America Coast to Coast: Women Artists at Mid Century (Essay)

Edna Reindel (1894 - 1990) Magnolia, c. 1946, oil on canvas, signed lower left, 22 3/4 x 25 3/4 inches

Conventional wisdom suggests women artists during the Great Depression through the immediate post-War years were discounted, minimized or even wholly dismissed. Many incorrectly assume that the ranks of women artists from the period do not extend far beyond Georgia O’Keeffe, and that others did not receive significant recognition. Tales abound of women who adopted pseudonyms or signed their works only with initials in an effort to hide their gender and gain greater acceptance in a world dominated by male establishments. No doubt traditional gender roles, responsibilities, perceptions, and outright discrimination, presented many women artists with challenges not faced by their male peers, but a careful examination suggests a more nuanced story filled with women who achieved significant artistic success and recognition during their lives not only as painters, sculptors and craftspeople, but also as leaders of art organizations, instructors, critics, authors and gallerists. Many were commercially successful in the fine and commercial arts and related fields.

Without diminishing the challenges faced by many women artists, it is important to note that the all-too-familiar acts of erasure of women artists from this period often occurred after their deaths or through the process of art historical canonization, particularly at a time when the type of art produced by both women and men during the New Deal public art programs fell out of favor as Abstract Expressionism came to dominate the American art world during the 1950s. Surprisingly, it is more recent attitudes during the third quarter of the 20th century that resulted in the minimization of the pivotal role that many women artists had in shaping American Art during the 1930s and 1940s.

America Coast to Coast: Women Artists at Mid Century aims to celebrate the lifetime accomplishments of women who were well regarded and begin to remedy the later neglect of their contributions. The continued failure to explore the professional accomplishments of these pioneering women artists would be a great disservice and wrongfully minimize their achievements. Women artists were at the core of artistic production and sponsorship across the United States during the 1930s, 1940s and into the 1950s. Corporate and government sponsored support for the arts during the Great Depression as well as economic and societal shifts during the war years offered women artists expanded opportunities to create, exhibit, and sell their work. The same forces that gave rise to greater opportunities for women in the commercial and industrial sectors (think Rosie the Riveter) also laid the groundwork for an expansion of the ranks of professional women artists.

Opportunities for women to study at the nation’s premier institutions provided a firm foundation for many women artists who came of age during the first third of the 20th century.  Many artists in this exhibition studied at New York’s Art Students League, including Elsie Driggs, Georgina Klitgaard, Kay Swan Works, and Margit Varga. Others such as Jeanette Maxfield Lewis, Edloe Risling, Beryl McCarthy Wynnyk, and Avis Zeidler studied at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts counted Isabel Banks Markell and Constance Coleman Richardson among its alumnae.   Edna Reindel studied at The Pratt Institute, Ethelyn Stewart at The Cooper Union, and Ava Gabriel and Klitgaard studied at Barnard College. Nearly all the women represented in this exhibition had professional training regardless of where they lived. Even Clara McDonald Williamson, who was born in rural Texas in 1875 and was largely self-taught, attended classes in the 1940s at the Dallas Museum of Art where her work attracted the attention of some of the most prominent artists working in her home state. Work study programs, the availability of scholarships and fellowships, and the modest cost of attending certain schools such as the Art Students League facilitated the ability of many financially disadvantaged women to continue their studies. Works was employed at the Art Students League cafeteria to help offset her fees and she also earned two scholarships. On the other side of the country in San Francisco, Zeidler earned a scholarship to the California School of Fine Arts. Reindel was the recipient of two Tiffany Fellowships and Klitgaard won a Guggenheim Fellowship. The connections many of these women made while in art school or through fellowships were significant for their personal lives and professional prospects and reputations, including the ability to join arts organizations that proliferated across the country.

The rosters of art associations, such as the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, where Ethel Dean and Helen F. Price were members, the Texas Fine Arts Association, where Frances Skinner was a member, and the Woodstock Art Association, where Klitgaard was a member, included many women artists. They were not only members but assumed important leadership positions. Lois Wilde Hartshorne who is represented in the exhibition by the oil Judy and Rita on Porch at Afton was President of the Minneapolis Artists Union. Helen F. Price, who’s widely exhibited work The Highway Derelict is included in the exhibition, held various executive positions and was a director of the Allied Artists of Johnstown. Texas artist Lucie Harris Locke was Chair of the Corpus Christi Art Foundation and President of the Texas Fine Arts Association. Works, who is represented in the exhibition by the beautifully jewel-toned Excavation, was the youngest member of the Board of Control of the Art Students League and she later became President of the Marin Society of Artists. Vanessa Helder served as Vice President of the California Watercolor Society.

Artistic production by women was also supported during this period by the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors (commonly referred to as the National Association of Women Artists or “NAWA”) which actively promoted the works of many of the artists represented in this exhibition. Ethelyn Stewart exhibited Wind Flowers in a Tzu Chow Vase in the 1935 iteration of NAWA’s annual exhibition in New York. During the middle portion of the 20th century hundreds of women artists exhibited with NAWA including Lewis, Markell, Skinner, Ada Gabriel, and Florence Walton Pomeroy. NAWA exhibitions were often reviewed favorably by newspapers and art magazines during the 1930s and 1940s, bringing nationwide attention to the organization and its members.

Arguably the greatest empowerment of women artists in the first half of the 20th century came from the New Deal art projects, including the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Treasury Department Section of Fine Arts (the Section). Driggs, Klitgaard, Reindel, Works, Zeidler, and Helen Lundeberg were all on the government’s payroll working on public murals during the 1930s or early 1940s. Except for Zeidler, all these women were commissioned as the lead artists for public works murals. Locke also was awarded commissions for murals outside the public works programs. In addition to sponsoring murals, various agencies led by the FAP hired painters, sculptors, printmakers, designers, and craftspeople to create smaller, more human scale works. Tens of thousands of paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, posters, and textiles were completed for these programs and many of the artists were women. Beryl Wynnyk worked in the FAP sculpture program in San Francisco, the only women working mainly in hammered copper. Gordena Parker Jackson was employed by the FAP’s Index of American Design, where she produced dozens of precisely rendered watercolors of historic references.  Jesse Justin Herron was appointed the sculpture supervisor for the FAP in Los Angeles. Driggs was among the first artists hired to work for the PWAP. Reindel painted for the FAP’s easel painting section and the ranks of women artists working alongside her and in the print and graphic art sections are extensive.

New Deal public works projects provided opportunities for underprivileged and often untrained women to work in the visual arts, sometimes working in media traditionally gendered as female, such as textile design and production. The most prominent of these programs was the Milwaukee Handicraft Project (MHP) which served as a model for many other similar projects across the United States. Designed with the dual goals of providing work for disadvantaged women and the creation of well-designed and crafted household objects, the MHP began in 1935 under the direction of Elsa Ulbricht, an art professor at the Milwaukee State Teachers College. The MHP produced a wide array of handmade objects, including dolls, toys, clothing, furniture, books and textiles, all using inexpensive materials which could be crafted by women who were trained by the Project. The workforce was multiracial and integrated. The MHP’s textile designs by Professor Ulbricht, Barbara Warren, and other yet to be identified artists are among the Project’s most noteworthy accomplishments. The designs were created from hand-carved and inked linoleum blocks applied to linen using a similar process to woodblock printing that for many centuries had been employed by fine art practitioners. Applied Design Blockprinted Textiles Volume VI Supplement which is included in this exhibition is a prime example of how the WPA helped bring together traditional fine and decorative art practices, a concept which gained traction in the United States several decades earlier during the Arts & Crafts Movement. The WPA also supported decorative arts projects in other states which produced textiles, including in Iowa and Tennessee, where Musical Abstraction (Untitled) was created. This unique weaving is among the best textiles from this period to come to market.

Museums across the country took note of the outstanding work produced by women artists in the fine and decorative arts. Juries routinely included their work in local, regional and national exhibitions. More than a dozen of the works in American Coast to Coast: Women Artists at Mid Century were exhibited during the artist’s lifetime at premier institutions across the United States, including the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Carnegie Institute, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the McNay Art Institute, the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, and the Butler Art Institute. Many of the other works in the exhibition were created by women who exhibited at these and similar prestigious institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art (e.g. Vanessa Helder’s inclusion in the seminal 1943 exhibition American Realists and Magic Realists). From the decorative arts field, Stewart’s innovative textiles for lamp shades and other domestic objects were exhibited at the National Academy of Design and Agnes Thorley’s wallpaper designs were shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1940, soon after she won the $1,000 first prize at the United Wallpaper Association’s national competition, a truly handsome sum during the Great Depression. Many other artists in the exhibition were awarded prizes in their respective fields. In fact, almost every woman in this show, including Hartshorne, Markell, Skinner, Price, Klitgaard, Lundeberg, Wynnyk, Williamson, and Elizabeth Chase, won significant juried awards.

Significant commercial galleries represented many of the women in this exhibition. In New York, the Charles Daniel Gallery, Rehn Gallery, Milch Galleries, Kennedy Gallery, MacBeth Gallery, and Midtown Galleries included Driggs, Klitgaard, Reindel, Richardson, Williamson, and Helder among their artists. Not only was Varga represented by Midtown Galleries, but earlier in her career she founded and operated her own Greenwich Village venue, The Painters and Sculptors Gallery. On the West Coast, Gelber-Lilienthal Gallery, Gump’s Art Gallery, Stanley Rose Gallery, and Felix Landau Gallery represented Lewis, Jackson, and Lundeberg. Still others, including Reindel who is represented in the exhibition by the significant painting Magnolia, were able to combine their fine art with commercial practices for magazine and advertising design to provide financial support for themselves and their families. Magnolia was part of a series of twelve paintings commissioned by the John Morell Company. Reindel frequently received commercial commissions, including from House Beautiful and Life magazines.

Museums and commercial galleries offered many of the women in this exhibition solo exhibitions. The Associated Artists of Pittsburgh honored Dean with a solo exhibition in 1939.  Lunderberg had a one woman show at the Pasadena Art Institute in 1953, where Fruit and Leaves was exhibited. Gabriel, Hartshorne, Jackson, Klitgaard, Lewis, Lundeberg, Price, Reindel, Richardson, Risling, Varga, and Williamson, all had lifetime solo exhibitions at galleries and institutions as diverse as New York’s Allison Gallery, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Art Museum. The artists in this exhibition were frequently well received by critics across the nation, including Chicago’s C. J. Builet and Los Angeles’ Arthur Millier, who championed Ethel Sharp’s painting.  Several of the artists in America Coast to Coast: Women at Mid Century were themselves art critics and writers. Locke, Varga, and Price worked professionally as art writers, with Varga ultimately becoming the Art Editor of Life magazine at a time when it was one of the most widely read periodicals in the United States.

America Coast to Coast: Women Artists at Mid Century is wide-ranging in terms of media, geography and styles demonstrating the breadth of work produced be this extraordinary group of creators.  Paintings include oils, watercolors, and mixed media. Bronze sculptures, hammered copper plaques, WPA-era weavings and block-printed textiles all reflect the continued influence of craft traditions well into the 20th century. Artists in this exhibition hail from all parts of the United States from California to New York and Minnesota to Texas. The show includes Magic Realist works and a Bauhaus-influenced non-objective work by little-known, but talented, Veino (Vienna) Panttaja Leeman. Modernist works include rare oils by New Jersey’s Driggs and California’s Constance Draper Seely Still among others. A real strength of this exhibition is the American Scene. Particularly strong examples of folk influences on Regionalism include a trio of paintings by New York’s Klitgaard and an extraordinary oil on Masonite, Dinner at May’s Boarding House, by Williamson. The richness, diversity, and quality of the works in America Coast to Coast: Women Artists at Mid Century is a worthy testament to the creative output of this remarkable group of women.