At the Art Students League

Founded in 1875 in reaction against the conservative National Academy of Design, the League provided academic training in the fine arts for approximately one thousand full and part-time students. From the start, women made up a notable percentage of the faculty and student body. Vivian studied drawing and painting there for fourteen years, eventually turning out well-wrought portraits for private clients and publications.

In the early ‘30s, League instructors included luminaries such as muralist Thomas Hart Benton, and painter John Sloan. Both worked in a mythic/realist style that valorized common people – urban and rural. Both taught, starting in 1930, a League student from Iowa one year older than Vivian -- Jackson Pollock.

Vivian’s main teachers were painters Jon Corbino and Robert Brackman. Both painted romantic, faintly mythological, warm-toned portraits and tableaus. Brackman, an in-demand society portraitist, had the greater apparent influence on Vivian's student work.

Sensitive to gesture and mood, Brackman was apt to include still lifes of fruit bowls or flowers in his portraits. The Italian-born Corbino, then in his late 20s, had a dynamic line that worked vivid and muscular massed shapes in a definite Futurist vein. His tableaus featuring horses and circus performers owe a distinct debt to Giorgio DeChirico. Central to both Brackman’s and Corbino’s work, and making up a large part of the school’s drawing curriculum, were semi-clothed or fully nude women.

Thoroughly academic, and at distinct odds with the prevailing Cubist/surrealist abstractive edge of European art, the League promoted an old-fashioned American brand of Bohemianism that stood against the national puritanical mood. It emphasized and celebrated the human body, mainly attractive young women, and certainly well-muscled men too, in easily grasped, if sometimes mysteriously lyrical, settings. The prevailing effect is emotive, not cerebral, quite different from the complex ideas regarding identity, space, and time that informed Europe’s prewar avant–garde.

Vivian's tactile nude studies display a confident line and nuanced shading. [2] Her figures are grounded, weighty. Occasionally she pays psychological attention to her model’s gesture and features, something more than a quick figure study of an anonymous nude. Her obvious interest in others, and distinct drafting skill, gained Springford commercial assignments. She produced oil portraits of private clients, and sketches of trendy socialites for New York newspapers. [4]

In 1933, Vivian moved to an apartment in a residential hotel on E. 48th St. where she lived for the rest of her life. That year also saw the absolute nadir of the Great Depression in New York City. The dislocation and suffering of so many at the time would've been impossible to ignore. While it is unfair to expect an evolved political consciousness from a 20-year-old woman raised in privilege, we might presume a certain awareness that the old social order was coming apart, that certain rules no longer applied.

Photographs give a distinct impression of Vivian then. She stares forthrightly from a composite portrait of 1932’s debutantes, a collage of elegant head shots published that November in the New York Times. Where the other young women regard the viewer with coy expressions, or nervous smiles, Vivian meets our contemporary gaze without the embarrassed reserve of her peers. [5]

A similar self-possession is evident in two other photos, taken in a single sitting, perhaps a year or two later. In her early 20s, clearly dressed for, maybe even at, a party, Vivian sits in a ladder back wooden chair before a white background. Bare shouldered, she wears a spaghetti-strap gown, obviously bra-less, with what looks like a large gardenia centered at her low décolletage. Her arched eyebrows are penciled; her mouth, vivid with lipstick; her hair, parted down the middle, is pulled back from a broad forehead. [6]

She sits slightly sideways, in one shot glancing stage right with a bemused smile, a long earring, an irregular cluster of colored glass or semiprecious stones, dangles from a long and shapely left ear. In the other, made moments before or after, she has shifted to a direct posture before the camera, the amusement of the first shot has given way to a more appraising gaze: calm, confident, someone prepared for whatever happens next. [7]

Life then was dedicated to art and sex, but not always in that order. 

— Vivian Springford, in conversation

When describing her life to young admirers six decades later, Vivian was clear about the importance of sex: she pursued it, like art she said, for it’s own sake. This frankness, the obvious ease and pride she had in her body, may be why she appears so contemporary in these pictures today. She was daring, smart, interested – fun.

Apparently, Springford had an affair with Corbino who, judging from photographs from the time, had dark good looks and a dramatic sense of self. In 1945, she sent a short story entitled "A Man Inspired" to Redbook magazine about an art teacher’s sexual obsession with one of his female students. She left the League a year later, at thirty-three, and began a decade of relatively modest output. Her portrait and illustration work was combined with some effort to write short stories, none of which were published.

The pinnacle of Springford’s illustration career came with the 1939 book Juggernaut: the Path of Dictatorship by historian Albert Carr. Her dark ink portraits, head shots that sit somewhere between exact likenesses and caricatures, included Mussolini, Stalin, Napoleon, Hitler, and Bismarck. [8]

Though Vivian’s portrait work in the following decade hewed to Art Students League orthodoxy, the bright pastel drawings of flowers [10] and nudes [9] she also produced lean toward Raoul Dufy’s colorful near abstractions.

Abstraction Arrives in New York

New York in the ‘40s saw the advent of an abstract painting movement centered around the school run by the immigrant German Hans Hoffman, situated directly across town, on East 57th St., from the Art Students League. Almost exactly between the two sat Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery. Pollock, one of her artists, painted his titanic, Mural, for Guggenheim’s townhouse in 1943, a much-discussed omen of the drip paintings that would appear four years later.

The nearly overnight embrace of Abstract Expressionism was launched by essays on the work of Pollock and his male peers in leading intellectual journals. The deft promotion of these artists by city dealers, led to a faddish, and laddish, atmosphere surrounding the cutting edge of American painting.

This is not the place to catalog the abject sexism of the Abstract Expressionist era. The post-WW2 period in general saw greatly diminished social roles for women, as men returned to civilian life and work after military service - a rolling-up of economic and creative opportunities unquestioned for almost twenty years to come.

Male artists and critics dominated popular attention. The women most closely associated with the movement - Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, and Helen Frankenthaler – were the wives of far-more famous artists. Another, Grace Hartigan, felt the need to exhibit her work under the name George until 1954.[11] [12]

With her training at an academy that, however aesthetically conservative, had welcomed female artists for nearly a century, we can presume some level of exasperation on Springford’s part with an art-for-art’s sake movement that almost automatically dismissed women from its ranks. If Abstract Expressionism was as serious as it wanted to be, it had to be more than a boy’s club. This took decades, time that Springford spent working out of the spotlight.

The incorporation of abstraction, she said once her work was (re)discovered, was a gradual process, underway for some time before her initial, very assured execution of large canvases.

Vivian’s first fully abstract works were in a series of five canvases based on a Hindu folk tale,  The Brahmin and Mongoose, done in 1957. In the story, a woman gives birth to a human boy and a mongoose and cares for both until the day she finds the animal with blood dripping from its jaws. Believing it has harmed her human child, she kills it, only to find that the mongoose had instead killed a cobra that was threatening its human brother. [13]

While the tale’s obvious moral cautions against hasty action, it is also a coded warning to women against killing the fiercer aspects of their psyches that might otherwise guard a precious self. Springford’s Brahmin paintings are angry, serpentine swirls of white on a gray/black field, a fight to the death that, considering the work to come, was also an awakening.

These fully-realized oil paintings led immediately to Springford’s early Calligraphy Series, mainly acrylic paints on rice or mulberry paper that she then mounted onto canvas. Growing in scale, these works occupied her through 1962. They are predominantly swirling, light and dark blacks, done in large brush strokes that pattern forms anchoring gestural lines. The effect is of a charged unfolding; a dynamic field balanced somewhere between the written word and an active world. One senses in them great forces finally set free.

In evaluating Springford’s surprising new work, early commenters cite a catalyzing influence in a new relationship with the refugee Chinese artist Walasse Ting. Although Vivian’s association with Ting, seventeen years her junior, coincided with this remarkable transformation in her paintings, there’s room to doubt if Ting was as influential on her artistic trajectory as some believe. There was, in fact, a growing cultural awareness of Eastern thought in New York art circles at the time.

In 1951, the Japanese Zen Buddhist instructor Daisetsu Suzuki gave an influential series of lectures at Columbia University (attended by composer John Cage, who incorporated Zen notions of action and time in his performances). New York Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were celebrities, while a collection of Suzuki's essays appeared in paperback in 1956, followed a year later by The Way of Zen by the English theologian Alan Watts.

It seems more than likely that an affluent, worldly New Yorker would have some familiarity with, if not an active interest in, Asian art (the Metropolitan Museum of Art's extensive Oriental gallery, after all, dates to its 19th century beginning).

Some evidence of Vivian’s early interest can be noted in a poem of hers that appeared in a journal of Upper East Side social notes while she still lived with her parents. Incense is a dreamy, adolescent exercise that reflects on "the land of the pale yellow flower", mystic aromas, mysterious smiles: "Almond eyes, sleepy, saddened/Are touched with smoky jade."

Whatever the case, something clicked with the appearance of a dashing young Asian artist in need of a patron. Working in distinctly non-Asian modes, Ting’s art was intensely colorful, explicitly sexual, nearly cartoonish; a hybrid of ideas drawn from the Austro/Germans Max Beckman, George Groz, and Egon Schile.[14]

Apart from injecting an element of excitement and drama into Springford's life, Ting was certainly a conduit of classical Chinese painting techniques – most of which had dropped out of his own work – that Vivian picked up, and soon enough mastered.

More possible evidence of an early interest in Asian philosophy are two small, highly-annotated softcover books from her library: Translations published in England in the 1920s of the sayings of Confucius and Lao Tzu. She wrote “V. Springford” on the flyleaf of each, with the note “Locker 26”, presumably where she kept materials at the League. [15]

Both Chinese texts date from the fourth century BCE and are fundamentally observations, admonitions, and instructions to upper-class, administrative officials regarding behavior in a highly structured society amid a constantly evolving cosmic order.

A comparison with the Western philosophy of Stoicism is apt. Both were internal guides to self knowledge for elite men negotiating often dangerous political/bureaucratic situations in a highly organized social state. A perceptive, upper-class woman confronted with the patriarchal pitfalls of the New York art scene might have found the Chinese proto-Zen philosophy – a mix of humility, enlightened awareness, and detachment – very appealing.

The many underlined passages and brief marginal notes in both, penciled in her tidy cursive handwriting, show an engaged familiarity with the texts. While it is easy to make too much of any single highlight and any impulse or feeling that might have made a phrase noteworthy, many passages marked in the Lao Tzu volume speak directly to issues of expression, accomplishment, and renown: on matter and spirit; order and the senses; modesty and self-worth.

I have three precious things, which I hold fast and prize, reads a bracketed passage from Lao Tzu: The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal, and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can be a leader among men.

In the margin next to it, Vivian wrote: Memorize.

Highlighted lines in the Confucius volume speak to goals higher than commerce: The nobler sort of man is proficient in the knowledge of his duty; the inferior man is proficient only in moneymaking. And: If the pursuit of riches were a commendable pursuit, I would join in it.

One passage criticizes stuffy decorum: You goody-goody people are the thieves of virtue. Another is an admonition for hard work: Take the lead and set the example of diligent toil.

The Chromatic Pools

And so started her third major phase, something she would not exhaust in the two decades remaining before her eyesight failed. In 1965 Springford was in Yellowstone Park, where she surely stayed at the elegant Old Faithful Inn. Situated at the famous geyser, it is still at one end of a two-mile boardwalk allowing access to a chain of hot springs and fumaroles that dot the Yellowstone caldera.

These geological features, of diverse sizes and oval shapes, are concentric mineral deposits, in bright, elemental blues, greens, yellows, and browns that well up from deep underground. It is an otherworldly landscape in which intensely colored pits of steaming water reflect the sky on the surface of mysterious depths. [21] The boardwalk follows what the U.S. Park Service calls the Artemesia Trail, named for the large geyser situated at the trail’s furthest end.

It is also the first name, in one of those synchronious events that enliven creative life, of the preeminent female artist of the Italian Baroque, Artemesia Gentileschi, whose dramatically lit tableaus of mostly biblical subjects would have been familiar to Art Students League pupils.

Whether or not Vivian noted the happy coincidence, it is clear that she drew profound inspiration from this small section of Yellowstone's landscape. What came next was an evolving series of large, bright, multicolored paintings of round, pulsing forms of kaleidoscopic depth that she never stopped exploring.

Taken as a whole, the paintings range across the high-key color spectrum. The tones in all balance beautifully, harmonizing even the brightest acrylic colors in vigorous, subtly shaded shapes. Beginning with the Morning Glory series, named for one of Yellowstone’s larger thermal springs, the paintings invoke intense depths - pools of space and vivid emotion. [22] [23]

Perhaps because of Vivian’s back injury, the earliest chromatic pool paintings were done by pouring alcohol-thinned acrylics onto 36x36 inch and 27x27 inch sheets of rice paper. [23] The varied viscosity of the color solutions, and repeated applications, create a range of auras. Deeper shades and related colors, obviously dripped on, were added.

Distinct from cerebral color field exercises, The paintings depict particular geological features of often remote locales that Springford was able to visit and photograph, such as Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater, [24] the mountain ranges of the Himalayas, [25] as well as different species of flowers seen on these expeditions.

Some two hundred canvases were produced over the course of twenty years, all executed without any gallery representation or support from major collectors.

Along with the geographic sets, Springford produced work through the ‘70s in three main self-titled series Cosmos, Star Stuff, [26] and Expansionist that gazed into the depths of space as intently as it, like the geological studies, peered into the earth.

The Expansionist works are divided between treatments of what she saw during the eruption of the Soufrière volcano on the island of Guadalupe in 1976 [27] - intense reds, oranges and blues flow in every direction [28] - and lunar studies, cool blues of the moon and clouds.

The Expansionist works are denser in color than the Cosmos paintings, Often they feature a curved bar of dark color, a high tide mark which resolves the composition into a form resembling a horizon, or wave top, that invokes the line of energy found in the composition of traditional Chinese painting. [29]

Some Expansionist works ended up as the material for the third great body of Springford’s work she called Assemblages. The largest series in this body, the Star Stuff series draws its name from astronomer Carl Sagan’s famous quote. Theses are big, irregular multicolored shapes cut from drawings and assembled on white boards in sprawling isomorphic combinations. Very confidently calculated, the wildly-colored groupings have the persistent freshness of arbitrary arrangements, or chance encounters. [30]

The work is original without being challenging; accessible, but not revealing. Doing away with gestures and framing, the artist has apparently receded behind the work, allowing it to form itself. The playful shapes come together simply because they belong together.

The Star Stuff and many of the Expansionist series were directly based on photographs of galaxies published in the three volumes of Burnham’s Celestial Handbook Vivian owned, very likely purchased to augment what must have been spectacular stargazing at her remote destinations. [31]

Darkness Descends

By the mid-1970s, some of the Cosmos paintings distinctly resemble the cloudy iris of a huge eye, likely coinciding with the early symptoms of failing eyesight. Macular degeneration was diagnosed in 1979.

The condition, a genetically based, age-onset disease worsened by cigarette smoking (Springford was a lifelong smoker), causes a deterioration of vision (as if to mock the way Vivian painted) from the center outward. Early symptoms can last years and include a growing inability to distinguish between colors. One cannot imagine a harsher, nonfatal condition for an artist of Springford's caliber.

In her last active decade, Vivian shot color slides of her work, sending them to influential critics, artists, galleries and museums. She got only two favorable responses, each inviting her to participate in a group show. The first was at Santa Barbara, California’s Esther Bear Gallery in 1970; the other came the following year at the Ruth Shafer Gallery back in New York.

By the late 1970s, New York art’s cutting edge had moved on to the wild esthetics of the Lower East Side scene. Graffiti, performance, installations, photography, and a painting sensibility that jumbled Pop strains of Expressionism, cartooning, and neo-primitive amateurism into a disorienting mash-up of styles. It was the twilight of cheap Manhattan workspaces and the dawn of the AIDS epidemic. The times had well and truly passed Vivian by.

Springford spent the five or six years remaining in her working life on her last great body of work, what she termed the Scuba Series. These aqua-toned works on paper – bright kaleidoscopic visions of swirling, sometimes sharp-edged, shapes in apparently infinite variety – a clash of colored forms, bits and pieces of organic and mineral debris you might find in a drop of seawater seen under a microscope, [33] or the retinal flares you might see with your eyes tightly shut. [32]

She did have two more solo shows. In 1975, the Expansionist works were featured in a month-long exhibition at the Dorothy Yepez Gallery Without Walls in Saranac Lake, New York – a venue dedicated to exhibiting work by women and African-American artists. In 1979, eight Expansionist and three large Star Stuff series works were up for three weeks at midtown Manhattan’s St. Peter's Lutheran Church, a venue renowned for its forward-looking music and visual arts programming. [33]

Between 1975 and 1980, Springford also placed pieces in four group shows sponsored by the Visual Artists Coalition, an organization dedicated to promoting work by under-recognized female artists. After 1980, Springford's work was not seen publicly for nearly fifteen years.

In 1993, Vivian came to the attention of a social help organization dedicated to aiding elderly Manhattan shut-ins. She told a regular visitor from the group, lawyer Kurt McAfee, about her life and said she had all her work in a storage facility on W. 28th St. Given access to the archive, McAfee contacted the New York gallery owner Gary Snyder, a specialist representing and exhibiting mid century American, mainly Abstract Expressionist, artists.

Deeply impressed with Vivian and her work, Snyder and his staff thoroughly cataloged it all. In early 1998, the Snyder gallery opened Springford's first solo show in nearly two decades: Vivian Springford: Abstract Paintings 1956–1988. [34] Almost all the pieces sold before the opening, which the frail, and very stylish, Springford attended. [35]

After a long decline, she died in New York in 2003, two weeks shy of her ninetieth birthday.

In judging Vivian Springford's life and work, it can’t be overlooked that her financial situation allowed her to paint without the support of critics, curators, or collectors, and then preserve her work for years. This does not minimize the nature of her accomplishment. Artists rightfully need some measure of validation, and to work so confidently and so well for years without it is heroic.

If her example is one more indictment of narrow patriarchal notions of creativity and importance, of what's included and what's dismissed by contemporary criticism and notions of history, Springford’s influence from here on out is assured.

Steadily overlooked, she never gave up. The prodigious output of masterworks from middle-age onward - evolving, inventive, and assured - has almost no parallel. Few peers had her material grasp of color, execution, and form and even fewer – at least in the Western tradition – were content to create work beyond the needs of ego and self.

More than a footnote to the history of 20th century American art, Springford may best be appreciated in the light of the 21st. The parochial, putatively sophisticated, art scene that ignored her, and so many other women, has made way for a thoroughly eclectic, un-doctrinaire, culture of abundant visions and diverse themes. Springford’s great achievement was to create her work and then keep it safe until it drew the attention she knew it deserved.