Anne Poor
Anne Poor was an American artist most known for her paintings and sketches created during World War II, while serving as an official art correspondent in the United States Army. However, Poor's complete oeuvre also consists of still lifes and landscapes created in a range of mediums, including oil, pastel, ink, pencil, and watercolor.
Overview
Poor grew up with accomplished parents. Her mother, Bessie Breuer, was an American journalist, novelist, and playwright, while her stepfather, Henry Varnum Poor, was a successful artist and architect, most involved in murals and sculptures. A third marriage for both Henry Varnum Poor and Bessie Breuer, Poor was subsequently adopted by Henry, while also having a son of their own named Peter, Poor's only sibling.While in high school, Anne studied at the Arts Students League with well-known artists such as Alexander Brook, William Zorach, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. During her years of attending Bennington college, she also had the opportunity of studying abroad in Paris at the Académie Julian and the École Fernand Léger as well as working underneath the tutelage of Jean Lurçat and Abraham Rattner.
Once back in the United States, she assisted her father with many mural projects commissioned through New Deal art programs. Assignments included Washington, D.C.'s Department of Justice and Department of Interior buildings, Pennsylvania State University, and the Gleason, Tennessee and Depew, New York post offices.
The 1940s brought new art experiences separate from her father. After a small landscape of hers was accepted in the New York show called "Artists for Victory," Poor wanted to be more directly involved in the war efforts and joined the Women's Army Corps in 1943. Starting as a photo-technician, it was only after much convincing of war department officials that she took an overseas assignment to the Pacific Theater, where it appears most of her time was spent in Manila, Philippines. Poor began an intense period of depicting military life and the evacuations of the wounded for the Air Transport Command.
These military life paintings were later exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Her work continued to be awarded and honored through different exhibitions. At the WAC showroom in Rockefeller Center, New York City, Poor exhibited 33 paintings and drawings of bomber crews in action entitled "Men in Flight."
After the conclusion of the war, she came back home to find her father busy establishing the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where he would serve as president, teacher, and trustee. After the schools founding, Anne was invited to lecture about her time as a war artist and later stayed on to become a member of the faculty, a director for 15 years, a member of the Boards, and finally, a trustee. In these positions, Poor quickly earned the respect of both faculty and students as they described her efforts as indispensable.
Besides displaying her work in major museums, Poor published a book of drawings depicting Grecian landscape from her two-year trip traversing the countryside of Greece and Italy. Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan, "Henry Miller's Timeless Greece through the Drawings of Anne Poor," From the Archivist's Notebook, August 1, 2015, Accompanying her drawings was text written by Henry Miller based on memories of his own journey in 1939. It appears they made each other's acquaintance in Paris during Poor's study abroad and continued to keep in touch through the years.
The post-war years brought a renewed interest in landscape painting as seen through numerous renderings of the Hudson River and floral still life's. Her later works focused on interior shots of her home in Rockland County, many showcasing her beloved pet cats.
In 1987 Poor was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Membership to this academy is limited to 250 Americans who have made notable achievements in art, literature, and music. Although members rotate in and out with their subsequent deaths, past members are continually remembered and kept alive through their records. Poor's final show took place in 2001, a year before her death, at the Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, New York.
Poor's work is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Artistic career
Murals
In the 1930s, Poor aided her stepfather, Henry Varnum Poor, in painting murals for the United States Justice Department and the Conservation of American Wildlife for the Department of the Interior, located in Washington, D.C. She also assisted him with a commission by the Pennsylvania State University, paying tribute to the university's founding and the evolution of its land-grant mission of teaching, research, and service— completed in 1940.Poor's skills were recognized independently from her father when she received her own Section of Painting and Sculpture mural commission for the Depew, New York, post office in 1941, and the Gleason, Tennessee, post office in 1942.
The mural over the Depew post office is titled Beginning the Day and features a scene of mostly men interacting and conducting business. It has been described by scholar Sylvia Moore that this particular mural showcases Piero della Francesca's influence on Poor with the figures clustered together in small carefully balanced groups.
In Tennessee, the mural Gleason Agriculture was one of the last murals painted in the state for the Treasury Section. The composition illustrates Gleason's sweet potato industry with workers preparing baskets for shipping and the Gleason railroad depot in the background. Poor also painted green leaves around the frame signaling prosperity for the community.
Due to her success in these murals, in 1948 Poor won the Edwin Austin Abbey Memorial Fellowship, which included a grant that enabled her to study in Italy and Greece.
World War II
The decision to become involved with the war efforts was easily made with her brother and many friends already in the service, as well as both parents aiding in their own way; Henry Varnum Poor was a member of the artist war record project, and Bessie Breuer wrote radio scripts for the Office of War Information.Beginning her service in the Women's Army Corps as a photographic technician at Luke Air Field, Arizona, Poor initiated a drawing class for convalescents at the post hospital. However, in an interview given later in life, Poor lamented that the Army only wanted women to be in secretarial positions, nothing more.On detached service in New York City, Poor would continue her study of art. Over weekends, she traveled to Washington, D.C., by train, where she used her mother's connections with The Pentagon to further her dreams of being assigned overseas. Bessie Breuer's literary agent, Bernice Baumgarten, happened to be married to James Gould Cozzens, first employed under the U.S. Army Air Forces and then by the USAAF Office of Information Services. He sympathized with Poor's wishes to join a B-29 bombing mission over Tokyo and arranged for her to join under the Women's Army Corps. However, when she arrived at LaGuardia Field to report for duty it was discovered that Oveta Culp Hobby, the director of the WAC, had denied her permission to go abroad due to the lack of toilet facilities for her use on the ship. Instead, Poor was assigned to Fort Totten, a small permanent army installation situated on land across the bay from LaGuardia Field. Although it is not known what her role consisted of during the day, at nights she joined a group of army personnel driving over to Mitchell Field. The group would meet incoming planes loaded with war casualties flown in directly from the Battle of the Bulge— the largest and bloodiest single battle fought by the U.S. in WWII. In her journal, she described the experience of watching the wounded unloaded by forklift, transferred to ambulances headed to the Field Hospital, before finally being transferred to hospitals across the country for more specialized medical treatment. It is here at Mitchel Field that Poor experienced first-hand the atrocities of war. After such nights, she would recreate these experiences in her sketchbook. It was also around this time that Poor had her first painting exhibited, a small landscape of San Francisco, in the 1942 "Artists for Victory" show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It is unclear whether she was officially a part of the Army Art Program with female artists Marion Greenwood, Lucia Wiley, and Doris Rosenthal. However, it seems incredibly likely as her father, Henry Varnum Poor, was the head of the War Art Unit under the Corps of Engineers and led a group of artists in Alaska. Regardless, the Army Art Program ended in 1943 to eliminate what was deemed an unnecessary war expenditure. Instead, Poor's dream of sketching the war abroad was made possible by Fortune magazine and their request for her to illustrate a feature article for the Air Transport Command. In order to be granted the freedom to travel anywhere, at any time, and with no conditions attached, Captain Cunningham had Poor discharged from the Women's Army Corps before she set off to the Pacific Theater.
During this time, Poor began to create her most emotional and thought-provoking works depicting wounded soldiers, make-shift operation rooms, and psychiatric patients suffering from the horrors of war. While in Manila, Philippines, she specifically sketched patients with both physical and psychiatric wounds. Addressing a doctor in charge of the psychiatric ward, he expressed to Poor, "Most people in familiar circumstances can deal with stress, but the emotional trauma of war destroys their ability to cope."
Being rather adventurous, Poor continued her travels to China, a direct disobeyment for leaving her assigned theater of operations. After noticing a group of Chinese soldiers in the Manila Airport terminal, Poor found herself joining the crew. Landing in Kunming after an eventful experience of a failed propeller, the crew asked her to join the rest of their journey of flying around the world, ending in New York. However, Poor turned the offer down, describing how she did not desire to fly The Hump, the eastern end of the Himalayan Mountains, which was extremely dangerous and made more difficult by a lack or absence of reliable charts, radio navigation aids, and weather information.
Once finishing her tour of duty, Poor returned home and submitted all of her work— sketches and paintings– to her boss Lafarge, an officer with the Air Transport Command. However, for reasons unknown, the U.S. Army rejected her work, granting Poor the ability to exhibit and show her wartime creations.