In the 1948 Pyramid Club catalog I got at auction, the women artists appear to share the listing with the men. Their names are right there, seemingly in no particular order and with no ranking.
The club did not allow women as members, but apparently understood, recognized and respected their work as artists.
Some of the African American and white male artists had become or would go on to become pretty well-known locally and nationally: Allan Freelon, Julius Bloch, Paul Keene, Ralph Taylor, Samuel J. Brown, Morris Blackburn, Claude Clark, Dox Thrash, Rex Goreleigh, Joseph Delaney, Humbert Howard.
I found background on many of them by Googling, It was not so easy with the 11 or so women who exhibited during that year’s invitational show called “Fifty Seven Artists,” held Feb. 20-March 20, 1948.
I was curious about the women because I wanted to actually see some of their works. I could derive a taste of their subject matters from the titles of their oil paintings, but sometimes those titles are not as precise or clear.
What I wondered mostly was how did these women slip away? Why didn’t as many of them become named artists – even locally?
Some did rise above, though. The club dedicated the exhibit to Laura Wheeler Waring, who had died on Feb. 3, 1948. At the time, Waring was an art teacher and department head at Cheney University outside Philadelphia and had been exhibiting for at least 20 or more years. In 1927, her work was in the country’s first African American art exhibit held by the Harmon Foundation, a major patron of black artists. She was later commissioned by the foundation to help paint the portraits of outstanding African Americans, which became a traveling exhibit in 1944.
- “Untitled (Rural Landscape),” by Laura Wheeler Waring, circa 1940s, sold for $10,000 last year at Swann Auction Galleries.
Wheeler was represented in the Pyramid’s exhibit with an oil painting called “Judy.” A year ago, I was at an auction at the Swann Auction Galleriers in New York where a Waring oil painting was sold for $10,000. It was a scene near her studio at Cheney.
Here are the other women and what I did and did not find out about them:
Etelka Greenfield – “The Open Drawer”
Greenfield’s papers are housed at the Smithsonian Institution, whose website listed her death as 1949. The documents include exhibitions, announcements, newspaper clippings, brochures, illustrations and artist statements. I’ll have to get down to the Smithsonian to take a look at the artist statements, which should include her bio.
I did find a painting by Greenfield that sold for $550 in September at Stanton Auctions in Hampton, MA. A still life of flowers, it was called “Design For Centerpiece,” and had an exhibition label on the back. The auction house described her as “a ground breaking African American artist and a member of the Pyramid Club of Philadelphia.”
The piece was a 16″ x 20″ oil on board and had been signed twice by the artist, at the bottom right and along the side. It seemed that the painting had also been purchased online from a Goodwill store outside Philadelphia a month earlier for $361.
This was printed on the back label of the painting:
Title: Design for Centerpiece
Artist: Etelka J. Greenfield
Size: 16X20 Medium Oil No. 38
Price: $400
Address: 10 S. 18th Street, Philadelphia
Elsie Reber – “Self Portrait”
Reber was described as a mid-20th-century painter who attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She is mentioned in the 1999 book “Who Was Who in American Art 1564-1975,” edited by Peter Hastings Falk. She was also a member of a team with N.W. Ayer & Son, the country’s first advertising agency, that won a merit award for its design in the 17th annual exhibition of advertising art from Nov. 2-16, 1949. The team won in the category of trade periodicals in the Art Directors Club of Chicago exhibition. She was the artist for the design, and the Chicago Tribune newspaper was the advertiser.
Reba Klein – “Nude”
Nothing turned up on the web.
Edith Townsend Scarlett – “Sanctuary”
From 1944, the Pyramid Club started showing white artists, and Scarlett was among them. The club had been founded in 1937 as a social and cultural club for professional black men and started its art shows in 1941. I did not find any bio on Scarlett.
Naomi Lavin – “Hillside Shacks”
Nothing turned up on the web.
Elizabeth Coyne – “Canadian Fisherman”
Nothing turned up on the web.
Hilde Foss – “Abraham and the Three Angels”
Nothing turned up on the web.
Maude C. Lewis – “International Harmony”
Nothing turned up on the web.
Sarai Sherman – “Hericane Time”
Sherman was described as an Italian-American artist who was born in 1922, and according to the latest information I found, was still around. The Museum of Modern Art included one of her works in an exhibit of its recent acquisitions from Dec. 19, 1960 to Feb. 12, 1961. It was an oil on canvas, 39 ½” x 27 ½” , a gift of Joseph H. Hirshorn. The title was not mentioned.
I did find several works by her:
“Girls in Red Square” sold for $2,000 at Clarke Auction Gallery in Larchmont, NY in 2007. Measuring 42″ x 60″, it was dated 1965 and signed on the lower right.
On the back:
Applicant: Sarai Sherman
Title: Girls in Red Square
Date of work: 1965-66
Lender: Artist
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
- One of nine intaglio prints by Sarai Sherman sold by Motley’s Auction in Richmond, VA, in September 2010.
Last September, Motley’s Auction in Richmond, VA., sold nine intaglio prints from 1969 called “Folk Rock Blues” for $600. They were in a portfolio case with an embossed cover, and contained 1960s images of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and others with lyrics from the Beatles, Donovan and Hendrix, according to the auction house.
Beatrice Clare Overton – “Common Things”
Overton was on the exhibition committee for this exhibit. Her work was presented in the second-floor Pharaoh’s Temple Gallery as part of the members gallery, along with John Harris, Howard, Thrash and Franklin Syres. They were described as the hosts of the exhibit.
A blurb in Jet magazine in Oct. 9, 1959, announced her death, and said that she had been an art teacher in Wilmington, DE, who had studied in Paris and Mexico. She had formerly taught 36 years in the Philadelphia public schools, according to the magazine.
A student’s thesis I found on the web noted that in 1935, Overton was appointed to Sulzberger Middle School, one of the first black teachers to work in a white school in Philadelphia. The information was documented from a book on education of black Philadelphians published in 1979.
Overton worked with art teacher Claude Clark at Sulzberger in the late 1940s, and at his request assisted him with “art issues,” according to a 1996 interview conducted with Clark.
