Marie Wilson (painter)

Wilson was born in 1922 in Cedarville, California.^[3][1] She attended Mills College in the San Francisco Bay Area where she received a BFA degree in 1944. She went on to pursue a graduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley, earning an MFA in 1948.^[2]

In 1950, Wilson met the American artist Gordon Onslow Ford and the Turkish-born Greek artist Jean Varda in Sausalito, California.^[2][4] Through these professional relationships, she became engaged with the Dynaton movement and its associated intellectual community.^[2]

In 1952, Wilson moved to Paris where her work was curated into exhibitions by André Breton.The paintings were influenced by Indigenous cultures of the Americas, spirituality, and the occult.^[1][5] Wilson's semi-abstract paintings incorporated geometric and biomorphic formal elements. The compositions of her later work were highly symmetrical. It has been described as having "a transcendental artistic language that was uniquely her own: a poetic, masterful, and harmonious fusion of the sacred and the surreal."^[2] In Paris she met the painters, Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso, the conceptual artist, Marcel Duchamp, the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, and other modernist artists. She became interested in Zen Buddhism and Hinduism as well as the mythology of pre-Columbian cultures.^[2]

The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti organized a one-person show of Wilson's works in 1984, titled, Apparitions: The Mythical World of Marie Wilson.^[2]

In 2024–2025, Her work is included in the Vital Signs exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.^[6]

In 2026, Wilson's work was presented in a solo exhibition at the San Francisco; it had been forty years since she had a solo exhibition.^[1][7]

The book, The Occult, in Modernist Art, Literature, and Cinema includes a chapter on Wilson's work.^[8]