccupation—as yet unaware of how divisive her subject matter would become.

Before Tompkins could even begin to establish herself, censorship waylaid her career. “When I moved to SoHo I was invited to be in a show called A Flash of U.S. Avant Garde: Realism, New Realism, Photo Realism, at the Espace Cardin in Paris. At that point I had been in two group shows in New York City, one at Warren Benedek Gallery and the other at Lo Giudice Gallery,” Tompkins told me during a panel discussion at the Dallas Contemporary museum in 2016. She shipped Fuck Painting #1 and Fuck Painting #5 (1972) to Europe, only to have them impounded at the French border on the grounds that they violated obscenity laws. Instead of basking in what should have been her breakout moment, Tompkins belatedly learned of the seizure. “I received a letter from the curator of the show saying my work had been stopped in customs,” she said in 2016. “I was really upset. I felt totally blindsided by the event.” For about a year Tompkins waged a bureaucratic battle to get her paintings returned to New York. “It felt like a decade in the analog age,” she says.

Although the whole French affair was debilitating, Tompkins didn’t take it passively. She leveraged and transformed the negativity, embarking on her Censored Grid series in 1974. In these drawings, Tompkins revisits the same pornographic motifs as in her previous series, this time meticulously rendered in pencil, pen and ink, often with the “offending” parts obscured by the word censored drawn, written or stamped over the graphic imagery.

“It was a way to keep sane,” she explains. “I was not up on any art history that had to do with censorship, except maybe Courbet’s painting.” (Indeed, the Fuck Paintings are heirs to The Origin of the World, the infamous 19th century oil painting of female genitalia—the ur-work of sexually explicit art in the Western canon.) “Basically what I said was, ‘Oh you think you can censor me? I can do a better job.’ I thought if I censored myself it would have more legitimacy.”

Initially deployed out of frustration, text became a staple of Tompkins’s conceptual tool kit. She would foreground language in much of her later work as a way of reclaiming vile, misogynistic or demeaning terms—most recently in her Women Words series, begun in 2013. In the same manner that she had appropriated pre-existing photography for her Fuck Paintings, Tompkins culled her texts from an archive of more than 3,500 terms for women she had solicited via e-mail. “What was really important with the thousand ‘women words’ on canvas was that none of them could be from me,” she says. “The rule I made was it all had to be given to me.” Painted on backgrounds that range from monochromatic to lace overlays or close-ups of the female body, epithets such as bitch, slut and cunt dominate this anthology of small canvases, as do clichés like ball and chain and the imagistic I’m going to Jackson Pollock all over her face. As the series evolved, Tompkins began to transpose the words onto the female subjects within iconic works by male photographers including Helmut Newton and Richard Avedon.

But Tompkins could not direct her defiance at adversaries she didn’t realize she had.

Around the time her work was facing governmental erasure in Europe, Tompkins was subjected to an even more powerful form of exclusion by women artists in her own backyard. Emboldened by the momentum of the women’s liberation movement, feminist artists groups had mushroomed in New York City. In Tompkins’s SoHo neighborhood, women-run collectives such as AIR Gallery (which is also artist-run) were founded in the early 1970s to provide a platform for women who’d been systematically excluded from the commercial art world—some of them, anyway.

“I saw every show they put up at AIR, but my impression was that you were invited to show. It was like a club,” Tompkins says, remembering the cold shoulder she received from her feminist neighbors.

Unbeknownst to Tompkins, another coterie of feminist artists had banded together in solidarity over their right to make explicit erotic art. The Fight Censorship Group, founded in 1973 by artist Anita Steckel, could have been a game-changing outlet for Tompkins. Its manifesto seemed tailor-made for her iconography and her own struggle against censors: “If the erect penis is not ‘wholesome’ enough to go into museums—it should not be considered ‘wholesome’ enough to go into women. And if the erect penis is ‘wholesome’ enough to go into women, then it is more than ‘wholesome’ enough to go into the greatest art museums.” Yet this bold vindication of phallic imagery would not be extended to Tompkins. While the group decried museums’ puritanical policies and asserted the right of women artists to reclaim this field of sexual representation for themselves, some members opposed commercially produced pornographic material, claiming it was a tool of patriarchal oppression.

“I had used pornographic photographs that I hadn’t taken myself,” Tompkins says. “That was the main objection.”

In the mid-1970s, Tompkins literally rolled up her monumental Fuck Paintings and put them in storage in her loft. She made a living teaching for the next three decades. (A surreal side note: The gender-convention-pushing comedian Joan Rivers was a private oil-painting student of Tompkins in the early 2000s.) Teaching did not stop her from making art: She created a series of paintings on paper based on foundational legal texts such as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights—the word law appears in their backdrops, repeated in all caps like a protest chant. “I’d read an article that posited that students could not identify them on sight. That was shocking. So I painted them.” Reminiscent of fragmented illuminated manuscripts, these pieces play upon Tompkins’s struggle against repression—which dates back to her earliest childhood memories.

Tompkins was born in Washington, D.C. in 1945 and raised in Philadelphia. Her father was head of the local chapter of the left-wing Progressive Party—a controversial association in an age of Cold War paranoia. “My first complete sentence,” she says, “was ‘Do you have a search warrant?’—when I was a toddler with a five-word vocabulary!” The FBI regularly followed Tompkins and her sister to school, during a time when the government was largely anti-liberal. It’s hard not to see these formative experiences as a source of Tompkins’s fortitude in asserting her rights as a citizen, an artist and a woman. She has also cited the way she was raised as a reason for her disinterest in belonging to systems and groups as an adult.

Only at the turn of the 21st century was Tompkins given another opportunity to show in New York—this time on her own terms. In 2002, New York City public school teacher turned renowned gallerist Mitchell Algus finally had the guts to exhibit her full cycle of nine Fuck Paintings. “Jerry Saltz came into the gallery around 2000 or 2001 and handed me a sheet of slides Betty had sent him,” Algus recalls. “I immediately called her.”

Ever the art world tastemaker, Saltz was at that time serving as art critic at The Village Voice. “I used to get a lot of unsolicited slides from artists. I looked at them all. Then came Betty Tompkins’s slides. They sizzled—still,” he says. “I called Betty. She was the real deal, obviously. I remember thinking, This is how free art is! Women are finally getting to tell their stories.” With Saltz’s endorsement and Algus’s commitment to spotlighting artists who’d been hidden in plain sight, the stage was set. Algus recalls of the Fuck Paintings, “The fact that they were rolled up appealed to me.” When asked if he was nervous about debuting them, he says, “They were good paintings, and that was their defense. If that was not the case, it would have fallen flat.”

With critical momentum from Saltz and support from esteemed fellow artists (Robert Gober and Donald Moffett were among the first to buy paintings from the 2002 show), this time around critics paid attention, and the censors were kept at bay—albeit temporarily. The New York Times art critic Holland Cotter declared Tompkins’s belated debut “formidable” in an article entitled “Two Nods to Feminism, Long Snubbed by Curators.”

Artist Marilyn Minter still remembers the breakthrough show. “When I first saw her hardcore images at Mitchell Algus, I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Minter says. “Honestly, my first thought was, Damn, I thought I was the first. But I also thought how much braver she was than me and how much shame must have been thrown at her back in the 1970s. Being officially censored by the government was truly scary stuff.”

Speaking of the art-world backlash both she and Tompkins experienced, Minter continues, “Most art people were so frightened about any women owning sexual agency. It was such a threat to the status quo back then and still today, unfortunately.” Adds Saltz, “The world still fears women picturing dicks and blow jobs.” Nevertheless, Tompkins’s 2002 outing brought in the first of many critical appraisals that would help reinsert her into art history and a larger feminist conversation.

By that time, feminist discourse had become less polarized and more diverse. The anti-pornography wing of American feminism, promulgated by theorist Andrea Dworkin and lawyer Catharine MacKinnon, had lost its stranglehold, allowing for a range of positions on sexual speech in the mainstream and giving credence to more sex-positive feminisms. Despite the high emotional toll, Tompkins’s work prevailed as a commentary on and harbinger of the ferocious political tensions that surround issues of sexuality, sexual free speech and sex work today.

Given this second chance to build her profile, Tompkins wasted no time. After her debut show with Algus, she began a slow but steady climb out of obscurity. As her extraordinary story spread and revisionist art histories began to incorporate her work into the narrative of 20th century art, invitations to show in galleries, museums and biennials arrived in Tompkins’s in-box from around the world. Fuck Painting #1 was acquired by the National Museum of Modern Art at Paris’s Centre Pompidou—a glorious outcome for a work that spent 30 years rolled up under the artist’s pool table. With this new approbation, Tompkins not only returned to making Fuck Paintings, she jubilantly expanded the range of her work, no longer limited to her original trove of miniature porno photos. With the savvy of a millennial, she mined the internet for material and advocated for her work on social media. Like a warrior who has awoken from forced hibernation, Tompkins engaged with new fronts on the battlefield for free speech and gender equity.

Since she joined Instagram in 2015, Tompkins’s postings of her paintings have been regularly taken down—flagged as “inappropriate.” In the spring of 2019, her account was deactivated. After protesting with the help of fellow artists, she got it reinstated, and Instagram invited her to participate in a private roundtable on censorship with other artists and cultural figures.

“As it turned out, I couldn’t be there,” she says. “So I asked if it would be okay to write something that could be read at the panel so it’s on the record.” Tompkins spent two weeks wracking her brain. Instagram, after all, is not a public utility or a public space and therefore not required to uphold the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

“I said to myself, You actually never read their community guidelines. So I read them, and I was simultaneously so fucking angry and laughing so hard that I threw out all my ideas and sat down and wrote a statement.” Tompkins learned that when it comes to nudity, Instagram’s rules allow for certain images such as nursing babies and mastectomy scars. “And, I quote, ‘Nudity in photos of paintings and sculptures is okay too.’ ” After reading that, she wrote a statement for the panel that simply said, “ ‘These are your community guidelines. Follow them. Do better.’ That was my whole statement.”

Still occasionally subjected to deleted posts and account shutdowns (which Instagram attributes to “mistakes” due to high user volume), she hasn’t shied away from holding the platform to its terms of use or publicly calling out its hypocrisies. Tompkins will not be silenced—and similar to her practice in the 1970s, she has immortalized posts deleted by Instagram as the basis of a new series of Censored paintings.

The same timely quest for justice drives Tompkins’s most recent body of work. Under the umbrella title Apologia, Tompkins draws on public mea culpas from some of the most egregious sexual abusers toppled by the #MeToo movement, including press statements by notorious offenders Harvey Weinstein, Les Moonves, Mario Batali, Matt Lauer, Knight Landesman, Louis C.K. and Charlie Rose, among many others. Using her signature Bazooka-pink paint, Tompkins meticulously hand-paints the language geared toward covering up or redeeming bad behavior onto reproductions of famous paintings. In addition to highlighting the falsehoods and rhetorical backpedaling, she transforms familiar works by artists such as Ingres and Degas in the Women Words series by covering the female figures with the toxic language. Or as Tompkins explains, overlaying a woman in an art historical image with these scripts is like “putting her in a shroud: You’re obliterating her, hiding her with words.”

In other Apologia pieces, Tompkins paints over the male figures in historical works by women artists—such as Artemisia Gentileschi’s biblical scene Jael and Sisera (1620). Obscuring the supine figure of the general Sisera, who is about to be murdered by the woman Jael, Tompkins superimposes the words of artist Chuck Close, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by numerous young women: “It’s lies. I haven’t slept in weeks. I’ve been such a supporter of women and women artists. I’ve done nothing wrong and I’m being crucified.”

Tompkins’s textual interventions confront the distortions of history while holding up a mirror to our present-day reckoning with systemic abuses of power. “One day I thought, Art history!” she says. “What I saw was hundreds and hundreds of years of misogyny in the art world coming right up to my face and giving itself to me as a present.”

It’s tempting to interpret the Apologia series as an implicit rebuke to a college professor who, according to Tompkins, once told her, “The only way you’re making it in New York, honey, is on your back.” And though decades separate her most recent word paintings and the pieces that scared off gallerists in the 1970s, they’re united by Tompkins’s will to transform or reclaim forces that seek to silence her. Her example has paved the way for a whole new generation of artists who continue the battle over sexual free speech, expanding on the feminist debates of the 1970s to explore and represent non-heteronormative erotic imaginaries. She may have started out as an accidental dissident, but Tompkins has grown to harness her monumentally defiant spirit.