SUE FULLER (1914-2006)
Biography • Sue Fuller (1914-2006)
Sue Fuller was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1914. Fuller was introduced to modern art through annual visits with her parents to the Carnegie International. In high school Fuller spent a summer studying with Ernest Thurn in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she encountered her first books on modern art. Fuller furthered her academic art training at the Carnegie Institute of Technology which she entered in 1932. In the summer of 1934 Fuller returned to Gloucester to attend the Thurn School of Art where Hans Hofmann was the guest teacher. As Fuller said, “This was my first direct contact with one of the giants of modern art and I was ready for it. Hofmann repeatedly chose my work as examples for the class.”
Fuller graduated with a B.A. from the Carnegie Institute in 1936 and moved to New York City, where she took a teaching course at Columbia University’s Teachers College. In 1943 she studied printmaking with Stanley William Hayter, an important figure in the world of etching. Fuller worked as Hayter’s assistant from 1943 to 1945 at Atelier 17, housed in the New School of Social Research in New York City. At Atelier 17, Fuller researched and perfected methods of soft ground etching and printed editions of plates by André Masson and Marc Chagall. While at Atelier 17, Fuller felt she found her own style through interaction with many great artists, including Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Roberto Matta, and Jacques Lipchitz. In her own etchings, Fuller incorporated lace and other fabrics to provide texture. She soon found the immobility of the fabrics limiting, so she pulled or stretched them, then reassembled them, and finally reduced them to a single thread. Needing to secure these string compositions for use in her etchings, Fuller first taped them to paper, then nailed them to frames for greater stability and finally used pegs and double frames to ensure their security.
Sue Fuller gained further skills in her artmaking in an eight session workshop on Bauhaus fundamentals led by Josef Albers at the Camera Club in New York in 1944. In addition to the Bauhaus use of modern materials, Albers’s abstract line drawings and his style of geometric abstraction would become important influences on Fuller’s compositions. In 1948, the comprehensive retrospective of Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner at the Museum of Modern Art led Sue Fuller to realize her string preparations for etchings could stand on their own as art.
Sue Fuller stopped printmaking completely in 1949 to pursue her “String Compositions.” Her first constructions were made of wool and she was pictured with one of her gigantic “Cat’s Cradles” in Life magazine in 1949. Unfortunately these wool compositions began to drag and lose color over time, so in keeping with her Bauhaus training Fuller looked to modern industry for more durable materials. In 1950 Fuller started to use plastic monofilament in her constructions and had Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company set her constructions between two sheets of double-paned thermo glass. The preservation issues with these new materials and techniques would take some years to resolve as Fuller soon discovered the plastic threads lost their color faster than wool. Despite the technical problems along the way, Fuller exhibited String Composition No.11 in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Abstract Art in America in 1950. Improvements in the plastics industry made Fuller’s work more durable and by 1955 both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art had purchased her work. Fuller’s mid-Fifties plastic thread constructions were anchored in aluminum frames designed by the artist and executed by the Matheson Tool Company. To further improve the execution of her compositions, Fuller apprenticed in glassmaking in Italy and England in 1950, studied calligraphy for six months in Japan in 1954, and studied lace making in 1962.
In the early Sixties Fuller had physicist Dr. Robert Feller of the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh test the threads of her constructions until she was confident her palette of colors would be permanent. Fuller also investigated ways to embed her compositions in plastic so they could appear to float. She was first able to embed her smallest works in plastic in 1960 and by 1965 with the help of Roy Slipp of Clearfloat Inc., Fuller was embedding many of her string compositions in varying sizes. In 1967 Fuller was granted a patent for her process by the United States Government. In 1969 Josef Albers attended an exhibition of his student’s work and was so impressed he traded work with Fuller.
Starting in 1949, Fuller’s dealer was the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, who represented her until 1965. Fuller’s 1965 exhibition at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery was a critical success with positive reviews in The Herald Tribune and The New York Times. Fuller was included in The Responsive Eye in 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art, exhibiting String Composition 119, 1964, a piece described as polypropylene thread in Plexiglas. By 1967, the Museum of Modern Art, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Honolulu Academy of Art, and the Tate Gallery had all purchased work by Fuller. The McNay Art Museum had a solo exhibition of Fuller’s work in January 1967.
In New York, Sue Fuller exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She also exhibited at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and the Tate Gallery in London. Between 1948 and 1950, Fuller received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Tiffany foundations, as well as a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Fuller taught periodically at several New York City institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Columbia University, and Pratt Institute. She also held artist-in-residence positions at both the University of Georgia and the University of Minnesota.