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About Marion Greenwood
Greenwood, a child prodigy, was raised by her father Walter, a painter and her mother, a poet. At the tender age of fifteen, she began studying at the Art Students League where one of her teachers was John Sloan. She discovered Woodstock, New York in 1920. In Paris Marion took instruction at the Académie Colarossi and was back in New York by 1930. A year later she was in the Southwest and Mexico where she worked on fresco painting and lived and sketched among the people, in mines, on plantations and in small villages. For the University of San Hidalgo in Morelia she executed a massive fresco (86 feet wide), then Diego Rivera hired her in 1934 to work in Mexico City’s civic center. Another major Mexican painter, David Alfaro Siqueiros exclaimed that she "could have been the Queen of Mexico," but later during a wave of anti-American sentiment, her fresco painting in Morelia was in danger of destruction, until "President Cardenas interceded, pointing out Greenwood’s deep love of the Mexican people and the laborious study that had attended the creation of this work." Subsequently she executed New Deal mural projects and she taught fresco painting technique at Columbia University in 1937. Later Greenwood had successful one-woman shows and won numerous awards (from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design and the Carnegie Institute). She exhibited three times at the Corcoran biennial (1941-53), at the Carnegie International (1943-49), at the Whitney annuals (1941-51), at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1945-52).
Greenwood was an advocate of low-cost public housing, which she promoted in her mural painting Planned Community Life, also known as Blueprint for Living, for the Red Hook Housing Project in Brooklyn (1940), the same year that she painted The Partnership of Man and Nature, at the Post Office at Crossville, Tennessee, which shows the benefits of the TVA. The Pennsylvania Academy has her canvas called Slaughterhouse (1942). During the second world war she contributed posters for the Fifth War Loan Drive. As visiting professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, she painted a highly expressive and animated mural that represented aspects of American music-making (1954-55). Marion Greenwood will be remembered as a witty, optimistic feminist and a left-wing liberal with a sense of humor and a vivacious personality. |
Paintings by Marion Greenwood
| Carnival at Kripplebush |
| oil on canvas:26 1/4 x 34 inches |
| signed: lower left |
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