Untitled (1966): Judy Chicago’s Lipstick Sculpture

In 1966, Judy Chicago made a series of three sculptures, each consisting of a group of circular columns ranging in height from three to nine inches. Formal variations between the three Untitled works reveal a playful oscillation between minimal, feminine, and phallic forms. In one variation, the shapes read as abstract cylindrical forms; in a second, the top edges of the columns are beveled diagonally replicating the shape of lipsticks; and in the third, the tall, slender columns are arranged to appear like phallic towers of a cityscape. The following year, Chicago — then still known by her married name Judy Gerowitz — created the large room installation Ten Part Cylinder, basing it on the abstract, minimal version of Untitled. Maurice Tuchman, curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, included Ten Part Cylinder in American Sculpture of the Sixties (1967), one of the central exhibitions that canonized Minimal art. While Ten Part Cylinder has been recognized as a major work of Chicago’s Minimal phase, its small counterparts have been absent from scholarship. I only recently discovered photographs of the three untitled works in the archive of the Rolf Nelson Gallery at the Getty Research Institute. Have these works been lost because their sexually allusive subject matter was not appropriate for a female artist working under patriarchy? This paper recovers the three untitled works within the gendered discourses of Pop and Minimal art, providing insights into Chicago’s strategies to cope with a male-dominated art world.