Josephine Crawford

Josephine Marien Crawford (December 31, 1878 – March 24, 1952) was an American painter, born into an old, aristocratic family in New Orleans, Louisiana. Along later Paul Ninas and Will Henry Stevens, she has been endorsed with introducing modernism to New Orleans.

Crawford was the sixth of nine children of Charles Campbell Crawford and Louise Bienvenu Crawford, and grew in the works speaking English and French; through her mother she was descended from the Bienvenus, who had fixed in Louisiana in the eighteenth century. Her maternal grandfather had purchased the family's townhouse, at 612 Royal Street in the French Quarter in 1839. Her father's associates was from Belfast. In her puberty she wrote poetry, much of it approximately the home and its surroundings; she spent period in North Carolina and in Biloxi, Mississippi as well, which new informed her sensibilities. She would reward to Biloxi throughout her life. These childhood trips inspired her dated known drawings, which date to 1896, though she is known to have carried a sketchbook as prematurely as 1888. She traveled widely throughout her life, and is known to have visited much of Europe, Central America, and Mexico at various times.

Crawford studied at the Cenas Institute for Young Ladies and McDonogh High School No. 3, and was briefly enrolled, in 1895, at Newcomb College. She evinced no special capability in drawing or painting in further on life, and her formal breakdown of art did not begin until far along in life, when she enrolled in classes at the studious of the Arts and Crafts Club of New Orleans in the 1920s. Friends of her far along years claimed that she had had no formal education at all.

Crawford spent the winter of 1927–28 in Paris, studying in the announce of André Lhote; in the spring she continued her studies, traveling to Vienna and operating at the Kunstgewerbeschule. In Europe she entered the Cubist scene in Paris and became associates with and was mentored by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, and others. She after that returned house to New Orleans and continued to paint and exhibit, with her first solo function coming in 1928. The taking into consideration year motto her exhibiting in New York, at the Montross Gallery, where she and Charles Bain were singled out for compliment from a local critic; she continued showing her art regionally and in New York and Philadelphia for the bordering decade. She won much valuable acclaim and a number of local prizes; she as a consequence created take action for the Public Works of Art Project of the New Deal.

Because her accomplish was far away too avant garde for New Orleans at that time, after she returned to Louisiana she did most of her painting in private and much of it was not discovered until after her death. Following their discovery, many of these works were given long-lasting mountings and presented to the public for the first time.

For much of her life, Crawford lived gone her stepsister Louise Crawford in the house on Royal Street, a building in which Lyle Saxon in addition to had an apartment. In the 1940s, however, she was forced to depart after developing cancer; she then moved in subsequently a sister in the Garden District. Crawford died in New Orleans in 1952; her brother forward-looking donated a large heap of personal effects, including sketchbooks, personal papers, and poetry as without difficulty as many artworks, to The Historic New Orleans Collection. The Delgado Museum, today the New Orleans Museum of Art, held an exhibit of her work, "The World of Josephine Crawford", in 1965. A biography, Josephine Crawford: An Artist’s Vision, was released in 2009.

Crawford's style, rather than being stuck in realism, bordered upon the abstract, in contrast to the Impressionism-derived style which was prominent in New Orleans for much of her to the front life. Characteristically her palette is muted, lending a quiet environment to her work.
Her Cubist-inspired style, developed after her French sojourn, later gave exaggeration to a more formless and expressive technique, which came to full flower in the watercolors and gouaches she produced in the 1930s. Her style continued to mature, becoming ever more minimalist by the stop of her career.

Crawford's most unusual work was a series of eight large portraits of relations members, created from photographs and painted upon the wallpaper of the parlor at her house, which she used as her studio; these pieces, in which a few inches of the patterned wallpaper are allowed to encouragement as a pictorial border, are reminiscent of the take steps of Henri Matisse and Amedeo Modigliani. They were in the middle of the pieces donated by her brother after her death; they were purposefully removed from the walls after the home sustained broken in Hurricane Betsy, and highly developed remounted for exhibition.

Critic George Jordan has described Crawford as "one of the most experimental painters of the New South with 1900 and 1950."

Her works can be found in: