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Artist or Maker: Patrick Henry Bruce (1881-1937)
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Dimensions: 21 1/2 x 18 in. (54.7 x 45.7 cm)
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Provenance: The artist
Mrs. Helen Kibbey Bruce
Collection of William Kennedy, Marigot, St. Martin, circa 1960
Private Collection
Literature
William C. Agee and Barbara Rose, Patrick Henry Bruce: American Modernist,
New York, 1979, no. B11, p. 160, illustrated
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Notes: One of the pioneers of American modernism, Patrick Henry Bruce was part of
a circle of American artists — among them Max Weber and Arthur B.
Frost, Jr. — who gathered around Gertrude and Leo Stein and Henri Matisse
in Paris at the end of the 20th century’s first decade. Those relationships,
together with his own intensive study of Cezanne’s late paintings, led Bruce
to begin a series of 15 floral still lifes in early 1910 in which he explored the
implications both of Matisse’s color and of Cezanne’s space. Flowers
is one of these still lifes, its unpainted voids, fluid drawing and flattened
geometries underscoring not only the tulips’ rich color harmonies but also the
process of its own creation.