Elsie Driggs (American, 1898-1992)
Sea Battle
American: 20th Century
Watercolor and pencil on paper
Signed in pencil lower right
Signed in and titled in red pencil verso and
numbered 4254
10.5 x 17.5 inches, image
13.25 x 21.5 inches, sheet
18.5 x 25.5 inches, gold frame
Sold, please inquire as to availability of similar items.
Sea Battle by Elsie Driggs
Fighting Lobsters Watercolor
Fighting Lobsters Watercolor
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Underwater scene of two lobsters battling each other on the sandy sea ocean floor. Their interlocked grasping claws are executed in transparent watercolor, which gives the impression of transitory movement as well as conveying the watery environment.
Elsie Driggs was a prominent early American modernist of the 1920s and 30s, associated with the precisionist painters, such as Charles Sheeler Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella and Georgia O’Keeffe. She is best known for her industrial landscapes, especially a series on the Pittsburgh steel mills, with the bold forms and clarity of light characterizing the precisionist style.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Driggs studied in New York at the Art Students League from 1919 to 1925 and with Maurice Stern in Rome (1922), where she was influenced by the paintings of the Italian Futurist movement. She exhibited and sold her work through the Daniel Gallery, New York City, from 1924 to 1932 and produced murals for the Federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the 1930s with her husband, artist Lee Gatch. She was included in 35 Under 35, the opening show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1930. Over the next 55 years, many other major museum shows followed at the Whitney Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Royal Academy in Edinburgh, Scotland; the Hayward Gallery, London; and the Akademie Kunste, Berlin. Her work is in the collection of major museums across the country including many of the above-listed museums, the Corcoran Gallery, the Phillips Gallery and the Barnes Collection.
References:
Hollister, Dean, Amy I. Furman, Mary Bruccoli and Tamara Adams, eds. Who’s Who in American Art. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1989. pp. 281-282.
Zellman, Michael David, dir. American Art Analog. Vol. 3. Chelsea House: New York, 1986. p. 918.