Gretchen Schoeninger Corazzo
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Gretchen Schoeninger Corazzo | |
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| Born | 18 December 1913 Highland Park, Illinois, US |
| Died | January 11, 2016 (aged 102) |
| Known for | Sculpture, assemblages |
| Spouse | Alexander Corazzo |
Gretchen Schoeninger Corazzo (1913–2016) was an American sculptor and artist.
Corazzo was born on December 18, 1913 in Ravinia, a small community in Highland Park, Illinois, near Chicago. Her artistic talents were encouraged from an early age. Her mother, Hester B. Hall, was a teacher and her father, Joseph Schoeninger, was a businessman who specialised in printing. Her parents moved several times, often to provide more progressive schooling for their children. She attended the Francis W. Parker School (Chicago) and in 1922, she and her siblings boarded at the Heidehoff Schule near Stuttgart in Germany, as their father was negotiating the purchase of a rotogravure printing process. Still in Germany in 1923, the family stayed in the home of Anton Lang, a sculptor and actor who had played the part of Jesus Christ in the decennial Oberammergau Passion Play in 1900, 1910 and 1922. Lang gave her clay to model and she said that from then, "I always had a piece of mud in my hands, making something."[1][2][3]
The family returned to Chicago, where her father set up his new printing press and his daughter attended a school in Chicago. In art classes she could do what she wanted and she created large posters of Heracles and other Greek mythological figures. On summer holidays, her mother encouraged her artistic leanings by attaching wallpaper to the walls of the barn for the children to draw on. In 1925 the family moved to Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, an artistic colony where she would meet people such as the author, John Steinbeck, the photographer Edward Weston, the poet Robinson Jeffers, the marine biologist, Ed Ricketts, the avant- garde composer, John Cage and his future wife, also an artist, Xenia Cage. However, despite the attractions of Carmel, her mother was unhappy with the schools and educated her children herself. Her daughter then entered Monterey High School (Monterey, California), where she found the art lessons to be too academic. For a time, she wanted to become a veterinarian.[1][2][3]
After leaving high school, Corazzo produced posters for local organizations. She also did the scenic design for a play by the Carmel Arts & Crafts Clubhouse, which was performed in a Los Angeles theatre. In her early twenties she attended the Chouinard Art Institute, but became disillusioned by its commercial approach. She then provided monochrome linocut illustrations for a local newspaper, the Pacific Weekly, published by Lincoln Steffens, who also lived in Carmel. She also worked as a nanny for Jacob Zeitlin, owner of a well-known bookstore in Los Angeles, who was the first person to buy one of her paintings.[1]
She then moved to the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which took its inspiration from the Bauhaus in Germany, which had been closed by the Nazis, and was sometimes known as the "New Bauhaus." This had been founded by a former Bauhaus instructor and artist László Moholy-Nagy and former Bauhaus student Hin Bredendieck. At the institute she studied woodworking techniques, sculpture, physics, semantics, and photography. Working with clay, she studied sculpture with Alexander Archipenko, the Ukrainian born cubist sculptor. Moholy-Nagy's photography course strengthened her interest in abstraction and shadows and the same teacher also taught her about creating sculptures for the blind.[1][2][3]
