This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Elsie Driggs, of Hartford, Connecticut, is best known as a
precisionist* painter who, in the 1920s, responded to the clean,
abstract beauty of the machine age in geometrically simplified
compositions. Driggs studied at the Art Students League* (1919
1925), and with Maurice Sterne in Rome.
Her romantic feelings
about industrial forms were part of the general optimism during the
booming prosperity of the 1920s. Her painting, Pittsburgh
(1928), was inspired by a trip to the Jones and Laughlin steel mills,
of which she said: "The particles of dust in the air seemed to catch
and reflect the light to make a backdrop of luminous pale gray behind
the shapes of simple smoke stack and cone. To me it was
Greek." And, in fact, the critics called her series of
approximately seven paintings in this mode "a new classicism".
Driggs painted the Queensborough Bridge (1927) and several other works in a precisionist mode, but starting in the thirties, she turned away from this style.
Her
work has been shown, among other places, at the Daniel Gallery (1924
1932), and at the Rehn Gallery. For residency in the Yaddo
Colony*, she received a Yaddo Foundation fellowship in 1935 and
executed murals for the Federal Art Project* in the 1930s. She
was the widow of artist Lee Gatch.
Source:
Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists
* For more in-depth information about these terms and others, see
AskART.com Glossary:
http://www.askart.com/AskART/lists/Art_Definition.aspx
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