All posts by Madeleine Bogan

Marjorie Johnson Lee

January 18, 2019 Madeleine Bogan

AN AMERICAN MODERNIST

On May 31, 1911, Marjorie Evelin Johnson was born in Upland, Texas, a small town that no longer exists, in Upton County. Her father, a country doctor who worked for Humble Oil, constantly moved his family around West Texas to wherever Humble oil workers needed his services. Most likely from the stress of being in almost constant motion, Marjorie’s parents divorced in 1924 and her grandmother moved the family to Fort Worth where they lived in rental housing until 1938. Marjorie graduated Paschal High School in 1925 and that next year, at age 15, started working for Southwestern Bell Telephone Company. That same year, pursuing her childhood interest in drawing, Marjorie started studying art with Fort Worth artist, Mrs. G.W. Greathouse.

In 1934, while still working with the phone company, Marjorie decided to attended Texas Christian University. After taking classes at TCU for two years, she dropped out when Blanche McVeigh, a respected artist and printmaker who was a principal of the Fort Worth School of Fine Arts along with Evaline Sellors and Wade Jolly, was impressed enough with her artistic talent to invite her to enroll in their school. Under Jolly’s tutelage, she became a skilled landscape watercolorist. In the late 30’s and early 40’s she exhibited often with other prominent Fort Worth artists like Bror Utter and Veronica Helfensteller. As with many serious artists in the Dallas and Fort area during that time, she traveled to Colorado Springs to take classes at the Colorado Art Center in 1942.

In the latter part of 42, to do her part, Marjorie joined the WAVES and was sent to Norman Oklahoma for training in radio communication and celestial navigation. In 1943, she was assigned to Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida for the next three years where she taught young airmen these skills and painted and drew whenever she had time off.

*Flowers*, 1971
Oil on Canvas
24 x 20 inches

After WWII, she moved to New York City to attend the Art Students League under the GI Bill. In 1947, to be sure she could stay in the city, she took a job with New York Telephone and continued to take classes at the League through 48.

She vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard in 1950 and chose to capture her impressions of the island in pastel. She returned in 52, and this time chose watercolor, possibly more suited to the Island atmosphere.

She continued the artistic life in NYC and in 1950, met and married an experimental film maker and educator named Francis Lee. Marjorie’s artwork documents their vacations and trips out of NYC over the next 14 years with works from Minnewaska, New Rochelle, Carmel, East Hampton, and Woodstock in NY, Colorado, Glacier Park in Montana, and New Jersey.

*Rocky Crossing*, 1978
Oil on Canvas
18 x 24 inches

After working for the phone company in NYC for 27 years, in 1974, she moved back to Fort Worth introducing her husband to life in Texas. Although while living in New York, she continued to show in important Texas and regional shows, retirement provided the opportunity to focus on her art. She started exhibiting with the Evelyn Siegel Gallery in Fort Worth and entering competitive shows all over Texas. Nine years after their move, Marjorie and Francis divorced and he moved back to NYC.

About the time Marjorie entered the Art Students League in NYC, she fell in love with color and was won over by Modernist art. During her vacations she filled drawing books with plein-air, almost fauve like, pastels and watercolors of ebullient trees, fast flowing rivers, and assemblages of hyper-colored rocks. Upon her return to the city, her favorite pastels and watercolors would often evolve into studies for oil paintings.

*Untitled (Still Life)*
Pastel and Cut Paper Collage on Paper
20 x 26 inches

After she returned to live in Fort Worth, she started creating brightly colored collages, cut from home-made and commercial colored papers, repurposed watercolors, and often combined with watercolor washes, ink, and sometimes pastel. They were always bright in color and evolved over time from representational to totally non-objective.

*Swim Through the Sea of Light, Little Swimmer*, 1979
Cut Paper Collage on Paper
20 x 14 inches

Marjorie gave up entering competitive shows in 1984 and her last one-person show was held at Evelyn Siegal Gallery in 1994. She died in a Fort Worth nursing home on February 1, 1997.

*****

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Highlighted

Paintings and Sculptures by Richard Neidhardt

July 9, 2018 Madeleine Bogan

MATHEMATICS AND COLOR

FAE is pleased to offer artworks from William Campbell Contemporary Art, by painter and sculptor Richard Neidhardt (1921-2009). These artworks span decades of an accomplished career, and yet not one could be recognized for its date. Artist-cum-globetrotter, Neidhardt tapped into a distilled aesthetic that remains fresh.

Neidhardt was born in Chattanooga, TN, and served as a transport pilot for Pan American Airways during World War II. He earned his BA from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, his MFA from the university of Florida, and his Ph.D. from Ohio State University. He taught at Austin College in Sherman, TX, from 1967 to 1986, retiring as professor emeritus. He was awarded several grants, and his artworks are widely included in Texas museum collections.

His time in service as a transport pilot came to be deeply influential to Neidhardt’s artwork. He flew routes through Europe, South America, Africa, the Middle East and India, gaining a worldliness that informed his artwork throughout his career. Neidhardt processed these influences by distilling them down to their essence. He describes this philosophical geometry in his artist’s statement,

Aerial Landscape #2, 1967, Oil on Canvas, 50 x 40 inches

“Most of my earlier paintings were formal architectural and semi-abstract statements with little subject matter. This approach would evolve into mostly non-objective geometric explorations with shape and color. Increasingly, I became fascinated with subtle interrelationships existing between forms, colors, space and time. Simplicity and attention to edge became hallmarks.”

There is a rigorous analytical quality to Neidhardt’s paintings, which he describes as “the aesthetics of mathematics and the energy of color”. His paintings would often feature an underlying grid and a precise Mondrian-like application of color, perhaps owed to his 1953 Fulbright Award for research in the Netherlands. Neidhardt spent a year at the Rijksacadamie in Amsterdam, developing his philosophical geometric painting style.

Left: Prism #5, 1972, Acrylic and Graphite on Canvas, 20 x 20 inches; Center: Four Clips #5, 1974, Acrylic and Graphite on Canvas, 12 x 12 inches; Right: Serpentine #4, 1973, Acrylic and Graphite on Canvas, 20 x 20 inches

Neidhardt’s world travel continued as he was awarded a 1973 Cullen Grant for Research in Egypt, a 1975 Richardson Grant for Research in Southern France, and a 1982 Richardson Grant for Research in Greece. It was in the 1980’s that he began sculpting in the round, creating bronze casts of wood carvings that synthesized architectural and artistic visual cues with a sardonic twist.

“They came from a side of me aware of being a fellow inmate of the earth with all of its absurdities, a possible justification for being a part of this great mystery. My output was prolific; many images were cast in bronze. I presented singly, conditions and attitudes common to mankind, and did so as simply and honestly as possible. The presentation is universal and generic, often a formal frontal stance with possible roots in Egyptian, Minoan and late archaic Greek sculpture.”

Gothic Man, 1987, Bronze, 8 x 3 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches

One such pan-cultural edition is Gothic Man, 1987, standing 8 inches with the help of several flying buttresses. The Gothic Man’s posture echoes that of a Greek kouros, less idealized. His architectural armatures enable him to stand taller, and at the same time keep him cemented in situ.

Golfer, 1989, Bronze, 11 x 3 3/4 x 3 inches

Neidhardt’s 1989 small bronze edition Golfer reads as a wry interpretation of a Pharaoh’s sarcophagus. The symbolic crook and flail are replaced with golf clubs, and Pharaoh’s headdress re-imagined as a golf ball and tee. The smoothed-down face quotes those of Minoan fertility totems. With this sum of references, does Golfer add up to a retiree’s kingly sendoff, or totem for a fruitful outing?

Neidhardt’s artworks have been shown in galleries and museums, in solo exhibitions at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas (1991) and The Grace Museum (2001). In 2010 Austin College memorialized their late professor with the exhibition “Richard Neidhardt: 1921-2009: A Retrospective of Sculpture and Painting”.

Neidhardt’s pan-cultural approach has seemingly immunized his artworks to the pitfalls of dated colors or trends. His paintings’ clean lines and colors have a perpetually contemporary energy. His sculptures are keenly arranged amalgams of classical elements. With his global visual language and “mathematics of aesthetics”, Neidhardt’s artworks have both humor and a timeless appeal.

*****

To see all available FAE Design Blog Posts, jump to the Design Blog Table of Contents.

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Browse fine artworks available to purchase on FAE. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to stay updated about FAE and new blog posts.

For comments about this blog or suggestions for a future post, contact Kevin at [email protected].