WOODSTOCK ARTIST SISTERS: MARION GREENWOOD & GRACE GREENWOOD

By Sylvia Day

Marion and Grace Greenwood, Mexico City, 1935

Estate of Marion Greenwood

Marion and Gace Greenwood,

Morelia, Mexico, 1933

Estate of Marion Greenwood

LECTURE ON

MARION GREENWOOD

Tomorrow -Sat.

May 3rd at 2 p.m.

at the Historical Society of Woodstock

Joanne Mulcahy will be speaking about her wonderful new biography of Woodstock artist Marion Greenwood. Followed by a book signing. Free Admission. In celebration of this event Learning Woodstock Art Colony is presenting the following essays about the sisters Marion and her sister Grace Greenwood—both of whom enjoyed success as muralists and easel painters, as well as excelling in other media— which are drawn from a group of 18 artist profiles that Sylvia Day wrote for a planned enlarged and revised version of her 1966 book, Creative Woodstock. This is the first time they have been published. I would like to thank the author’s sons Rowan and Webb Dordick for making this possible.

Marion Greenwood

American Artist, May 3, 1947

Marion Greenwood

A conscientious noblewoman once asked Dr. Samuel Johnson what recommendations he would make for the education of her four-year-old son. “The education of your son, Madam,” Dr. Johnson replied, “began with his grandmother.”

That was certainly the case with Marion Greenwood, one of America’s most gifted painters.  As proposed by Dr. Johnson, Greenwood’s talent and that of her equally talented older sister Grace may well have begun with their paternal grandmother, who was a Hudson River painter of no small ability,  and if Greenwood wasn’t born with a paintbrush in her hand, it is evident that she lost little time in acquiring one, since she painted as far back as she could remember.

Greenwood first came to Woodstock at age 11, with her three siblings and her painter father, Walter, and her vibrant Irish [American] mother, Katherine, who wrote poetry when she wasn’t engaged in caring for her large family. Both parents, now buried in the Woodstock Artists Cemetery, provided admirable role models for the children.        

Lila Refregier, the late wife of the renown muralist and painter Anton Refregier, reminisced about Greenwood, who was the subject of an article in Vogue Magazine when she was in her early twenties, painting murals and interacting with great Mexican artists such as Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros among others. Refregier recalled that the Vogue reporter was astonished that so stunningly beautiful a woman could be so oblivious of her beauty and so engrossed in her work.

It was also this dedication and drive that impelled Greenwood to travel widely, searching, sketching and painting. Her earliest work drawing for The New York Times was the start of a career that won her acclaim as a muralist and painter. Her natural talent and passionate love of life coupled with a deep sense of compassion and understanding enabled her to bridge cultures and gave her an uncanny access to the inner recesses of the spirit of men, women and children wherever she encountered them, be it America, Mexico or China.

A rapid worker, Greenwood produced a prodigious quantity of work in diverse genres. During her first visit to Mexico, on the basis of a fresco she painted in Taxco for free, she was hired to do another at the university in Morelia and later worked on murals in Mexico City, including the Abelardo L. Rodriguez Market. Still later, in her studios in New York City and Woodstock, as well as at Yaddo, an artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, she produced easel paintings, lithographs—a skill she learned in part from the Woodstock artist Emil Ganso—illustrations and portraits. During the 1930s, as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) project, she also worked on large-scale murals at a housing project in Camden, New Jersey, and at Red Hook in Brooklyn, New York. All of her works bear the impress of a dynamic talent and penetrating awareness of the techniques required across that wide range of media.

An inordinately skilled artist, she employed color, draftsmanship and characterization in a kind of splendid gesture. Greenwood had the rare insight to see deeply into the brooding sorrow of the underprivileged, and she had the ability to extract from the complex emotions of her models the stark aspects of their tragic lives and to portray them with unflinching fidelity, eschewing all signs of sentimentality. The heartache of Korean waifs, the graceful repose of a Black dancer, the weary stance of Chinese women compelled to accept their wretched plight—all bear the singular mark of this remarkably accomplished artist that propelled her to the forefront of her contemporaries and won her widespread praise.

Over the years, Greenwood exhibited widely. Her work can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, the John Herron Art Institute, the Butler Art Institute, The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and in many other institutions, as well as in hundreds of private collections.

In 1954-1955, she was visiting professor of fine arts at the University of Tennessee, where she also painted a mural, and in 1965 she was a visiting artist at Syracuse University as part of a unique program whereby outstanding artists were invited to paint murals in various university buildings in a working-teaching arrangement. A film was made and many photographs were taken to document that unusual educational experiment.

Over a long period, Greenwood painted or drew many of her fellow artists, including Oscar Kokoschka. Indeed, she considered the line drawing of him the best she ever made. Many artists, in return, painted portraits of her, including Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi and Alexander Archipenko.  She also drew portraits of such eminent individuals as the inventor Buckminster Fuller, dancers Martha Graham and Pearl Primus, and the biologist Julian Huxley, whom she met in London and counted as a close friend.

Greenwood was an effervescent personality, and all those privileged to know her valued her and many loved her, She was a rare woman, as well as an exceptionally fine artist.

Grace on a Scaffold, Probably Mexico City,

c. 1935

Estate of Marion Greenwood

Grace Greenwood

Grace Greenwood, the older sister of Marion Greenwood and wife of fellow artist Rollin Crampton, was a gifted artist who worked zealously in search of an impossible perfection. She had no hesitancy in delaying the completion of a work of art if it did not meet her exacting standards, and, as a result, her output judged by that of other painters was relatively small.

When still a very young girl, Greenwood studied in France and Italy. She had become particularly interested in mural painting, and in Rome she studied Michelangelo’s frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel so diligently that she was subsequently able to visualize them in detail. When the opportunity arose to work on frescoes in Mexico, she was in her element.

Her fresco in the [Museo Regional in Morelia] won her deserved acclaim, and the effort she devoted to it exemplified the intensity and dedication that she expended on every aspect of her work. Because the wall assigned to her was to portray the theme of “Man and Machine,” focusing specifically on the perilous lives of Mexican [workers enmeshed in thh steel gray gears they push against], she spent months at various sites, descending into the mines [with a crew for four hours in preparation for creating her mural "Mining" at the Abelardo Rodrigiuez Market in Mexico City] and observing the harsh and dangerous conditions under which the men risked their lives to earn barely enough for a meager existence. Little escaped her, and she was honored for the superb artistry and honesty with which she depicted what she had seen.

Greenwood was invited back to Mexico by the government to participate in the group mural decoration of the Abelardo L. Rodriguez Market in the center of Mexico City, and once again she demonstrated the same outstanding talent and technique exhibited in her earlier effort. On her return to the States, her reputation having preceded her, she was invited to work on murals for the city of Camden, New Jersey.

Although Greenwood never had a large body of work on hand, she painted steadily, driven by a desire to experiment, and she developed a totally independent style of expression. “The real traveler,” she explained, doesn’t always know where he’s going, and he doesn’t know where it’s going to end. I feel that way about my work.”

In keeping with this philosophy, Greenwood focused more on finding the means to establish her identity than on producing a large oeuvre for posterity. She never sought material success nor did she labor under the necessity of earning a livelihood from her art.  On a personal level, she was a beautiful woman who found joy in both her work and her life and reveled in the thought that she was free and not committed to a specific style of painting.  She was, however, a compellingly fresh painter whose work projected an assured vitality. An outstanding example was the painting she exhibited at the Woodstock Artists Association 50th Anniversary in 1969; much like a collage, it was filled with luminous blues.  The authority of her painting, her extraordinary color sense and technique, and the apparent ease with which she brought all her talents to bear on the composition of her work testified to her phenomenal gifts.

Greenwood, who had lived in Woodstock in the 1920s, returned in 1958, when she married Crampton, who had been her supervisor on a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project painting murals at Hunter College in New York City and who had had a long association with Woodstock. In their house, reading materials covered every table and desk, and the couple had separate studies; in hers, Greenwood often worked on several canvases at the same time. Crampton insisted that she was one of the finest painters of our time. Even allowing for a little husbandly bias, he may well have been right, and her work can be found in numerous collections. Indeed, several years before her death in 1979, a collector in Scarsdale, New York, bought her entire output produced over a period of three and half years.

Greenwood continued working until the end, still searching, still experimenting. “I was very lucky,” she acknowledged late in life, “but I hope now that all the experience I have gained has crystallized. It is my goal. It keeps my blood circulating. Every day is a new day and a new challenge.”