Anna A. Hills: California Impressionist

Anna Althea Hills

Anna Althea Hills was a renowned plein-air artist, community activist, and a key founder of the Laguna Art Museum. Hills was a six-term president of the Laguna Beach Art Association and is best-known for her work as a California Impressionist, specializing in landscape, marine, genre, and figure painting. 

Anna A. Hills was born in Ravenna, Ohio on January 28, 1882, daughter of a minister. Due to her father's occupation as a Presbyterian minister, the family lived in a number of locations during her childhood. Hills lost her mother in 1886 when she was just four years old, and her father remarried several years later. In 1898, Hills attended Olivet College in Michigan where she took painting and drawing classes. She went on to study at the School of the AIC (Art Institute of Chicago), and Cooper Union in New York where, in 1905, she won awards for her watercolor and oil painting and in 1906, for her still life work. She received her diploma in 1908 and culminated her art training abroad between the years 1908-1913 at the Academie Julian, Paris. 

Hills returned to the United States in 1914 and settled in Los Angeles. As she began to visit and sketch in Laguna Beach, surrounded by its scenic beauty, she decided to move there to pursue her art career. Hills taught painting, helped to organize the Laguna Beach Art Association and helped to found a new gallery which opened in 1929. 

Anna A. Hills
Sunshine & Shadow, 
1915
Oil on board,
7 x 10 inches
Orange County Park, California
Private Collection

Hills' early landscapes were created using the darker atmospheric Barbizon tradition, but once in Southern California's light and varied landscape, in addition to her exposure to contemporaries Edgar Payne and George Brandriff, she embraced a lighter palette while abandoning her brushes for the palette knife. Coastal scenes from Laguna to Carmel including trees were among her favorite themes. She also loved the desert, staying in such locations as Banning and Hemet. Physically energetic, and despite a severe spinal injury, Hills took ruggedly adventurous trips into remote mountain areas to sketch. 

Anna A. Hills
Springtime, Banning, California
1916
Oil on paperboard,
10 x 14 inches
Private Collection, shown by the Irvine Museum

Anna A. Hills
The Lone Palm 
1918
Andreas Canyon
Oil on board
10 x 7 inches
Private Collection

Anna A. Hills
The Spell of the Sea
Laguna Beach near Moss Point
1920
30 x 39
Oil on Canvas
Private Collection

Hills won the Bronze Medal at the Panama-California Exposition, San Diego in 1915; the Bronze Medal at the California State Fair, 1919; and the Landscape Prize at the Laguna Beach Art Association, 1922 and 1923. Anna A. Hills died at age 48 on June 19th, 1930. 

Anna A. Hills exhibited widely including with the San Francisco Art Association, the California Art Club, the Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Diego, the Laguna Beach Art Association, and the California State Fair in Sacramento. Her solo shows included the Kanst Galleries in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Museum of Art and California State University, Long Beach. Her works are often featured in shows curated by the Irvine Museum, Irvine, California.

Sources

The Eclectic Light Company, Into the Light, Anna Hills and California Light, https://eclecticlight.co/2016/06/18/into-the-light-anna-hills-and-california-light/ retrieved December 11, 2017.

An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West, Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1998, p. 142. 

Independent Spirits, Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1995, ppg 66, 68.

Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery Monthly, Anna Althea Hills, 1880-1930, http://www.bodegabayheritagegallery.com/Hills_Anna.htm, retrieved December 11, 2017.

                                                   

Waldine Tauch: American Sculptress

Waldine Amanda Tauch at work

The Tauch Family. Standing: Emma (left) and Waldine
Courtesy Fayette Heritage Museum & Archives

Waldine Amanda Tauch was born on January 28, 1892, in Schulenberg, Texas, the second of three children of William and Elizabeth (Heimann) Tauch. Her father, the mayor of Fayetteville, a farmer and photographer, recognized and encouraged her emerging artistic abilities by giving her photographs to draw. At age seven she began to sculpt, initially modeling in clay, and later carving soap, wood, chalk, and stone. When she was 13, while living in Brady, Texas, she carved a figure from butter for the McCulloch County Fair. Brady Tuesday Club president Maggie Miller Henderson convinced local rising sculptor Pompeo L. Coppini to take Waldine as his pupil, and in 1910, just two weeks shy of graduating from high school, she began her studies with Coppini in San Antonio. When funds for her education were exhausted, Coppini taught her without tuition and he and his wife welcomed her as a foster daughter in their home. 

Pompeo Luigi Coppini
May 19, 1870-September 26, 1957
b. Moglia, Mantua, Italy

Under the influence of Coppini, a staunch advocate of classical sculpture, Tauch developed a naturalistic style, He condemned abstract art as "an irritation to the eye and an insult to the mind!" By 1911 she had secured her first public commission, a bas-relief (low-relief sculpture) commemorating Mrs. I. J. Rice, for the Brownwood Library. More commissions followed, primarily for portrait busts. Tauch determined that she wanted to sculpt heroic public monuments and Coppini initially opposed her decision, arguing that a small woman would not have the strength to complete the larger-than-life-sized works, an issue that faces all women who sculpt large-scale works.

From 1918 to 1922 Tauch worked with Coppini in his Chicago studio, where she assisted him with various projects and completed a life-sized marble high relief commemorating her early patron, Maggie Miller Henderson (1919), which was placed over Henderson's grave in Richmond, Kentucky. Tauch returned to San Antonio for a short time but, in 1922, moved to New York to help Coppini's wife recover from an injury and to assist him in his work on the Littlefield Fountain for the University of Texas at Austin.

During the following twelve years in New York City, Tauch completed a number of major sculptures, including her first commission for a large work, the Indiana War Memorial (1926) in Bedford, Indiana. While in New York she began producing small genre figures that were reproduced for the mass market by the Gorham Company. Small statuettes such as Surfboard (ca. 1924), Gulf Breeze (1929), and Boy and Eel (1924), all of which celebrated the nude figure, revealed a more romantic, personal, vision than the sober commemorative works that occupied most of her time. 

Waldine Amanda Tauch
Turbulent Youth
Bronze Bookends
1940

Tauch returned to San Antonio in 1935 in order to compete for commissions inspired by the Texas Centennial celebration (1936). She was awarded the commission to carve The First Shot Fired For Texas Independence (1935), a life-sized bronze bas-relief set in granite seven miles southwest of Gonzales, near the site of the battle of Gonzales. She also completed Centennial memorials to Moses Austin (1937–38) in San Antonio and Isaac and Frances C. Lipscomb Van Zandt (1938) in Canton. In 1936 Tauch and Coppini built a studio at 115 Melrose Place, San Antonio. Their sharing the costs of the studio indicated a move away from their mentor-protege's relationship to a partnership. Tauch remained in San Antonio for the rest of her career, completing works for patrons throughout Texas and in New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Oklahoma. 

Waldine Amanda Tauch
Douglas MacArthur
Bronze
ca. 1969
Douglas MacArthur Academy of Freedom
Affiliated with Howard Payne University

Her best-known works are Douglas MacArthur, an eight-foot bronze statue at Howard Payne University, Brownwood; Higher Education Reflects Responsibility to the World (1965), a heroic-sized bronze at Trinity University, San Antonio; Texas Ranger of Today (1960), an eight-foot bronze statue at the Union Terminal in Dallas; and Pippa Passes, a bronze, life-sized high relief at Baylor University, in Waco, Texas.

Waldine Amanda Tauch
Pippa Passes
Bronze
ca 1956
Baylor University, Waco, Texas

In addition to sculpting, Tauch traveled throughout the state promoting traditional art in lectures to various clubs and organizations. In 1939 she began teaching, initially at the San Antonio Art Academy and later in her own studio. She taught at Trinity University from 1943 to 1945, when Coppini was head of the art department there. In 1945 Coppini and Tauch founded the Academy of Fine Arts, a club dedicated to traditional art styles and techniques. Members met regularly for discussion and exhibited their work in museums and galleries throughout the state. The organization was later renamed Coppini Academy of Fine Arts and was sponsored by Tauch after her mentor's death in 1957. 

Coppini Academy of Fine Arts
1926-Present
San Antonio, Texas

Tauch was active in a number of other organizations, including the Society of Medalists, the Southern States Art League, the Artists Professional League, the National Society of Arts and Letters, Artists and Craftsmen, the San Antonio Art League, and the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. In 1941 she was awarded an honorary doctorate of fine arts degree by Howard Payne College, and in 1964 she was elected a fellow of the National Sculpture Society of New York City. The Texas Senate awarded her a Recognition Certificate in 1969 for her contribution to the cultural and artistic life of Texas and the nation. In 1971 Alpha Delta Kappa, an honorary society for women educators, named Tauch Woman of Distinction. She continued to sculpt into her eighties, when her eyesight began to fail. 

Comanche Indian bas-relief figure, once a fountain
Waldine Tauch
Commerce Street Bridge, San Antonio, Texas

Waldine Tauch died in San Antonio on March 31, 1986, and was buried at Sunset Memorial Park in the plot where the Coppinis are buried. Many of her sculptures are on view at her former studio, which now houses workshops, classes, and exhibitions sponsored by the Coppini Academy of Fine Arts. Tauch, who was a fellow of both the National Sculpture society and the American Academy of Arts and Letters is also represented in many public collections, among them the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon; the MacArthur Memorial Foundation, Norfolk, Virginia; the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and the Witte Museum, San Antonio.

Here is a link to a video for more information on the life of Waldine Amanda Tauch. 

https://vimeo.com/184717184

Sources

__________________________________________________________________

Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick, An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1998, p. 298.

Texas State Historical Association, Waldine Amanda Tauch, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fta36, published in partnership with University of Texas at Austin, retrieved September 19, 2017.

Pompeo Coppini, From Dawn to Sunset (San Antonio: Naylor, 1949). Coppini-Tauch Papers, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Dallas Morning News, April 3, 1986. 

Patricia D. Hendricks and Becky D. Reese, A Century of Sculpture in Texas, 1889–1989 (Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas at Austin, 1989). Alice Hutson, From Chalk to Bronze: A Biography of Waldine Tauch (Austin: Shoal Creek, 1978).

Vimeo, Waldine Tauch Documentary, https://vimeo.com/184717184, retrieved September 20, 2017.

Ethel Magafan: American Muralist and Painter of Abstract Western Landscapes

Jenne (left) and Ethel (right) Magafan
ca. n.d.

Ethel Magafan and her sister Jenne were identical twins, born in Chicago, Illinois in 1915 to Petros Magafan, a Greek immigrant father and Julia (Bronick) their Polish mother. Due to their father's health concerns, the family moved to Colorado, where the landscape reminded Petros of his native village in Greece. The family lived in Colorado Springs and then in Denver from 1931-1934. The twins both wanted to become artists and were supported by both teachers and family members. Unfortunately, Petros died suddenly in 1932, a tragic loss for both of the girls. 

The twins attended East High School in Denver, where they found a mentor in their art teacher Helen Perry. She had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and her background made her uniquely qualified to help the girls in their pursuit of an art career.

 In 1936, Jenne won the Carter Memorial Art Scholarship and shared it with her sister so that they both could attend the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs. Once they ran out of money, Mechau, now teaching there, hired them as assistants. Through their involvement at the Academy, the twins entered into careers as muralists, working at first with Mechau and then with Peppino Mangravite.

From 1937 to 1943, Ethel was commissioned to paint her first of seven government sponsored murals. Located in the US Post Office in Auburn, Nebraska, this commission made Ethel (at age 26) the youngest artist in America to receive such an honor. Denver Art Museum director Donald J. Bear once commented that "[Ethel and Jenne's] study of local detail makes them appear as little Bruegels of ranch genre - natural and unforced."

Ethel Magafan
Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, January 8, 1814
ca. 1943
Mural
Recorder of Deeds Building, Washington, D.C.

Other New Deal Works Progress Adminstration (WPA) murals included the US Senate Chamber, the Recorder Deeds Building, and the Social Security Building in Washington, D.C. which Ethel painted with her sister. One of her earliest submissions to the Treasury Department Section of Fine Arts was a study of The Lawrence Massacre for the Post Office of Fort Scott, Kansas. The subject was a tragic event in the town but was not accepted as a design at the time. Magafan realized that she needed to work with government bureaucracy in order to have her ideas accepted and focused her subjects on local agriculture and industry. She included subtle references that pushed against the limitations of subject matter in her work such as including Black workers depicted in a noble light during a period of segregation in the South for a mural in the Wynne Post Office in Arkansas.

Ethel Magafan
The Cotton Pickers
ca. 1940
Oil on Canvas
Post Office, Wynne, Arkansas

During the World War II era, the sisters would frequently drive across the country together in their station wagon to research and complete art assignments. They were thrifty as they saved gas coupons and used re-treaded tires in order to secure their work.

Ethel Magafan at Palisades Reservoir, Minidoka Project, Idaho.

As mural painting commissions diminished, Ethel began to do more easel painting for which she used a palette knife and tempera paints to great effect. Ethel earned her first solo exhibition in 1940 at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in New York. She and her sister collaborated to create seven joint exhibits during the course of their careers. While working together, yet maintaining their own artistic styles, the sisters were able to avoid the competitive nature of business and respect each other's abilities.

Phil Fitzpatrick, Ethel Magafan, Bruce Currie, Cecile Forman.
Photograph by Adrian Siegel.
Courtesy of WAAM Archives.

After living in Los Angeles, California for five years and briefly in Wyoming, the twins relocated to the art colony at Woodstock, New York in 1945, where the sisters lived and worked apart for the first time. Ethel began working in a style that evolved from the literal to the semi abstract and from figurative studies to landscapes. She met fellow artist Bruce Currie at an artist's party, and the two were married in 1946.

Ethel Magafan
Corralled Horse
ca. 1947
Etching, pencil signed and titled, lower margin
10 x 14 inches

Both sisters were awarded Fullbright Scholarships and Tiffany Foundation Awards which allowed Ethel to go to Greece and Jenne to Italy.In 1952, almost immediately upon their return to the U.S., Jenne died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, a loss that Ethel would mourn deeply. With her sister gone, her landscapes became much more abstract, as she sought out the feeling of the scene rather than an exact representation. She ignored the rules for color and explored simplicity and open space in her work.

Ethel Magafan
Canyon Cascade
Tempera on canvas
96.5 inches highx48.5 inches wide

In 1956, Ethel gave birth to a daughter, Jenne Magafan Currie, named after her sister. During the mid-fifties, Ethel began to make annual trips to Colorado to sketch and find inspiration. She was elected an Academician of the National Academy of Design in 1968 and taught art throughout the 1970s at both the University of Georgia and Syracuse University in New York. Her stature within the art world was solidified in 1971 when the United States Department of Interior requested that Ethel tour and draw sketches throughout the Western U.S. These sketches were later exhibited at the National Gallery in Washington and then sent on a national tour by the Smithsonian Institution.

Ethel's last mural "Grant in the Wilderness" was installed at the Chancellorsville Visitor's Center at the Fredericksburg National Military Park, Virginia, in 1979. From 1962 until her death in 1993, she had an impressive 19 solo gallery shows. Ethel Magafan died at her home in Woodstock from a series of strokes in 1993. In a later Woodstock Times interview, her husband stated "if there was one word for Ethel, it would be warmth, because there was never a person or an animal with a broken wing or broken heart she didn't try to help."

Ethel Magafan
Gibson Dam on the Sun River Project, Montana
ca. n.d.
27 x 53 inches

Ethel Magafan was a member of the American Watercolor Society, Audubon Artists Incorporated, the National Academy of Design, Woodstock Artists Association and the WPA/Federal Arts Project.The recipient of a number of awards including the Fullbright Grant, Tiffany Fellowship, Hallmark and Ranger Awards, Purchase and Altman Prize, the Audubon Artists Medal of Honor and the Childe Hassam Purchase Award. Her work is included, but not limited to collections in the Denver Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Museum of Modern Art, NY, National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., Oklahoma Museum of Art, and the United States Department of the Interior. 

Sources_______________________________________________________________________-

An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West, Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick, University of Texas Press: Austin, 1998, p. 199-200. 

Sullivan Goss, An American Gallery, Ethel Magafan (1916-1993), Alish Patrick, http://www.sullivangoss.com/ethel_Magafan/, retrieved May 8, 2017.

David Cook Galleries, Ethel Magafan Ethel Magafan (1916- 1993) http://davidcookgalleries.com/artist/ethel-magafan, retrieved May 8, 2017.

Ask Art, Ethel (Currie) Magafan, http://www.askart.com/artist/Ethel_Currie_Magafan/20672/Ethel_Currie_Magafan.aspx, retrieved May 8, 2017.

New York Times Obituaries, Ethel Magafan, Dead, Published April 29, 1993,  http://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/29/obituaries/ethel-magafan-dead-landscape-painter-76.html, retrieved May 8, 2017.

Una Hanbury: Sculptress Extraordinaire

Una Hanbury
Lioness and Cubs
ca. 1984
Bronze
Rio Grande Zoo
Albuquerque Public Art Program
Albuquerque, New Mexico

After a long and unintended break from exploring talented women artists in history, let's check out sculptor Una Hanbury (1904-1990). I connect with her because, as I have done, Hanbury had several careers and even lived in Washington, D.C. before she ended up out West...as an artist.

Una Hanbury
Phoenix Rising from Ashes
Bronze
ca. n.d.

Hanbury was born Una Rawnsley in Middlesex, England in 1904, and grew up primarily in Kent County, UK. Her grandfather was Hardwicke Rawnsley, a Church of England clergyman, poet, hymn writer, local politician, and conservationist. He was also one of the founders of the National Trust. 

Hanbury exhibited artistic talent when she was quite young and received instruction from animal artist Frank Calderon. When she reached fourteen years old, she attended the London Polytechnic School of Art after which she studied for three years at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Sir Jacob Epstein, an American sculptor who championed many concepts central to the modernist sculpture movement was her most influential teacher. During this period, Hanbury learned the art of stone cutting on the Italian island of Capri.

Una Hanbury married her first husband, Anthony H.R.C. Hanbury, a stockbroker, in 1926, and retired from her art career to raise a family. She later divorced Hanbury, left England with the children at the outbreak of World War II, and settled in Bermuda in 1940. Hanbury relocated to Washington D.C. in 1944 to work for the British Embassy. After the war she became a real estate broker and general contractor until she married again in 1957 to Alan Cotsworth Brown. 

Una Hanbury
Lying Horse Foal
Bronze
ca. n.d.

After some time in Canada, she resumed her artistic endeavors and studied painting at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, Academie Julian, and L'Atelier de Vieux, located in Paris. Her interest in sculpture was stimulated by a piece she created while using her youngest stepdaughter as a model. When she returned to Washington in 1961, she had to address personal and professional issues before exploring sculpture as her medium of choice. 

Beginning in the mid-1960s until 1982 or '83, Hanbury produced an impressive body of work in bronze, cast aluminum, stone, terracotta, and marble. 

Georgia O'Keeffe posing for Una Hanbury
ca. 1967
Unidentified Photographer

Una Hanbury
Bust of Rachel Carson
ca. 1965
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D.C.

Hanbury resumed her sculpting career, completing a number of large-scale commissions for public buildings such as the Medical Examiners Building, Baltimore, and St. Mark's Lutheran Church, Springfield, Virginia. She developed a fine reputation as a portrait sculptor, and commissions included busts of Rachel Carson, Enrico Fermi, Buckminster Fuller, Laura Gilpin, Richard Neutra, Georgia O'Keeffe, Robert Oppenheimer, S. Dillon Ripley, and Andrés Segovia. In addition, animals--particularly horses--were a favorite subject since childhood; sculptures were commissioned by several zoos, and horse portraits often were commissioned by owners. She had solo exhibitions at the Folger Shakespeare Library and National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. in 1971.

Una Hanbury
Circle of Three Lamas
Bronze
ca. 1970
Potomac School, Washington, D.C.

In 1970, Una Hanbury relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she continued working well into old age and became a significant force in the art life of that region. Her western themes included animals, both domestic and wild and Native Americans.

Una Hanbury
Navajo Land
Bronze
ca. n.d.

Hanbury exhibited in shows at the Royal Academy, London; Salon d'Automne, Paris; Religious Art Commission, Washington, D.C.; Mostra d'Arte Moderna, Camaiore, Italy; NAD; National Arts Club, New York; and National Cowboy Hall of Fame, Oklahoma City. Her papers are in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Sources__________________________________________________________________
An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West, Phil Kovinick and Marion Yoshiki-Kovinick, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1998, p. 125.
The Potomac School, https://www.potomacschool.org/about-us/100-plus-years, retrieved March 16, 2017.
Public Art Archive, http://www.publicartarchive.org/work/lioness-and-cubs, retrieved March 16, 2017.