Meret Oppenheim

Méret Oppenheim

Meret Oppenheim (6 October 1913, Berlin  — 15 November 1985, Basel) was a German-born, Swiss, Surrealist artist. Oppenheim  is highly associated with the Dada movement because of her circle of friends. However, her art cannot be considered Dada: she did care about the aesthetics of the art object. Despite frequent recognition of her work in standard texts, relatively little critical attention has been paid to Oppenheim herself.

Having been raised in Switzerland and South Germany, Oppenheim traveled at the age of 18 to Paris and enrolled at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. She became absorbed in Surrealism and was invited by Giacometti and Arp to exhibit with the Surrealists in 1933. She continued to contribute to their exhibitions until 1960. Many of her pieces consisted of everyday objects arranged as such that they allude to female sexuality and feminine exploitation by the opposite sex. Oppenheim’s paintings focused on the same themes. Her originality and audacity established her as a leading figure in the surrealist movement.

Oppenheim’s best known piece is Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure) (1936). The sculpture consists of a teacup, saucer and spoon that the artist covered with fur from a Chinese gazelle. It is displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Oppenheim is also often credited with coining the phrase ” Nobody will give you freedom, you have to take it. “

Text from Wikipedia. Photo: “My Nursemaid”, 1967

Additional information

• Kleiner, Fred S.; Mamiya, Christian J. (2005) (12th ed.). USA: Thompson Learning Co.. p. 999-1000.

• Slatkin, Wendy (2001). Women Artists in History (4th ed.). USA: Pearson Education. p. 203-204.

• Meyer-Thoss, Christiane (1996). ‘Meret Oppenheim: Book of Ideas’. Early Drawings and Sketches for Fashion, Jewelry, and Designs.. Gachnang & Springer. ISBN 978-3-906127-51-4.  With Photographs by Heinrich Helfenstein. Translated from German by Catherine Schelbert.

Selma Hortense Burke

Selma Hortense Burke (1900-1995) was born in  North Carolina, one of ten children of  a local Methodist minister.  She received her formal educational training from Winston Salem University and later graduated in 1924 as a registered nurse from St. Agnes Training School for Nurses in Raleigh.  After graduating she moved to New York City where she worked as a private nurse.

While in New York, Burke began to focus on her art and became associated with the Harlem Renaissance.  Working in Harlem for the Works Progress Administration and the Harlem Artists Guild, Burke began teaching art appreciation and education to New York youth.  During the 1930s, she traveled across Europe studying and honing her skills as an artist. In 1940 she opened the Selma Burke School of Sculpture in New York City and the following year graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University.  In 1942 she joined the navy, making her one of the first African American women to enroll.  While in the navy, Burke was commissioned to do a bronze relief portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt which is currently on the United States dime. Since the coin bears the initials of the engraver, John Sinnock, Selma Burke has never received proper credit for the portrait used on the dime.

Sources: Charlotte Striefer Rubinstein, American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimensions (Boston: G. K. Hall & Company, 1990); http://www.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/aavaahp.htm

Helene Sardeau

Helene Sardeau was born in 1899 in Belgium and lived and worked in New York. Her work embodies the social realism that transformed figurative art in the early decades of the 20th century.

Sardeau’s set of three bas reliefs in the Greenfield, Massachusetts Post Office lobby was installed in 1941.* The  almost-life-size bronzes are in high relief, in the semi-abstract figurative style that is the hallmark of Art Deco sculpture. The group consists of two individual figures flanking a mother and child pair. All figures are silhouetted and hung directly on the wall–this a modernist rejection of conventional architectural framing in a cartouche or escutcheon. The figure on the left is an African-American man with a trowel in his right hand, sowing grain. The central panel shows a mother and child playing. In the relief on the right (pictured) a woman harvests grapes and vegetables in basket held in her lap.

Sardeau carved her first major commission, Slave (1933), for the Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial Sculpture Garden in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia. In 1925, “Miss Helene Sardeau, Belgian sculptress” modeled an “American Venus” trophy  in her New York studio. The completed trophy, two feet high and cast in bronze, was, according to  a contemporary newspaper account, “[to] be presented at Atlantic City, September 19th, to the contestant among the seventy-one inter-city beauties and Miss Americas who photograph to the best advantage. This lucky girl will also have the title role in The American Venus, a Paramount Picture to be produced on the Boardwalk by Frank Tuttle.”

Sardeau continued to use her maiden name after she married a fellow artist, the painter George Biddle, in 1931. In 1940 she and Biddle collaborated on frescoes and sculptures for the Supreme Court Building in Mexico City. Sardeau died in 1969 in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.

*Most of the Post Office works of art in Massachusetts were funded through commissions under the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture (later known as The Section of Fine Arts) and not (as commonly thought) by the WPA. The Federal Arts Program was proposed in 1933 by George Biddle to ex-Choate classmate, Franklin Roosevelt.

www.fpaa.org/samuel_garden.html

Eugenie Gershoy

Eugenie Gershoy was born in Russia and was brought to New York City as an infant. By the time Gershoy moved to Woodstock, NY, in 1921 her individual  style was already evident in her sculpture. Gershoy worked in stone, bronze, terracotta, plaster and papier-mache; her sculptures were mainly figurative and extemporized artist peers such as Carl Walters, Raphael and Moses Soyer, William Zorach and Lucille Blanch. From 1942 to 1966 Gershoy lived and painted in San Francisco where she taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. She traveled extensively, filling sketchbooks with scenes of Mexico, France, Spain, Africa and India. During her later years Eugenie Gershoy returned to New York City and concentrated on numerous well received exhibitions.

John Russell, former chief art critic at the New York Times, writes about the 1986 Sid Deutsch gallery exhibition: “As Eugenie Gershoy won the Saint-Gaudens Medal for fine draftsmanship as long ago as 1914 and since 1967 has had 15 papier-mache portrait figures suspended from the ceiling of the lobby of the Hotel Chelsea, she must be ranked as a veteran of the New York scene. Her present exhibition includes not only the high-spirited papier-mache sculptures for which she is best known but a group of small portraits of artists, mostly dating from the 30’s, that is strongly evocative.”

Pictured: Homage to Audrey McMahon, Goddess of Fertility, 1977

Mary Frank

Mary Frank, over the course of her artistic career, has worked in sculpture, painting, drawing, and printmaking. Her work has been collected by nearly every major American museum including The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Frank’s pioneering clay sculpture of the 1970s was especially concerned with the linear interconnections of sculptural fragments and torn edges. Frank often incorporated striated markings and gouges into the clay surface, which was almost always unglazed, allowing the natural textures and colors of the material to be revealed.

Frank has  illustrated and collaborated on several books, including Skies in Blossom: The Mature Poetry of Emily Dickinson; Shadows of Africa, by Peter Matthiessen and Mary Frank; and Desert Quartet, an Erotic Landscape, by Terry Tempest Williams and Mary Frank. She is, and has been for most of her adult life, a committed advocate for social and political change regarding such issues as the environment, AIDS, nuclear disarmament, and human rights, both as an artist and an activist.

Pictured: Three Dancers, 1981

Elisabeth Frink

Elisabeth Frink was born in Thurlow, Suffolk, in 1930. One of Britain’s leading sculptors, Frink taught at the Chelsea School of art, and the Royal College of Art. She was awarded many honorary degrees and awards including the CBE in 1969, and in 1982 she was created Dame of the British Empire.

Men, dogs, horses and birds were constant subject-matter throughout Frink’s career. She modelled, cast in plaster and then carved the plaster, to achieve a tougher surface when the plaster was cast in bronze. She rarely worked with the female form: ‘I have focused on the male because to me he is a subtle combination of sensuality and strength with vulnerability,’ Frink is quoted as saying in the catalogue raisonné of her work (Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture, Harpvale, 1984).

Her figures have dignity, mystery and a simplicity of form which place them apart from us: they seem to be focused elsewhere. The animals demonstrate her deep understanding of their state, for she encapsulates their innate and individual characteristics. Frink’s drawing and graphic work followed the same themes, being executed with the economy of means and feeling for surface texture that is to be found in her three-dimensional work. Elisabeth Frink died in 1993.

Pictured: Horse and Rider, bronze, 1974

February Symposium on Women Artists

Smith College hosts the symposium “Real Lives of Women Artists” February 26-27, 2010. Visit their website to register, or for more information on the panelists (who include Lucy Lippard, Paula Cooper, Susan Hiller,  and Mierle Laderman Ukeles) http://www.smith.edu/artmuseum/symposium/students.php

Laura Gardin Fraser

Laura Gardin (1889-1966), was the daughter of a wealthy and distinguished Chicago family. She grew up in New York, attended Columbia University, and studied at the Art Students League where she won both the Saint-Gaudens medal and the Saint-Gaudens Figure Prize. She married her sculpture instructor,  James Earle Fraser, and the couple moved to Long Island and built a large studio in Westport.

Laura’s career included medallic commissions as well as her better-known, heroic-scale figurative work. Her “Pegasus” (pictured) can be seen in Brookgreen Gardens. She modeled panels depicting the history of the United States for West Point Academy, and sculpted mascots of the Navy goat and Army mule.

James Earle and Laura Gardin Fraser, though inseparable, only collaborated on one sculpture project, the Oregon Trail Centennial Coin. “We talked and laughed all our lives,” Laura once said. “When we weren’t working we were talking, and we never grew tired of each other or ran out of subject matter.”

Soutrce: http://www.meadowlarkgallery.com/FraserLaura.htm

Outer Shell

Now the hydrocal backup shell halves are complete, and all I have left is the tedious task of separating them (not so easy when you’ve basically created a vacuum!), cutting off the rubber “glove” shown below, and then cleaning up the big mess that’s sure to follow.

Beginning a mold

Here’s a photo of a new sculpture, in the first stage of moldmaking. I spent the weekend at Open Studios trying (and occasionally failing) to describe this basic moldmaking process, but here it goes again.

I’m making a reusable “glove” mold on this lifesize half figure. The figure was sculpted in a red earthenware clay (the color you can see through the greenish mold rubber), which I let dry to a leather-hard stage which stands up better to the rigors of the moldmaking process. Over the clay I spread several thin layers of Polytek’s Polygel 40 mold rubber. This mixes 1:1 by volume, a fairly forgiving mix for a plastic but this is thankfully typical of Polytek’s products. Since this is the first time I had used a gel rubber (actually polyurethane), I found that it hardened up a bit suddenly and I got stuck with several drips and a few untintentional gaps. Next time I will mix it with some poly-fiber (although the company says this is not necessary) to make a more evenly-spreadable resin in the liquid stage.

I then fastened a strip of cast rubber about 1″ x 1″ x 36″ around the top of the figure (cementing it on with more liquid rubber), which will ultimately form a dividing line for the two pieces of the hard backup shell. I added a wall of plastelina on top of this, making a fairly solid dividing line for the backup halves, which I will make in hydrocal.

After I make the hydrocal outer shell, I’ll remove it as soon as it sets up completely, then cut the seam line (that cast 1×1″ strip you can see running around the top of the head and shoulders) of the rubber mold until I can peel it off easily from the clay. Usually the clay original is pretty badly destroyed in this stage, but occasionally I can retrieve part for another use. Once I put the rubber halves, and then the covering shell, all back together again, I can fill the rubber mold with a number of materials: plaster, wax, cement, or polyurethane hard plastic.