In the summertime of 1927, Esther Estelle Pressoir, a 24-year-old artist from Rhode Island who glided by “Stella,” set out by bike from the west coast of France for Italy, a journey of some 12,000 miles. A graduate of the Rhode Island College of Design (RISD), Pressoir had not too long ago attended the Artwork College students League in New York, and wished to expertise the artwork of Europe. Fellow college students had scoffed. In response to Suzanne M. Scanlan, writer of Esther Pressoir: A Fashionable Girl’s Painter, the younger artist was decided “to show she may ‘do’ the Grand Tour on a not-so-grand price range.” The expertise proved decisive to her life, and her legacy.
Pressoir graduated from RISD in 1923. Almost a century later, Scanlan, a professor and artwork historian on the college, discovered about Pressoir through a newspaper clipping about her bicycling journey within the library archive, illustrated by a woodblock print she had made. When Scanlan went on the lookout for extra, she discovered that Pressoir’s nephew, Leon Dulac, had saved almost all the pieces in her studio after she died. The ensuing e book is an intensive and charming take a look at Pressoir’s life and work between world wars.
Pressoir launched into her journey to Italy wearing a turquoise pajama prime, skirt, and black leather-based jacket, with a cigarette as an adjunct, as Scanlan notes. In her handwritten journals (pages of which give enjoyable endpapers for the e book) Pressoir describes hauling “30 lbs of paper, drawings & pencils” on her bike, on prime of different requirements like clothes. In brief, art-making was central to the journey. Alongside her written account of the journey, Pressoir created “600 pencil and ink drawings, lots of which she later translated into work and prints.”
A type of works is “By means of Andorra” (c. 1928), a linocut depicting a lady pushing her bicycle by way of a mountain hole. With a cross atop one peak and rays of daylight filling the sky, the picture unmistakably remembers a holy pilgrimage. Although her bike journey comprised simply seven months of Pressoir’s lengthy life — she died in 1986 — it’s important to Scanlan’s compelling story of her as a contemporary girl and modernist artist: trailblazing, impartial, courageous.
Certainly, Pressoir was brave as a traveler, an artist, and a queer girl. In Europe, she developed a captivating drawing type influenced by Expressionism that carries by way of numerous media, together with a long time of illustrations she contributed to the New Yorker, together with work, prints, and ceramics. She created nudes of herself, fashions, and lovers, together with a dancer from Harlem known as Florita. Pressoir, Scanlan writes, “made dozens of images of Florita” at a time when White artists not often depicted Black topics, significantly with such intimacy. She would hold many of those works along with her for the remainder of her life.
Earlier than leaving Europe, Pressoir offered her bike and purchased, in her phrases, “a superbly irresistible tiny silver cigarette case … as a gesture of feminism.” Certainly, within the expressionistic portray “Self-Portrait, Smoking” (c. 1935), she depicts herself tucked inside a womb-like house that rhymes with a spiral of smoke rising from the cigarette she holds with informal cool. She is a brand new type of girl: sensual, confident, and self-created.
Esther Pressoir: A Fashionable Girl’s Painter (2024), written by Suzanne M. Scanlan and revealed by Lund Humphries, is accessible for buy on-line and in bookstores.