The last week before Christmas and while we scramble to get the final orders in the post, here on the Persephone Post: Christmas paintings to soothe the spirit. This is The Annunciation by Fra Angelico, it's at St Marco in Florence. Some of us, including the writer of the Post, first saw this when they were 18 and it must have influenced their sense of colour and form forever. The composition, and the pink especially, are miraculously beautiful.

'A different show, conceived in anger rather than resignation, might have leveraged the limitations [of not enough space etc], offering a keyhole view into a vaster world. This one makes do.' Oh dear, we know all too well about tokenism (is that a word?). On the other hand, the Whitney has tried, and here is their 'editorial' about the exhibition. And better to have the exhibition, albeit too small, than not have it at all. This is Lee Krasner's Still Life, 1938.

'The usual doses of indifference, condescension and critical hostility were all increased for female applicants to the avant-garde boys' club. And so they banded together to battle prejudice and carve out room to manoeuvre. ..Now the Whitney honours [their] resourcefulness in the same way MOMA did in 2017 with Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction – by not making nearly enough space.' This is Perle Fine's Sub-Marine 1948.

Although it is marvellous that the Whitney (in New York) has an exhibition of women abstract painters, the Financial Times is very critical of the limited scope of the display: While pleased about the museum arguing that women contributed more to the history of abstract art than has been generally acknowledged, the paper's Ariella Budick calls the exhibition 'tiny and misleading... Even as Jasper Johns manspreads across multiple floors of the Whitney, Women and Abstraction is stuffed into a leftover wedge of real estate between the auditorium and the education centre.' Figures in a Yellow Room (1946) was painted by Anne Ryan.

This week on the Post: women and abstract art. We don't want anyone to think we are fuddy-duddy and although, it is true, we prefer representational paintings, we cannot ignore the extraordinary women painters represented in an exhibition at the Witney in New York called Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction 1930-50. Here for example is  the stunning 'Untitled' 1942 by Charmion von Wiegand.