Under the Sea – Three Fates (1989) by Jacqueline Morreau
Jacqueline Morreau (18 October 1929 – 13 July 2016) was an American artist.
Life
She was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was the daughter of Eugene Segall, a furniture dealer, and his wife, Jennie (née Horowitz), a milliner. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1943, and at the age of 14 Morreau attended Chouinard Art Institute; in 1946 she won a scholarship to Jepson Art Institute. At that time, the school was dominated by returning servicemen taking advantage of the GI Bill; it was overwhelmingly male. "I was considered a great prodigy. That was very nice, very ego-gratifying. I worked very hard."
In 1949, she spent a year in France and some time in New York City, returning to Los Angeles where she married; her first child was born in 1951. Four years later, she left her husband and, with her son, moved to San Francisco, where she studied medical illustration. She qualified in 1958. These two streams in her education – artistic and anatomical – enabled her to ground in observed reality her more abstract themes: identity, desire, memory, power and resistance.[1]
She married Patrick Morreau in 1959 and had three more children. Of this period of her life, Morreau has written "In 1950s and 60s’ San Francisco, I was doing more printmaking than painting because I did not have a place to paint but I did have an etching press in my garage......There was the Vietnam War and the violence of the civil rights movement in the American South. I couldn't ignore these and my prints reflect my anger and horror. The etchings I made at that time prepared the way for the political triptychs I did later: The Children's Crusade, Lessons of History, and the Gulf War triptych.[1]
In 1967, the family moved to Massachusetts where Morreau found a studio and started painting again, while continuing to develop her printmaking. She exhibited and gained some recognition for her work. When, in 1972, her husband was offered a job in London, she and their children moved with him. She soon began to exhibit, and produced portfolios of prints with publishers such as Paupers Press. Her drawings also appeared on book covers from the Women's Press and Bloodaxe Books, and Scarecrow Press in the US.[1]
However, her primary commitment was to the field of fine art and in 1978 she staged Drawn from Life, an exhibition of figurative drawings and prints at the Women's Arts Alliance in London. Galleries at that time were dominated by conceptual art, colourfield painting and electronic media, and both the mainstream art world and the avant garde rejected figuration. Certain factions within feminism also regarded any direct representation of the female body to be retrogressive. In her view, unity was strength and, together with Cate Elwes, Pat Whiteread and Joyce Agee, she spent two years seeking out female artists working with figuration. The result was Women's Images of Men and About Time, two touring exhibitions commencing at the ICA in London in 1980.[1]
Morreau edited the book of the Images of Men show with the critic Sarah Kent, and continued to exhibit with many other female artists, including Sue Coe, Marisa Rueda and Pam Skelton. She promoted female artists in her work as a curator of the Wales Drawing Biennale and as a trustee of the Rootstein Hopkins Foundation. She also influenced generations of students as a visiting lecturer in drawing at the Royal College of Art, London, and Oxford Brookes University, and at Regent's College, London (now Regent's University), where she was a professor of drawing until 1998. Morreau's vision as an artist is recorded at the British Library's Artists’ Lives archive, and her work is in many private and public collections, including the British Museum, the Arts Council, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.[1]
National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C466/135) with Jacqueline Morreau in 2002 for its Artists' Lives collection held by the British Library.[2]
Known primarily for her figurative paintings, Jacqueline Morreau's work is often discussed in relation to the feminist art movement.[3][4] Together with Joyce Agee, Sarah Kent and Pat Whiteread, Morreau organised the touring exhibition 'Women's Images of Men' which opened at the ICA in 1980 and went on to tour across Britain at a number of Galleries including the Arnolfini.[5] Morreau and Kent went on to edit and write the accompanying book.
"We have only a small space of time in which to make our marks on paper and canvas, to effect permanent changes in society before the barbarians once more close in … We must work harder than ever to make what gains we can in the consciousness of civilised people."[7]
Bibliography
Year
Work
1983
Power Plays, exhibition catalogue, introduction by Bryan Biggs and Sarah Kent
^ abGilbert, Harriett (1992). The Sexual Imagination: From Acker to Zola – A Feminist Companion. Jonathan Cape Ltd. ISBN0224035355. A US born figurative painter working on the representation of women from a feminist viewpoint, Jacqueline Morreau studied with Rico Lebrun in Los Angeles and completed a training in medical illustration before settling permanently in London in 1972. Technical skill and concern with depicting the human body have both remained central to her work, even when this commitment contravened feminism's 1970s rejection of oil painting as too traditional to be politically valid. Although Morreau's art is traditional in appearance, it is revolutionary in content. Morreau was one of the four artists who organized "Women's Images of Men" – an exhibition which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and toured Britain in 1980–81 – and, in her paintings and drawings, she has continued to express what she has described as `the divided self'. Through metaphorical scenes, often derived from classical mythology, Morreau presents complex and often conflicting views of women which not only reclaim and represent familiar stories from a female perspective, but also act as allegories for the values of contemporary society... Just as Greek mythology is underpinned by strata of complex and ambiguous sexual messages, so are Morreau's paintings... Morreau is one of the few artists to produce work that is both didactic and open to wide interpretation.
^Saunders, Gill (1989). The Nude: A New Perspective. Herbert Press Ltd. ISBN0906969980.
^Judith Kazanzis (1994), Fold upon Fold, catalogue essay.
"At first it astonishes me: Jacqueline Morreau ... has left the human form behind her and journeyed into an extraordinary terrain of coasts and desert mountains... But this radical departure into landscape is a development, not a break. She has always painted metamorphoses, transformations. Here earth and mountain become sea, sea becomes earth, earth becomes the furniture of my sleep and my eroticism. In the etching series, `Disclosing Eros', I re-enter Jacqueline Morreau's love affair with the human body, its passion expressed by yearning torsions of bone and muscle. Again I am at the interface of the human and the divine, this time within a retelling of the ancient encounter of soul and body, intellect and passion."
