Betty Holliday
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
May 23, 1925
Betty Holliday | |
|---|---|
| Born | Elizabeth Gertrude Holliday May 23, 1925 |
| Died | April 3, 2011 (aged 85) Port Washington, New York |
| Known for | Painting, drawing |
| Movement | Abstract Expressionism |
Elizabeth Gertrude Holliday (23 May 1925—3 April 2011),[1] known professionally as Betty Holliday and Betty Holliday Deckoff,[2] was an American visual artist and educator who was active on Long Island, New York, and in New York City.[1] Her most well-known works are large figurative paintings and drawings. Her early paintings were dominated by color, as she was trained when Abstract Expressionism was the dominant American art movement; later she became interested in photography and, as a result, experimented in "decolorizing" her paintings and drawings.[3]
Betty Holliday was the youngest daughter of Gertrude Holliday and George Alvin Holliday (1887–1970);[4] she had one sister, Priscilla.[1] She earned a BA in Art History at Barnard College (1945), studied painting and drawing at the Art Students League of New York (1942–47), and earned an MA in Art History at Radcliffe College (1950), now fully merged with Harvard University.[4][5]
After completing her formal education, Holliday worked as an editorial associate for ARTnews (1950–55), which familiarized her with the works of contemporary artists.[4] This access to the art scene proved instrumental in her recruitment of visiting artists for the Cumberland Center for Continuing Education, the adult education program at the Great Neck School District, where Holliday was a well-respected teacher from 1955 until 1984.[4][6] She also taught privately and many of her students became professional artists, including Shirley Gorelick,[7] Deborah Katz,[8] Peter Galasso,[9] and Sigrid Somers.[10]
Abstract Expressionism
Holliday began to explore nonobjectivity in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but her figural abstractions attracted the earliest published critical attention. My Father (1960), a monumental abstraction of George Alvin Holliday seated in a chair, was prominently reproduced in Art in America to illustrate how the nontraditional, unsymbolic figurative works of "fledgling artists" attested to the flexibility of abstraction and representation.[11] Even in her earliest works, Holliday was able to "reveal the truth of the figure which is just as well expressed by its stance, its total gesture, as by its individual features" through the language of Abstract Expressionism.[11] Her heavy, bold, interpenetrating, and in some cases obliterating, gestural strokes of white, gray, black, and brown invited comparisons to Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning.[11] A few years later, she asserted her expressive independence in a group of paintings and drawings on the theme of figures in striped clothing against a green backdrop, including In the Garden (1964) and On the Grass III (1965), both large canvases. Holliday's command of compositional space and structure, which was already evident in My Father, became more nuanced and her forms more decentralized; her figures were also more enigmatic.[4] As noted by one reviewer, Holliday surpassed "factual representation" to achieve "an expressiveness and concern for human meaning" through both the subject and her handling of it.[5]