VIRGINIA BERRESFORD (1904-1995)
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Biography • Virginia Berresford (1904-1995)
Virginia Berresford was born in Rochelle Park, New York in 1904. She studied mathematics, art and design at the Horace Mann School. She began her work by doing stage designs for a theater on Martha’s Vineyard. After she completed high school in 1919 she was urged by her mother to attend college. Berresford was reluctant at first, but realized that she needed the education to advance in her art.
From 1920 to 1921, Berresford attended Wellesley College, where she found the art courses to be elementary. It was during her class tour to Europe in 1921 that she gained the exposure she needed to nurture her passion for art. After attending Columbia University from 1923 to 1924, Berresford returned to Paris in 1925 and studied privately with Amédée Ozenfant, who, with Ferdinand Léger, taught at the Académie Moderne. Ozenfant, with Le Corbusier, was the author of Après le Cubisme (1918), the manifesto of the movement known as Purism. Berresford received extensive training in the tenets of Purism, which replaced Cubist chaos, flux, and illegibility with order, balance, and clarity by utilizing flat, hard-edged planes, muted colors, and simplified geometric shapes executed in a dry, mechanical manner. Berresford had her first one man exhibition in Paris at the Galleries Bernheim Jeune in 1927.
In 1928 Virginia Berresford had her first New York solo exhibition at the New Gallery. This was followed by three solo exhibitions at Montross Gallery in 1932, 1933, and 1934. Berresford added to her knowledge of French cubism by looking at the work of American contemporaries Sheeler, Demuth, Lozowick, and especially O’Keeffe. In 1936, James W. Lane claimed that Berresford’s “clear, simple designs” of varied subjects in her solo show at the Walker Gallery in New York, ensured “her place among ‘The Immaculates’,” (now known as the Precisionists).
In 1930 Virginia Berresford met her future husband Benedict Thielen who had a promising career in the military. The couple first visited Florida in 1934, staying in Key West. There, Berresford painted the coco palms, never tiring of the designs the fronds of their never still branches would make. In Key West, Berresford broke loose from the severe painting style she developed from her studies with Ozenfant. She loosened up her style, began working in watercolor, and used daringly free strokes and bright colors. From 1934 until the couple’s divorce in 1950, they lived in New York, spent summers in Martha’s Vineyard, and wintered in Key West. Berresford’s husband Ben received a commission of Lieutenant Commander in the Navy from 1943 to 1945, which led the couple to be stationed in Miami. There they rented a roomy Spanish style home set in a tropical garden. Berresford converted one of the bedrooms into a studio. In 1945 Berresford taught watercolor technique to hospitalized soldiers for the Red Cross.
Virginia Berresford maintained an active exhibition schedule. In the 1930s, she had solo exhibitions at the Montross Gallery, the Walker Gallery, and Marie Sterner Gallery. In 1939 she exhibited at the New York World’s Fair, and in 1941 had her first retrospective show at the Bonestell Gallery in New York. In 1945 Ted Shaw, an old Boston friend of Berresford’s, gave her the opportunity to have a one man show at his Stuart Gallery. In February of 1946 she received a solo exhibition at her alma mater Wellesley College.
In 1952 Virginia Berresford bought a fishing shack in Menemsha near Chilmark and turned it into a gallery to show her work and to teach art to summer pupils. In New York Berresford exhibited with Mortimer Levitt Gallery from 1947 to 1952 with four solo exhibitions. She then showed with Bodley Gallery with solo exhibitions in 1956 and 1957. In 1965 she showed at the University of Maine in Orono, and then in 1971 the Princeton Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey gave her a solo show for her paintings of Ireland.
Through the 1980s, Berresford continued to have her popular one man shows in Menemsha and regularly exhibited at other galleries on Martha’s Vineyard. In 1995 Berresford’s work was included in the seminal exhibition, Precisionism in America 1915-1941: Reordering Reality, organized by the Montclair Art Museum.
Personal accounts of Virginia Berresford’s life can be found in Virginia’s Journal: An Autobiography of an Artist published by the Glen Publishing Company, Martha’s Vineyard, 1989.