Wednesday 6 June 2012

Irene Rice Pereira



Irene Rice Pereira (August 5, 1902–January 11, 1971) was an American abstract artist, known for her work in the Geometric abstraction, Abstract expressionist, and Lyrical Abstraction genres and her use of the principles of the Bauhaus school.

Pereira was born Irene Rice in 1902 in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, the eldest of three sisters and one brother. After her father died in 1918 she and her family moved to Brooklyn, New York. In 1922 she began working as a secretary to help support her family in the wake of her father's death and her mothers illness. In 1927, she enrolled in evening art classes at the Art Students League in New York City. Among her instructors at the Art Students League were Jan Matulka and Richard Lahey. In 1931, she travelled to Europe and North Africa to further her painting studies and she studied with Amédée Ozenfant in Paris. In the mid-1930s she studied with Hans Hofmann, and among her friends and colleagues were Burgoyne Diller (see blog post April 2012), Dorothy Dehner, David Smith, Hilla Rebay, Arshile Gorky, John D. Graham. and Frederick Kiesler. In 1935, Pereira became one of the founders and first instructors at the Design Laboratory, a school modelled on the Bauhaus school.

Irene Rice Pereira's first husband was the commercial artist Umberto Pereira. She later married George Wellington Brown, a naval architect. When this marriage ended in divorce, she married the Irish poet George Reavey in 1950; that marriage, too, ended in divorce. She used the professional name I. Rice Pereira to avoid discrimination against female artists. She died January 11, 1971, in Marbella, Spain.

The Boca Raton Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), The Phillips Collection, and the University of Iowa Museum of Art are among the public collections holding work by I. Rice Pereira.


1932 Untitled ( Boats at Cape Cod ) 
oil on canvas 40.8 x 50.5 cm

c1934-35 Masts 
oil on canvas 71.1 x 86.4 cm

c1934-35 Pier 
oil on canvas 61 x 76.2 cm

c1934 Table Top Still Life with Champagne Cooler, Horn and Ball 
oil on canvas 101.6 x 76.2 cm 
© Michael Rosenfield Gallery N.Y.

1935-39c Abstract
watercolour, ink and gouache on paper 36.8 x 45.7 cm

1936 Man and Machine 
oil on canvas 92.1 x 122.6 cm

1936 Sketch for Machine Composition #2 
pencil and crayon on paper 44.5 x 57.5 cm

1937 Machine Composition #2 
oil on canvas 122.5 x 152.4 cm

1938 Washington ( aka Surreal City ) 
oil on canvas 76.2 x 91.4 cm 
© Michael Rosenfield Gallery N.Y.

1938-39 Untitled Abstraction
oil and mixed media on fibreboard 43.2 x 53.3 cm

1939 White Rectangles, Number 3
oil on canvas 61 x 76.2 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

1940 Red Squares
oil on paper 38.1 x 25.4 cm

1940 Three White Squares
oil

1940 White Squares
oil on paper 30.1 x 25.4 cm

1941 White Lines
gouache on paper 56.5 x 39.4 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

1944 Green Depth
casein on canvas 78.7 x 106.7 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

1945 Composition
Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn University
© Djelloul Marbrook

1946 Receding Red

1946 Transitory Reflection 
oil on glass and panel 63.5 x 43.2 cm 
© Michael Rosenfield Gallery N.Y.

1946 Transversion 
ceramic fluid, porcelain cement on corrugated glass on panel of oil on hardboard 34.3 x 40 cm

1948 Composition 
graphite 33.8 x 36.8cm

1949-53c Vernal equinox
oil on canvas 91.4  127 cm

1950 Bright Depths 
oil on canvas 76.2 x 86.4 cm

1950 Green Mass 
oil on canvas 101.9 x 127.1 cm

1951 Evaporating Night 
oil on canvas 92.07 x 76.83 cm

1951 Light is Gold 
glass, acrylic, lacquer, casein, gold leaf 76.5 x 59 cm

1951 Seven Red Squares
oil on canvas 101.6 x 127 cm

1952 Inside Outside 
oil on canvas 127 x 76.2 cm
1952 Transforming Night 
oil on canvas 101.6 x 76.2 cm

1952 White Marker on magenta coloured paper 45.5 x 63 cm approx.

1953 Mecca 
oil on canvas 101.9 x 126.9 cm

1953 Roselit Day 
oil on canvas 91.3 x 127 cm
1955c Sphere the Ether with your Flaming Heart
oil on canvas 142.2 x 126.7 cm

1960-62c The Effluence of an Infinitude #18
oil on linen 141.6 x 127.1 cm

1962c The Majestic Grandeur of the Immutable Light
oil on linen 127.8 x 142.2 cm

n.d. Transversion of the Fourth
oil on canvas 127 x 101.6 cm

n.d. Heart of Flame 
oil on canvas 142 x 127 cm
n.d. Untitled ( Triangles)
oil on canvas 91.4 x 76.2 cm

n.d. Three Dimensional Abstract Composition 
oil on board and glass 23.5 x 18.4 cm



Monday 4 June 2012

William Holman Hunt - part 2

William Holman Hunt Self-portrait 1867 
oil on canvas 104 x 73 cm

William Holman Hunt (1827 – 1910) was, along with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in 1848.

This is part 2 of a 2-part post on Holman Hunt. For biographical notes and earlier works, see part 1 also.


1866 Il Dolce Far Niente 
oil on panel

1866 The Festival of St. Swithin ( The Dovecot ) 
oil on canvas 73 x 91 cm 
© 2006 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

1866-68 Fanny Holman Hunt 
oil on canvas 106.5 x 73.5 cm



The above portrait is clearly based on this photograph of Fanny taken in December 1865 shortly before her marriage. She died in Florence having given birth to Cyril in 1866. Her sister Edith becameHolman Hunt's  second wife.




1868 Isabella and the Pot of Basil 
oil on canvas 187 x 116 cm
1868-9 Bianca 
oil on canvas

1870 A Flood

1870 The Shadow of Death 
oil on canvas 214.2 x 168.2 cm

c1882-3 Portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti at 22 years of Age 
oil on panel 30 x 23 cm

On 12 April 1853, the remaining members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood met for breakfast in Millais's studio, to make portrait drawings of each other which could be sent to Thomas Woolner, who had immigrated to Australia six months before. Hunt's drawings, of Millais and Rossetti, are the finest of this series, most of which are in the National Portrait Gallery. His pastel drawing of Rossetti (now at Manchester City Art Gallery) had become badly rubbed by 1882, and Hunt painted the above replica in oils to commemorate his friend's recent death.


1853 Dante Gabriel Rosetti 
pastel on paper 28.6 x 25.9 cm

1883-4 The Triumph of the Innocents 
oil on canvas 156 x 254 cm

1884 Amaryllis ( The Shepherdess ) 
oil on canvas

1887 Christ Among the Doctors

c1888-93 May Morning on Magdalen College Tower, Oxford, Ancient Annual Ceremony 
oil on canvas 39 x 49 cm 
© Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery

1895 The Importunate Neighbour

c1897 The Risen Christ with the Two Marys in the Garden of Joseph of Arimathea 
oil on canvas 116.8 x 94 cm

1905 The Lady of Shalott 
oil on canvas 188 x 146.1 cm

1910 A Summer Landscape

1968-9 Tuscan Girl

Hounds 
pencil and red chalk 25 x 29 cm

Miss Gladys M. Holman Hunt

Plain of Rephaim from Zion 
oil on canvas

Holman Hunt in his Eastern Dress 
photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron