Judy Chicago: Revelations review

Serpentine North Gallery, London
Best known for her 70s Dinner Table homage to heroic women, the American artist moves centre stage at last in a show of variously blazing, bold, crude, generous work inspired by female subjugation and power

Fierce but gentle, blatant yet often graceful: Judy Chicago’s six-decade survey at the Serpentine North Gallery is not at all as expected. This is partly because of everything that this show omits. There are no death masks, bloody menstrual pads or caustic needlework. There are no gathered-lace vulvas standing in for the mind and art of Emily Dickinson.

Chicago’s most celebrated work – exhibit A in feminist art of the 70s, and once described by Roberta Smith in the New York Times as “almost as much a part of American culture as Norman Rockwell, Walt Disney, WPA murals and the Aids quilt” – cannot be here. The Dinner Party (1979), that vast triangular table, with place settings for 39 great women, above floor tiles citing 999 more, is now too fragile to move from the Brooklyn Museum.