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Charles Marvin Fairchild (SFS '48) Memorial
Gallery
March 22 · June 19, 2005
Home · Illustrations · Press
Gallery Talk: Guest
Curator Christina Weyl will give a gallery talk on Thursday,
April 21, at noon. If you plan to attend, please contact
the Georgetown University Art Collection at (202) 687-1469; artcollection@georgetown.edu.
Grace
Thurston Arnold Albee (1890–1985)
stands as an important American Regionalist
printmaker of the twentieth century. Her career spanned
more than sixty years, during which she produced more
than two
hundred and fifty prints from linocuts, woodcuts, and wood engravings. These
graphic works, created between 1915 and 1983, record her careful observations
of her surroundings near the various locales in which she lived: Providence (1915–1928);
Paris (1928–1933); New York City (1933–1938); Bucks County, Pennsylvania
(1938–1962); Kew Gardens, New York (1962–1974); and finally in Barrington
and Bristol, Rhode Island (1974–1983). In spite of the importance of Grace
Albee’s early work to her professional career, these early prints are scarcely
known and rarely reproduced in monographs about twentieth century American printmaking.
This exhibition will illustrate those factors from 1915 to 1933 that kindled
the professionalization of Grace Albee’s career, as it was shaped by outside
forces affecting the American art scene and as viewed through the lens of her
personal life and early works.
Although Grace Albee’s professional legacy as a printmaker is grounded
primarily upon the images she created of rustic Pennsylvania barns and the rural
countryside during the 1940s and 1950s, her works that predate this period were
formative to her career and laid the foundations for the success she would achieve
later in her life. Between 1915 and 1933, Albee was forced to balance her familial
duties as a wife and a mother of five sons with her artistic aspirations. In
an article that she co-wrote for American Artist magazine with another printmaker,
Ernest Watson (1884–1969), Albee admitted the difficulties of managing
career with family during these early years:
Grace Albee is not a ‘career woman’ in the
accepted connotation of that term. Unlike those who,
with singleness of purpose, completely sacrifice domestic
life to professional pursuits, Mrs. Percy F. Albee first
distinguished herself as the mother of five sons…For
about fifteen years after her marriage
in 1913 to Percy F. Albee, mural painter
and lithographer of Providence,
her art had to take second place. That
period was pretty much occupied with
home and family duties.1
Despite this juggling of roles and her downplaying of
these years, she managed to produce approximately sixty-four
prints of increasing competence, gradually moving towards
becoming a professional artist. While living in Providence
and Paris, Albee honed her technical skills, exhibited
her prints with greater frequency, received critical
acclaim, and bolstered her desire to continue a career
in printmaking.
Grace Albee’s thirteen
years of artistic production in Providence
from
1915 to 1928 formed the cornerstone upon
which her subsequent artistic endeavors
were built. Although her central focus in Providence
was on raising
a family,
Grace Albee remained current in the art world through vicarious involvement
with the career of her artist husband, Percy Albee (1883–1959), and her
own sporadic forays into linoleum block printing. As Percy shifted his professional
goals away from the large mural commissions that engaged him during the 1910s
and into the 1920s, towards lithography in the 1920s, Grace found an advantageous
opportunity to work on her printmaking passion together with her husband and
to gain exhibition exposure alongside him in graphic arts shows.
Progressively, Grace metamorphosed from a dabbling,
but talented amateur who fashioned relatively anonymous
and disposable promotional posters for a marionette
show that she operated with her husband into a more technically proficient
artist who crafted serious works and whose prints were displayed in prominent
exhibitions. As time passed in Providence, she moved beyond Percy’s artistic
sponsorship and developed an individual career track as a skilled practitioner
of relief printing. Even though she was principally an amateur artist in Providence,
Albee’s perseverance, intensity, and natural talent signaled her potential
to become a professional artist.
The next period of Grace Albee’s life, a six-year
sojourn in Paris, France from 1928 to 1933, represents
a crucial time of artistic flowering
in her printmaking career. Albee’s years in
Paris encapsulate the pivotal moment when she shifted
away from working according to amateur
artistic standards and turned towards a model of artistic professionalism.
This transition commenced in March of 1928 when Grace Albee traveled, along
with her husband and her five sons, then ranging in age from five to fourteen,
from Providence across the Atlantic Ocean to Paris, the undisputed center
of the art world. Along with her husband, Grace
expected that joining the expatriate
community in Montparnasse would advance her career and teach her valuable
lessons about her art. With her several young children,
unusual at the time due to
the severe loss of young men in World War I, Albee at the beginning of her
stay in Paris was recognized in the French community more through her identity
as a mother, called la mère à cinq fils; she became increasingly
known professionally for her art as her technical skills improved and her
exhibition presence expanded. Embarking upon one of the most productive periods
in her
career, Grace advanced and perfected her art to include wood engraving and
gained entry into the French salons, exhibited her works at independent French
galleries and at art shows back home in the United States. All of these venues
gave her opportunities to receive significant positive press from French
and American art critics, which was instrumental in strengthening her professional
reputation. The pinnacle of her artistic career in Paris is embodied in her
first one-woman show at the American Library in Paris in March of 1931.
Once Grace Albee arrived in New York City in 1933,
she was able to dedicate herself to full-time printmaking
and her art began to command serious national
attention. Albee’s work from this point forward demonstrates the confidence
that developed as she became more personally secure as a professional artist.
Her prints also became increasingly recognized in the American art community
as on par with the best professional wood engravers in the field. During the
1930s and 1940s, the most prolific decades of her career, Albee won prestigious
awards and was showered with accolades from art critics. Through numerous purchase
prizes, her prints were accessioned into the best print collections in museums
throughout the United States and abroad. The greatest indication of Grace Albee’s
success as a professional printmaker was her admission to the highly selective
membership of the National Academy of Design as an Associate in 1941 and as
a National Academician in 1946. Not only was she the second woman in this history
of the Academy to receive the Associate distinction in the class of Graphic
Arts, but Grace Albee was also the first female graphic artist ever to attain
full Academician membership.2
- Christina M. Weyl (C'05), Guest Curator
1 Grace Albee, with commentary
by Ernest W. Watson, “Wood
Engravings by Grace Albee,” American Artist 10
(December 1946): 24. Grace Albee Papers,
Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution,
roll 2977, grid
1283. Return to essay
2 Eliot Clark, History of the National Academy of
Design: 1825-1953 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953). These
findings are based
upon listings of
all members of the Academy since its founding in 1825. Eliza Greatorex (1820–1897),
an etcher, was the first female graphic artist to earn Academy membership
as an Associate between 1869 and 1888. Return to essay
For additional reading:
Erik Denker, Grace Albee: 1890–1985, An American Printmaker (unpublished
manuscript; Washington: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1999);
and Denker, “Grace Albee: An American Printmaker, 1890-1985.” Exhibition
brochure, National Museum of Women in the Arts, July 26–November
21, 1999.
The following persons are acknowledged for their support for and
assistance with this exhibit: LuLen Walker and David C. Alan in the Georgetown University
Art Collection; William and Kay Albee; Professor Ed Ingebretsen, Director
of the American Studies Program; Professor Elizabeth Prelinger; Professor
Alison Hilton, Department Chair of Art History; Professor Ricardo Ortiz;
Hubert Cloke, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; Dr.
Eric Denker, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Corcoran Gallery of
Art; Angel Dean, Assistant Archivist at the Providence Art Club; Andrew
Martinez, Archivist at the Rhode Island School of Design; Judy Throm
and Wendy Hurlock Baker at the Archives of American Art; Jane and Alan
Weyl.
About the guest curator: Christina Weyl is
a senior in Georgetown College majoring in American Studies with minors
in Art History and French. This
exhibition is based on her American Studies Senior Thesis, The Professionalization
of an American Woman Printmaker: The Early Career of Grace Albee, 1915-1933. This choice of thesis topic, the focus of its research, and the decision
to be the guest curator this show reflect Christina’s longstanding
goal to pursue a career in museum work and fine arts management after
graduation in May 2005. Christina has prior work experience at Sotheby’s,
Inc., the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
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