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Esther Pressoir: A Modern Woman’s Painter situates Esther Estelle Pressoir’s body of work within the effervescent art scene of the early 20th century, both in America and abroad. The first book to present the wide-ranging oeuvre of this American modernist, it covers the span of Pressoir’s long life (1902-86) with a particular focus on the interwar decades (1920-40). Coming of age in the 1920s, Stella, as she was known to her friends, cast off societal expectations of a working-class immigrant family in New England and moved through the studios, galleries, and nightclubs of New York. Following an unprecedented 18,000 km bicycle trip across Europe in 1927, where she kept a daily journal and made hundreds of sketches, Pressoir developed an expressionistic style that straddled figuration and abstraction. She made provocative renderings of the female nude that challenged historical models, including unabashed self-portraits and intimate depictions of her longtime model, muse, and lover, a black dancer from Harlem named Florita. Pressoir’s work is illuminated here in an examination of her private travel journal, letters, and numerous paintings, prints and drawings, some of which were recovered from the veritable time capsule of her art studio after she died.
Placing Pressoir’s work in relation to trailblazing contemporaries such as Alice Neel, Florine Stettheimer and Suzanne Valadon, this book establishes Pressoir as a force to be reckoned with in the decades of emergent feminism and modern art in America and restores her to her rightful place in the expanding canon of art and women’s histories.
‘In this vividly written monograph accessible to the general reader, Suzanne M. Scanlan reconstitutes the life and work of a largely forgotten American woman artist of the twentieth century, offering a tantalizingly detailed view into her development as well as the shadowed corners of female and queer experience in the first half of the twentieth century. {…} We see Pressoir's evolution from precocious child to experimenting student and ultimately to artistic maturity, confident in her hand and eye.’ – Taylor M Polites, Provincetown Arts
Suzanne M. Scanlan is Assistant Professor of Theory and History of Art and Design at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her research centers on women as artists, patrons and collectors from the Renaissance through the modern period. Previous works include Divine and Demonic Imagery at Tor de’Specchi, 1400-1500: Religious Women and Art in 15th -Century Rome (2018).
List of Illustrations; Preface; 1: Artist, Model, Model Artist: Esther Pressoir’s Formal Education; 2: Three Women and a Bicycle: Esther, Helen and ‘B’; 3: New York: ‘The Emotional Intimacies of Her Imaginative Brain’; 4: From the Studio to the Boudoir: Pressoir and the Nude; 5: Call Her ‘Florita'; Conclusion; Appendix: Selections from Esther Pressoir’s Travel Journals; Notes; Select Bibliography; Index; Acknowledgements