“Young painters follow in almost every possible tradition,” Alfred H. Barr, Jr., wrote in the introduction to 46 Painters Under 35, MoMA’s 1930 attempt to capture the spirit of the new decade.
“No particular school or phase of contemporary painting is especially favored since it is found that younger artists are moving in amazingly varied directions. Among the painters: A. Everett Austin, Jr., of Hartford, Conn.; Peggy Bacon of New York; Jane Berlandina of New York; Virginia Berresford of Brooklyn . . . ”1
Barr cultivated a diversity of approaches, including the early work from Reuben Nakian and Isamu Noguchi, and he managed to pick artists that mostly went on to greatness even after the hoary age of 35 (Barr himself was a wisened 28 at the time). Scanning the top of Barr’s list: Austin was already the director of Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum; Bacon was the foremost caricaturist of her generation; Berlandina would paint the murals of San Francisco’s Coit Tower in just a few years.
Which brings us alphabetically to a name that I had barely tracked: Virginia Berresford. At a quick pass, Berresford’s sharp-edged landscapes seem to bely Barr’s claim of the “amazing variety” of the time: here is an exceptionally gifted painter making cornfields a bit like Grant Wood, skyscrapers a bit like Ralston Crawford, sandy hills a bit like Georgia O’Keeffe, and beaches a bit like George Ault. It’s exciting to find a new entrant, but the camp feels familiar. Isn’t this Precisionism?2
It’s not the only question raised by a new solo show at Schoelkopf Gallery. Who is Virginia Berresford? Where did these eerie, radiant paintings come from — and where did they go?
Berresford studied at the Art Students League and Columbia University, and it’s tempting to try and pin her to Georgia O’Keeffe’s shadow—O’Keeffe studied at both institutions about ten years before Berresford, and there’s more than a family resemblance between their respective sand dunes. It’s a little unclear how much these early studies impacted Berresford’s mature work, though. She studied mainly under George Bridgman, a celebrated anatomist; but on the rare occasion that a figure appears in Berresford’s work at all, it’s hard to imagine Bridgman’s influence. We learn much more about Berresford’s journey—how she travelled and where she went—from how she spent the 1920s—soaking up ennui.
II. Ozenfant & Le Corbusier.
Le Corbusier was mostly an architect and Ozenfant mostly a painter,3 but they understood the post-Cubist world to be one of smooth surfaces and crisp design.4 Together, in the studio of kindred spirit Fernand Léger, they launched their own school of painting in 1917, producing a magazine and mounting exhibitions in the new style from 1920-25. Le Corbusier’s L'Esprit Nouveau Pavilion offered a foundational work in Art Deco in 1925, while Ozenfant opened his own atelier to evangelize for Purism the same year. And for the first five years of that atelier, his star student was an American named Virginia Berresford.
Berresford’s work from this period shows a total embrace of Ozenfant’s aesthetic. Purism isn’t un-painterly, but the idea was to simplify texture and detail, as if the object is surface all the way down. Berresford’s forms are luminous and billowing but appropriately opaque. A subject she returned to several times was the French coastal fort at Antibes. Its clean lines and mounded silhouette appealed to Berresford just as Georgia O’Keeffe gravitated toward the huddled architecture of the mission church in Ranchos de Taos.5 Antibes, in Berresford’s hands, is a closed-off fortress; forms are opaque, guarded—to the point of suggesting that there may be no interior at all.
When this sealed-off aesthetic returned with the painter to New York in 1930, American critics hastily lumped her in with what would become Precisionism. Admiring the extraordinary technique but put off by the coldness, The New York Times lamented:
“The paintings of Virginia Berresford, on view at Montross Gallery, must meet the accusation of frigidity. The carefully defined contours, the smooth brushwork, the immaculate tones, ally them to the work of . . . ‘the purity boys.’ The coldness may be, of course, merely the defect of an admirable ‘classicism.’” 6
It’s a telling remark: before the “Precisionist” moniker took hold, the American industrial painting school tried on several of the phrases uttered by the Times critic: the “Immaculates”; “Purity Boys,” etc. That it didn’t know quite what to make of Berresford underscores how her innovations ran parallel to the American scene painting that had evolved while she was abroad.
III. On Glass.
If the press wasn’t quickly won over, Berresford was embraced by her fellow American artists and the curators that celebrated them. Her ultra-pure painting was immediately scooped up into zeitgeisty shows at the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art through the 1930s and 40s. Precisionism was focused on industrial subjects, and so painters of dream-like sand dunes weren’t really candidates for the movement—but strangely, she found a welcome company among Georgia O’Keeffe, Rebecca Salsbury James, the eerie nocturnes of Joseph Stella, and the eerie daylit scenes of Edward Hopper. The parallels in O’Keeffe’s career are abundant, but O’Keeffe’s close friend Salsbury7 shared with Berresford the unusual technique of painting on glass.8 The technique requires working backwards, so that the layer of paint that the viewer sees is actually the bottom layer of paint—the opposite of traditional oil painting. So while the support is transparent, the medium conceals itself. The effect in Salsbury’s is similar to Berresford’s—there is a dream-like obscurity to their forms, as if they are not empty but full of something unseen.
IV. Purism Complicated.
The surrealist quality may have been in her work from the first, but in the late 1930s, Berresford’s work began to explore inner depths that had previously only been hinted at.
“Virginia Berresford paints with larger, more ‘mystical’ simplification than formerly,” observed the Times approvingly in 19369; “continuing her simplification which almost becomes abstraction,” they lauded, in 194110. Her work was still “simple,” but she had embraced all kinds of texture—texture that wasn’t especially welcome in either Precisionism or Purism. It was as if the carefully guarded inner secrets of the citadel had bubbled up through unseen fissures—and the work, while still compositionally restrained, took on a much more expressive quality. A sand dune from 1940 is as pleasingly geometric as any O’Keeffe, but it is now covered with a fine carpet of beach grass, seemingly with each blade faithfully drawn.
In a revealing work, a stunning canvas from 1935, Berresford lays a field of diaphanous texture, its noisy abstraction interrupted by one of the super-crisp lines of one of the few industrial subjects in her work. Emerging from the waters of chaos—or perhaps sinking into them—is the decrepit, abandoned support from a failed attempt to build a canal across Panama.
It’s such a strange historical reference for an American painter in 1935, it’s worth unpacking. Ferdinand de Lesseps—mentioned in the title of Berresford’s canvas—tried to build a sea-level channel—without locks to raise and lower boats—across Colombian-controlled Panama in 1880. He had just built the Suez Canal in the same manner, so Lesseps thought it would work.11 He was wrong. As costs ballooned to over a billion francs, the United States floated the idea of building its own, presumably cheaper, route through Nicaragua—and the threat of destroying the French monopoly on trans-isthmus transit brought Lesseps to the bargaining table. America bought the project for forty million dollars—a bargain even when it took decades more to complete, in 1914. But for France, it was a scandal of epic proportion on every level: a failure of engineering, of finance, of empire—and small French investors were left holding the bag.
That failure was not a fresh wound in the French psyche in 1925 when Berresford landed on Ozenfant’s door. But the emergence of this strange disappointing industrial ruin from the waters of memory rang a bell with the artist—loud enough that she wrestled with its iconography long after leaving Paris. Her French victories had fallen to ruin, derided and misunderstood by American critics. The ambitions, the failures, and the rust of the past, cannot sink into the swamp of memory. If it is Precisionism she practiced here, it is certainly not a pure one.
Berresford lived long afterwards, opening a gallery on Martha’s Vineyard and crossing paths with Thomas Hart Benton. But if her period of greatest promise was from 1925-30, her finest achievements came with the struggle with concealment and revelation in the fifteen years that followed.
Virginia Berresford: Strangeness and Romance runs through April 8 at Schoelkopf Gallery, and at writing there are exemplar works of the 1940s available at D. Wigmore Fine Art. Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Roberta Smith mentioned “unfamiliar names like Virginia Berresford” in her roundup of “Precisionism and a Few of Its Friends,” Dec. 11, 1994, The New York Times.
Neither trained formally as an architect, but both contributed to one another’s projects, Ozenfant helped design Le Corbuiser’s L'Esprit Nouveau Pavilion, and Corbusier’s painting career was brilliantly illuminated by MoMA’s 2013 An Atlas of Modern Landscape.
A position the two sketched out in their 1917 book, Après le cubisme (After Cubism).
See for one of several examples, Ranchos de Taos, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Carolyn Burke’s excellent 2019 Foursome: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury tells just how close.
Not a lot of American modernists tried this challenging technique. Joseph Stella did on several occasions; Marsden Hartley painted on glass in nearly two dozen works, but with expressionist rather than “Purist” goals and methods.
“An Octet of Current Solo Flights,” The New York Times, Feb. 9, 1936, p. 172.
Howard Devree, “A Reviewer’s Notebook,” The New York Times, April 27, 1941, p. 187.
Lesseps negotiated a century-long lease with Colombia, from whom Panama had yet to secede. Colombia got 20% of the bonds in the project in return for the long lease, and the rest were sold to some 200,000 French and Swiss investors. The idea was that the proceeds of this monopoly on trans-America shipping would easily repay the seven-hundred million francs Lesseps expected the project to cost.