"Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” is the title of an article written by art historian Linda Nochlin (1931-2017) and published in the January 1971 edition of ARTnews. The writer’s main argument in the piece, which was later republished as part of a full-length text bearing the same title, was that throughout history, women had been denied opportunities that were instead given to men, be they in training, professional recognition, or monetary success. It was not the women who had failed, then, but systems and institutions that had failed them. Nochlin’s piece profoundly influenced feminist art history and coincidentally debuted the same year as the death of the artist Irene Rice Pereira (known as I. Rice Pereira). Throughout her career, the artist signed her work “I. Rice Pereira” to disguise her biological sex, which caused some to mistakenly refer to her as a male artist. Similar to women artists who came before her, Pereira navigated the art world and became a prominent artist in her own time, only to be mostly forgotten by the same institutions that collected her work.
Despite the obstacles she encountered as a woman in a field dominated by men, Pereira achieved great success, evidenced by her numerous exhibitions and inclusion in museum collections. For instance, in 1943, Pereira’s work was part of the show, Exhibition by 31 Women, at Art of This Century, a museum-gallery founded by Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979). In 1953, Pereira became one of the first women to be featured in a major retrospective with Loren MacIver (1909-98) at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. How did Pereira establish herself as an artist? Beginning in 1927, she trained at the Art Students League, where she attended night classes and developed a strong professional network. In 1935, Pereira helped found and began teaching at the Design Laboratory of New York. Funded by the WPA (Works Progress Administration), the Design Laboratory was an industrial design school with a curriculum that paralleled that of the Bauhaus. As such, it emphasized technology, science, and new materials.
While Pereira is most often recognized as an abstract artist, her early work included figural compositions, portraiture, nautical representations, and cityscapes from her travels in Europe. Pereira’s painting Man and Machine #1 (1936) exemplifies a transition from her previous naturalistic scenes to abstract painting. Three determined, muscular men are entwined with modern machines comprised of belts, pulleys, and levers; one of them (the man in the lower right-hand corner) handles a large bomb with a long, winding fuse that suggests self-destruction. Earlier scholars have associated this painting with the mechanomorphic Cubism of Fernand Léger (1881-1955), but the painting is also in tune with other subjects rendered by Pereira during her early career: depictions of male figures, nautical objects, urban spaces, and machinery. Additionally, Pereira’s painting aligns with other New Deal-era artists and muralists who strategically depicted laboring, muscular men to counter the reality of the weakened nation in which nearly twenty-five percent of the population was unemployed.
The painting Ascending Scale (1937), on the other hand, marks Pereira’s notable shift toward fully abstract compositions. Stemming from her work at the Design Laboratory, Pereira became interested in science, chemistry, space, time, optics, mathematics, physics, and light—so much that, by the 1940s, she began painting directly on glass. As a prominent member of the American Abstract Artists, and with her continued fascination with Bauhaus design and philosophy, Pereira spent her later career creating nonobjective compositions. Ascending Scale is one of the earliest examples of her abstract paintings composed of intersecting, colorful planes with biomorphic forms and geometric shapes outlined in white.
The Lowe has the most comprehensive museum collection in the United States of work by I. Rice Pereira with fifty-two paintings and drawings given to the Museum by collectors William E. Lange, Mr. and Mrs. M. Lubin, Lawrence Rodgers, and John V. Christie. In 1994, the Lowe organized a retrospective of Pereira’s work, Embarking on an Eastward Journey: Irene Rice Pereira’s Early Work, which was curated by Karen A. Bearor and featured a companion catalogue that revisited the work of this great American artist.
—Dr. Christina Larson, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow for Academic Engagement, University of Miami Libraries and Lowe Art Museum.
