Ann Kocsis

Last updated
Ann Kocsis
Borncirca 1910
Died1972
OccupationArtist

Ann Kocsis (c. 1910 - 1972) was an American still-life painter.

Contents

Early life and education

Kocsis born in New York City to Hungarian immigrants John and Katie Svidro. At the age of five, sometime between 1910 and 1920, her family moved to Pittsburgh. [1] After leaving her formal education at the age of 15, she worked for a time as an apprentice for a millinery designer, and at 17 began working at a beauty parlor. That work, combined with teaching private piano and art lessons, enabled her to pay tuition at the Wickersham School of Music and the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. [1]

Career

At some point, Kocsis returned to New York, where she began to focus on painting. After taking classes at the National Academy of Design, in 1939 and 1941 she held solo shows at the Montross Gallery, which was managed by her acquaintance, Philip Reilly. [1] A New York Times review of the 1939 show noted her fastidious style, saying that the work was “all very earnest… carrying with it a distinct sense of subjects being very carefully studied and color and arrangement being very painstakingly thought out,” [2] and suggesting that it could have benefitted from a less controlled approach. A review by the same writer of the 1941 show was more complimentary, noting that Kocsis' work was “high in key, sound in construction and brushed with assurance and determination,” [3] mentioning in particular the paintings World's Fair at Night, Cleaning Up, Grapes and Cabbage and Palette and Brushes. The last won honorable mention in Seton Hall University's 1958 Fourth Annual Spring Art Exhibition. [1] While the Montross shows appear to have been Kocsis’ only solo exhibitions, she participated in as many as 50 group exhibitions over the course of her career. These group shows were primarily in New York and the United States, but at least two were international. [1]

Kocsis was a member of many professional organizations, including the Knickerbocker Artists, the International Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Artists Professional League, the National Association of Women Artists, the National Arts Club, and the Royal Society of Arts. [1] Through these organizations and their group shows, Kocsis won several awards and is listed in several bibliographic resources such as Who’s Who 1947 and 1973. Her archive is kept at the Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Related Research Articles

Colleen Browning was an Anglo-American realist and magical realist painter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Frank</span> American painter

Jane Schenthal Frank was an American multidisciplinary artist, known as a painter, sculptor, mixed media artist, illustrator, and textile artist. Her landscape-like, mixed-media abstract paintings are included in public collections, including those of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She studied with artists, Hans Hofmann and Norman Carlberg.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yvonne Thomas</span> American artist

Yvonne Thomas was an American abstract artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Okie Paxton</span> American painter

Elizabeth Okie Paxton (1878–1972) was an American painter, married to another artist William McGregor Paxton (1869–1941). The Paxtons were part of the Boston School, a prominent group of artists known for works of beautiful interiors, landscapes, and portraits of their wealthy patrons. Her paintings were widely exhibited and sold well.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Birgitta Moran Farmer</span> American painter

Birgitta Kathleen Moran Farmer was an American artist particularly known for her portrait miniatures.

Eleanor de Laittre was an American visual artist and an early proponent of abstract, cubist-inspired, and largely non-objective art. During a period when representational art was the norm in the United States, she adhered to a style that was based on her study of paintings by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Paul Klee, and Raoul Dufy. She was a member of American Abstract Artists, a group that flourished during the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s and that included among its members Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Werner Drewes, Suzy Frelinghuysen, A.E. Gallatin, Adolph Gottlieb, László Moholy-Nagy, George L.K. Morris, and Ad Reinhardt. In 1939 de Laittre was recognized for her skill in handling the design of a painting she had placed in a group exhibition and was praised in general for her subtle handling of color. Critical appraisal of her work remained positive in the 1940s and early 1950s and toward the end of her career she was honored as one of the best-known artists among those who strove to overcome resistance to abstract art in America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Werner Drewes</span>

Werner Drewes (1899–1985) was a painter, printmaker, and art teacher. Considered to be one of the founding fathers of American abstraction, he was one of the first artists to introduce concepts of the Bauhaus school within the United States. His mature style encompassed both nonobjective and figurative work and the emotional content of this work was consistently more expressive than formal. Drewes was as highly regarded for his printmaking as for his painting. In his role as teacher as well as artist he was largely responsible for bringing the Bauhaus aesthetic to America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Catharine Carter Critcher</span> American painter

CatharineCarter Critcher was an American painter. A native of Westmoreland County, Virginia, she worked in Paris and Washington, D.C. before becoming, in 1924, a member of the Taos Society of Artists, the only woman ever elected to that body. She was a long time member of the Arts Club of Washington.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lena Gurr</span> American painter

Lena Gurr (1897–1992), was an American artist who made paintings, prints, and drawings showing, as one critic said, "the joys and sorrows of everyday life." Another critic noted that her still lifes, city scenes, and depictions of vacation locales were imbued with "quiet humor," while her portrayal of slum-dwellers and the victims of warfare revealed a "ready sympathy" for victims of social injustice at home and of warfare abroad. During the course of her career Gurr's compositions retained emotional content as they evolved from a naturalistic to a semi-abstract cubist style. Discussing this trend, she once told an interviewer that as her work tended toward increasing abstraction she believed it nonetheless "must have some kind of human depth to it." Born into a Russian-Jewish immigrant family, she was the wife of Joseph Biel, also Russian-Jewish and an artist of similar genre and sensibility.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary E. Hutchinson</span> American painter

Mary E. Hutchinson was an artist and art instructor from Atlanta who lived and worked in New York City during the years of the Great Depression and World War II. She specialized in figure painting, particularly portraits of female subjects. New York critics described these portraits as "sculptural," having a "bold yet rhythmic design," and often possessing a "haunted mood". Critics noted the "introspective" nature of some portraits whose subjects showed "an almost morbidly brooding sensitiveness." From 1934 to 1943 she was a member of the Art Teaching Staff of the WPA New York Federal Art Project. Following her return to Atlanta in 1945 Hutchinson was an art teacher in Catholic high schools.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Goeller</span> American painter

Charles Goeller (1901–1955) was an American artist best known for precise and detailed paintings and drawings in which, he once said, he aimed to achieve "emotion expressed by precision." Employing, as one critic wrote, an "exquisitely meticulous realism," he might take a full year to complete work on a single picture. Early in his career he achieved critical recognition for his still lifes, in which one critic saw an "acumen of genius" working to produce "truly superb achievement of team work between eyes that see and hands that do." Later, he also became known for cityscapes in which he employed precisionist flat planes and geometric forms to show the physical structures of his subjects.

Roselle Osk (1884–1954) was an American printmaker known for her drypoints and etchings. Her style was realist and her subjects were figure studies, landscapes, and seascapes. She exhibited frequently during the 1930s and 1940s and was awarded prizes by the Society of American Etchers, Philadelphia Print Club, and National Association of Women Artists. Her work was often selected for "Best Prints of the Year" shows held by the etchers group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Steele Marsh</span> American painter

Anne Steele Marsh (1901–1995) was an American painter and printmaker whose watercolors, oil paintings, and wood engravings were widely exhibited and drew critical praise. She was also a noted educator and arts administrator.

Lucy L'Engle (1889–1978) was an American painter who had an abstract style that ranged from Cubist to representational to purely abstract. Critics appreciated the discipline she showed in constructing a solid base on which these stylistic phases evolved. As one of them, Helen Appleton Read of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, said in 1932, she was "at heart a painter with a painter's sensuous enjoyment of the medium itself." L'Engle herself at one time described her art as "a play of form and color" and at another said, "My pictures represent my feelings about experiences. They are experiments in modern art." Over the course of a long career she used studios in both Manhattan and Provincetown and exhibited in both commercial galleries and the annual shows held by two membership organizations, the New York Society of Women Artists and the Provincetown Art Association.

Betty Waldo Parish (1910–1986) was an American printmaker and painter who exhibited with nonprofit organizations, including the Fine Arts Guild, the Pen and Brush Club, and the National Association of Women Artists, as well as commercial galleries. Best known for her etchings and woodcuts in a modernist representational style, she was also a watercolorist and oil painter and it was an oil painting of hers, "The Lower Lot," that won her the first of quite a few prizes during her career.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alethea Hill Platt</span> American artist and educator (1860–1932)

Alethea Hill Platt was an American artist and educator. Her paintings of rural landscapes in France, England, the Adirondacks, and New England were displayed in about 200 exhibitions at venues including the National Academy of Design, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Louisiana Purchase Exposition. The New York Times found a "quality of serenity, even a kind of nobility" in her work, and American Art News placed her "in the ranks of America's leading women painters."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Russell Cowles</span> American artist (1887–1979)

Russell Cowles (1887–1979) was an American artist who painted landscapes, still lifes, and human forms in a style that combined both modernist and traditional elements. In 1947 the New York Times critic Howard Devree said "his work shows a remarkably dynamic understanding of both traditional occidental and oriental painting as well as of the abstract principles which activate and underlie the modern movement as such". Over a career that spanned some fifty years, he achieved an unusual degree of success as measured by gallery representation, commercial sales of his work, critical reception, and representation in museum collections. He traveled widely throughout his life, combining the study and practice of art with an interest in learning about distant places and cultures. These travels included a circumferential world tour of nearly two years as well as frequent trips to Europe and travel within the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dorothy Eaton</span> American painter (1893–1968)

Dorothy Eaton was an American visual artist best known for rural subjects in a style that merged nineteenth-century regional folk art with mid-century American realism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scribner Ames</span> American painter

Scribner Ames (1908–1993) was an American artist known for her paintings and sculpture. Her paintings included portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and abstractions. Her portrait sitters were often children or well-known men and women in the performing arts. Born and raised in Chicago, she worked first in Manhattan and later returned to her birth city. She also made repeated trips to Europe and, once, to the West Indies. Although she admired the work of Cézanne, Braque, and Marsden Hartley, her painting was, as one critic said, "not derivative". Critics noted her effective handling of color and one said she was "particularly noted for her work in creating movement through space by the use of color perspective." In her carved wood sculpture, critics generally noted the influence of her teacher, José de Creeft.

Marion Gray Traver was an American woman painter remembered in part for her membership and volunteerism with the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors during the first half of the 20th Century. In April 1941, the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors voted to change the name of the organization to the National Association of Women Artists and at that formative meeting, Traver was elected Recording Secretary, one of six officers.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Finding Aid to the Ann Kocsis papers at the National Museum of Women in the Arts
  2. Devree, Howard (January 22, 1930). "A Reviewer's Notebook: Works by Seven Women". The New York Times. Retrieved October 19, 2020.
  3. Devree, Howard (January 12, 1941). "Current One-Man Shows". The New York Times.

Other resources for research

  1. Ann Kocsis vertical file, Horticultural Hall, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Library
  2. Ann Kocsis vertical file, Ingalls Library, Cleveland Museum of Art
  3. Ann Kocsis vertical file, Frick Art Reference Library, The Frick Collection
  4. Recent paintings by Ann Kocsis (Montross Gallery:1941)
  5. Exhibitions in New York. (1941). Parnassus,13(1), 47-48.
  6. McCausland, E. (1939). Gallery Index. Parnassus,11(1), 45-51.