Julia Thecla: Undiscovered Worlds Joanna Gardner-Hugget
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Via Sapientiae: Masthead Logo The nI stitutional Repository at DePaul University DePaul Art Museum Publications Academic Affairs 1-1-2006 Julia Thecla: Undiscovered Worlds Joanna Gardner-Hugget Louise Lincoln Recommended Citation Gardner-Hugget, Joanna and Lincoln, Louise, "Julia Thecla: Undiscovered Worlds" (2006). DePaul Art Museum Publications. 11. https://via.library.depaul.edu/museum-publications/11 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Academic Affairs at Via Sapientiae. It has been accepted for inclusion in DePaul Art Museum Publications by an authorized administrator of Via Sapientiae. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. JULIA THECLA undiscovered worlds DEPAUL UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM JULIA THECLA undiscovered worlds DEPAUL UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM Julia Thecla Undiscovered Worlds September 14 - November 22, 2006 DePaul University Art Museum Chicago, Illinois Copyright © 2006 DePaul University ISBN-13: 978-0-9789074-1-9 ISBN-10: 0-9789074-1-8 Cover image: Julia Thecla. In the Clouds, 1960. Oil on canvas. DePaul University (cat. no. 26) Photo on page 5: Season’s Greetings, about 1945. Photomechanical reproduction. Courtesy of Barton Faist Studio and Gallery, Chicago Photo on page 42: Julia Thecla at an Art Institute of Chicago opening, about 1936. Courtesy of Barton Faist Studio and Gallery, Chicago ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We acknowledge with deep gratitude the generosity of individual lenders to the exhibition: Harlan Berk, River Forest, Illinois; John Corbett, Chicago; Leon and Marian Aschuler Despres, Chicago; Maximilienne Ewalt, San Francisco; Barton Faist, Chicago; Brenda Faist, Chicago; Daniel and Elizabeth McMullen, Naperville, Illinois; Edward Mogul, Chicago; and Montserrat Wassam, San Francisco, California. Colleagues at other institutions have kindly facilitated loans from their collections: Bart H. Ryckbosch and Jack Perry Brown, Art Institute of Chicago; Judith Palmese, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hjordis Halvorson and Lauren Reno, Newberry Library, Chicago; Robert Sloan, Harold Washington Library, Chicago; Carole Peterson, Illinois State Museum, Springfield; Elisabeth Petrulis, Swope Museum, Terre Haute, Indiana; Lyndel King, Karen Duncan, Molly Hanse, Laura Muessig, and Diane Mullen, Frederick R. Weisman Museum, Minneapolis; Barbara Freund and Keri Towler, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; and John Graham, Western Illinois University Art Gallery, Macomb, Illinois. Acquaintances of Julia Thecla have generously and patiently shared information and expertise, and we are particularly grateful to Dick Andros, New York; Donald Baum, Chicago; Martyl Langsdorf, Schaumburg, Illinois; and June Wayne, Los Angeles. Barton Faist and Marian and Leon Despres, listed above as lenders, have also provided valued insights into Julia Theda’s life. Laura Lee Settles, an art history student at DePaul University, carried out painstaking research on Thecla. Scholars in a variety of fields have also contributed enthusiastically to the project: Tim Long, Chicago Historical Society; Patricia W. Rader, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; Judy Throm, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C.; Susan Weininger, Roosevelt University, Chicago; and Simone Zurawski, DePaul University, Chicago. Elyse Klein and Kirk Vuillemont have provided abundant expertise in conservation matters. We owe a great debt to our guest curator and collaborator extraordinaire, Joanna Gardner Huggett, Assistant Professor of Art History at DePaul University. Drawn into the project by virtue of her interest in issues surrounding women artists, she has devoted time, energy, and meticulous research not only to Thecla herself, but also the Chicago artistic world at midcentury. In her hands the exhibition and catalogue have come to represent the ideal university museum project, providing exposure for scholarly work while generating a fresh and unexpected perspective on the past. Finally, we are grateful for the support of DePaul University’s Research Council grant program, and especially for the generous contribution of the Terra Foundation for American Art in support of this publication and the programs accompanying the exhibition. Louise Lincoln, Director FOREWORD Across an artistic career that spanned five decades Julia Thecla maintained a distinctive and highly personal imagery that evades easy interpretation. From her early work, laden with apparently charged but unreadable objects (keys, rabbits, parachutes) to the late, luminous views of extraterrestrial space, she created visionary worlds in which the viewer becomes a curious but slightly baffled visitor. Her deliberately obscured biography makes the interpretation of her work that much more difficult. Works by contemporaries in Chicago, especially her friends Ivan Albright and Gertrude Abercrombie, suggest conversations and exchanges of ideas, but their concerns and visual style remain distinct. Thecla’s imagery does not seem to derive from the artistic interest, common at the time, in psychoanalysis or the unconscious, although Jungians might be forgiven for assuming it did (Abercrombie was an enthusiastic analysand but there is no evidence that Thecla shared this interest). Nor was she a self-taught unconscious artist along the lines of the Chicagoan Henry Darger, whose obsessive illustrations for a 15,000-page epic narrative entirely filled his tiny attic apartment. Instead she seems to have been focused, self-sufficient, and relatively immune to the rapidly changing fashions of the postwar art world. Guest curator Joanna Gardner-Huggett has identified two developments in Thecla’s subject matter that reveal unexpected aspects of her work: the first, occurring in the late 1930s, is her growing fascination with dancers and the ballet, which is not only an opportunity to portray an enclosed and female world, but also to focus on aspects of performative practice that have implications for Thecla’s own eccentric persona. A more notable shift occurs around i960, when her work alters in scale, medium, and subject matter. Here Thecla seems to have been responding to external events in surprising ways, ingeniously linking her own hermetic imagery to the technofuturist world of space exploration. She pursued this ambitious approach for a relatively short time until she was overcome by age, illness, and impoverishment. She died in Chicago in 1973. In the same year, the Wally Findlay Gallery, which represented her at the end of her career, moved from South Michigan Avenue to the near North Side. As part of the paring of its holdings the gallery donated a significant number of her canvases and works on paper to DePaul University. The works given were mostly from her late “planetary” period, which had been less successfully received, but a decade of inactivity and dramatic changes in the art world had already faded her reputation. Helen T. Findlay probably assumed that the gallery would be unlikely to sell such deep stock, certainly a correct judgment at that moment, but the gift was generous and foresighted. The expedient donation, the critical mass of work, and contemporary art-historical interest in issues of gender and regionalism make Thecla’s life and the reception of her work of particular interest at present. While she seems to fit neatly into a common stereotype (eccentric and reclusive female artist, lapsed into obscurity), in fact her narrative is far more complex and far more interesting, both on its own terms and for the light it sheds on the Chicago art world at midcentury. Thecla did indeed paint her own universe, but it was hardly an isolated one; her work is populated by images of friends and acquaintances and by references to events of the moment. And in a larger sense her overlapping bodies of work—her painted oeuvre on the one hand and her self-fashioning as an artist on the other— reveal a degree of autonomy and control that can only be fully understood with the passage of time. Louise Lincoln, Director JULIA THECLA: UNDISCOVERED WORLDS JOANNA GARDNER-HUGGETT INTRODUCTION For over thirty years, Julia Thecla created paintings that served as windows to undiscovered and intangible worlds, fairy tales, distant planets and Dionysian spectacles. Often her own self-portrait acts as the viewer’s guide, and when she is not present pigeons, rabbits, cats, or ballerinas may step into the role. Regrettably, Thecla’s fantasy realms are rarely shown, although there are examples in major collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Museum of Modern Art.1 Thecla was absent from the National Academy of Design’s monumental show “Surrealism USA” (2005) even though a few of her Chicago contemporaries like Gertrude Abercrombie and Ivan Albright were included. This fading reputation is not atypical for women artists from the first half of the twentieth century, especially those who chose to remain unmarried or unconnected to a well-known male artist, immediately placing them on the margins. Nancy Burke demonstrated that female solitude among writers has been regarded with suspicion and this can easily be extended to a female visual artist like Thecla.2 Thecla’s ultra-feminine and figurative style and her intimate scale, epitomized in Morning Walk from 1938 (cat- no- 5), further exclude her from historical consideration since they depart from modernism’s traditional insistence on formalism and abstraction. The attentiveness to details of dress—the elaborately plumed straw hat, the polka-dotted