Lot 429: Grace Martin Taylor Mixed Media Cubist Portait of a Woman

Grace Martin Frame Taylor (West Virginia, 1903-1995) watercolor with tempera, crayon, and collage, “Portrait of Lyle,” 1948. A woman seated in a domestic setting wears a necklace and red shoes and on her lap lie several pages of a newspaper with economic information related to stocks. Martin depicts the newspaper with collaged clippings. Tempera highlights elements that include the woman’s hands and parts of the newspaper while crayon describes the curls of her hair and aspects of the room. Signed “Grace Martin,” lower left. With two labels affixed to backing with date, title, and other printed text. Sight: 27 in. H x 20 1/2 in. Frame: 35 in. H x 28 1/2 in. W. Biographical Note: “Born in Morgantown, West Virginia, Grace Martin Taylor was a younger cousin of Blanche Lazzell, who encouraged her artistic talent. In 1921 she enrolled at West Virginia University, Morgantown, which Lazzell had first attended some twenty years earlier. Not finding instruction in the studio arts at West Virginia University sufficiently rigorous, in 1922 Grace Taylor supplemented her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, where her teachers Arthur B. Carles and Henry McCarter introduced her to abstraction. After graduating from West Virginia University in 1929, she took up Lazzell”s invitation to come to Provincetown, where she learned the technique of white-line colour woodblock printing and soon assumed proficiency. Taylor joined the American Color Print Society as one of its founders as well as the Woodcut Society based in Kansas City, Missouri. In 1933, one of her woodcuts, Studio Window, was nominated by the Printmakers Society of California for the Fifty Best Prints of the Year. Although she made periodic visits to Provincetown, where, like Lazzell, she attended Hans Hofmann”s summer classes in the 1940s, Taylor largely spent her career in West Virginia, where she was committed to art education. For more than forty years she taught at Mason College of Music and Fine Art in Charleston, eventually becoming its president. In 1931 she set up the Allied Artists of West Virginia, helping with its exhibitions; she also established the Creative Arts Festival of West Virginia and sat on various state educational and historical bodies. Her commitment to art education in West Virginia brought her several official honours. In 1998 the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, recognized her role as a woman pioneer of American abstraction with a special display of her 1938 painting ‘Still Life with Ukulele.'” Source: The British Museum

PROVENANCE: Lucie Mellert, the artist’s daughter. 

CONDITION: Overall very good condition, with fresh colors. Even toning to paper. Not examined out of frame.