September 7 – 10, 2023
Independent 20th Century: Loren MacIver and Edith Schloss
September 7 – 10, 2023
Independent 20th Century: Loren MacIver and Edith Schloss
Independent 20th Century: Loren MacIver and Edith Schloss
September 7 – 10, 2023
Cipriani South Street at the Battery Maritime Building
10 South Street, New York, NY, 10004
Loren MacIver, Fleurs de marronniers, 1963, oil on canvas, 64 x 51 1/4 inches
Independent 20th Century: Loren MacIver and Edith Schloss
September 7 – 10, 2023
Cipriani South Street at the Battery Maritime Building
10 South Street, New York, NY, 10004
Thursday, September 7: 11 AM – 8 PM (By Invitation Only)
Friday, September 8: 12 PM – 8 PM
Saturday, September 9: 12 PM – 8 PM
Sunday, September 10: 11 AM – 6 PM
Alexandre is pleased to present a selection of paintings and works on paper by Loren MacIver (1909–1998) and Edith Schloss (1919–2011), two American artists who each spent an extended period of time in Europe in the mid-late 20th century. Both of these artists elevate quotidian subjects in delightful and unexpected ways: MacIver, through her poetic renderings of fleeting moments and objects collected throughout a lifetime of travel and contemplation, and Schloss, in her whimsical views and still lifes that celebrate the ease and joy of summer on the Mediterranean coast.
Loren MacIver, A Fall of Snow, 1948, oil on linen, 41 x 28 3/4 inches
Loren MacIver quietly carved out a place for herself in the history of American art through poetic depictions of everyday observations which “succeed in instilling transient entities with a shimmering inner life, at once potent and fragile” (Roberta Smith, New York Times, 2000). Born and raised in New York, MacIver received little formal art training outside of a few Sunday classes at the Art Students League at the age of ten. In 1928, she moved to Greenwich Village, marrying the poet Lloyd Frankenberg (1907-1975). The pair would join the social circle of modernist poets including e. e. cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore. MacIver’s first major sale came in 1935, when Shack (1934) was purchased by the then-director of MoMA, Alfred Barr, and became the first painting by a woman in the museum’s permanent collection. Soon thereafter in 1940, MacIver gained representation from the Pierre Matisse Gallery, marking the beginning of a relationship that would last through 1989. At the time, MacIver was the only woman in Pierre Matisse’s stable. A decades-long career of abundant production and activity would follow, including the acquisition of A Fall of Snow (1948)— included in our Independent presentation—by famed curator Dorothy Miller, and MacIver’s solo presentation at the 31st Venice Biennale in 1962, where she represented the United States.
In her paintings, much like in the work of the modernist poets that surrounded her, MacIver turned her patient and watchful eye towards the ephemerality of each passing moment, and the subtle qualities of the objects and scenes that constructed her lived experience. She spoke to these themes in her only official artist statement, published in 1946 on the occasion of her inclusion in the Whitney’s exhibition Fourteen Americans:
My wish is to make something permanent out of the transitory, by means at once dramatic and colloquial. Certain moments have the gift of revealing the
past and foretelling the future. It is these moments that I hope to catch.
— Loren MacIver
Loren MacIver, Regard Fixe, 1969, oil on canvas, 59 x 26 inches
Subjects include glowing visions of New York City, such as the radiant Greenwich Village Night I (1939) which pulses with vibrant nocturnal energy, while Sidewalk Drawing I and II (both 1939) illustrate MacIver’s enduring ability to observe her surroundings with a youthful playfulness. Other early works including The Tub and the Window (1935) and Penny Candy (1939) provide a further view into MacIver’s life in Greenwich Village, where her careful compositions reveal identifiable objects within clouds of subtle color. In Crossing the Dunes (1933), MacIver records her experience of the summers (and one harrowing winter) she and Frankenberg spent in the shack they made out of driftwood on Cape Cod. Le Petit Verger (1968), with its tree forms emerging amidst a haze of red, orange and blue, is representative of her otherworldly French landscapes. Other French paintings include the stately Regard Fixe (1969), depicting an antique Parisian coal shoot, and Port Bonheur (1980), a spirited display of sundry greens which emanate from the center of the canvas.
Included among a minority of women artists in the Abstract Expressionism movement and in the New York School of the 1950s and 60s, Edith Schloss was a bold—and at times brash— presence in the art world. Born in Germany, Schloss immigrated to New York City via London in 1942, where she became an observant member of the Abstract Expressionist movement and part of the thriving community of artists and intellectuals including artists Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Jack Tworkov, and Larry Rivers; composer John Cage; and poets John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and John Schuyler. Schloss left New York and settled in Rome in 1962, where she would remain for the rest of her life, summering in the coastal town of La Spezia in the northwest region of Liguria. In Italy, Schloss cemented her role as a noted transatlantic correspondent of art criticism, and continued to write and paint until she died in 2011 at the age of 92. In 2021, Schloss’s long-awaited posthumous memoir, The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly; Portraits and Sketches, 1942–2011, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and included in New York Times’ Top Books of 2021, deemed a “glowing jewel of a book.”
Edith Schloss, Rignalla, 1967, oil on canvas, 20 1/8 x 24 1/8 inches
Edith Schloss, Open Window (June 4), 1974, oil on canvas, 17 3/4 x 29 7/16 inches
Schloss’s work, which spans painting, assemblage, collage, watercolor, and drawing, embraces the intimate, the primitive, and the profound. Her playful still life paintings are often set in the foreground against views out of open windows onto the Mediterranean Sea, celebrating everyday wonders with a delight in pure color and child- like curiosity—yet resolute in representational form. The understated abstraction of the still lifes and visions of the sea in Rignalla (1967), Open Window (1974), and Melograno (1979), speak to her attention to the individual spirit of each object, each section of the canvas.
What I really do is what any painter worth his salt has always done. I abstract color and line from life around me, and make another life out of it.
— Edith Schloss
