FOLLOWING A VISION
INSPIRATIONAL MODERNIST STOOD ON HER OWN TWO FEET
Janet Lippincott was a fiercely independent woman who followed her own artistic muse in creating abstract prints and paintings in powerful brushstrokes and saturated colors. It was a good thing she could stand on her own two feet because, when she came to Taos in 1949 to study under modernist painter Emil Bisttram, he told her she would never make it.
Matthews Gallery is holding a 70-year retrospective of Lippincott’s art, opening tonight, that will fill the gallery with at least 70 or so artworks, according to gallery owner Lawrence Matthews.
“She was one of the most influential women modernists that came to Santa Fe in the 1950s,” he said. She came at a time when abstract art was big in Europe and New York, but was barely getting started in the Southwest. Besides Bisttram, she studied in Santa Fe under Alfred Morang, whose style was sort of a bridge between realism and abstraction, and who may have influenced her to move from her earlier figures and landscapes to abstract expressionism instead, according to Matthews.
Her own art wasn’t always highly regarded, perhaps partly because of her gender, he speculated. “She was very confrontational about the fact that women can’t compete on equal terms with male artists,” Matthews said, adding that she once related a story about
a male customer who became reluctant to buy one of her works once he realized a woman had painted it.
But her example did seem to inspire younger artists coming in to the area, he said.
“She gave those artists someone to look up to,” Matthews said. “She was someone they saw following her own vision and not caring much what other artists or collectors thought.”
Lippincott had shows in Mexico, Denver, New York and New Orleans, as well at the local fine art museum, Matthews said.
She was born in Brooklyn to a well-to-do family, with whom she spent part of her childhood in Paris and was exposed to early modernist painters. She studied in the Art Students League of New York, but enrolled in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II and worked on Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff. While in London in 1941-42 during German bombing, she broke her back when a building collapsed around her.
After studying art with Bisttram in Taos, she moved on to Colorado Springs and San Francisco, where she took a job at its art institute. She moved to Santa Fe in 1954, where she built a house and studio on Upper Canyon Road.
“She was married for like 10 days, but said that was too much,” Matthews said.
She died in 2007 and donated her estate to St. John’s College, which has valued the gift at roughly $350,000, according to Margaret Mertz, St. John’s director of major and planned gifts. That estate includes documents, papers, sketchbooks, press clippings and more, along with more than 150 large-scale artworks and maybe 100 more smaller pieces, she said. “Some are hanging in Levan Hall on campus,” she said, adding that almost everything else is in storage.
In working with Matthews Gallery, St. John’s College hopes to sell the works, she added.
Besides paintings in watercolor, oil and later acrylic, Lippincott’s works include a number of prints, especially monoprints, in which the artist paints directly on the plate that then is pressed onto a paper, producing only one unique print, Matthews said. “She’s a very accomplished print-maker,” he said. “A lot of her very good work is on paper.”
As her work became less realistic and more abstract, her forms and colors also became more refined over the years, according to Matthews. “Starting out, she was experimenting with many different things,” he said. “As she defined her own modes of expression, the focus is more and more on refining those forms, symbols and colors that represent whatever she wanted to show.”
While her abstract work was somewhat geometric, it worked with a flowing line and free-formed shapes.
“It was not hard-edged,” Matthews said. “She used very idiosyncratic shapes.”
The exhibit will be on view through Dec. 30.