Lot 720: Grace Martin Taylor Abstract W/C Painting

Grace Martin Frame Taylor (West Virginia, 1903-1995) abstract watercolor or inkwash painting in black with white highlights, 1956. Signed “Grace Martin Taylor” and numbered/dated “#2 July 16 1956,” lower right. Additionally numbered “#2” in pencil, lower right, and numbered/dated “#2 July 16 19[?],” lower left. Housed under acrylic in a painted wooden frame with white mat. Sight: 23 1/2 in. H x 17 1/2 in. W. Frame: 32 1/4 in. H x 25 3/4 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

CONDITION: Two horizontal tears without losses to left edge, largest approximately 1-inch long, plus pinhole punctures to at least three corners. Minor 7/16 inch x 1/4 inch area of brown liquid accretion, lower center. Faint creasing to lower left corner. Not examined out of frame.