Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud is completely connected biographically to her life, and what she began to experience as a woman and as an American during the 1970s. In the late 1960s, the Vietnam war continued to rage, woman’s rights became a tipping point once again, and the civil rights movement was in full swing and still in shock after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. As an American woman artist living in New York City, Spero was heavily connected and invested in many of these issues that were present in America at the time. She had produced pieces of art previously that dealt with the issue of the Vietnam War, and which had expressed the extreme consequences and violence that came with it. Another important aspect to this piece was the fact that in 1960 she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. After her works which condemned the Vietnam War, Spero looked to do something more personal, which she was able to complete through her Codex Artaud. Artaud was a French playwright who was masochistic, and known for his extreme language. Spero misdirected Artaud’s masochistic rages towards her own range and anger, which was previously at the American government and their involvement in the war, and made it much more personal and directed at her own inner demons and ventings. As a woman who experienced pain on a daily basis, who had to fight for feminism, and had to fight to be heard as a woman in a male dominated art world, she found solace in Artaud’s writings and made the Codex Artaud, which features his words whilst changing and manipulating them. Artuad was known for his alienating language, and saw himself as an outsider and expressed that in his writings. This was a great parallel for Spero, who also saw herself as an outsider as she was a woman artist, who was anti-Vietnam.
Women in Art History 