For sale is an original etching by Chicago Society of Artists artist and etcher Beatrice Sophia Levy (1892 - 1974)
This etching is titled: Bay at Fuenterrabia. Fuenterrabia ( Hondarribia ) is a town situated on the west shore of Bidasoa rivers mouth, in Gipuzkoa, in Basque Country, Spain. The border town is situated on a little promontory facing Hendaye (France) over the Txingudi bay.
The etching is on woven paper and is gallery framed.
Circa 1930's in age
Signed lower right by the artist and titled and inscribed as a trial proof to Sol & Helene Wile lower left.
Condition: Good. Light/medium overall paper tone.
Measurements
Framed - 13 1/4” x 16 1/4”
Image size - 7” x 10”
Beatrice Sophia Levy (1892 - 1974)
Levy was born in Chicago to a German-Jewish emigrant father and a mother from Kentucky and grew up on Chicagos Near South Side. She studied at the Chicago Art Institute after graduating from high school in 1910 with an initial focus on illustration. While there, she was among a small number of students including Stanislaus Szukalski who defended the modernist works on display at the notorious Armory Show at the Art Institute in 1913. Encouraged by her instructors she continued her art education after graduating in 1910 with honorable mention, studying portraiture with Ralph Clarkson in Chicago, painting with Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and fine print methods with Vojtěch Preissig in New Yorks Art Students League in 1915.
By then, she was already a prolific painter and printmaker, producing striking images with saturated color and abbreviated, semi-realist imagery. One of the earliest members of the Chicago Society of Etchers, her exacting, three-plate color intaglios were first exhibited by the Society in 1914. The same year, one of her prints received an honorable mention at Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.
She held her first solo exhibition in 1916 at Goupil & Cie Gallery in New York, featured her entire collection of color aquatints. She had a studio in Chicagos 57th Street Art Colony.
In the 1920s she helped form an "art for arts sake" group called the Cor Ardens along with Szukalski, Carl Hoeckner, Ramon Shiva, and Gerrit Sinclair. Traveling with friends all over the United States, Europe, and Mexico, she was by then well-known for "forceful painting in oils, but also for her ability to express in the exquisite art of the copper plate … an individual style through a simple and dignified treatment of her subject matter." (Palos Journal, May 1929)
During the Great Depression (1929-39), Levy supervised the Easel Painting Division and Art Gallery of the Illinois Art Project of the WPA. She also supervised the Easel Painting Division for the Federal Arts Project a decade later.
For two years during World War II, Levy worked as a meteorological map draftsman and her subsequent work developed along more modern lines.
She traveled extensively in the US, Europe, and North Africa and summered La Jolla, California for several years before making it her home in 1950. She served on the board of the San Diego Museum of Art (then the San Diego Fine Arts Gallery) and taught at the La Jolla Museum School of Arts and Crafts (1961–62). Also at the time, she began a close relationship with the modernist artist Dorothy Stratton King, a La Jolla resident with whom she shared a passion for rich color and strong form.
Levy experimented heavily in her final decade in linear and highly abstract printmaking and enamels.
Levy never married. After a long and distinguished career, she died in La Jolla in 1974. Her papers are held by the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
