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QUITA BRODHEAD (1901 – 2002)
The
painter Quita Brodhead’s (nee Marie W Berl) career stretched the entire
length of the twentieth century. Born in 1901, to well-to-do parents
who encouraged her interests, Brodhead’s financial independence allowed
her to pursue a career in a field open to relatively few women. As an
adult, she took the name Quita from a childhood nickname, Mariequita or
“Little Marie”.
Upon entering the Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts in 1919, Brodhead pursued her studies with the well-known
artist Arthur B. Carles. Brodhead absorbed Carles’ ideas about
“creating form with color”(as Carles scholar Barbara Wolanin puts it)
and his teachings and body of work had a lifelong impact on her work.
He introduced her to modern artists like Picasso, Cezanne and
Modigliani who were on display at the nearby Barnes Collection.
Matisse, who visited Philadelphia in 1933 at Carles and Dr Barnes
invitation also had a major influence on her work. By the early 1950s,
Brodhead’s work still alive with color, had grown more abstract and, in
the words of a critic, “induces physical sensations as though vision
were a tactile sense, as though her play in color were to stroke the
observer”. Art historian and critic Bill Scott said, “Quita’s painting
is a continual act of balance and proportions in which she always
leaves room for air.”
Her travels in the 50s, always with paints and
easel, included three years in France, and a year in Rome and in
1960-61, ten months in Tenerife in the Canary Islands, Spain.
Beginning
in 1938 and continuing for the rest of her life, Quita exhibited
frequently in galleries and museums with solo and group shows in New
York City, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Paris, Rome and elsewhere.
Before her death in 2002 at 101, retrospective shows were held at the
Wayne Art Center, Wayne Pa which she had founded in 1930, The
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and The Hollis Taggart Galleries in
New York, celebrating her 100th birthday. Grace Glueck, art critic for
the New York Times, said in reviewing the Taggart show, “The gifts of
long life and the talent to live it rewardingly do not go to many. Ms
Brodhead is quite simply a phenomenon.”
Brodhead’s paintings
can be found in over twenty museums including: Philadelphia Museum,
Philadelphia, Pa.; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia,
Pa.; State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, Pa.; Delaware Art
Museum, Wilmington, De.; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, N.J.;
Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, N.Y.; Woodmere Art Museum,
Philadelphia, Pa. and the Museo de Bellas Artes, Santa Cruz, Tenerife,
Spain.
Please contact Mr. Charles Brodhead at:
charles.brodhead@verizon.net for any additional information. Thank you
for visiting this site.
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