about the artist
Born in 1902 in New Rochelle, New York, Berresford attended Horace Mann High School, and later studied at Wellesley College (1921–22) and Teachers’ College at Columbia University (1923–24). With an inheritance, she traveled to Europe and studied at the Académie Moderne in Paris with Amedée Ozenfant from 1925 to 1930. Along with Le Corbusier, Ozenfant was a co-founder of Purism, a type of modernism that advocated for the absence of unnecessary detail. In 1927 at age twenty-five, she held her first solo exhibition in Paris at the top-tier Galleries Bernheim-Jeune, followed by her first New York exhibition at New Gallery in 1928.
After marrying Ben Thielen, a writer, Berresford returned to New York. She renewed her relationship with Ozenfant, who was now teaching at the New School. She passed the summers in Martha’s Vineyard and the winters in Key West. In Florida, Berresford began to break from Ozenfant’s influence. She adopted a less severe style, using free brush strokes and vibrant colors. “Bright colors might not be ‘lasting’,” she declared, “but they gave a lot of pleasure while they last.”
In 1930, she was included in MoMA’s An Exhibition of Work of 46 Painters & Sculptors Under 35 Years of Age. Montross Gallery in New York organized three exhibitions of her work in the 1930s, and in 1968, she exhibited at Jacques Seligmann Gallery in New York, an elite gallery known for dealing in European modernism. In 1954, Berresford opened her own gallery in Menemsha on Martha’s Vineyard, the first on the island, where she showed her own work and organized exhibitions on behalf of other artists. Berresford gained critical recognition during her lifetime, and her work is held in important institutional collections today including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dallas Museum of Art; the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Massachusetts; the Detroit Museum of Art; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
about the ARTWORK
Baroque Music is given a full-page illustration in the artist's autobiography published in 1989, over 40 years after the date of creation, underscoring the importance of this work to the artist. Two years before Baroque Music was executed, Berresford recalled an evening when a friend performed Bach’s celebrated “Toccata and Fugue in D minor” in a church. The painting recalls the works of William Harnett and other 19th century American trompe l'oeil painters who represented impossible and magical still life configurations. Berresford depicts an orchestral ensemble in an unachievable and perfect situation; the cello and trombones stand by themselves and bisect at roughly a 90 degree angle, while bells and a baroque horn float in a celestial landscape complete with a solar eclipse. Although animate figures do not occupy the scene, the instruments seemingly play themselves and create the kaleidoscopic, tie-dye tapestry that radiates from the Gothic stained glass windows. The single star at the top of the scene could signify the prescence of a higher spirtitual power, and is also exemplified in the Transcendentalist paintings of Agnes Pelton.
Music played a huge part in Virginia Berresford's life from her formative years through adulthood. She reminisced in 1989 on her childhood, "Mother took many concerts in New York when we lived in the suburbs (Greenwich, Connecticut and New Rochelle, New York) and after we moved to New York [City]. We were among those lucky children to attend the Walter Damrosch series of symphony concerts for children. Another series most memorable was Harold Bauer playing all of the Beethoven sonatas." And without a piano at her fingertips in her fifth floor walk-up apartment as an adult, Berresford chose to purchase an accordion. She played for fun at social parties and noted jazz as a marked influence of the 1930s and 40s.
Baroque Music was not Berresford's first painting to include her musical interests. In 1946, she painted Under the Bigtop, acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art in 2018, in which the artist painted from memory a notable entertainment event that she attended in 1945, identical to the subject painting. Although the focus is on the figures in the ring and not on music, a drum and trombones nevertheless peek out of the lower left corner.
"Virginia Berresford, at the [Mortimer] Levitt Gallery, is one of the most individual of American woman painters. From early simplified compositions, with strongly silhouetted figures, she has developed with each successive showing, making increasingly striking use of color and channeling her representational paintings from an essentially abstract approach. Three of the recent pictures take on something of the appearance of panoramic topographic maps. "Circus" and "Carnival" seek to capture the spirit of the respective events —in the former, especially, the introduction of trombones from a corner of the canvas is very effective. Similarly, four color impressions suggest, respectively, bird, jazz, church and orchestral music. It is all very personal work."
- Howard DeVree, 1947
Lastly, it is impossible to ignore the Precisionist influences of artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, Ralston Crawford, and Charles Demuth on Virginia Berresford's Baroque Music. The smooth, metallic organ pipes directly refer to industrial structures and urban architecture that the aforementioned artists captured largely in the 1920s and 30s. However, Precisionism was still a dominant force in 1947, with legendary art dealer Edith Halpert first marketing select artists as "Precisionists" at her Downtown Gallery that year.
Virginia Berresford is one of the few female artists (Elsie Driggs also comes to mind) counted in the exclusive group of Precisionists. She completed City of Factories in 1937, and three renditions titled Factories in 1939 based on the manufacturing industries of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Berresford stated in a 1993 phone interview, "[Factories] were good vehicles for simplicity, for a purely abstract thinking about color, form, design, and composition."
