By Irene Rice Pereira
Located in Southampton, NY
Early in the career painting of a red boat with swans by Irene Rice Pereira. Most likely done in Paris in 1931 or 1932. Signed lower right. Oil on canvas. The painting is housed in a new silver leaf gallery frame. Overall measurements are 23 by 27 inches. Provenance: A Pelham, New York collector.
Born in Boston in 1902, Irene Rice Pereira moved to Brooklyn, New York, with her family during her childhood. In 1926, Pereira enrolled in art classes at Manhattan’s Washington Irving High School. In 1927, at age twenty-five, she began taking night classes at the Art Students League. She studied with Jan Matulka, a formative teacher who introduced his students to the European avant-garde, particularly the Cubists and Constructivists. Here, Pereira was exposed to the work of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse and was encouraged to experiment with Cubist abstraction. In 1931, Pereira left New York for Paris and studied briefly at the Académie moderne before traveling throughout Europe and visiting several African countries.
After returning to New York in 1933, Pereira received her first solo exhibition at the American Contemporary Art Gallery (now ACA Gallery) and went on to become a member of the fine-arts faculty at the Works Progress Administration Design Laboratory. As a teacher, Pereira championed the interdisciplinary study of art and science, modeling her program after László Moholy-Nagy’s machine and technology-oriented curriculum at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany. Pereira’s work from this period demonstrates her interest in a modern, clean-lined aesthetic and new, industrially produced materials, such as metal and glass. Philosophy, psychology, and theories of perception were equally influential, and works such as Black and White (1940) exemplify her investigations of light, reflection, and depth through geometric abstraction.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Pereira became a central figure among New York–based abstract artists. From 1940 to 1942, she worked at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) as a museum assistant. In addition to continuing her prolific work as an educator and lecturing at numerous universities and art museums, Pereira was honored with many shows at major local museums, including the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. Pereira’s art was included in the groundbreaking Exhibition by 31 Women (1943) at Peggy Guggenheim’s museum-gallery, Art of This Century; in a major two-person retrospective with Loren MacIver...
Category
1930s Modern Irene Rice Pereira Paintings
