Loren maciver biography

Artist

born New York City 1909-died New York City 1998

Biography

In 1919, at the age of ten, MacIver attended Saturday classes at the Art Students League in New York—her only formal instruction in painting. When she was twenty-five she married poet Lloyd Frankenberg and settled in Greenwich Village. Although she continued painting, she never expected to make a career as an artist. From 1936 until 1939 she worked on the WPA, and in the 1940s, as her reputation grew, she received commissions to do several murals for shipping lines and magazine covers. After her first trip to Europe in 1948, Maclver painted with increasingly brilliant colors. In 1966 she returned to Paris, where she remained for four years and worked in Provence for several winters. New York City, where she has spent much of her life, and her recurrent interest in nature have been the principal themes of Maclver's art, which has ranged stylistically from extreme realism to highly abstract designs.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection

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Loren MacIver

American, 1909 - 1998

Loren MacIver captured the essence of her subjects through abstract images composed of veils of color and subtle, shimmering light. Born in New York City, MacIver was essentially a self-taught painter, having attended classes at the Art Students League only briefly at ages ten and eleven.

Her work was included in group shows at New York’s Contemporary Arts Gallery in 1933 and 1942, which brought her work to the attention of important collectors as well other key figures in the art world: Alfred Stieglitz, John Sloan, and Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art. The Museum of Modern Art acquired one of her works in 1935, well before her first one-person exhibition in 1938 at Marian Willard’s East River Gallery. From 1936 to 1939 she worked on the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration.

By the early 1950's MacIver was known for abstract compositions that incorporated recognizable fragments from her native New York City and from European locales. After a 1953 retrospective of her work organized by the Whitney Mu

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MacIver, Loren (1909–1998)

American artist . Born Loren Newman on February 2, 1909, in New York City; died on May 3, 1998, in New York City; daughter of Charles Augustus Paul Newman and Julia MacIver Newman; married Lloyd Frankenberg (a poet), in 1929 (died 1975).

A 20th-century artist acclaimed for her half-abstract landscapes, city views, and close-ups of inanimate objects, all rendered with a luminous use of color, Loren MacIver was born in New York City in 1909. Self-taught except for a single year of Saturday classes at the Art Students League in Manhattan when she was ten, MacIver (who as a young woman began using the maiden name her mother had retained after her marriage) painted throughout her youth but felt no special ambition to turn what she considered a hobby into a career. Others, however, recognized her considerable talent—particularly her husband, Lloyd Frankenberg, a poet whom she married in 1929. Their relationship was mutually stimulating, as her paintings often inspired his poetry and displayed many of the ideals he put into words. He began her profession