The 31 Women - re. Barbara Poe Levee and my request yesterday

Following information from Paula Thompson, I now know that only one of the 31 Women is still with us in person.  The remaining member of this select and important group is Gretchen (Schoeninger) Corazzo, who celebrated her 100th birthday two weeks ago.

Sadly, painter and collector Barbara (Reis) Poe Levee has died at the age of 91, in the autumn of 2013.  I will post Barbara Poe Levee's biography to coincide with her birthday, in March 2014.

I'd be pleased to hear from anyone who knew Barbara or can tell me anything about her paintings, as I have never seen any of them. Anyone with information can email me - summerlok@btconnect.com  or post a comment below. Thank you.

The 31 Women, the Project So Far - and a request for help.

Summary.
In 2013 I've posted biographies of 25 out of the 31 Women. These have included luminaries such as Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington, the unlikely including Gipsy Rose Lee and the unknown with Gretchen Corazzo and Anne Harvey.

For anyone who has missed the point of the selection, the 31 Women all exhibited their work seventy years ago, at an exhibition in January 1943 at the Art of This Century Gallery in New York. This was the first exhibition dedicated to women artists of the avant-garde. The gallery itself was owned and run by Peggy Guggenheim who, though not an artist herself, was probably the most important one of a group of far-sighted women who collected and promoted modern art during the twentieth century. These included Betty Parsons, Louise Dryer and Aline Meyer Liebman, who was also one of the 31 Women.

Popularity
The most popular of my posts seem to be the following:-
1 Gypsy Rose Lee - She was the first I posted but still... not all the interest is in her artworks!
2 Leonora Carrington - I'm trying to promote Leonora as a British artist, she's woefully under-represented in the UK. 
3 Sonja Sekula - Surprisingly popular considering Sonja's obscurity, although her work is lovely.
4 Xenia Cage - Not so surprised about Xenia, considering the interest in John Cage.
5 Frida Kahlo - I'm just surprised that dear Frida is only number five!

For 2014
My research is almost complete, so there are only another six artists whose biographies will appear here, hopefully to coincide with their birthdays.

Look out for Esphyr Slobodkina, Leonor Fini, Maria Elena Vieira da Silva, Louise Nevelson, Aline Meyer Liebman and Barbara Poe Levee (formerly Barbara Reis).

I hope soon to turn this research into an actual book.

Help needed.
My request for help surrounds the last two artists, Aline Meyer Liebman and Barbara Poe Levee. I don't know either of their birthdays, just that they were born in 1879 and 1922 respectively. Also in the case of Barbara Poe Levee I have no information about her work as an artist or her exhibitions between 1945 and  2002.
Any information would be very welcome.

And a Very Happy 2014 to everyone!

Gretchen Corazzo celebrates her Centenary on 18 December 2013 - She is number twenty-five of the 31 Women

Artist and sculptor Gretchen Schoeninger Corazzo celebrates her one-hundredth birthday on 18 December 2013. Her century is being celebrated by a retrospective exhibition at the Box Factory for the Arts on Broad Street, St. Joseph, Michigan. Gretchen is an American sculptor, photographer, illustrator, collage and assemblage artist, printmaker and a musician.  She is another of those multi-talented women who have been active artists all their lives, yet have somehow managed to evade both fame and notoriety. In her nineties she stopped making the large concrete sculptures which formed her output for some time. As a centenarian she still works daily on a smaller scale with collages.

Born on 18 December 1913 in Ravinia, Illinois, Gretchen’s life has spanned the entirety of twentieth century innovations in American art. She has created sculptures in the same vein as Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina, working with found objects to form abstract constructions, as well as working in cement, clay and plaster.  Although today she is unknown outside her home state, she was involved with the wider avant-garde from an early stage.  Her husband, painter and architect Alexander Corazzo is hardly any better known than Gretchen so her obscurity cannot be blamed on him, unlike for example her friend Xenia Cage, who was conveniently ignored in the creation of the John Cage myth.

Gretchen’s talents were encouraged throughout her childhood. Her mother, Hester B. Hall was a schoolteacher and her father Joseph Schoeninger was an entrepreneur specialising in printing processes. Her parents wanted an unrestrictive education for their offspring and were quite prepared to move to a new area to put the children into a more progressive school, the family relocated several times. In 1922 Gretcehen and her siblings boarded at the Heidehoff Schule near Stuttgart in Southern Germany, whilst their father negotiated the bringing of the advanced rotogravure printing process from Germany to the States. This was a shrewd investment. The rotogravure process would become widely used in the newspaper and publishing industry and is still used today, printing everything from glossy magazines to vinyl floor coverings.

Anne Harvey, the 31 Women Number twenty-four, Her Birthday is in November

Anne Harvey was a painter and illustrator, her birthday is in November but I don’t know which day, only that she was born in 1916 and died only 51 years later, in 1967. Marcel Duchamp was a fan, he wanted to arrange a posthumous exhibition of her work, but he too died before this was possible. She is so little known that until now I was unable to find a photograph of her, but this one is from the Met Museum archives. This article on Anne Harvey replaces my earlier, incomplete version.

Anne Harvey, photo by Brancusi

Anne Harvey would be regarded as a European artist, except for the fact that she was born in Chicago in November 1916. She is also not so much a forgotten artist as an artist who was never really known, even though her work was admired by some of the masters of twentieth century art, including Henri Matisse and sculptor Constantin Brancusi. She painted a remarkable portrait of Brancusi when she was only eighteen and this is the only work of hers to have received much acknowledgement outside her immediate circle. Even though you might think you’ve heard of an artist named Anne Harvey, it’s probably not this Anne Harvey, which is a shame. As a painter she was both talented and original.

 Anne was born into a wealthy, educated and unconventional family, she and her brother Jason were sent to progressive schools in the USA. Harry Harvey, their father was an advertising executive and author. He wrote a biography of Debussy, which was published in 1948. Their mother, Dorothy Dudley Harvey was a writer and poet and one of the four famous Dudley sisters, she published a biography of American novelist Theodore Dreisner in 1932.   

Jacqueline Lamba: the 31 Women number twenty-three - her Birthday is 17 November

Jaqueline Lamba (Breton) born Paris 1910 -died 1993 -  French painter

Surrealist godfather Andre Breton became obsessed with Jacqueline Lamba on their first meeting. She was his muse and he wrote obsessively about her in L’Amour Fou – a surrealist record of their momentous first meeting on 29 May 1934. Jacqueline, an orphan, was apparently earning her living as a swimmer in an aquatic burlesque show – however she was no guttersnipe. She spent her early childhood in Egypt where her father, Jose Lamba was an agricultural engineer.  He died in a car accident when Jacqueline was only four and his wife, Jane Pinon returned to France with her daughters Huguette and Jacqueline.

Jacqueline Lamba

Jacqueline was sent to boarding schools in Neuilly and then Versailles, though times were not always easy as her mother died of TB. She studied at l’Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs, with photographer Dora Maar, who remained a close friend.  Maar later photographed Lamba, Breton and other Surrealists whilst holidaying with Picasso in the mid 30’s. Jacqueline moved up to the Beaux-Arts where her tutor was cubist André Lhote.

While Breton always maintained that his first meeting with Jacqueline Lamba was chance/fate, this was typical of how he wished to see the world. Lamba was already a politicised woman, rebellious against conventional social and political attitudes. Attracted by Breton’s writing, she was interested in both his politics and his art. The dice of chance leading to their meeting was heavily weighted in her favour by her own prior knowledge, assisted by friends. Thus she was subverting Breton’s romantic ideal of the fateful chance encounter, while he was oblivious to any other interpretation of the event.

Jacqueline became involved in the surrealist dream in which her creativity became immersed, almost drowned, for a number of years. She experimented with automatism and began painting surreal dream-scapes.  Her work appeared in surrealist exhibitions between 1934 and 1948, but like the other women associated with surrealism, her art was not taken very seriously. However she created imaginative and very sophisticated surrealist drawings, collages and objects which were greeted with enthusiasm by the men and exhibited alongside their work.

'Wild Abandon' by Joe Dunthorne - book review

The main characters in Joe Dunthorne's second novel are teenager Kate and her 11 year old brother Albert. Their father, Don is the patriarch of the commune at Blaen-y-Llyn and thinks it's all about him. He's wrong of course, but patriarchs generally are.

Kate drops out of the commune to go to school, her sights set on Cambridge, via a sojourn in the suburbs with a boyfriend who ultimately proves boring. Albert is furious at his sister's desertion and prepares for the coming apocalypse, which nobody else believes in, not even his faithful little acolyte Isaac. Freya, their mother, decides to leave Don and goes to live alone in the woods, in a geodesic dome abandoned by Patrick. 

Patrick and Janet are the only other founder members of the commune still there... they are not a couple... The newer arrivals, known as the wwoofers, are few in number; they come and go and are generally lacking commitment, never mind finance. Patrick is the oldest communard, but he drops out too after an excess of hand-crafted substances. This probably seals the commune's fate as, unbeknown to everyone except Don, Patrick has been funding Blaen-y-Llyn for years.

I've tried writing about people living in a commune and they always turn out more dysfunctional than I expected. I can't say that Joe Dunthorne had the same problem with this book, because his cast in Wild Abandon are obviously intended to be dysfunctional from the start. I just wonder if anyone has ever written a novel about a functional commune.
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Anyway, Wild Abandon is full of funny set pieces and apt descriptions. It's engagingly written and a very entertaining read. I absolutely loved the (maybe) apocalyptic and certainly orgiastic ending. This would make a great film, provided no Americans get their hands on it - they don't know where Wales is.

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http://joedunthorne.com/index.php?/project/wild-abandon/

Milena Pavlović Barili; the 31 Women number twenty-two - her Birthday is 5 November

Yugoslavian painter, poet, graphic artist, theatre designer, born in Pozarevac,05/11/1909 - died in New York, 03/06/1945.

Milena in Spanish costume

Milena Pavlović Barili was one of the European artists who moved to the USA during the Second World War. She was talented, imaginative and committed to her painting, sometimes to the point of obsession. Despite constant travelling, she produced 400 known works in a career of only eighteen years, while also working as a designer for Vogue, Harpers and other up market magazines. Although her exhibited work was often well received, she never became popular in her lifetime and her associations within the art community are not well documented.  However she can’t be accurately described as a forgotten artist; she is remembered and well loved in her home country, Serbia, where a museum is dedicated to her art.


Milena was an only child born in Pozarevac, Yugoslavia. She was an aristocrat of sorts, a distant cousin of King Peter II of Yugoslavia though her parents were not hugely wealthy. She actually spent part of her childhood in the royal palace in Belgrade, where her mother Danica worked.  Danica was a pianist and music teacher, her Italian husband, Milena's father was composer Bruno Barili, from Parma in Italy. Milena's parents seldom lived together. Bruno was an influential businessman and intellectual, a music critic, poet and founder of the literary journal, La Ronda. Music played a major part in Milena’s life, her friends were musicians and Milena herself received some training as a singer, though she never sang professionally.