Esther Pressoir : a modern woman's painter / Suzanne M. Scanlan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Scanlan, Suzanne M., author.

Contributor:

Pressoir, Esther, artist.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pressoir, Esther.

Women artists--United States--20th century--Biography.

Women artists.

Modernism (Art)--United States.

Modernism (Art).

Bicycle touring--Europe--History--20th century.

Bicycle touring.

Artists' models.

Physical Description:

152 pages : color illustrations, portraits, facsimiles ; 26 cm

Other Title:

A modern woman's painter.

Place of Publication:

London : Lund Humphries, 2023.

Summary:

"Coming of age in the 1920s, Stella, as she was known to her friends, cast off societal expectations of a working-class immigrant family in New England and moved through the studios, galleries, and nightclubs of New York. Following an unprecedented 18,000 km bicycle trip across Europe in 1927, where she kept a daily journal and made hundreds of sketches, Pressoir developed an expressionistic style that straddled figuration and abstraction. She made provocative renderings of the female nude that challenged historical models, including unabashed self-portraits and intimate depictions of her longtime muse, a dancer from Harlem named Florita. Pressoir' s work is illuminated here in an examination of her private travel journal, letters, and numerous paintings, prints and drawings, some of which were recovered from the veritable time capsule of her art studio after she died. Placing Pressoir' s work in relation to trailblazing contemporaries such as Alice Neel, Florine Stettheimer and Suzanne Valadon, this book establishes Pressoir as a force to be reckoned with in the decades of emergent feminism and modern art in America and restores her to her rightful place in the expanding canon of art." --publisher.

Contents:

Acknowledgments

Preface

Artist, model, model artist: Esther Pressoir's formal education

Three women and a bicycle: Esther, Helen and 'B'

New York: 'The emotional intimacies of her imaginative brain'

From the studio to the boudoir: Pressoir and the nude

Call her 'Florita'

Conclusion

Appendix: selections from Esther Pressor's travel journals

Notes

Select bibliography

Image credits

Index.

Notes:

"This book is an introduction to the life and wide-ranging oeuvre of the American modern painter, printmaker and ceramicist, Esther Estelle (Stella) Pressoir (1902-86). Pressoir graduated from the Department of Freehand Drawing and Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1923."-- Preface, page 9.

Includes bibliography (pages 145-146) and index.

Facsimile on endpapers.

ISBN:

1848226004

9781848226005

OCLC:

1391094562

Publisher Number:

90100689580