Women in Visual Arts Archives – Page 2 of 13

Alma Thomas: 1891-1978

September 22, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born on September 22, 1891, in Columbus, Georgia, Alma Woodsey Thomas grew up in a family that encouraged education and appreciation of literature and the arts. In 1907, the family moved to Washington D.C., partly due to the Atlanta race riots, but also because Washington had better education and employment opportunities for African Americans than most other cities at the time. That same year, Thomas enrolled at Armstrong Manual Training High School where she excelled at math, and was exposed to the visual arts.

Thomas attended Miner Normal School (today, the University of the District of Columbia) in 1911 studying kindergarten education. She received her teaching certificate in 1913 after which she taught for four years at Thomas Garrett Settlement House in Wilmington Delaware. Thomas returned to Washington in 1921 to study home economics at Howard University. Initially intending to pursue a career as a costume designer, she switched her studies to the newly created Fine Arts department and in 1924, became the first graduate of the program.

In 1925, Thomas began working as an art instructor at Shaw Junior High School in Washington D.C. – a career which she would remain at for 35 years. With a desire to cultivate appreciation for art in young people, Thomas organized the School Arts League based at Shaw as well as organizing the school’s first art gallery.

Between 1930 and 1934, Thomas earned her masters degree in Fine Arts Education from the teachers college at Columbia University. In 1943, she was vice-president of the Barnett Aden Gallery – the first private gallery to welcome art created by artists of any race, colour, or creed. While there, Thomas was able to increase her awareness of art trends and directions. As well, she was involved with the Little Paris Studio where artists met and worked together, improving their skills, exchanging critiques, and holding exhibitions.

Thomas initially painted realistic images but moved toward abstract painting in 1950, when at the age of 59, she returned to school, taking art classes at the American University. She studied with Robert Gates, Ben Summerford, and well-known painter Jacob Kainen with whom she became close friends. A passion for learning, Thomas continued her evening and weekend classes for ten years. During that time, her painting evolved from realism to cubism, abstract impressionism, and finally her own style of abstract art.

In 1960, Thomas retired from teaching to focus exclusively on her art. Her primary inspirations were her observations of nature and the abstract patterns of light created when shining through flowers and plants. Her paintings reflected this with their bold colours and short jagged brush strokes.

Thomas’s work began receiving recognition in the late 60s and early 70s. She had solo exhibitions at Howard and Fisk Universities, at the Franz Bader Gallery in Washington, and was included in the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies Program. In 1972, she was the first African American woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

From the 1970s onward, Thomas minimized the number of colours in her paintings and experimented with optical effects. Her brush strokes had the appearance of wedges and commas and created rhythmic patterns that often resembled mosaics. During these last years of her life, Thomas was challenged by arthritis and deteriorating eyesight, but she continued painting, drawing on nature and music for inspiration, up until her last days.

Alma Thomas died on February 24, 1978 in Washington D.C. from complications following surgery. Today, her paintings are on display in major art museums and university galleries across the United States. Her 1966 painting, Resurrection, currently hangs in the White House.

Sources: Alma W. Thomas: A Retrospective of the Paintings, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Daphne Odjig: Painting

September 11, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Award-winning First Nations Canadian artist Daphne Odjig (September 11, 1919 – October 1, 2016) was born and raised on the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve on Manitoulin Island (Lake Huron), Ontario, Canada. As a child, art was a favourite subject and she developed the habit of sketching with her grandfather and father who were both artistic.

In 1942, Odjig moved to Toronto with her sister Winnie where she worked at the John Inglis Munitions, Planters Peanuts and Dr. Ballards dog food factories. Over the next ten years, Odjig taught herself to paint by trial and error. In 1945, she moved to British Columbia and married Paul Somerville, a Mohawk/Metis Second World War veteran she met in Toronto. In 1948, their son Stanley was born.

Odjig continued her art explorations, experimenting in oils on homemade stretchers and recycled tent canvas. Influenced by Canadian painter Cornelius Krieghoff, she painted naturalistic landscapes. In 1950, Odjig discovered the work of Picasso and began experimenting with Cubism and Abstract Expressionism.

In 1958, Odjig and her family purchased a thirty-acre farm at Columbia Valley, British Columbia with a plan to grow strawberries. Despite her husband’s death in 1960, Odjig planted the crop as planned and continued to farm in the summer, focusing on painting in the winter months. In 1961, Odjig began a period of intense artistic experimentation. She learned by copying works in books borrowed from the library and by visits to the Vancouver Art Gallery to study painting techniques up close. Influenced by the Impressionists, Odjig experimented with light effects, broken brush strokes and Cloisonnism.

In 1967, Odjig had her first public solo exhibition at the Lakehead Art Centre in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The exhibition consisted of seventy-eight drawings, pastels and acrylics. By 1971, Odjig had moved to Winnipeg with her second husband Chester Beavon, where she opened a small craft store and taught at Manitou Art Foundation on Schreiber Island.

In 1973, Odjig co-founded the Professional Indian Artists Inc. (the Indian Group of Seven), a group of professional aboriginal artists who came together to promote their work and change the way the western art world looked at native art. In that same year, she was commissioned by the Royal Ontario Museum to create From Mother Earth Flows the River of Life for the Canadian Indian Art’74 exhibition.

“Odjig has a unique Native style blended with a modern graphic approach. Influenced by Northwest Coast art during her time in British Columbia and by the developing Anishinaabe style, her paintings focus on the importance of womanhood and sense of family. Central to her work is the circle, which to the Ojibwa signifies completion and perfection and is symbolic of women.”

Odjig has received numerous awards and honours including the first (and as of November 2009, the only) First Nation woman artist to show at the National Gallery of Canada, the Order of Canada, the Order of British Columbia, seven honorary degrees, the National Aboriginal Achievement Award, the Governor General’s Laureate for Visual and Media Arts, and the Expression Award from the National Film Board of Canada.

Daphne Odjig died on 1 October 2016 in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. For more information, visit DaphneOdjig.com.

Sources: Preview Gallery Guide, Art History Archive, Odjig.com

Grandma Moses – Anna Mary Robertson Moses: 1860-1961

September 7, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

“If I hadn’t taken up painting, I would have raised chickens…it’s all art.” —Grandma Moses

Born on September 7, 1860, Anna Mary Robertson Moses (aka Grandma Moses) was one of the most successful and renowned artists in America and possibly the best-known American artist in Europe. Born in a farming community in Greenwich, New York, Moses had little formal education and left home at the age of 12 to work as a hired girl on a nearby farm. She worked in this capacity until the age of 27 when she married Thomas Salmon Moses, a worker at the farm .

Anna and Thomas invested in a farm in Virginia where they remained for twenty years. During that time, Moses had ten children (five died in infancy). The couple returned to New York in 1905 and settled on a farm in Eagle Bridge. Thomas died in 1927 and Anna remained on the farm until 1936 when she retired and went to live with her daughter.

Moses’ earliest works were in embroidery which she began making in the 1930s. It was not until her late 70s, when arthritis prevented her from continuing with her craft, that she took up painting. A self-taught artist, her first paintings were copies of prints and postcards. Moses soon began painting her own scenes with subject matter based on her memories of the rural countryside and farm life. In 1938, Moses’ paintings were on display at Thomas’s Drugstore, Hoosick Falls, NY when engineer and art collector, Louis J. Caldor discovered them and bought them all.

The following year, Moses’ work was included in an exhibition of “contemporary unknown painters” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1940, Moses had her first successful solo show What a Farmwife Painted at the Galerie St. Etienne. Media and viewers alike were charmed by Moses’ “down-home” personality and the simple realism and nostalgia of her paintings. Her ability to capture optimistic scenes of rural activities such as maple sugaring, soap and candle making, haying, etc., were welcomed by a world recovering from WWII and facing the new threat of the Cold War. Soon, other solo shows followed in the US and abroad and Moses developed a large international following. European critics described her work as “lovable,” “fresh,” “charming,” “adorable” and “full of naive and childlike joy.”

Moses was a prolific painter and created more than one thousand paintings in her lifetime. Her works have been reproduced on holiday greeting cards, tiles, fabrics, and in books. In 1949, President Harry S. Truman presented her with the Women’s National Press Club Trophy Award for outstanding accomplishment in art. In 1951, Moses appeared on the Edward R. Murrow television show See It Now, and in 1952, she published her autobiography Grandma Moses: My Life’s History. In 1953, Moses was on the cover of TIME magazine, and in 1960 on the cover of LIFE magazine celebrating her 100th birthday. Moses also received honorary doctoral degrees from Russell Sage College in 1949, and from the Moore Institute of Art, Science and Industry in 1951.

Anna Mary Robertson (Grandma) Moses died on December 13, 1961 at the age of 101. Of her death, her physician, Dr. Clayton E. Shaw, said “she had died of hardening of the arteries, but the best way to describe the cause of death”, he suggested, was to say “she just wore out.”

Sources: New York Times, Orlando Museum of Art, Galerie St. Etienne

Helen Levitt: 1913-2009

August 31, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Since I’m inarticulate, I express myself with images. —Helen Levitt

Born on August 31, 1913 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York, Helen Levitt was once called (by David Strauss in a 1997 Artforum International article) “the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time.” Perhaps this lack of recognition stems from Levitt’s tendency to be an “intensely private” person who did not seek fame and rarely gave interviews. Perhaps it was because she did not wish to assign “social meaning” to her photographs—a lesson she learned after meeting photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson—that a photograph could “stand up by itself.”

Leaving high school in her senior year, Levitt began working in 1931 for the commercial portrait photographer J. Florian Mitchell, who was known to the family. “I helped in darkroom printing and developing,” she said. “My salary was six bucks a week.” It was during this time that she taught herself photography.

Levitt was influenced by the photographic styles of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn. She met and accompanied Cartier-Bresson on a photographic shoot of the Brooklyn waterfront in 1935 and the following year, bought a second hand Leica, the camera Cartier-Bresson preferred. Between 1938-39, Levitt was mentored by and worked with Walker Evans but she gave more credit to photographer Ben Shahn and his gritty photos of New York of the 1930s.

Levitt found success early on, and in July 1939, her work was published in Fortune magazine. In 1940, her Halloween photograph was included in the inaugural exhibition at Museum of Modern Art as part of its new photography section. In 1943, Levitt had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children March 10-April 18).

In a rare interview in 2001 for NPR, Levitt talked about her street photography: “It was a very good neighbourhood for taking pictures in those days, because that was before television, there was a lot happening. And then the older people would sometimes be sitting out on the stoops because of the heat. They didn’t have air conditioning in those days. It was, don’t forget, in the late ’30s. So those neighbourhoods were very active.” (listen to/read the interview)

Levitt also worked in film and spent most of her time from 1949-59 as a full-time film editor and director. Notably, during this period, she worked on two documentary films, In the Street with friend and painter Janice Loeb and the writer James Agee, and The Quiet One (1948). The Quiet One writers, Sidney Meyers, Loeb, and Levitt, were nominated for the Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Academy Award. The film was also nominated for Best Documentary Feature. The National Board of Review named it the second best film of 1949. Levitt continued working in film making for almost twenty-five years.

When Levitt returned to photography in 1959, she was among the first photographers to work in colour. She received Guggenheim fellowships in 1959 and 1960 for these projects. Sadly, a great deal of Levitt’s early colour work was stolen from her New York apartment in the late 1960s.

Comprehensive surveys of Levitt’s work were held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1980 and at the Laurence Miller Gallery in 1987. However, it was not until 1991 that she gained significant recognition when the first national retrospective of her work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was held. The exhibition showed at other major museums including the International Center for Photography, New York (1997), and the Centre National la Photographie, Paris (2001). In 2007, Helen Levitt: Un Art de l’accident poetique, opened at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. In 2008, Levitt was the recipient of the Spectrum International Photography Prize which included a major retrospective at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany. Also in the fall of 2008, a major retrospective was held at FOAM Museum in Amsterdam. In that same year, Levitt received the Francis Greenburger award for excellence in the arts.

On March 29, 2009, Helen Levitt died in her sleep at the age of 95.

James Agee (1909-1955), a good friend of Levitt, wrote “Helen Levitt’s photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body, as a book, seem to me to combine into a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and in a gentle and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.“

Sources: New York Times, NPR, Artsy, Lawrence Miller Gallery

5 Random Art Facts: XXIV

August 9, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

1. The De Stijl Art Movement was a Dutch movement founded in 1917 in Amsterdam. Originally a publication, De Stijl (meaning “style” in Dutch), was created by two pioneers of abstract art, Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. The magazine De Stijl became a vehicle for Mondrian’s ideas on art, and in a series of articles in the first year’s issues he defined his aims and used, perhaps for the first time, the term neo-plasticism. This became the name for the type of abstract art that he and the De Stijl circle practiced. Proponents of De Stijl advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour. They simplified visual compositions to vertical and horizontal, using only black, white and primary colours. The movement had a profound influence on the development both of abstract art and modern architecture and design.

Other members of the group included Bart van der Leck, Vantongerloo and Vordemberge-Gildewart, as well as the architects Gerrit Rietveld and JJP Oud. Mondrian withdrew from De Stijl in 1923 following Van Doesburg’s adoption of diagonal elements in his work. Van Doesburg continued the publication until 1931. (Tate)

2. Wabi-Sabi is a term used to describe a type of Japanese aesthetics and has been associated with Zen Buddhism as it exemplifies many of Zen’s core spiritual and philosophical tenets. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Emerging in the 15th century in Japan as a reaction to the prevailing aesthetic of lavishness, ornamentation, and rich materials, wabi-sabi is the art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in earthiness, of revering authenticity above all. An example of this can be seen in certain styles of Japanese pottery. In the Japanese tea ceremony, the pottery items used are often rustic and simple-looking. Hagi ware pottery for example have shapes that are not quite symmetrical, and colours or textures that appear to emphasize an unrefined or simple style. Other examples of wabi-sabi include Honkyoku (traditional shakuhachi music of wandering Zen monks), Ikebana (the art of flower arrangement), Japanese gardens, Zen and bonsai (tray) gardens and Japanese poetry. (Wikipedia, Utne Reader)

3. Women and the Arts: In 1976, at the peak of her career, Georgia O’Keeffe refused to lend her work to a pivotal exhibition in Los Angeles, Women Artists: 1550 to 1950. It was one of a wave of all-female shows that decade — some 150 — to spotlight artists largely ignored by major museums and galleries. But O’Keeffe, the most famous female artist of her day, saw herself in a different category — “one of the best painters,” period.

The feminist art historian Linda Nochlin borrowed an O’Keeffe painting elsewhere and put her in the show anyway. Yet despite these exhibitions, neither O’Keeffe nor any other woman would break into Janson’s History of Art, the leading textbook, until 1987, and equality remained elusive. (New York Times)

4. The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh was painted in June 1889, one year before his death. It depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence where he voluntarily admitted himself after the self-mutilation of his ear. The painting is a combination of van Gogh’s direct observations as well as his imagination, memories, and emotions. The steeple of the church, for example, resembles those common in his native Holland, rather than those in France. The whirling forms in the sky, on the other hand, match published astronomical observations of clouds of dust and gas known as nebulae. (Moma, Wikipedia)

5. Fluxus – Founded in 1960 by Lithuanian/American artist George Maciunas, Fluxus was a small international network of artists and composers who challenged accepted ideas about what art is. Rooted in experimental music, it was named after a magazine which featured the work of musicians and artists centred around avant-garde composer John Cage.

Almost every avant-garde artist of the time took part in Fluxus, including Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Alice Hutchins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Benjamin Patterson and Emmett Williams.

Fluxus had no single unifying style. Its artists used a range of media and processes adopting a ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude to creative activity, often staging random performances and using whatever materials were at hand to make art. Seeing themselves as an alternative to academic art and music, Fluxus was a democratic form of creativity open to anyone. Collaborations were encouraged between artists and across art forms, and also with the audience or spectator. It valued simplicity and anti-commercialism, with chance and humour playing a big part in the creation of works. The fluxus network still continues today. (Tate)

Beatrix Potter: 1866-1943

July 28, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born on July 28, 1866 in South Kensington in London, England, Beatrix Potter is best known for her illustrated children’s books. She was an author, illustrator, mycologist, farmer, and conservationist. Potter came from a wealthy family and although her father was a barrister, he devoted much of his time to his passions of art and photography. He and Beatrix’s mother Helen were socially active associating with many writers, artists, and politicians.

Potter had a lonely childhood and was educated at home by a governess. By the age of eight, she was filling sketchbooks with drawings of animals and plants and her artistic endeavors were encouraged, especially by her father.

In her teens, Potter spent most of her time studying, and painting and sketching. “Although she got her Art Student’s Certificate for drawing, Beatrix reached the age of 21 having had little real education. Like many adult daughters of the rich, she was appointed ‘household supervisor’ – a role that left her with enough time to indulge her interest in the natural sciences.”

In her 20s, Potter developed into a talented naturalist, made studies of plants and animals at the Cromwell Road museums, and learned how to draw with her eye to a microscope. She began to focus more on drawing and painting and began to earn a small income from her illustrations. She had also begun to write illustrated letters to the children of her former governess, Annie Moore. Peter Rabbit was born in a letter she wrote in September 1893 to Annie’s son, Noel.

Six publishers rejected “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” before Potter decided to publish her own edition of the story. Having seen the edition, publisher Frederick Warne decided to publish Peter Rabbit, and within a year had to produce six editions to meet demand. “This success marked the start of a life-long relationship between Beatrix and Warne who proposed marriage in 1905. ” Although she accepted him – defying her parents, who saw that being a ‘trade’, a publisher was an unthinkable match for their daughter – Norman unexpectedly died less than a month later of a blood disorder.”

Potter continued writing and produced one or two new books each year for the next eight years. In 1909, she met and befriended a local solicitor, William Heelis. After a period of having to battle her parents’ objections to her relationship Beatrix married William in 1913.

After her marriage, Potter dedicated herself to the role of lady farmer and became an expert in breeding Herdwick sheep. From 1920, and due to failing eyesight, Potter did less and less creative work and her books had to be pieced together from sketches and drawings done years earlier. Her last major work, “The Tale of Little Pig Robinson”, was published in 1930.

In the final part of her life, Potter concentrated on her other passion – conservation which was inspired by her friendship with Canon Rawnsley, one of the founder members of the National Trust. “Her expanding estate, funded by revenue from book sales, gave her the opportunity to fulfil an ambition to preserve not only part of the Lake District’s unique landscape but the area’s traditional farming methods.”

Beatrix Potter died on December 22, 1943. She left 14 farms and over 4,000 acres to the National Trust, land that it still owns and protects against development today.

She wrote and illustrated a total of 28 books, including the 23 Tales, the ‘little books’ that have been translated into more than 35 languages and have sold over 100 million copies. Her stories have been retold in various formats including a ballet, films, and in animation.

Sources: V&A Museum, BibliOdyssey

Beatrix Potter’s love of animals may have meant that she would have appreciated this little pair of owls.

Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother

May 26, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born on May 26, 1895, Dorothea Lange was an influential American documentary photographer best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration. Lange’s photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography.

One of the most iconic photographs of the Depression and in American history is Lange’s Migrant Mother, photographed in 1936 in Nipomo, California at a campsite of out-of-work pea pickers. Lange approached one of the pickers, Florence Owens Thompson (1903 – 1983) and her seven children and asked to take their photo.

“I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that (she and her children) had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.” –Dorothea Lange

During this period, known as the Dust Bowl, severe dust storms greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the US and Canadian prairies. Poverty stricken families like Florence’s, were common. “Their poverty was total; they had nothing. Where is her husband, the children’s father? She is on her own. There is no help, no protection, and nothing over the horizon but work, want and more wandering. Her worried, vacant expression seems to communicate what we, at our end of history, already know: Things were not going to get better for a long, long time.” (PBS)

For over forty years, the identity of the woman in the photo remained unknown. In 1978, Emmett Corrigan, a reporter from the Modesto Bee tracked down Florence in a trailer park outside Modesto, California. She was 75 at the time. “Lange had promised Thompson that her name would never be published — Thompson wanted to spare her children the embarrassment — but once she was discovered, she revealed her name and told her story.” A letter Thompson wrote was published in The Modesto Bee and the Associated Press distributed a story headlined “Woman Fighting Mad Over Famous Depression Photo” Florence was quoted as saying “I wish she (Lange) hadn’t taken my picture. I can’t get a penny out of it. She didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.“

Migrant Mother catapulted Dorothea Lange’s reputation and helped earn her a Guggenheim fellowship for achievement in photography. She was funded by the federal government when the photograph was taken, so the image was in the public domain. Lange never directly received any royalties. In 1941, Lange gave up her Guggenheim Fellowship to document the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority.

In 1945, Lange accepted a position as faculty at the first fine art photography department at the California School of Fine Arts. In 1952, she co-founded the photographic magazine Aperture with a consortium of photographers including Ansel Adams. Lange and Pirkle Jones were commissioned in the mid-1950s to shoot a photographic documentary for Life magazine of the death of Monticello, California and of the displacement of its residents by the damming of Putah Creek to form Lake Berryessa. Life did not run the piece, however an entire issue of Aperture was devoted to the work. The photo collection was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1960.

Dorothea Lange died of esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965, in San Francisco, California, at age 70.

Sources: PBS, Wikipedia, C-SPAN

Read Florence Owens Thompson’s story on PBS.
Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning premiered on PBS’s American Masters in August 2014. The full episode is available here (USA only)

DAF Group Feature: Vol. 152

April 19, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Your Weekly Mixx – Enjoy! DAF’s Weekly Mixx is a selection of nine contemporary artworks and/or art related videos chosen from artist and gallery submissions and from our own search for new and interesting works. Visit the Submissions page for information on how to have your art featured in the Weekly Mixx.

Elaine Fried de Kooning: 1918-1989

March 12, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Born on March 12, 1918 (or 1920) in Brooklyn, New York, Elaine Marie Catherine Fried de Kooning was a painter, sculptor, draughtswoman, printmaker, writer, and wife of influential artist Willem de Kooning.

De Kooning studied in New York at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School, the American Art School, the Academy School, and with Willem de Kooning. She was interested in both figurative and abstract art, acknowledging the influence of her husband and of the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School.

Elaine met Willem de Kooning in 1938 and the couple married in 1943. They had a turbulent marriage, separating in 1956 and reconciling in 1975. Though they benefited from one another’s art and teaching, they also suffered from each other’s infidelities and struggles with alcoholism.

During the 1940s, de Kooning painted portraits of her family, her husband, and many of her literary friends and fellow artists, including the poets Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg and the choreographer Merce Cunningham.

De Kooning had her first solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1952 and exhibited almost annually thereafter throughout the United States, including shows at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1964.

In 1962, de Kooning was commissioned by the White House to paint the portrait of President John F. Kennedy. The portrait is one of de Kooning’s most well known and celebrated paintings. Following his assassination in 1963, de Kooning stopped painting for a year and took a teaching appointment at the University of California, Davis.

In the 1970s, de Kooning taught at numerous colleges including Yale University, Pratt Institute, University of Pennsylvania, and Rice University, and others.

While de Kooning, like the “action” painters of the time, used gestural brushstrokes, most her work was figurative and representational, and rarely pure abstraction. An avid traveler, “she was exposed to and inspired by a wide variety of art work that helped make her one of the more diverse artists from the Abstract Expressionist movement; she experimented with sculpture, etchings and subject matter inspired by cave drawings, all in addition to her wealth of painting, which included everything from watercolors and still lifes to abstractions and formal portraits.”

De Kooning’s works are in the collections of numerous major American museums, including the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, and the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York.

Elaine de Kooning died of lung cancer on February 1, 1989. Willem de Kooning, suffering from dementia at the time, was never told of his wife’s death.

Sources: Crown Point Press, The Art Story

Cedar Lake: Imaginative & Inpsired Works by Canadian Artists & Artisans – Shop Canadian & Save!

International Women’s Day 2016 – Women in the Visual Arts

March 8, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

In honour of International Women’s Day this year, we bring you a visual selection of women artists that have appeared on Daily Art Fixx over the last seven years. Enjoy! Click on an image to open the gallery.

Emily Carr