Rose Theodora Piper (October 7, 1917 – May 11, 2005) was an American painter best known for her semi-abstract, blues-inspired paintings of the 1940s. In the 1950s, out of financial necessity, she became a textile designer. For nearly thirty years, she worked as Rose Ransier, designing knit fabrics.
The American public took note of her work in the fall of 1947 when she gave her first solo exhibition—titled Blues and Negro Folk Songs—at the Roko Gallery in New York. The exhibition featured 14 paintings based on folk and blues songs. The show was very successful and was lauded by art critics; due to its resounding success, the show was held over for an extra week, and the vast majority of the paintings were sold. At the time, Piper was one of only four African-American abstract painters to have had solo shows in New York. After retiring from textile design, she resumed painting and exhibiting in the 1980s.
Early life and education
Rose Piper was born Rose Theodora Sams in New York on October 7, 1917. She grew up in the Bronx, where her father was a public schoolteacher who taught Latin and Greek. Piper went to Evander Childs High School where she majored in art earning her a four year scholarship to Pratt Institute due to earning the highest graduating GPA in art. She had to decline due to family pressure. Later, she attended Hunter College, majoring in art and minoring in geometry, and graduated in 1940. From 1943 to 1946, she attended the Art Students League of New York, where she studied with Vaclav Vytlacil and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. It was during this period that the poet Myron O'Higgins introduced her to Sterling Brown, who encouraged her growing interest in blues music.[1] Brown was the author of "Ma Rainey" (1932), arguably the quintessential blues poem;[2][3] O'Higgins, his student at Howard University, had also written poetry on blues themes, such as "Blues for Bessie" (1945).[4]
Career
Blues-inspired paintings
The Death of Bessie Smith by Rose Piper, 1947
In 1946, Piper received a Julius Rosenwald fellowship and spent the summer traveling in the American South, "imbibing" the atmosphere, as she put it, and studying blues music.[1] As a New Yorker, she had not grown up listening to the blues; she said in an interview years later, however, "I ran out and got all kinds of recordings and listened to them. I worked at it." Her research inspired a series of increasingly abstract, blues-themed paintings. "Back Water" (1946), inspired by Bessie Smith's "Backwater Blues",[3] is both more figurative and literal in its approach than the paintings that followed. By 1947, Piper had adopted the Picasso-influenced, flat, geometric style seen in "Slow Down, Freight Train" and "The Death of Bessie Smith" (pictured right).[5]
According to critic Graham Lock, this semi-abstract style was a fitting choice for the series because the blues themselves are stylized, often using exaggeration (such as "pouring water on a drowning man") to convey strong emotions.[6] Piper never embraced pure abstraction, however, preferring to keep the human figure at the center of her work. Her purpose in creating art was political: to fight injustice "the best way I know how—by putting it on the canvas."[5]
Her work attracted national attention in the fall of 1947, when Piper gave her first solo exhibition at the Roko Gallery in New York. Titled "Blues and Negro Folk Songs", the exhibition featured 14 paintings based on folk and blues songs. The show was a major success: praised by critics, it was held over for an extra week, and most of the paintings were sold.[1] At that time, Piper was one of only four African-American abstract painters to have had solo shows in New York. The other three were Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Thelma Johnson Streat.[7]
Piper scored another win in 1948 when her work was included in the 7th Annual Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Prints by Negro Artists. Sponsored by Atlanta University, it was one of the most prestigious venues for black artists; fellow exhibitors included Richmond Barthé, Robert Blackburn, Jacob Lawrence, and Hale Woodruff. Piper's Grievin' Hearted was awarded the prize for Best Portrait or Figure Painting.[1]
Piper, alongside artist such as Elder Cortor, produced images during the 1940s that illuminated the constant contemporary problems related to women's control over their bodies within social, racial, and sexual milieux.[8]
While it is not clear whether "Slow Down, Freight Train" was painted in 1946 or 1947, this painting represents a very different aesthetic approach to that of Back Water. This is Piper at her most semiabstract. When the Ackland Art Museum acquired the work in 1990, director Charles Millard wrote to Piper, enquiring about the origins of the title. The title referred to "Freight Train Blues", a recording by Trixie Smith who "sang and recorded the misery of the woman who had been left behind by men who hopped freight trains to the North".[11]
Even as her blues-themed paintings won her attention and acclaim, Piper was wary of being stereotyped as a black painter limited to "black" themes. It was partly for this reason that, on receiving a second Rosenwald grant in 1948, she opted to work in Paris rather than continue her exploration of the American South.[12]
Textile design
When Piper returned from Paris, a series of financial and family misfortunes forced her to put her painting career on hold. For a time she ran her own greeting card business. She then worked as a textile designer, using the name Rose Ransier. Over the next three decades she built a successful, albeit anonymous, career in fashion, while raising her two children and caring for ailing family members. Her minor in geometry gave her an edge in her new line of work: she was able to design patterns on graph paper that did not need to be adjusted for the knitwear machines. In 1973, she won the Knitted Textile Association's First Annual Knit Competition. When she retired in 1979, she was a senior vice president.[13]
Later work
Go Down Neath, Easy An’ Bring My Servant Home by Rose Piper, c.1988
In the 1980s, Piper returned to painting. This time she adopted a whole new style, influenced by her years in textile design: instead of semi-abstraction and a subdued, melancholy palette, the later paintings combined a meticulous attention to detail and bright acrylics. As influences, she cited Flemish School painters Hans Memling and Jan van Eyck, and the medieval Book of Hours tradition.[14]
She still drew inspiration from African-American music, and her sense of political purpose had not changed. In 1989 she had a solo exhibition in New York, sponsored by the Phelps Stokes Fund. The centerpiece, titled Slave Song Series, was a set of ten 12 x 9 inch miniatures based on lines from spirituals. Half were set in contemporary urban locales; for example, Go Down Neath, Easy An’ Bring My Servant Home (pictured right) is set in the 96th Street subway station. Describing her motivation for the series, she wrote that "the current state of many inner-city blacks is not unlike the desperate situation of the slave ancestors."[15]
Death
Piper died of a stroke on May 11, 2005, in a Connecticut nursing home, aged 87.[14]
Personal life
Piper had two children, a son and a daughter, and was an aunt of the conceptual artist Adrian Piper.[12][16]
Selected exhibitions
Blues and Negro Folk Songs, RoKo Gallery, New York, 1947[1]
7th Annual Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Prints by Negro Artists, Atlanta University, 1948[5]
Rose Piper: Paintings and Works on Paper, Phelps-Stokes Fund, New York, 1989[17]
The Search for Freedom: African-American Abstraction 1945–1975, Kenkeleba Gallery, New York, 1991[16]
A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, Spertus Museum, Chicago, 2009[18]
Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades, she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field. Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by Greenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock's paintings. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Lenore "Lee" Krasner was an American painter and visual artist active primarily in New York whose work has been associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. She received her early academic training at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union, and the National Academy of Design from 1928 to 1932. Krasner's exposure to Post-Impressionism at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in 1929 led to a sustained interest in modern art. In 1937, she enrolled in classes taught by Hans Hofmann, which led her to integrate influences of Cubism into her paintings. During the Great Depression, Krasner joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, transitioning to war propaganda artworks during the War Services era.
Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."
Adolph Friedrich Reinhardt was an abstract painter active in New York for more than three decades. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) and part of the movement centered on the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as abstract expressionism. He was also a member of The Club, the meeting place for the New York School abstract expressionist artists during the 1940s and 1950s. He wrote and lectured extensively on art and was a major influence on conceptual art, minimal art and monochrome painting. Most famous for his "black" or "ultimate" paintings, he claimed to be painting the "last paintings" that anyone can paint. He believed in a philosophy of art he called Art-as-Art and used his writing and satirical cartoons to advocate for abstract art and against what he described as "the disreputable practices of artists-as-artists".
Nicolas de Staël was a French painter of Russian origin known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting. He also worked with collage, illustration and textiles.
Alma Woodsey Thomas was an African-American artist and teacher who lived and worked in Washington, D.C., and is now recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century. Thomas is best known for the "exuberant", colorful, abstract paintings that she created after her retirement from a 35-year career teaching art at Washington's Shaw Junior High School.
Clementine Hunter was a self-taught Black folk artist from the Cane River region of Louisiana, who lived and worked on Melrose Plantation.
Lyrical abstraction is either of two related but distinct trends in Post-war Modernist painting:
Norman Wilfred Lewis was an American painter, scholar, and teacher. Lewis, who was African-American and of Bermudian descent, was associated with abstract expressionism, and used representational strategies to focus on black urban life and his community's struggles.
American Abstract Artists (AAA) was founded in 1937 in New York City, to promote and foster public understanding of abstract art. American Abstract Artists exhibitions, publications, and lectures helped to establish the organization as a major forum for the exchange and discussion of ideas, and for presenting abstract art to a broader public. The American Abstract Artists group contributed to the development and acceptance of abstract art in the United States and has a historic role in its avant-garde. It is one of the few artists’ organizations to survive from the Great Depression and continue into the 21st century.
Thelma Beatrice Johnson Streat (1912–1959) was an African-American artist, dancer, and educator. She gained prominence in the 1940s for her art, performance and work to foster intercultural understanding and appreciation.
Mildred Jean Thompson was an American artist who worked in painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and photography. Critics have related her art to West African textiles and Islamic architecture; they have also cited German Expressionism, music and Thompson's readings in astronomy, spiritualism and metaphysics as important artistic influences. She also wrote and was an associate editor for the magazine Art Papers.
Perle Fine (1905–1988) was an American Abstract expressionist painter. Fine's work was most known by its combination of fluid and brushy rendering of the materials and the use of biomorphic forms encased and intertwined with irregular geometric shapes.
Haywood "Bill" Rivers was an African American contemporary artist and gallerist.
Alice Trumbull Mason (1904–1971) was an American artist, writer, and a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group (AAA) in New York City. Mason was recognized as a pioneer of American Abstract Art.
Corinne Michelle West (1908–1991) was an American painter; she also used the names Mikael and Michael West. She was an Abstract Expressionist.
Ruth Starr Rose (1887–1965) was an American artist. She was a painter, lithographer and serigrapher, and best known for her paintings of African American life in Maryland in the 1930s and 1940s.
Jane Gibson Piper (1916–1991) was an American artist known for her abstract treatment of still lifes. Building on the French modernist tradition of Matisse and Cézanne, she gave color precedence over representation. Shortly after her death a critic said "throughout her career Piper worked within a relatively narrow aesthetic range. She was interested in spatial organization and in creating space through color — concerns of another painter she admired, Henri Matisse. There's a sense of Matisse in her later work, but no indication that she was trying to imitate him; the resonance reflects shared concerns." From her first exhibition in 1943 through the end of her life she was given a total of thirty-four solo exhibitions in Philadelphia, New York, and other East Coast galleries and her works have been collected by major museums including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Academy of Design, The Phillips Collection, and the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Ronald Joseph (1910–1992) was an African-American artist, teacher, and printmaker.
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.
Dallow, Jessica (Spring 2004). "Reclaiming Histories: Betye and Alison Saar, Feminism, and the Representation of Black Womanhood". Feminist Studies. 30 (1): 74–113. JSTOR3178559.
Dohogne, Meghan (2016). Rose Piper: New discoveries (Thesis). Department of Art and Art History. University of Missouri-Kansas City. hdl:10355/60504.
Gibson, Ann Eden (1997). Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp.110–12, 138–39. ISBN9780300063394.
Lock, Graham (2008). "Blues on the Brush: Musical Influence in Rose Piper's Blues and Negro Folk Songs Paintings of the Mid-1940s". International Review of African American Art. 22 (1).
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
