Draft:Marjorie McKee

Marjorie Lee McKee, abstract expressionist artist (1912–2007)

Biography
Marjorie McKee was an artist of the mid 20th century New York Art World. She was an abstract expressionist and scholarship student of the American painting icon, Hans Hofmann. She worked in essentially two different artistic modes: the “pure” expressionism which used colour and spatial relationships as primary subjects and “hard edge” painting, most widely represented by painters like Frank Stella. Eventually in one or two final paintings, she did succeed in combining the two ways of seeing into a single image, but of these there are only one or two, both in possession of her son and never exhibited. One is in very thinly applied acrylic on a canvas approximately four by four feet. The second exists only in a gouache study on tracing paper and backed with a brown paper bag. Like most of her work, these have no titles. Not only did McKee leave her work untitled but they were also rarely signed, except on the back on the stretcher. All this signature said was “McKee”. When she had paintings hung in some of the very late shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century in New York, at least one catalogue credited her only as “McKee,”  without even indicating if the artist was male or female. I mention these details of her obscurity to explain how someone reviewed by Clement Greenberg in The Nation, exhibited alongside Robert Motherwell and Elaine de Kooning could have almost disappeared without a trace.

Art began for Marjorie on the floor of her mother’s living room in Morgan Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. She drew compulsively, obsessively, as a child and on through high school when she designed posters for school dances. She was descended from a family of well-off Scottish immigrants who made their money first in cattle and later in small but intelligent hands-on real estate investments, including a small apartment building near the university of Chicago and a beauty salon/barber shop. Her grandfather, Henry Nichols, brought the first Black Angus cattle to North America and owned the home where the University of Chicago was founded. So Marjorie had more options than many young women of her era. The fact that she was petite and pretty certainly opened some doors for her, like her audition for Irving Berlin. Her mother wanted her to “go on the stage,” and she was given some stage training which she later used when she went to New York and appeared in the Yiddish Art Theatre on Irving Place in lower Manhattan.

But for Marjorie, the theatre was only a way to leave Chicago and get involved in the exciting artistic experiments that were beginning to take place in New York. Her friend, Virginia Admiral, a young woman with similar ambitions was already there, studying with Hans Hofmann, the former Bauhaus teacher who almost single-handedly created the abstract expressionist movement in the United States.

For Marjorie, as with many aspiring artists of her generation, her contact with Hofmann was almost a religious experience. She would refer to him for the rest of her life as, “Mr. Hofmann,” a formality that grew out of her great, even worshipful regard and appreciation for what he gave her. For unlike many other art teachers, Hofmann taught his students how to be themselves. He did not teach them to produce copies of his own work. He taught them his principles of what he believed constituted good painting and how to apply those ideas to individual talents. To look at Elaine de Kooning’s work next to Marjorie’s brings forth no identifying characteristics of a “school”. This, Marjorie felt, was what made Hofmann the premier artist and teacher in America. Name] was born ...

Career and Works
Marjorie continued her passion for the visual arts by continuing to paint all of her life, from early childhood to the last painting she did when she became legally blind in the mid 1970s. Sadly, she was legally blind from her late seventies to her passing at the age of ninety-six. Her career was, unfortunately, interrupted many times by family strife, including an eight year custody battle for her son with his father, Alvin Schwartz (Golden Age Comic Book author for DC).

She had a group show and solo shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s fabled gallery, Art of this Century on fifty-seventh street in New York City. She appeared in the ground breaking group show titled, The Women at Art of this Century, but appears in the catalogue only as “McKee.”  She also had a solo show under her own name, one of the last before Peggy Guggenheim departed to live out her life and career in Venice. Because of Marjorie’s family struggles, her career was interrupted many times so it is difficult to find a clear career track to follow after she had her son in 1948. She was very favourably reviewed by Clement Greenberg and by Harold Rosenberg.She is also cited in the book, Modern Woman, edited by Alexandra Schwartz published in 2010 by the MOMA. The only other solo show she ever had during the lively mid-century art world of New York was at the Smolin Gallery in the early nineteen-sixties, a show which was completely sold out. The final destinations of the 12-15 canvasses from the show are completely unknown. Slides of some of the pieces exist but there is no knowledge of the locations of any of the canvases. The only existing works that exist in the hands of her family are three very late works which were painted in her final home, Montreal, Quebec, and a small single study from the nineteen-sixties..