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Every day, 95-year-old
Fannie
Hillsmith sits down in her studio in Jaffrey, New
Hampshire,
to paint. Like petting her
cats, it’s not something she thinks about—she just
does it. But even with three-quarters of a century of experience,
Hillsmith says
the work never comes easily. “Art is so baffling, so
difficult,” she says.
“Every painting is a new challenge.”
You wouldn’t know that
from her resumé. Hillsmith (Diploma ’34)
mounted her first
solo show in 1943,
the same year as her friend
Jackson
Pollock, and has exhibited her Cubist
paintings and prints ever
since. Her work can be seen in the permanent
collections of
museums
across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of
Art and the Museum of
Modern
Art in
New
York. Her
most
recent solo exhibition took place only last fall.
Hillsmith, a
Boston native, traces her desire to make art back to
her father, an engineer who loved to paint, and to her grandfather, one
of the
founders of the Museum School. When Hillsmith moved to
New
York in the
mid-1930s, her mother
proudly told
family and friends, “Fannie isn’t going to
get a
job. She’s going to be
an artist.”
After spending her
school years on traditional
figure-drawing, Hillsmith happily
soaked up the
influence of European
modernists like Paul Klee,
Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miro,
and got to
work. In the 1940s
her paintings caught the eye of Peggy Guggenheim, a pioneer
among
modern-art
collectors, who exhibited Hillsmith’s work in her
New
York
gallery. Bauhaus emigré Josef Albers invited
Hillsmith to teach at
North
Carolina’s
experimental
Black Mountain College, a haven for groundbreaking artists.
She
studied
printmaking alongside Salvador Dali and Marc
Chagall in
New
York, and
watched Pollock
struggle with his rapid rise to
stardom. “I wasn’t envious of
that,” she says. “It was too much
pressure.”
Hillsmith lived for 46
years in the same cold-water flat on Second
Avenue.
She steadily exhibited and sold paintings, but was
always utterly pragmatic
about life as an artist. “I never had
the
feeling I’d be able to make a living,”
she says “All I
ever thought
about was how to be a good painter,
period.” N.B. Hillsmith died on
July 27, 2007 in her Jaffrey, N.H., home at the age of 96.
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