Virginia Berresford
Biography
Shells, c. 1940
Virginia Berresford (1902–1995) was an American modernist whose singular approach to painting emphasizes clarity and precision. Born in 1902 [1] in Rochelle Park, New York, Berresford was a deeply curious woman with a passion for reading, culture, world travel, and new experiences. She attended Horace Mann High School, and later studied at Wellesley College (1921–22) and Teachers’ College at Columbia University (1923–24). Determined to learn pioneering techniques directly from the European avant-garde, Berresford traveled to Paris in 1925. There, she arranged private lessons with Amédée Ozenfant, co-founder with Le Corbusier of Purism, which, in a reactionary evolution against the visual fragmentation of Cubism, assigned critical importance to the strength of individual forms and to the absence of unnecessary detail.
Berresford had many love affairs throughout her life and travels, including two marriages. While living in France, the artist met writer Benedict Thielen, whom she married in 1930. She later ended their marriage after falling violently in love with Morgan Worthy in 1947. Her marriage to Worthy was defined by his alcoholism and abuse, and she ultimately managed to extricate herself from the relationship a few years later. In 1954, Berresford opened her eponymous gallery in Menemsha on Martha’s Vineyard, where she showed her own work and organized exhibitions on behalf of other artists.
Throughout her career, Berresford earned important exhibitions. In 1927 at age twenty-five, she held her first solo exhibition in Paris at the influential Galleries Bernheim-Jeune, followed by her first New York exhibition at New Gallery in 1928. In 1930, she was included in MoMA’s An Exhibition of Work of 46 painters & Sculptors under 35 years of age, a groundbreaking group exhibition that heralded an emerging generation of talented modernists. Montross Gallery in New York organized exhibitions of her work in 1932, 1933, and 1934. Well into her career, in 1968, she exhibited at Jacques Seligmann Gallery in New York, a prominent gallery known for a robust program of European modernism responsible for one of the most famous sales in art history—Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) to MoMA. Berresford gained critical recognition during her lifetime, and her work is held in important institutional collections today including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dallas Museum of Art; the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Massachusetts; the Detroit Museum of Art; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
[1] Sources conflict regarding the year Berresford was born (1902, 1904)
Works
