Margaret Fisher
(b. 1898 Chicago d. 1990)
Education
University of Wisconsin; Art Institute of Chicago.
Selected Exhibitions
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Art Institute of Chicago; Milwaukee Art Institute, Wisconsin; St. Paul School of Art, Minnesota; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Michigan; Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University.
Selected Public Collections
Art Institute of Chicago; Fogg Museum, Harvard University; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe; DeYoung Museum of Art, San Francisco.
Margaret Fisher was a modernist painter, patron of the arts and life-long native of Chicago. She was a master of gesture and line, and her paintings remain fresh and dynamic today. Her father was Secretary of Interior under President Taft and the family traveled extensively. She was exposed to great art during these trips abroad, and following her graduation from the University of Wisconsin, Fisher began various studies in painting and sculpture. In 1923, she took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1924, she attended summer classes in Gloucester and Provincetown, and later that year, she studied drawing under Boardman Robinson at The Art Students League in New York. In 1927 she made a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico to witness the Indian Dance Festival, and returned in 1936 to spend time with the writer Alice Corbin, her husband William Penhallow Henderson and her friend Mabel Dodge. Back at home on the family’s estate in Hubbard Woods, Winnetka, Fisher frequently painted with neighbors Norman MacLeish and Fairfield Porter.
The works produced during the 1920’s and ‘30’s were primarily watercolors painted on location. She painted the fisherman on Cape Cod, the rolling hills of the Midwest with their barns and silos and the red hills of New Mexico. In the studio, she devoted her time to oil portraits and still lifes. These early works reveal her natural ease with color and composition. In 1938 she began to seek gallery representation, and had a one-woman show at Quest Galleries in Chicago in December of that year. She decided to try her luck in New York and approached several dealers, including Alfred Stieglitz who showed the work to his friend, Duncan Phillips. Phillips gave her a one-woman show of her watercolors at the Phillips Memorial Gallery in 1939.
In 1941, Fisher began to experiment with abstraction and throughout the 1940’s and ‘50’s produced small, whimsical mixed media works on paper. It is in these small compositions that Fisher’s true voice is heard. These are an intimate experience, a personal conversation between viewer and artist. As Agnes Mongan, Curator of Drawings at the Fogg Museum wrote, “The lively and highly varied compositions reveal wit, energy, discovery, control and intelligence.” It is very rare to find such a body of artwork so coherent, fresh and vibrant.