Gladys Caldwell Fisher: Sculptor and Animalier

I'm continually surprised at the numbers of female artists I discover whose names are virtually unknown beyond their local fame. That is my motivation-their work is beautiful, professional, and deserves to be re-visited so....



Gladys Caldwell Fisher
American Indian Orpheus and the Animals
ca 1934
Stone Relief
Denver City and County Building
Denver, Colorado

Born in Loveland, Colorado, Gladys Caldwell Fisher's family moved to Denver in 1917 when she was eleven years old. Gladys had an interest in sculpture from the time she was a child. While she attended Manual and East High Schools from 1921-1925, she joined the Beaux Arts Atelier, Denver at the suggestion of local, professional artists. After her third year at the atelier, she received a scholarship from the Denver Allied Arts in 1926, allowing her to study sculpture for a year at the American School of Architecture in New York under Alexander Archipenko. Afterward, she spent a summer in sculpture and ceramic classes in Woodstock, New York. She used a second Denver Allied Arts scholarship to study in Paris with Antoine Bourdelle at the Econle de las Grande Chaumiere and also learned under sculptors Jose de Creeft, George Hilbert, and Aristide Maillol.

After she returned to the United States in 1929, Fisher did freelance work in New York and in 1932, returned to Denver. Four years later she married architect Alan Berney Fisher. While raising a family, she continued to pursue her career and she taught art at Denver University and the Denver Art Museum.


Gladys Caldwell Fisher
Model of Boulder Dam
ca 1935
Cast aluminum
19.5 w x 14 d x 7 h inches

Gladys' love of animals was evident throughout her life and she spent quite a bit of time observing them in their natural habitat. Two of her Rocky Mountain sheep sculptures installed in 1936 at the main Denver post office, weighed ten tons each and were carved from limestone. The sculptures were the result of winning a federal competition to produce sculptures for the Denver Post Office. To begin her work, Gladys spent time in Yellowstone observing sheep in their natural habitat.


Gladys Caldwell Fisher

          Rocky Mountain Sheep" and White Ram

ca 1936

      Indiana limestone

        Byron White U.S. Courthouse

Fisher modeled a pair of grizzly bear cubs for the Yellowstone Park post office at Mammoth Hot Springs, a federal commission she completed in 1941. Her depiction of the cubs was somewhat controversial because of her abstracted style which was influenced by her study with Alexander Archipenko. Other subjects of her work included bobcats, fawns and burros.


Gladys Caldwell Fisher
Young Grizzly Bears
ca 1941
Stone
Yellowstone National Park Post Office

Fisher exhibited widely including the Paris Salon, Society of Independent Artists, the Denver Art Museum, Colorado Fine Arts Center, and the Syracuse, New York Museum of Fine Arts. Her work can also be found at the Special Collections Library, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, Denver Art Museum, the Denver Public Library and at the City and County Building in Denver.

Gladys Caldwell Fisher
Sandy and Johnny
ca n.d.
Charcoal
11 1/8 x 10 1/8 inches

Gladys Caldwell Fisher died on April 18, 1952 in Denver, Colorado.

_________________________________________________________________
Sources
An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West, Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick, 1998, pp 93-94
Public Art Archive, Gladys Caldwell Fisher, http://www.publicartarchive.org/work/american-indian-orpheus-and-animals, retrieved January 23, 2015
Peter Hassrick, "Drawn to Yellowstone"
New Deal Art Registry, http://www.newdealartregistry.org/artist/FishergladysCaldwell/, retrieved January 23, 2015
Best of the West Auctions, Gladys Caldwell Fisher, Colorado Springs, CO, retrieved January 23, 2015

Mabel Dodge Luhan: Patron of the Arts, Writer, and Muse of Taos

Mabel Dodge Luhan
1879 – 1962
ca. 1934
Carl van Vechten, Photographer
 

Most of my blog entries have been about specific female artists with a bit of history tossed in to allow for a greater understanding of the particular challenges faced by women, as they strove to create lives of purpose.

Mabel Dodge Luhan was less a visual artist but a writer whose account of her own complex life experiences, including her eventual self-healing in New Mexico, ran to four volumes. She was a force, a unique woman of profound contradictions; mercurial, domineering, generous, and endearing.

Luhan was born Mabel Ganson to society couple Charles Ganson and Sarah Cook. The Gansons lived in a Victorian mansion on Delaware Avenue in Buffalo, New York. Buffalo mirrored the prosperity and power of the growing United States during the Gilded Age. The Gansons, who spent lavishly on their daughter, neglected her emotional needs. Her father had a violent and unpredictable temper and her mother, while decisive and strong, was not warm. Mabel grew up in a family and in a society that placed value on appearances and a lack of purpose... she was raised to charm and groomed to marry. Luhan, however, was a Victorian woman who rejected the constraints and expectations of what a woman was supposed to be. She became a symbol of the "New Woman:" self-determining, emancipated, and publicly opinionated about art, society and politics.

Her first of four marriages at the age of 21 occurred in 1900 when she wed Karl Evans, son of a steamship owner. Mabel and Karl had one son, John. When Karl died in a hunting accident two-and-half years later, he left her a widow at the age of 23. Mabel was sent by her family to Paris because she was having an affair with a prominent Buffalo physician however, just later that year she met and married wealthy architect Edwin Dodge. It was a marriage of convenience for Mabel as she needed financial support and a father figure for her son.

Photo of Mabel and her son John in the Gran Salone,
Villa Curonia, Florence, Italy

The Dodges settled in Florence, Italy at the Villa Curonia in Arcetri, a region in the hills to the south of the city center. Between 1905 and 1912, Mabel entertained local artists, expats and visitors such as Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, Alice B. Toklas, and French author and Nobel Prize winner André Gide. Bored with her life in Florence by 1912 and greatly influenced by Gertrude and Leo Stein's philosophy that the individual could overcome the ill effects of both heredity and environment and create herself anew, Mabel returned to New York.
Mabel Dodge's friend, Bertram D. Wolfe, founder of the American Communist Party and biographer, later recalled: "Wealthy, gracious, open-hearted, beautiful, intellectually curious, and quite without a sense of discrimination, she was Bohemia's most successful lion-hunter." Her apartment in New York City became a salon, a place where intellectuals and artists such John Reed, Lincoln Steffens, Margaret Sanger, Louise Bryant, Emma Goldman, Frances Perkins, Carl Van Vechten and Amy Lowell would meet.


Thornton Wilder Soiree, Mabel Dodge’s Greenwich Village salon
n.d.
Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers

In his book, Autobiography (1931), Lincoln Steffens claimed: "... Mabel Dodge managed her evenings, and no one felt that they were managed. She sat quietly in a great armchair and rarely said a word; her guests did the talking, and with such a variety of guests, her success was amazing."

Dodge was involved with one of the most important exhibitions of the Twentieth Century, the Armory Show of European Modern Art in 1913, and she published in pamphlet from a piece by Gertrude Stein, "Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia" which Dodge distributed at the exhibition. She contributed to The Masses, the leading left-wing literary and political journal of her day; wrote a syndicated newspaper column popularizing Freudian psychology; and supported a host of organizations, among them the Women's Peace Party, the Heterodoxy Club, the Women's Birth Control League, and the Twilight Sleep Association. She also published articles in leading modernist literary and art magazines such as The Dial, and Stieglitz' photographic magazine, Camera Work.

In 1916, Mabel and her third husband, artist and sculptor Maurice Sterne, moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, but found it too confining so they relocated to Taos. The 600-year-old Pueblo culture provided a model of permanence and stability; a total integration of personality achieved through the organic connection of work, play, community, and environment. She soon fell in love with Tony Lujan, a Pueblo Native American. She quickly divorced Sterne and wed Lujan, her fourth and final husband. Mabel viewed their alliance as a bridge between Anglo and Native American cultures but changed the spelling of her last name (Lujan to Luhan) to allow for an easier pronunciation.

Tony Lujan of Taos Pueblo, New Mexico
 ca. 1930
 Ansel Adams

In the 1920s, Luhan wrote her four-volume memoirs: Intimate Memories (1933), Background, European Experiences (1935), Movers and Shakers (1936), and Edge of Taos Desert (1937). She wrote a number of articles on behalf of the integrity of Native American culture, health, and the protection of tribal lands. She remained, as one reporter described her in the early 1920s, "the most peculiar common denominator that society, literature, art, and radical revolutionaries ever found in New York and Europe." In attempting to alter the direction of American civilization, she captured the imaginations of her generation's most talented writers, artists, and thinkers, and profoundly influenced their understanding of modern America.

Mabel Dodge Luhan House
 also known as Big House and St. Teresa House
 Taos, New Mexico
Declared a National Historic Landmark in 1991 

Luhan also wrote Winter in Taos (1935) and Taos and Its Artists (1947), a leading overview of the painters and sculptors from the art colony founders through the modernists of the 1940s. Up through the early 1950s, Mabel continued to produce the occasional newspaper and magazine article, many of which were dedicated to the history and culture of Taos.

Mabel Dodge Luhan, Frieda Lawrence,
and Brett at Kiowa Ranch
  ca. 1938
Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers

Mabel Dodge Lujan died in Taos, New Mexico, on April 18th, 1962.

^{________________________________________________________________________________________
Sources
Taos.org, Look and Book,  Mabel Dodge Luhan, http://taos.org/women/profiles-legends?/item/78/Mabel-Dodge-Luhan, retrieved January 7, 2015.
The Muse of Taos, Stirring Still, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/16/garden/the-muse-of-taos-stirring-still.html, retrieved January 8, 2015
Women Artists of the American West, Susan R. Ressler, ed., McFarland and Publishers, Inc. Philadelphia, p. 85-86.
Spartacus Educational, Mabel Dodge, http://spartacus-educational.com/USAdodge.htm, retrieved January 8, 2014.
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Encyclopedia.com, http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Mabel_Dodge_Luhan.aspx, retrieved January 8, 2015.
New Mexico History.org, Mabel Dodge Luhan, http://newmexicohistory.org/people/mabel-dodge-luhan, retrieved January 8, 2015.}

Annita Delano: Artist and Founding Member of Art Faculty at UCLA

Annita Delano
ca. 1937
Graffito mural 4 x 7 feet
 for Dr. H.F. Ray- Housed in Oxnard, Calif.

"Delano was perhaps the local woman artist most abreast of modernist currents. Delano's modernism informed her teaching, especially her courses on design and architecture. Delano displays an awareness of the centrality of architecture and design, arguably California's greatest contribution to the unfolding of modernism in America." In addition, "Annita Delano was instrumental" in promoting the Blue Four. Delano helped friend Galka Scheyer "present several shows in the late 1920s at the Southern Branch campus of the University of California and through these exhibitions Californians could examine firsthand Feininger's Cubist paintings and Kandinsky's early spiritual abstractions, as well as the late nonobjective Bauhaus compositions."

Annita Delano's impact was felt simultaneously on several fronts: Delano the artist, Delano the art professor at the Southern Branch of the University of California (now the University of California, Los Angeles), and Delano as founder of the art department of UCLA and curator of the University's art museum.

Annita Delano (1894-1979) was born in Hueneme, California, on October 2, 1894. She attended elementary school in Los Angeles and later her family moved to Terra Bella, California, where she graduated from Porterville Union High School in 1914 as her class valedictorian. Delano enrolled in the art program at the Los Angeles Normal School before she began her career as Professor of Art in 1920.

In March 1881, after heavy lobbying by Los Angeles residents, the California State Legislature authorized the creation of a southern branch of the California State Normal School (which later became San Jose State University) in downtown Los Angeles to train teachers for the growing population of Southern California. The State Normal School at Los Angeles opened on August 29, 1882, on what is now the site of the Central Library of the Los Angeles Public Library system. Its curriculum, with a national reputation, included stagecraft, drawing, painting, life drawing, history of art, design, graphic arts, and crafts. In the latter part of the 1920s, the school was represented by an exhibition of student work at an international art conference in Vienna, Austria. Annita represented the Art Department for the University.


Annita Delano
A strip of four portrait photos of Annita Delano as a young woman,
ca. 1915.

Delano received training in art and art history from Columbia University, University of California at Berkeley and the Otis Art Institute, as well as in the studios of noted individual artists such as Dixon Morgan and Norman Bel Geddes. She spent two years conducting research with the Barnes Foundation, which provided a scholarship for a four-month research trip to Europe during 1930-1931. This trip brought her in contact with modern French masters and accelerated her development toward her own personal expression. During this period of research she spent time with Bauhaus faculty as well as with architects Richard Neutra and Josef Albers and the artist Anni Albers.


Annita Delano painting at Gallup, New
Mexico, 1934. Annita Delano papers, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Annita Delano was a founding member of the UCLA Art Department where she taught courses in fine art, art history and applied design. Her own paintings were widely exhibited, as part of group shows and in solo exhibitions of her work. Delano was a key figure in the development of the art world of Southern California and she was a member of a number of organizations including the California Watercolor Society and the Los Angeles Art Association.

Delano’s annual camping and painting trips include 28 summers to Arizona and New Mexico, beginning in the late 1920s. She recalled she would spend three months painting, camping and exploring each summer, living among the Hopi, Navajo, and Zuni Indians. Her artistic works were especially inspired by the landscapes of the Southwest and the Native American peoples of the region. She often attended the annual Intertribal Indian Ceremonial Gathering in Gallup, New Mexico, a large ceremonial gathering that first took place in 1922 and continues to this day.

Annita Delano
Canon Valley Landscape
ca. N.D.
Watercolor
30 x 21 1/4 inches

After her first solo exhibition in San Francisco and Fresno in 1929, Delano had thirty solo shows and participated in numerous exhibitions across the country, most of them in the western region of the United States. She was honored with a prestigious show at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, and an exhibition of work by living artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1940s, at a time when such exhibitions were not customary. After her retirement, Delano continued to paint and held three major exhibitions in California: the Cee Jee Gallery, Los Angeles, the Zara Gallery in San Francisco, and the Santa Monica Gallery, Santa Monica. 

 

Annita Delano
Roaring Green Lion With Chuckling Monkeys
ca. 1950
Watercolor on heavy textured rag paper
28 x 22 inches
 



Annita Delano
Cloud Shadows in The Grand Canyon,
 ca 1955
Oil on Canvas,
50 x 39 inches

Annita Delano spent forty-two years at UCLA, where she taught until she retired in 1962. She was critical to the growth and development of the art department into the professional school of the arts that it is at the University today. She never married and remained an independent woman for her entire life. Delano continued to paint until her death in 1979 at the age of 85.

__________________________________________________________________
Sources
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Research Collections, Image Gallery, Annita Delano, 1937, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/viewer/anita-delano-6314, retrieved December 28, 2014.
Hamilton, Andrew (2004-06-18). "(UC) Los Angeles: Historical Overview". University of California History, Digital Archives (from Berkeley). Retrieved 2006-06-20.
Calisphere, University of California, Annita Delano, Art: Los Angeles, http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb1j49n6pv;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00024&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=calisphere, retrieved December 28, 2014.
Independent Spirits, Woman Painters of the American West, 1890-1945, edited by Patricia Trenton, University of California Press 1995 at page 77. Independent Spirits at page 99.
Artists of the American West, Volume II by Doris Ostrander Dawdy , Sage / Swallow Press, 1981 at 78.  Independent Spirits at page 99.
On the Edge of America, California Modernist Art 1900-1950, edited by Paul J. Karlstrom, University of California Press, 1996 in association with the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.
Karlstrom at page 10. Independent Spirits at page 96 from interview with James V. Mink, 1971, Oral History Program, UCLA.
Independent Spirits at page 80 from interview with Delano's niece.

Mary Huntoon: Artist and Pioneer Art Therapist



Mary Huntoon
1896-1970
unknown photographer,
 Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library,
Topeka, KS, USA

Mary Huntoon was among the most innovative of Topeka's artists. Born Mary Huntoon Atkinson, she was the daughter of Ruth Huntoon Atkinson and Franklin Henry Atkinson and the descendent of prominent Topeka pioneer, Joel Huntoon. Huntoon spent six years of her childhood on the cattle ranch of her grandfather, Fred Huntoon, in Beaver County (No Man's Land), Oklahoma. At age twelve, she was rechristened Mary Huntoon Parsons and adopted by her mother's second husband, Harvey Greely Parsons.

Huntoon was inspired to develop her artistic ability by her stepfather, Harvey Parsons, a cartoonist and columnist in Topeka. Huntoon’s academic training began at Washburn University where she earned her degree in art in 1920. Huntoon studied with internationally-known portraitist and founder of the art school at Washburn, Kansas artist George M. Stone. She continued her studies at The Art Students League in New York, and grew as an artist under instructors Robert Henri, George Bridgman, Frank Vincent Du Mond, and Joseph Pennell. Pennell persuaded her to travel to Paris where she reputedly introduced Stanley Hayter to printmaking techniques. Living in the Latin Quarter for five years, Huntoon sketched the buildings, people, and surrounding city scenes in which she lived. Her works were exhibited in the Salon d’Automne of 1929, as well as at the Salon des Indépendants.  Huntoon's first one-artist show was in Paris at the Galerie Sacre du Printemps in 1929.


Mary Huntoon
Momus
ca 1928
Etching



Mary Huntoon
Along the Paris Quay
ca 1931
Etching
8 1/2 x 11 inches



Mary Huntoon
Tower
ca n.d.
Pencil
 7 x 8.25 inches

Despite these distinguished connections, Huntoon’s gender seemed to be a detriment. Under an assumed name, Huntoon's husband, a former reporter, mocked a reviewer's praise of her work in a letter to the editor of a Paris newspaper. He stated that "No women (sic) has distinguished herself in 5,000 years and it is a little too late to begin to hope." Public outcry at this misogynistic rant prompted record crowds at the exhibition, which was exactly the intended effect.
 Huntoon returned to Topeka in 1934 where she taught at her alma mater, Washburn College. She became state supervisor for the WPA Federal Art Project in Kansas from 1934-1938. In later years, Huntoon directed programs for the Menninger Foundation and later for the Winter Veterans Hospital becoming a pioneer in the field of art therapy from the 1930s through the 1950s. Huntoon carried out research in art therapy while she was employed at Winter V.A. Hospital and wrote several articles on the subject which were published. Huntoon believed in the power of art to heal, and encouraged her patients, whom she called "students," to engage with materials in a studio setting without external disruption. She devoted 16 years of her career to working with psychiatric patients and World War II veterans through art.  

Mary Huntoon
Fishing Shacks Marquette Michigan
ca n.d.
Oil on canvas
18 x 15 inches

Mary Huntoon
Poet's House
ca n.d.
Oil on canvas board
13 x 15 inches

 

Mary Huntoon
They Dreamed of Many Mansions
ca 1947
Etching
8 x 10 3/4 inches

 

Huntoon was married to Charles Hoyt (1920-29), Lester Hull (1933-37), Erwin Seaman (1945-1956) and Willis McEntarfar (1957-70). Mary Huntoon was a female artist with talent in a wide array of media. In addition, she was an art therapist, an author, a director (administrator), educator, lecturer, teacher, and intrepid traveler. She contributed art work to many exhibitions, won numerous awards, and her paintings and etchings are permanently displayed in the Topeka Public Library, Washburn University, the Salina Art Association, the Philadelphia Art Museum, and numerous public buildings across the state of Kansas.  __________________________________________________________________________

Sources:

Bernard O. Stone, "A Historical Review: Mary Huntoon's Far Reaching Influence on the Field of Art Psychotherapy" (unpublished manuscript, Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library files).

Mutual Art, Mary Huntoon, http://www.mutualart.com/Artist/Mary-Huntoon/D7590BBB283DDC24/Artworks, retrieved December 19, 2014.

AskArt, The Artist's Bluebook,  Mary Huntoon, http://www.askart.com/askart/artist.aspx?artist=105829, retrieved December 19, 2014.

Art Therapy: The Journal of Art Therapy, Looking for What's Lost: The Artistic Roots of Art Therapy: Mary Huntoon, Linney Wix, MeD, ATR, Published online: 22 Apr 2011.

Patricia Trenton, Ed., Independent Spirits, Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945, University of California Press, p. 271.

Clara, Database of Women Artists, Mary Huntoon, http://clara.nmwa.org/index.php?g=entity_detail&entity_id=11280.

The University of Kansas Libraries, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, Guide to the Mary Huntoon Collection, Mary Huntoon Papers, 1876-1970, http://etext.ku.edu/view?docId=ksrlead/ksrl.kc.huntoonmarypapers.xml, retrieved December 19, 2014.

Elizabeth Ann Cooper: Seattle Modernist Painter

Elizabeth Ann Cooper
Untitled Cubist Self-Portrait
ca 1930s
Oil on canvas
 Martin-Zambito Fine Art

Elizabeth Ann Cooper was a highly regarded Modernist painter who worked in Seattle during the 1920s and 30s. One of the early members of the Women Painters of Washington organization, Cooper exhibited with WPW. She participated in the Northwest Annuals at the Seattle Art Institute and the Seattle Art Museum as well.

Women Painters of Washington (WPW) began as one of the earliest arts organizations in the Pacific Northwest and remains among the few statewide women’s arts associations in the United States. The group formed in 1930 after several of the prominent regional women artists attended a class conducted in Seattle by the Canadian painter Frederick Horsman Varley (1881-1969). They were dedicated to exploring modern art techniques.  In 1937, the group produced a catalogue booklet that included their biographies and artistic statements, as well as illustrations of their work

Elizabeth Cooper was born in Nottingham, England. She emigrated to the United States and attended the Mark Hopkins Art Institute in San Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute). Cooper moved to Seattle in the early 1920s where she was a student at the University of Washington and studied with Walter Isaacs, Eugenie Worman, and others. 

Elizabeth Ann Cooper
Untitled Still-Life with Flowers
ca 1930s
Oil on canvas
 Martin-Zambito Fine Art

Cooper was a member of the prominent Group of Twelve, Modernist artists in Seattle that included some of the major regional painters of the period such as Morris Graves, Ambrose Patterson, and Kenneth Callahan.  Cooper was inspired by modern movements in art, including the European Post-Impressionists, Cubists, and the German Expressionists. She produced some of the most daring and progressive regional art of the period.

 In her own words:
"Aims: To interpret rather than represent, to achieve good composition, that is, fine arrangement of line, mass and color, irrespective of subject matter or emotional appeal. To stimulate in others, appreciation and understanding of the aims of modern painters, who, by individual technique, endeavor to interpret life and to communicate their aesthetic experience.."



Elizabeth Ann Cooper
Untitled Two Heads
ca 1930s
Oil on canvas
 Martin-Zambito Fine Art

Elizabeth Cooper, like so many female artists, raised two children and balanced family life while creating art. In middle age, she continued to work until her untimely death in 1936. Cooper asserted that "…Art creation is not the exclusive domain of youth. Middle age and old age find in creative art a wellspring of eternal youth. Renoir, in his eighties, did his best work. Art, like mercy, is twice blessed; it blesseth him who gives and him who takes.."

Elizabeth Ann Cooper
San Francisco Street
ca 1930s
Watercolor on paper
 J. Franklin Fine Art, Inc.

_________________________________________________________
Sources
1. An Enduring Legacy,Women Painters of Washington, 1930-2005, Whatcom Museum of History and Art, Bellingham, Washington, University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA, 2005, p. 65.
2. Elizabeth Ann Cooper, 1877-1936, http://www.womenpainters.com/75th/COOPER/Cooper.html, retrieved 12/4/2014.
4. AskArt: The Artist's Bluebook, Elizabeth Ann Cooper, http://www.askart.com/askart/artists/search/inquiry.aspx?artist=5011313&ad=160632&searchtype=ART_FOR_SALE, retrieved 12/4/2014.
5. Women Painters of Washington, http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=7644, retrieved 12/4/2014.

Adelaide Hanscom Leeson: Pictorialist Photographer

Adelaide Marquand Hanscom Leeson
(1876-1932)

Adelaide Hanscom Leeson  was an early 20th-century artist and photographer who published some of the first books using photography to illustrate literary works. Born in Empire City, Oregon, Hanscom was a major figure among West Coast photo-secessionists. She is probably best known for her photographic illustrations of the book, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam published in 1905. It was reprinted in a number of popular editions through 1922, including a color version in 1912.

Hanscom was named after Adelaide Marquand, an early proponent of universal suffrage. Marquand's husband, Henry, was a business associate of Meldon Hanscom (young Adelaide's father), and later publisher of the Berkeley Advocate. Henry was co-editor of the Advocate with his wife, the adult Adelaide, who remained a family friend and an influence on Hanscom for many years thereafter.

Hanscom began creating art when she was a teenager and later studied art and design at the University of California. She began to take photographs while at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art (now the San Francisco Art Institute). Her classmates, Emily Pitchford and Laura Adams, established their own studio, and by working with them, Hanscom expanded what she learned about photography while at school. Adelaide is also known to have spent time with photographer Anne Brigman and is thought to have learned some of her printing techniques from Brigman as well.

By 1900, Hanscom's work was entirely devoted to photography. She opened her own studio in partnership with Blanch Cumming in downtown San Francisco. Hanscom and Cumming produced the first edition of the lavishly illustrated Rubaiyat in 1905. Hanscom heavily manipulated her glass plates to affect a painterly, pictorialist style. Her images in this book are allegorical tableaux, featuring figures in ancient costume, enacting parts of Khayyam's verse. The first edition was printed on at least two different types of tissue, one limp and thin, and the other stiff and parchment-like.  The book was published in at least three smaller sizes, all with halftones, sometimes in color.



Adelaide Hanscom Leeson
Frontis
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
1905
Photogravure

Adelaide Hanscom Leeson
Plate VII
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
1905
Photogravure



Adelaide Hanscom Leeson
Plate XIV
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
1905
Photogravure

Adelaide Hanscom Leeson
Plate XXIII
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
1905
Photogravure

In 1906, the San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed Hanscom's entire studio, including her Rubaiyat negatives and most of her prints. Since the area in San Francisco where she lived and worked was now uninhabitable, she packed her few remaining belongings and moved to Seattle. Hanscom set up a studio with photographer Gertrude Wilson, and for the next five years she did commercial portrait works for prominent families in the area, her photographs appearing in the society pages of Seattle's newspaper.

Adelaide Hanscom Leeson
Logo
1909

In 1907, a contest was held to design the logo for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition  More than 150 of America's best artists and designers competed for the $500 prize and by unanimous vote, the publicity committee selected Hanscom's design as the winner. The logo, in the Arts and Crafts movement style, portrayed three women representing Seattle (right), Alaska (middle) and "the Orient" (left) all extending their hands to each other while holding representations of each area's economic strengths (respectively, railroad commerce, mineral resources and shipping commerce).

Hanscom married British mining engineer and ex-Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer Arthur Gerald Leeson in 1908. Soon after they moved to the area near Douglas, Alaska, for her husband's work on the Treadwell gold mine. They remained there for the next three years, although both Hanscom and her husband made yearly trips to Seattle and other areas outside of Alaska. In 1909 Hanscom spent several months in San Francisco after giving birth to a son, Gerald. During this time, most of her photographic work stopped while she supported her husband and raised their son. In 1911 the family moved to Danville, California, where her husband took up farming. Hanscom was able to set up a darkroom and resume her work. She provided similar Pictorialist style photographs for an edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. The first edition included twenty tipped-in photogravures and was followed by two additional editions due to its popularity.

Adelaide Hanscom Leeson
Sonnets of the Portuguese
1916
Photogravure

Adelaide Hanscom Leeson
Sonnets of the Portuguese
1916
Photogravure

In 1916, her husband, Gerald, enlisted in the Canadian Army in order to fight in World War I. He left for Europe with very little notice and, within a few weeks, he was killed in action. The combination of that loss and her father's death three years later caused Adelaide to fall into a deep depression. She became irrational at times and was in and out of mental institutions. Hanscom never resumed her photographic work, and, as one writer noted, "the remaining sixteen years of her life seem to have been a feckless series of wanderings with her children in tow." She moved briefly to England to be near her dead husband's relatives, but she eventually returned to California and lived with her daughter. In November 1931, Adelaide was killed by a hit-and-run driver while getting off of a trolley in Pasadena, California. For most of the twentieth century, like so many early female artists and photographers, her work was forgotten, but recently she is again being recognized for her  creativity, beauty and grace.

____________________
Sources
Women Artists of the American West, Susan R. Ressler, Ed. p. 313.
The Art of the Photogravure, A Comprehensive Resource Dedicated to the Photogravure, http://www.photogravure.com/collection/searchResults.php?page=2&portfolio=68&view=small, retrieved November 18, 2014
The J. Paul Getty Museum,

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. With Illustrations from Life Studies by Adelaide Hanscom and Blanche Cumming, http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=65995, retrieved November 18, 2014

Dr. Amy Freeman Lee: Artist, Educator, Experimenter

Amy Freeman Lee
1914-2004

Amy Freeman Lee lived in San Antonio, Texas, nearly her entire life. Freeman was a well-known and beloved Texas writer, artist, and lecturer. She has been represented in 1,253 national and international exhibitions, given 2,960 lectures and authored 255 publications. 

Amy Freeman was born to Julia Freeman and Joe Novich and she spent her early years in Seguin, Texas.  After her mother's death during the 1918 flu pandemic, she was legally adopted by her grandmother, Emma Freeman. In 1929 the family moved to San Antonio to enroll her in St. Mary's Hall from which she graduated in 1931, followed by special studies at the University of Texas in Austin. Lee attended Incarnate Word College in San Antonio and served as an assistant to the head of the English Department during the years of her attendance (1934-1942). Lee was married for several years to Ernest R. Lee an aide to General Dwight D. Eisenhower during World War II, and she worked as an art critic for the San Antonio Press during that time. A Quaker by choice, she described her spiritual convictions as based in the concept of reverence for the unity of life.

After Lee began to paint seriously in 1945, she became staff critic on radio show for station KONO, analyzing music, art, literature, and other cultural activities. From that time until her passing, Lee continued her career as a painter and sculptor, lecturer, judge at art exhibitions, and author.



Amy Freeman Lee
Dark Forest
ca 1949
Oil on canvas
30 x 36 inches

As an artist, Lee's style evolved from traditional realism to various forms of non-objective art (but not abstract expressionism), and she produced watercolors of western scenes during the 1940s and early 1950s. Half of the works shown at her first one-person exhibition in San Antonio were of Texas subjects, among them were paintings done at El Rancho de los Hombres Libres, the family ranch near San Marcos and scenes in and around San Antonio, San Geronimo and Bandera.

Amy Freeman Lee
Twilight Image
ca 1955
12 x 9 inches
Ink on paper

Lee was widely exhibited and collected. Her work was shown from Maine, where she summered for many years, to Monterrey, Mexico, where she developed many lifelong friends. Lee supported literacy efforts and was a champion of the liberal arts. She delivered lectures to groups throughout the nation, sometimes traveling as far as New York or California to share her belief in the importance of art, civility, humane ethics and universal love. Her self-deprecating humor and wit allowed for lively presentations, and she remained among the most popular speakers in the state, even in later years when bouts of illness slowed her in the years prior to her death.

Amy Freeman Lee
Dawn Silence
ca n.d.
Watercolor
11.5 x 17 inches

As a respected artist, art critic, poet writer and philanthropist, Lee numbered many distinguished artists among her close friends, including renowned Texas painter Kelly Fearing and essayist Loren Eisley, whose parable The Star Thrower, Lee often cited in lectures and in her written work. Lee was an early supporter of the Witte Museum in San Antonio and a founder of the San Antonio Art League, later, a founder of the Texas Watercolor Society.

Amy Freeman Lee
Autumn Harps
ca. n.d.
Watercolor
13 x 10 inches

Lee received numerous awards including the Ford Motor Company Lifetime Achievement Award, the J.C. Penney Spirit of the American Woman and the International Women’s Forum’s The Woman Who Made A Difference Award. Lee was a member of the International Art Critics Association in Paris, France, and a charter member of the Advisory Council for the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. She was also a National Trustee and National Secretary of the Humane Society of the United States.

 

Lee's life was spent as an artist in service to the arts, education, and humanitarianism. In thousands of public lectures, she routinely credited her grandmother for instilling in her an abiding commitment to give back to others the gifts she received early in life. Those who were closest to her will never forget her characteristic sign-off: "I'm loving you."

 

Amy Freeman Lee
Private Life of Plants Series: Mystical Geometry
ca n.d.
Mixed media
30.37 x 24.37 inches

Amy Freeman Lee died peacefully, surrounded by close friends, at the age of 89.

___________________________
Sources
An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West, Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick, University of Texas Press, Austin, p.185-186
Texas Women's University, Texas Women's Hall of Fame, http://www.twu.edu/twhf/tw-lee.asp, retrieved October 28, 2014
Images: Artnet, Amy Freeman Lee, http://www.artnet.com/artists/amy-freeman-lee/past-auction-results, retrieved October 28, 2014
AskArt: The Artist's Bluebook, Amy Freeman Lee,  http://www.askart.com/askart/l/amy_freeman_lee/amy_freeman_lee.aspx?GUID=1E6289D3-B98A-4896-85AA-689477277A60, retrieved October 28, 2014