This Is the Highly Stylized Art That Emphasized the Flat and Two ââ“dimensional

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Katharine Steele Renninger: Craft, Commitment, Customs

on view at the James A. Michener Art Museum from March 26, 2016 through June 12, 2016.

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Section wall labels from the exhibition

Early piece of work

Katharine Steele Renninger, known as Kay, was born in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, in 1925. When she was twelve, her family unit moved to a subcontract in Feasterville. Their neighbors were the painters Paulette van Roekens and her hubby, Arthur Meltzer, instructors at the Philadelphia Schoolhouse of Blueprint for Women (now Moore College of Fine art) who saw promise in young Kay and encouraged her to attend art schoolhouse. Renninger often spoke of the importance of her educational activity, writing, "The rather stringent bailiwick offered at Moore at that fourth dimension established in me a respect for craftsmanship, the need for keen, accurate ascertainment, and the awareness of professional quality, which is ultimately necessary for whatsoever painter." Later on graduating in 1946, she taught locally before spending six months away on a fellowship, filling sketchbooks with confident studies that testify a range of approaches as she experimented with perspective, technique, and levels of realism and abstraction in different media.

In 1951 the artist married Jack Renninger and established a dedicated studio exercise in their abode in Newtown. The young family was transferred to Caracas, Venezuela, in 195 -- a year abroad that renewed her appreciation for Bucks Canton. Past the time she returned, the wide-open landscapes of her childhood had begun to disappear equally bourgeoisie encroached. Her work shifted along with the times, equally seen in Bisected, a stylized blend of brainchild and realism that celebrates progress while warning of the effects of industrialization.

Ditch Digger , c. 1955

Gouache

eleven x 14 1/2 in.

James A. Michener Art Museum, Gift of Mary Renninger Rumsey, Sarah Renninger Henriques, Patrick John Renninger, and Katharine Ann Renninger

2008.14.181

Renninger's ongoing interest in industrial subjects led to an important turn in her oeuvre shortly afterward her return from Venezuela. "I saw a ditch digger; it was a marvelous piece of machinery, a series of buckets around a wheel. I had to stop and describe it and that's when I started to zero in on 1 affair rather than a whole bunch of things." A gouache version of this drawing shows testify of her training in illustration and the influence of her engineer father. It is both colorful and highly detailed, accurate and stylized. There is no context given, no landscape or even a ground line to locate the auto in space: this is a technical examination of an object that shows both her skill as a draftsman and her enthusiasm for agreement, through drawing, how things work.

Sketchbooks

Drawing was fundamental to Renninger'due south practice as a ways of observing, understanding, and composing her subjects. The sketchbooks in the Michener Museum's collection, which date from her college years through the mid-1970s when she turned to photography for preparatory studies, reveal her development as an artist, her thought process, and her personality. Graphite sketches show a confident hand and the "swell, authentic observation" that she credited to her studies at Moore; architectural studies and renderings of antique objects are highly detailed, both in line and in the copious notes that accompany them. Along with color specifics, she recorded the management, quality, and temperature of light and shadow, as well as practical information including street addresses, collector'southward names, dates, and weather conditions. Within these facts are clear moments of delight: on a 1968 sketch of a home in Martha's Vineyard, a identify she returned to often, she noted, "All chairs powder bluish!" and "Doors avocado!" Colors were often poetically recorded -- "marvelous mustard" -- and indicated in broad blocks, as if she imagined the terminal painting in her mind while she sketched.

Process and preparation

Several loose studies from the Michener'due south collection as well reveal how Renninger observed and recorded nuances of color, calorie-free, and shadow. Her final painting is as instructive; in its unfinished state, we tin follow her procedure equally she described it:

I draw directly on the canvas with a brush dipped in yellow ochre, frequently proceeding to raw sienna for corrections, accents, or definition of line -- in dire cases to burnt sienna, when too much confusion exists.

Different watercolor, casein allows me to begin working in whatever area interests me the most and work in any given direction . . . once the drawing is established, I either tone the sail with a wet wash or a loosely applied drybrush scrubbing of color . . . the tooth of the canvas enables me to pull pigment over a tone without completely covering the first application.

Much of the work is a series of crosshatching over the initial painting. This results in a simplification of forms and also in subtle gradations of colour. It is an excellent manner to observe and lose edges.

Glass Palette with Pigment Samples

James A. Michener Art Museum, Gift of Mary Renninger Rumsey, Sarah Renninger Henriques, Patrick John Renninger, and Katharine Ann Renninger

ARC2008.4

Renninger preferred to brand her own palettes from drinking glass with a paper backing, feeling that commercial models were "chemically inferior." From the late 1940s on, she worked with a narrow and specific range of colors in casein, a milk-based paint that she revered for its dry consistency and meticulous application.

Windows

The creative person delighted in the challenge of painting windows, with their dissimilarity of materials and surfaces both transparent and reflective. In Congress Hall she cropped out all but a sparse margin of yellow brick wall around one alpine, narrow window with louvered green shutters. With its scalloped shade offsetting the grid of panes, and the balance of muted colors with black and white elements, Renninger created a stately synecdoche of this historic Cape May hotel. Two Wheeler is a symmetrical view of a trinity of alpine, biconvex gable windows below gingerbread trim. Cut in a pattern of half dozen-pointed stars within circles (the "two wheels" of the title), the trim and its shadow are perfectly aligned, repeating the scrolled consequence that contrasts with the horizontal clapboards and truncated diagonals of the roofline.

Typically, Renninger'due south windows show reflections of the exterior, rather than domestic scenes within. 1 of the few paintings made from the within looking out, Emerge'south Attic Window was painted from the home of the artist's girl. The depicted landscape, however, is not as it appears in reality: Renninger often edited details to serve the limerick.

Signs & reflections

Renninger'south academic training in design gave her an appreciation for the skill and intendance required for hand-painted lettering, every bit in the "ghost sign" she reproduced in Wall Painting, Due west Chester (opposite). Large plate glass windows offered an boosted claiming: "The flim-flam to painting glass," she told a onetime student, "is not to paint it." Examples of this combined interest abound in this exhibition: Pufferbelly Restaurant; Antiques Sign, Lititz, PA; and Spring Service. All of these paintings feature signage painted on drinking glass, forming a complex layering of information that blurs the difference between inside and out, fifty-fifty every bit her lettering and line remain abrupt. Their corresponding structures have been cropped out, and then that the sheet and the window appear to be one and the aforementioned.

"I like to paint things through things," was Renninger's simple explanation for these complex studies. Main and Orange Streets, Nantucket is not a streetscape, equally the championship suggests, simply an image of a window seen through scaffolding. Two cross braces divide the surface and create a shallow shadow across the window, mirroring and fracturing the image across the street. Similar Antiques Sign, this image combines Renninger'due south involvement in depicting reflection and in playing with flatness and depth. "I don't know whether I'm hither or there," she remarked after near this work.

Variations on a Theme: The Boathouse

Renninger often returned to the same settings to capture shifts in color and light, and to consider dissimilar perspectives on a scene. The University of Pennsylvania boathouse was suggested past her son-in-law, an alumnus of the coiffure team, and became one of her favorite subjects. Created over a six-year period, this grouping of paintings allows us to compare how Renninger used cropping equally a strategy to emphasize existing geometries. In Ane Dozen Shells, the intersection of verticals and horizontals serve as the primary composition, whereas in U Penn Shells with Bikes, Renninger used these same elements to help organize a more complex amount of information. Beyond these formal concerns, this series captures the stillness and anticipation of the empty boathouse, an icon of Philadelphia'south architectural and sporting history.

Morrell's Antiquarian Shop

Morrell's Antique Shop in Newtown, where the Renningers lived for five decades, provided source cloth for over twenty paintings. The earliest, Morrell's Store, 1958, defenseless the middle of New York dealer Albert Duveen at the Phillips Mill Community Association'due south annual juried evidence that year -- a milestone in her career, according to the artist. Duveen's suggestions virtually craftsmanship and fashion steered Renninger toward her mature work, characterized by cropped compositions of objects and architectural details rendered in a muted palette.

This shift is axiomatic in 2 paintings made thirty years after. In Morrell's with Bunting Renninger used a long, horizontal canvass to locate a rhythm of repeating elements on a narrow view of the shop's exterior. Morrell's Spinning Wheel and Wool Winder shows the contents of one of these crowded display windows layered with the reflection of a group of buildings across the street. She anchored this busy composition with the large circumvolve of the bike and the square formed past the strands of wool on the winder, backed by repeating and layered grids of windows.

Finding "the character in things"

Antiquarian objects appear in the majority of Renninger's paintings. In Dowery Chairs and Pennsbury Baskets, for example, they suggest a human presence within an interior scene. The tightly cropped compositions of Churn, Warren and Cold Spring Boxes focus our attention on the subject field, so that nosotros might "run into the character in things" equally she did. Renninger was passionate near material civilisation before that discipline had a name. Preservation and nostalgia did play a role, but her involvement was more businesslike than romantic. Above all, she was drawn to an object's inherent design and the effort information technology represented to make the ordinary, beautiful: "I paint things that take a sense of integrity, that were fabricated one at a time by someone who actually cared. I guess information technology'southward a rebellion against the sameness of everything around the states today." Whether a hand-painted sign, a biscuit box, a corncrib, or gingerbread trim on a Victorian habitation, the connection betwixt craft, utility, history, and pride of place is memorialized and celebrated in Renninger'due south work.

Barns and Exteriors

The grace of old barns and their unproblematic geometries have long fatigued artists to Bucks County, and Renninger's images naturally invite a number of art historical comparisons. Where the Pennsylvania Impressionists situated these buildings in the landscape as but one element of a bucolic scene, the modernists, such equally Precisionist painter Charles Sheeler, were interested in their compositional forms. Renninger drew from both examples, maintaining an affection for her subjects while looking by them to consider their form and structure.

Rarely did Renninger portray an entire building. Instead, she focused on handcrafted features that represented the character of the larger whole, and cropped her compositions to locate patterns inside windows, doors, walls, and decorative trim. When she did take the long view, as in Edgecomb Boatworks, it was in lodge to present architectural elements in a rhythmic repetition that she further emphasized with flat, frontal perspectives and long, narrow canvases. These were considerate choices that balanced information with invention. Bricks, boards, and other building materials create smaller units within larger blocks of color, and shadows are portrayed as conspicuously defined shapes. People are suggested but never present; as the artist once stated, "An empty building gives the viewer more possibilities for imagination."

Pattern and repetition

Much of Renninger's work emphasizes pattern and repetition, whether plant inside a scene, equally in Jams and Jellies and Chestertown Porch, or in the object itself. Quilts were of interest to Renninger for their inherent design, their significance as artifacts, and for the challenge of painting in a brighter palette. Three Coverlets on a Ladder shows a display of nineteenth-century "figured and fancy" woven coverlets, with their inscriptions and stylized floral pattern. Like Cold Bound Boxes nearby, the presentation feels nigh scientific -- head-on, without cont -- which focuses our attention on the details. In Three Quilts in Closet, a stack of quilts becomes an element in a limerick that reads more than like traditional even so life, although for the almost function Renninger painted her subjects as she found them, preferring to edit as she worked rather than to contrive an arrangement. Typical of many of her paintings, in that location is little depth recession; the work appears very flat, and so we can read these images as both fragments of a scene and as arrangements of shapes and hues.

Drafting Tools from Renninger's Studio

James A. Michener Art Museum, Gift of Mary Renninger Rumsey, Sarah Renninger Henriques, Patrick John Renninger, and Katharine Ann Renninger

ARC 2008.iv

Now part of the museum's archive, Renninger's father'due south drafting tools were an important keepsake for the artist. "My male parent was an engineer and he said, 'If you're going to describe a bridge, and then that span better be able to acquit the weight.'"

Return to Katharine Steele Renninger: Craft, Commitment, Community

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