“I am a
painter and my paintings are all I can contribute to this world."
Janet Lippincott
Janet Lippincott
From telling the larger than life American World War Two general George S Patton to sit
down and shut up to determining that 10 days of marriage was more than enough,
American artist Janet Lippincott
was a determined woman unafraid to follow her own path or speak her mind. Her
long time dealer Karen Ruhlen described Lippincott as being "a little on
the ornery side," but "Janet was an artist to the core. Making art
was like breathing - it was her way of talking and expressing emotions."
In the early 1930’s as a young teen living in Paris, Lippincott
discovered the aesthetic
innovations of Picasso and Matisse, a life determining event that set
her on the course to become a painter herself and an influence that remained with
her for the rest of her life even after she embraced abstract expressionism.
Lippincott’s return to New York saw the 15 year old enroll at the New York Art
Students League.
After recovering from a broken back
sustained whilst working under the command of General Eisenhower
during the London Blitz Lippincott drove to Taos, New Mexico to attend Emil Bisttram’s School of
Art. Upon her arrival Lippincott was told by the founder that she didn’t have
what it takes to be an artist. She replied that the GI Bill was paying and she
would stay. Twenty three years later Bisttram wrote a glowing review of a 1972
exhibition of her work.
But with her arrival in the 1950’s she was in the vanguard of
abstract expressionism’s expansion into the United States South Western states.
As she reportedly said "After the war, I came out here, and no one was
doing any modern painting. Here I came with my screwball ideas and shook
everybody up." To which she has elaborated "Abstract painting is an
intellectual process. To be a modern painter and to make a truthful statement
is the sum total of all I am and what I am continually striving to create.”
As the Santa Fean magazine
wrote in 2011, four years after her death, “Compositionally akin to Matisse and
Picasso, but with softer contrasts and kinder hues, and an innately more fluid if
gauzy way with lines and shapes, Lippincott ended up an artist’s artist, and
created lasting images of the female form and abstract arrangements of
emotionally rich and inviting shapes.”
A selection of Lippincott’s works will
be included in the NEW LANGUAGE, NEW VISTAS: Women Artists of
New Mexico exhibition at Santa Fe’s Matthews
Gallery from the 8th to the 31st of May.
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