Esther Pressoir: A Modern Woman’s Painter
ESTHER PRESSOIR
A MODERN WOMAN’S PAINTER
By Suzanne M. Scanlan
Published by Lund Humphries (2024)
Language: English
Hardcover: 152 pages
ISBN-10: 1848226004
ISBN-13: 978-1848226005
Esther Pressoir: A Modern Woman’s Painter is the first book to present and contextualize Esther Pressoir’s vast oeuvre, including paintings, drawings, prints and ceramics.
Book launch video (58:33): Art Historian and RISD Faculty Suzanne Scanlan introduces her book Esther Pressoir: A Modern Woman’s Painter (Lund Humphries, 2024).
Esther Estelle Pressoir (1902-1986)
Esther Estelle Pressoir (1902-1986) was born in Woonsocket, RI and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in painting and drawing. Coming of age in the 1920s, Pressoir embraced the modern art scene in America and abroad. She spent summers with the Provincetown art colony and moved through the studios, galleries, and nightclubs of jazz-age New York. She punctuated her formal education with an unprecedented 18,000 km bicycle trip across Europe in 1927, where she developed her personal style. Pressoir’s provocative renderings of the female nude include unabashed self-portraits and intimate depictions of her models and lovers that challenged the status quo.
Pressoir developed an expressionistic style that straddled figuration and abstraction. She made provocative renderings of the female nude that challenged historical models, including unabashed self-portraits and intimate depictions of her longtime model, muse, and lover, a black dancer from Harlem named Florita. Pressoir’s work is illuminated here in an examination of her private travel journal, letters, and numerous paintings, prints and drawings, some of which were recovered from the veritable time capsule of her art studio after she died.
Related Link
Read more – Esther Pressoir: Imagining the Modern Woman, guest post by Suzanne M. Scanlan, Rhode Island School of Design (2021)