Louisa Matthíasdóttir

Biography

From 1925 to 1937 the Matthíasdóttir family lived in Höfði, a well-known house in Reykjavík, and the girl grew up there.

Louisa was born on 20 February 1917 in Reykjavík, the youngest of three children in a well-off family. Her father, Matthías Einarsson, was an early supporter of the Icelandic painter Jón Stefánsson and collected paintings. Her parents paid for private drawing lessons. Since Iceland at that time offered no systematic art education, in 1934–1937 she studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Copenhagen (Kunsthåndværkerskolen), which was oriented more towards design: her parents hoped that their daughter would be able to earn her own living. After a summer at home she went to Paris to study with Marcel Gromaire and lived with a family she knew. In the summer of 1939, because of the tense political situation, she left Paris.

Her early work of the late 1930s, painted with a broad brush and stressing the geometry of form, made her a prominent figure in the Icelandic avant-garde. Many of its members met in a Reykjavík house called Unuhús. She recalled later that it was then that she began to paint her pictures in one unbroken session. The colour in these works is more subdued than in her mature paintings, but the character is already visible. The future Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness sat for her, and she painted several portraits of the poet Steinn Steinarr. Her father provided her with a place to work.

At the end of 1942, together with the artist Nína Tryggvadóttir, she moved to New York and studied at Hans Hofmann’s school. Robert De Niro Sr., the actor’s father, and Jane Freilicher studied there as well. In 1944 Louisa married the painter Leland Bell, and they supported each other until his death in 1991. Their daughter Temma was born in 1945 and for several years was her mother’s regular model.

In the mid-1940s they met Jean Hélion. His figurative manner may have influenced the outline in her work of those years, for example in “Leland and Temma” (1948). Her first solo exhibition took place in 1948 at the Jane Street Gallery in New York. In 1951–1952 the family lived in Paris and often saw Hélion, who introduced them to Alberto Giacometti and Balthus.

In the 1950s she painted with small, gestural brushstrokes and tonal gradations. In the 1960s tonality gradually fell away: her manner became brisk, her colour forthright, her areas of paint broad. Like Bell and his circle, she resisted outside influences, whether Mondrian’s abstraction or Arp, and insisted on her independence. Of possible models she acknowledged only Henri Matisse.

From the late 1960s her work was shown almost every two years by Robert Schoelkopf’s gallery in New York. This continued until 1984. There were solo exhibitions at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum (1982) and in Reykjavík (1993), then a travelling exhibition in 1996–1998; a retrospective followed in 2004–2006, including a showing in Akureyri. In her large still lifes, up to 1.8 metres on a side, dishes and vegetables stand on a table almost without ornament. Her landscapes are usually small: the treeless Icelandic land, stylised horses and sheep. Her city views have been compared with Edward Hopper and Giorgio de Chirico. The poet John Ashbery wrote of a “flavor, both mellow and astringent, which no other painter gives us.” To my mind, that phrase is more accurate than many art-historical descriptions.

She remained an Icelandic citizen all her life and spent more and more time in Iceland as the years went by. In 1988 she received the Order of the Falcon (Knight’s Cross), in 1996 the Cultural Award of the American-Scandinavian Foundation, and in 1998 she became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work is in the Tate in London, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Reykjavík Art Museum. A monograph on her was written by Jed Perl (1999).

Louisa Matthíasdóttir died on 26 February 2000 in Delhi, New York.