California Modernist Women

Marguerite Wildenhain
Marguerite Wildenhain (1896–1985) was an internationally renowned studio potter who influenced generations of ceramicists. Born in Lyons, France, of English, German, and Jewish descent, she briefly studied drawing and sculpture at the Berlin School of Fine and Applied Arts. Dissatisfied with school, Wildenhain left and designed ceramic wares for a porcelain company in Rudolstadt, Germany, where she was fascinated by the factory’s potters. In 1919, Wildenhain enrolled in the inaugural year of instruction at the legendary Bauhaus in nearby Weimar. She studied sculpture under master potters Gerhard Marcks (1889–1981) and Max Krehan (1875–1925), and after a seven-year apprenticeship-in-residence, she became the first woman in Germany to achieve master potter status.

In 1933, Marguerite and her husband Frans Wildenhain (1905–1980) moved to Putten in the Netherlands and opened a pottery they named Het Kruikje, or The Little Jug. When the German army invaded the Netherlands in 1940, she immigrated to the United States and taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts) in Oakland. Two years later, she was the first resident at Pond Farm, an art colony and refuge for European artists near Guerneville in the Russian River Valley of Northern California. While other émigré artists including metalworker Victor Ries (1907–2011) and weaver Trude Guermonprez (1910–76) joined Wildenhain, the collaborative dissolved during the 1950s. Marguerite Wildenhain continued at Pond Farm, where she made studio ceramics and held annual summer workshops, teaching select students to master wheel-thrown pottery.

[artist photo]
Marguerite Wildenhain working in her studio  c. 1950
Guerneville, California
Courtesy of Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
R2022.0605.001

Mary Fuller McChesney
Mary Fuller McChesney (1922–2022) was a largely self-taught sculptor and art historian. After studying philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, she embarked on a more dexterous pursuit and apprenticed with potter William Bragdon (1884–1959) at California Faience in Berkeley. During the Second World War, she worked as a welder at the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California. By 1949, Mary lived in Point Richmond with her husband, Abstract Expressionist painter Robert McChesney (1913–2008), and made ceramic sculpture with a kiln that she constructed at their home. She was greatly inspired by Pre-Columbian sculpture when they moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1951, to join a group of Bay Area and New York artists.

In 1952, the couple hand-built a small home and two studios on two acres atop Sonoma Mountain near Petaluma, California. Their plot was the first in a planned artist’s colony that never materialized because of the remote location. Mary sculpted, wrote for art magazines, and in the mid-1960s, she worked for the Archives of American Art on an oral history project to document San Francisco artists who participated in the Works Progress Administration’s 1935–43 Federal Art Project. She also interviewed postwar Abstract Expressionist artists from the Bay Area, which evolved into her book A Period of Exploration: San Francisco 1945–1950 and the accompanying exhibition at the Oakland Museum in 1973. That decade, Mary Fuller McChesney began work on larger, publicly commissioned sculptures, carving forms from a mixture of cement, sand, vermiculite, and water as they slowly dried.

[artist photo]
Portrait of Mary Fuller McChesney  May 1955 
Arthur Knight (active mid-20th century) 
Sonoma Mountain, California
Courtesy of Dennis Calabi
R2022.0602.001

Edith Heath
Edith Heath (1911–2005) created ceramics that combined modern design with the hand-made aesthetics of studio pottery. Initially, Heath aspired to teach and completed her credential in art education at Chicago Teachers College. She moved west in the early 1940s and took classes in ceramics at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and the University of California, Berkeley. Heath converted the laundry room of her Filbert Street residence into a pottery studio, and by 1944, she exhibited at the Legion of Honor and sold to the high-end San Francisco retailer Gump’s. When national department stores including Marshall Field’s and Neiman-Marcus carried Heath Ceramics, production moved to a factory in Sausalito, California, that incorporated manufacturing equipment designed by Edith’s husband Brian Heath (1913–2001).

Innovative combinations of natural materials were at the core of Heath Ceramics’ success. Unimpressed with lightly colored, commercially available clays, Edith Heath formulated clay bodies from rich deposits left by a prehistoric inland sea near Lincoln, California, in the Sierra Nevada Mountains foothills. Glazes that contained metallic oxides were perfected to chemically react at low temperatures. Some of her distinctive finishes created speckled effects when fired in the kiln, such as the two-toned “Sea and Sand.” Heath introduced Coupe in 1948, which is still in production and was their first original dinnerware line. Coupe pioneered manufacturing at Heath Ceramics. Plates and shallow bowls were formed on mechanized jigger wheels developed by Brian, while Edith and her artisans used slip casting and other traditional methods for more complex shapes.

[artist photo]
Edith Heath at a potter’s wheel  c. late-1940s–50s
Courtesy of Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
R2022.0605.002

Dorr Bothwell
Dorr Bothwell (1902–2000) was a painter, printmaker, and art teacher who translated her travels into artistic expression. Born Doris Hodgson Bothwell in San Francisco, she moved to San Diego with her family and took art lessons with their neighbor, the painter and sculptor Anna Marie Valentien (1862–1947). In the early 1920s, Bothwell studied at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) with Rudolph Schaeffer (1886-1988). After her first exhibition entry was rejected in 1924, female colleagues suggested that Bothwell not sign her first name on artworks to avoid gender discrimination from male reviewers. Instead, Bothwell legally changed her first name to Dorr, a nickname from childhood that she preferred.

In 1925, Dorr Bothwell became a charter member of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. Three years later, Bothwell sailed for Pago Pago, Samoa. She lived on the island of Ta`ū as the adopted daughter of a local chief and sketched, painted, and made linocut prints, which she sent to California to fund further travel. During the late 1930s, Bothwell worked as a muralist for modernist painter Lorser Feitelson (1898–1978) and the Works Progress Administration in Los Angeles. In the 1940s, Bothwell was one of the first West Coast artists to exhibit serigraph prints. She taught at the California School of Fine Arts from 1944 until 1961, when Bothwell changed her trajectory and moved to Mendocino, California, where she established a studio and taught at the Mendocino Art Center until 1997.

[artist photo]
Dorr Bothwell displays artists’ works  September 1945
Courtesy of San Francisco History Center, 
San Francisco Public Library
MOR–0928
R2022.0606.001

Ray Eames
Ray Eames (1912–88) was an artist and designer who shaped public awareness of modern design. Along with her husband, Charles Eames (1907–78), they formed the Eames Office, an influential and prolific mid-century design team whose work is world renowned. Their philosophy was practical and personal, centered by a drive to bring good design and artfully modern products into every household and public space. For almost forty years, the Eames Office designed graphics, toys, and exhibitions in addition to furniture made from innovative materials such as molded plywood, fiberglass, aluminum, and steel wire. While Eames Office marketing and packaging attributed its products to Charles, Ray was critical to their success. In recent years, Ray Eames has received the design attribution that she deserves.

Ray Eames’ background in modern art guided everything the Eames Office produced. In the 1930s, she studied at the Art Students League in New York with the avant-garde German émigré painter Hans Hoffman (1880–1966) and exhibited with the American Abstract Artists. After meeting Charles at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1940, they moved to Southern California and focused on design. The S2–1790 Leg Splint, their first mass-manufactured plywood product, originated with Ray’s plywood sculptures, which she featured on the cover of California Arts & Architecture in September 1942. Most Eames Office items were designed from scratch by Ray, Charles, and their team. Certain pieces were influenced by found objects, such as the Time Life stool that Ray Eames based on a traditional African stool she had at home.

[artist photo]
Ray Eames with her art  c. early 1940s
Courtesy of Eames Office LLC
© Eames Office LLC 
R2022.0607.001

Ruth Asawa
Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) formed semi-transparent sculptures from looped or tied metal wire, and created public art and fountains from bronze, stainless steel, and other materials. Initially, Asawa studied drawing and painting while confined in Japanese American internment camps during the Second World War. She took art lessons from Tom Okamoto (1916–78), a Disney animator also incarcerated at the Santa Anita racetrack in Southern California. Asawa continued her artistic practice after transfer to the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas. In 1943, she received a scholarship to Milwaukee State Teachers College (now University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). However, after three years of training to become an art teacher, Asawa was denied a prerequisite internship because of postwar racism against Japanese Americans.

Undeterred, Asawa studied with former Bauhaus instructor Josef Albers (1888–1976) at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. During the summer of 1947, Asawa taught art in Toluca, Mexico, where she learned to make baskets from looped, metal wire. She applied the technique to sculpture and remarked, “what I was excited by was I could make a shape that was inside and outside at the same time.” By 1960, Asawa exhibited locally at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) and the de Young Museum, and at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York. She has since exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. Asawa was a lifelong advocate for art education, and in 1982, she helped found a public arts high school, renamed Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in 2010.

[artist photo]
Ruth Asawa making wire sculpture  1956
Paul Hassel (1906–64)
Courtesy of the Estate of Paul Hassel and Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. 
Photograph © Estate of Paul Hassel
© 2022 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Artists Rights Society, NY. Courtesy David Zwirner
R2022.0603.003

The Bruton Sisters
The Bruton sisters—Margaret (1894–1983), Esther (1896–1992), and Helen Bruton (1898–1985)—were multidisciplinary artists who worked in painting, printmaking, mosaic, terrazzo, and bas-relief. The Brutons shared major commissions and collaborated closely, no matter who was charged with the project. Raised in Alameda, California, they attended The Art Students League of New York, where Margaret painted and Helen sculpted, while Esther transferred to the New York School of Fine and Applied Art to study commercial art. During the 1920s, the Bruton sisters were part of the Monterey Group and exhibited throughout Northern California. In 1929, Margaret and Esther joined a community of modern artists in Taos, New Mexico, while Helen worked for Gladding, McBean in Glendale, California, as a ceramics designer.

From 1934–36, Helen completed Works Progress Administration mosaics at the San Francisco Zoo and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1935, Esther painted murals for the Cirque Room at the Fairmont Hotel. The Brutons’ largest commission was at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. Titled The Peacemakers, the bas-relief mural spanned 144 by fifty-seven feet, painted on carved and layered Masonite applied to 270 plywood boards. At the fair’s second season in 1940, Helen organized Art in Action, a live exhibition of artists working in the Fine Arts Palace that included Diego Rivera (1886–1957) painting the mural Pan Pacific Unity. During the 1950s, Margaret and her sisters completed a monumental installation of mosaic maps for the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.

[artist photo]
Esther, Margaret, and Helen Bruton, from left to right,
work on a rendering for The Peacemakers mural  1938
Courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
AAC–8855
R2022.0606.002

Margaret De Patta
Margaret De Patta (1903–64) was one of the first modernist American jewelers. During the 1920s, she trained as an avant-garde painter at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and the Art Students League in New York City. After an unsuccessful search for a modern wedding band, De Patta resolved to make her own ring—which ignited an interest in jewelry design that changed her trajectory as an artist. De Patta apprenticed as a jeweler for two months in 1929 and then set out on her own, studying books on jewelry-making and experimenting with unconventional metals and gemstones.

In the early 1940s, De Patta studied at Mills College in Oakland, and at the School of Design in Chicago under Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) who encouraged her to “catch your stones in the air. Make them float in space. Don’t enclose them.” De Patta’s work was an exciting departure from traditional jewelry that focused simply on mounting precious gemstones. Captivated by the effects of light and motion, she balanced sculptural compositions with quartz, pearls, or polished pebbles in a distinctly harmonious style. Working with San Francisco lapidarist Francis Sperisen (1900–86), De Patta pioneered modern gemstone cutting techniques and achieved exciting visual effects. She also created Designs Contemporary, a jewelry company that made limited numbers of her selected designs. In 1951, Margaret De Patta was a founder and president of the San Francisco Metal Arts Guild.

[artist photo]
Margaret De Patta at her workbench  November 1937
Courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
MOR–0929
R2022.0606.003

Eileen Reynolds Curtis
Eileen Reynolds Curtis (1915–77) was a San Francisco Bay Area studio potter who was known for hand-thrown ceramics with unique and distinctive glazes. She studied at Mills College in Oakland with F. Carlton Ball (1911–92), who encouraged Eileen and her husband Rossi Reynolds (1909–48) to evolve from amateur potters to professional ceramicists. By 1945, the Reynolds had established a pottery studio on Russian Hill in San Francisco and were producing ceramics full-time. Their work was inspired by the graceful forms of classical Chinese ceramics, along with the simple lines of traditional, stoneware jugs and bowls from the Ohio River Valley in Indiana where Eileen was raised.

Eileen and Rossi Reynolds worked with native materials such as California red and yellow clays. They developed unique glazes and kept their formulations as closely guarded secrets. Their semi-translucent glazes accentuated the natural qualities of clay. Perhaps the most striking was “Pebble White,” a textured glaze that bubbled in the kiln and created lava-like effects. The Reynolds’ work was exhibited at museums including the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) and sold through local specialty retailers such as Gump’s. After Rossi’s untimely passing, Eileen relocated her studio to Sausalito in 1961. She continued to make pottery and co-founded the Teahouse Group of artists with her second husband, the painter and ceramicist Ross Curtis (1918–2007).

[artist photo]
Eileen Reynolds Curtis  c. 1950s
Courtesy of Lost Art Salon
R2022.0608.001

Freda Koblick
Freda Koblick (1920–2011) was a native of San Francisco who pioneered cast-acrylic plastic sculpture. The first woman to graduate from the Plastic Industries Technical Institute in Los Angeles, she envisioned plastic as a fine arts medium that could provide exciting possibilities beyond the material’s traditional, industrial applications. Koblick found that the control of curvature, plane, and texture was far more precise to accomplish in plastic than with other transparent media such as glass. According to the artist, she was fascinated by “the promise and the mystery of transparency” of plastic as art, specifically when the internal structure of a piece played a dynamic counterpart to reflections on the surface. 

At first, Koblick produced functional items such as doorknobs, lighting fixtures, serving trays, and other decorative objects. She also made large site-specific architectural elements. By the 1960s, Koblick shifted focus to cast-acrylic sculpture, striving to elevate plastic as a fine art. In November 1968, she was honored with a solo exhibition titled Plastic Forms by Freda Koblick at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York. Koblick was awarded a prestigious fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation two years later. One of Freda Koblick’s monumental projects was Night Sky, a 1500-pound, cast-acrylic, hanging sculpture that was commissioned in 1980 for the central hub of Terminal 3 at the San Francisco International Airport.

[artist photo]
Freda Koblick with one of her sculptures  1968 
Peter B. George (active mid-20th century)
Courtesy of Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
R2022.0605.003

Zahara Schatz
Zahara Schatz (1916–99) created modern decorative arts from metal and laminated plastic. Born in Jerusalem, she was the daughter of Boris Schatz (1867–1932), a distinguished Israeli artist who founded the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Zahara Schatz studied at the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris and worked from studios in New York and Northern California. In 1950, she was awarded for a tubular metal desk lamp shown in the Lamp Design Competition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. The following year, she founded an arts and crafts workshop in Jerusalem with her brother, the painter Bezalel Schatz (1912–78).

From the 1940s–70s, Zahara Schatz experimented with Plexiglas, an aircraft-grade plastic that offered fantastic optical clarity and opportunities to explore color and reflection. Working in her Berkeley, California, studio, she arranged “inclusions”—or pieces of wire, screen, bright metal, and tinted plastic—between two sheets of Plexiglas softened by heat or solvent. To add color, she painted layers in translucent, opaque, and metallic pigments. Some of her lamps conducted electrical current through copper wire imbedded in Plexiglas; the example on display utilizes a spiral-shaped copper tube as a base and channel for the lamp cord. Zahara Schatz also created two-dimensional artwork that she called “planar layered paintings,” in addition to molded sculpture, decorated plates, jewelry, and architectural elements—all in translucent Plexiglas.

[artist photo]
Zahara Schatz with her acrylic art  1950
Courtesy of The Schatz House
R2022.0609.001