Schoelkopf Gallery is pleased to announce Virginia Berresford: Strangeness and Romance, on view from March 8 to April 5, 2024.
A painting of flowers hung in the window at Dudensing Gallery on West 44th Street in New York and caught the eye of Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield, who dashed off to buy several paintings from the young artist, Virginia Berresford. “The work of Virginia Berresford,” Crowninshield observed, “is suffused with a spirit so warm, so personal and so full of sympathy that many of her canvases take on…the quality of strangeness and romance.” A rising talent by twenty-five, Berresford earned her first solo exhibition in 1927, held in Paris at the legendary Galleries Bernheim-Jeune, a pillar of the European avant-garde known for exhibiting titans of modernism such as Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse. Three years later, Berresford was selected to represent a strong emerging generation of modernists alongside Arshile Gorky and Isamu Noguchi in An Exhibition of Work of 46 painters & Sculptors under 35 years of age, the fifth exhibition organized by the newly established Museum of Modern Art in New York. Berresford based herself largely in New York, where she regularly attended the Metropolitan Opera and visited museum and gallery exhibitions. When not in New York, she summered in Martha’s Vineyard, wintered in Key West, and traveled often to Europe.
Virginia Berresford: Strangeness and Romance presents eight paintings from 1926 to 1947 that trace the creative development of an ambitious young woman, who sought out private study with Purism co-founder Amédée Ozenfant in Paris and forged her enigmatic style before opening her own gallery, where she championed herself and other artists. Her work describes her favorite places and deepest personal passions—Antibes, France, Martha’s Vineyard, the natural world, and music. Berresford gained critical recognition during her lifetime, and her work is held in important institutional collections 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. It has been decades, however, since the artist has been the subject of a dedicated exhibition. Virginia Berresford: Strangeness and Romance invites viewers to rediscover and engage with Berresford’s lasting contribution to twentieth-century American modernism.
