I. Rice Pereira


Irene Rice Pereira, known professionally as I. Rice Pereira, was an American abstract artist, poet and philosopher who played a major role in the development of modernism in the United States. Pereira is known for her work in the genres of geometric abstraction, abstract expressionism and lyrical abstraction, as well as her use of the principles of the Bauhaus school. Her paintings and writings were significantly influenced by the complex intellectual currents of the 20th century.
WWW irenericepereira.com

Early life

Irene M. Rice was born August 5, 1902 in Chelsea, Massachusetts to Emery Rice and Hilda Rice. Pereira's father, a baker, was born in Poland and immigrated to the United States as a child. Pereira's maternal grandfather was born in Vienna, and her maternal grandmother was born to a Polish Jewish family in Poznań.
Pereira was the eldest of four siblings, and was the older sister of the painter Juanita Guccione. She spent her childhood in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where she spent time reading and writing poetry. After her father died in 1918 she and her family moved to Brooklyn, New York. In 1922 she began working as a stenographer in an accountant's office to help support her family in the wake of her father's death. She briefly attended courses in fashion design at the Traphagen School of Fashion and night courses in literature at New York University, and began taking evening art classes at Manhattan's Washington Irving High School. She immersed herself in the bohemian world of Greenwich Village and had a brief affair with the poet and novelist Maxwell Bodenheim.

Beginnings as an artist

In 1927, she enrolled in night art classes at the Art Students League in New York City. Among her instructors at the Art Students League were Jan Matulka and Richard Lahey. In her 1929 class Matulka provided Pereira with her first exposure to the artistic principles of the European avant-garde that would shape her work; most notably those of the Bauhaus, Cubism, and Constructivism (art). In 1931, she traveled to Europe and North Africa to further her painting studies, attending sessions at the Académie Moderne and studying with Amédée Ozenfant in Paris. She also spent time in Switzerland and Italy.
After returning to New York in 1933 she studied briefly with Hans Hofmann at the Art Students League. Her friends and colleagues were Burgoyne Diller, Dorothy Dehner, David Smith, Hilla Rebay, Arshile Gorky, John D. Graham, and Frederick Kiesler.

The Design Laboratory

In 1935, Pereira helped found the Design Laboratory, a cooperative school of industrial design established under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. The curriculum of the Design Laboratory was similar to that of the Bauhaus. All students were required to take a basic course that included an introduction to chemistry, physics, and art materials. Students experimented with materials in laboratories in order to understand their physical properties. There was an emphasis on social considerations, and students were taught the social implications of technological developments alongside classes in art, music, and literature. Pereira taught classes in painting, composition, and design synthesis.
She continued teaching at the Design Laboratory when it lost its financial support from the Works Progress Administration on June 27 of 1937. On July 1, 1937 the Design Laboratory became part of the FAECT School, located at 114 E. 16th St. New York. When classes resumed on September 27 of 1937 the school was known as The Laboratory School of Industrial Design. She resigned her position in October 1939.

Mid and later years

Pereira painted throughout her life. Her paintings first gained recognition in the early 1930s, when she exhibited at the ACA Galleries and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. With the showcase at the Whitney, she became one of the first women to be given a retrospective at a major New York museum. In the late 1930s, she started to move away from realistic work toward abstraction and experimented with painting on layered glass. In 1943, Pereira was included in Peggy Guggenheim's show Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in New York. In 1946, Pereira was included in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition 1946:Fourteen Americans.
During the latter part of her career, Pereira rejected abstract expressionism and experienced difficulties with gallery owners and museum directors. She believed that art and literature were being swallowed up in "a chaotic void of mindlessness." Eventually, she left New York permanently and moved to Spain. She died of emphysema on January 11, 1971, in Marbella, Spain.

Style

Pereira was interested in exploring the role of the artist in society, believing artists to be on a par with industrialists. She created "machine paintings" that incorporated images of technological components, including ship's ventilators, generators, and funnels, as well as hinges, levers, and gears. Boat Composite from 1932, in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art is an example of her "machine paintings".
Pereira began to explore abstraction in the late 1930s and her work included fewer references to machines. She became known for the geometric and rectilinear paintings created during this period. Abstraction from 1940, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, demonstrates her approach to geometric abstraction. She was interested in finding a way to bring light into her work, and began to incorporate materials such as glass, plastic, gold leaf, and other reflective materials into her paintings. She experimented with radium paint, layers of painted glass, and paint on parchment.
In a 1950 statement, she said "My philosophy is the reality of light and space; an ever flowing--never-ceasing--continuity, unfettered by man made machinery, weight and external likenesses. I use geometric symbols because they represent structural essences and contain infinite possibilities of change and dynamics."
Pereira signed her work as "I. Rice Pereira," which caused many people to assume that she was a man.
Cataloging of her works can be problematic as she frequently left works untitled and reused titles.

Personal life

On January 8, 1929, Pereira married Humberto Pereira, a commercial artist. The couple later divorced on January 28, 1938.
On September 26, 1942 Pereira married George Wellington Brown Jr a photographic technician at Curtiss-Wright and member of the United States Air Force. Brown and Pereira separated in the summer of 1949 and divorced the following year in Florida.
In August 1949, Pereira meet George Reavey, an Irish-Russian surrealist poet, literary agent, publisher, and translator. On September 9, 1950 Perieira and Reavey married in London. Pereira left Reavey on December 13, 1955 and the couple divorced on July 19, 1959.

Writings

Pereira worked prolifically as a writer, but she never received the same acclaim in this area as she did in painting. She published her first article in 1944, titled An Abstract Painter on Abstract Art. Her writings included topics such as structure, time, optics, and space. Her self-published book The Lapis discussed her dreams about the philosopher's stone. The original manuscript of The Lapis, 1954-1955, is housed at Houghton Library, Harvard University, and was a gift of Mrs. Irene Rice Pereira in 1958. The Lapis was republished in 1957 for a limited 1000 book run. She also wrote poetry and in 1968 she became an Honorary Poet Laureate of the United Poets' Laureate International, which is headquartered in the Philippines. She published her last work, The Poetic of the Form on Space, Light and the Infinite in 1969.
Published writings by Pereira include: Light and the New Reality, The Transformation of Nothing, The Paradox of Space, The Nature of Space, The Lapis, Crystal of the Rose, Space, Light and the Infinite, The Simultaneous 'Ever-Coming To Be', The Infinite Versus the Finite, The Transcendental Formal Logic of the Infinite, and The Poetics of the Form of Space, Light and the Infinite.

Collections

The Boca Raton Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, The Phillips Collection, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the University of Iowa Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are among the public collections holding work by I. Rice Pereira.

Art works

Listed Chronologically:Boat Composite Whitney Museum of American ArtUntitled Smithsonian American Art MuseumSketch for Machine Composition #2 Smithsonian American Art MuseumMachine Composition #2 Smithsonian American Art MuseumAbstract Composition Whitney Museum of American ArtAbstract Composition Whitney Museum of American ArtWhite Rectangles, Number 3 Metropolitan Museum of ArtAbstract, Rose Art Museum at Brandeis UniversityRed Form Baltimore Museum of ArtAbstraction Honolulu Museum of ArtShadows with Painting Museum of Modern ArtThree White Squares Private CollectionUntitled Philadelphia Museum of ArtTransparent Plants White Lines Metropolitan Museum of ArtRed, Yellow, and Blue Baltimore Museum of ArtWhite Lines Museum of Modern ArtGreen Depth Metropolitan Museum of ArtRose Planes Walker Art CenterQuadrangles in Two Planes Art Institute of ChicagoTransfluent Lines National Gallery of ArtTransversion The Phillips CollectionComposition Walker Art CenterOblique Progression Whitney Museum of American ArtVacillating Progression Munson-Williams-Proctor Art InstituteBright Depths Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenGreen Mass National Gallery of ArtYou Whitney Museum of American ArtEvaporating Night Dallas Museum of ArtTwo Becomes One Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenShooting Stars Metropolitan Museum of ArtDaybreak Metropolitan Museum of ArtSomewhere Today Brooklyn MuseumZenith National Gallery of ArtMecca Smithsonian American Art MuseumRoselit Day Smithsonian American Art MuseumThreshold of Eternity Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenHeart of Light Whitney Museum of American ArtLandscape of the Absolute Whitney Museum of American ArtEfflorescence Of Space Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenOmega Baltimore Museum of ArtThe Celestial Gate Sways on the Ringing Swells Smithsonian American Art MuseumLight Extending Itself Brooklyn MuseumHeart of Flame Smithsonian American Art Museum