This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born in Marietta, Ohio on Oct. 31, 1898, Gina Knee was mostly a self-taught artist. While based in Santa Fe in the 1930s and 1940s, she was active in Los Angeles with a studio in the Ambassador Hotel.
In 1946 she and her husband, the artist Alexander Brook, moved to Savannah, Georgia and in 1948 to Long Island, New York, where she remained until her death in October 1982.
Exhibitions:
California Water Color Society, 1938-40; New Mexico State Fair, 1939; Art Institute of Chicago, 1940-46; Hatfield Gallery (LA), 1942 (solo); California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1943 (solo); Santa Barbara Museum, 1943 (solo).
Collections:
Buffalo FA Academy; Museum of NM; San Diego Museum; Santa Barbara Museum; Denver Museum. | Source:
Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940"
Who's Who in American Art 1940-70; Social Security Death Index (1940-2002). | | Nearly 20,000 biographies can be found in Artists in California 1786-1940 by Edan Hughes and is available for sale ($150). For a full book description and order information please click here. |
Biography from The Owings Gallery:
| "That artists are born, not made, is amply proved by Gina Knee," writes Ina Sizer Cassidy who refers to the fact that the artist received no formal art training, with the exception of a few weeks of drawing classes at the Art Students League in New York. The writer continues, "for her work has an original, a fresh point of view not to be found in students of art schools. This original point of view, unhampered by tradition or set formulas as to what an artist should say, or should not say, or how, is her contribution to the art of New Mexico." ("Art and Artists of New Mexico", New Mexico Magazine, February, 1939).
Gina Knee was born Virginia Schnaufer on October 31, 1898, in Marietta, Ohio. Her family had considerable wealth from oil explorations and a lumber business begun by her German immigrant forebears. Virginia Schnaufer was brought up to function as her affluent family had done, setting family and social obligations above the pursuit of self. Art was not considered a serious activity in the Schnaufer family. Thus, although Virginia exhibited artistic tendencies at an early age, drawing and painting friends and family and art school were never options because women were neither expected nor encouraged to develop their talents beyond the amateur level.
Knee's biographer, Sharyn Udall writes: "A genteel upbringing in the 1910s was designed to prepare young women for the conventional marriage plot, and Virginia Snaufer's marriage plot was enacted early. As a young woman, she married Goodlow MacDowell, with whom she pursued an active, genteel life of parties and polo. The marriage lasted ten years, ending with Virginia's abrupt flight from husband and home, leaving even her clothes behind." Divorce was a scandalous thing in 1930, and Virginia was labeled a "fallen" woman. "Paradoxically, it was such a fall that permitted Virginia Schnaufer the life she could not have chosen for herself." (Udall, Inside Looking Out).
Gina Knee arrived in New Mexico in 1931, inspired by thirty-two John Marin watercolors she had seen on exhibit in New York at Alfred Stieglitz's An American Place Gallery in November, 1930. Marin had completed the watercolors the previous summer in the Taos region. Schnaufer, then living in New York, was struck by the powerful forms captured by the artists confident brush: "It was not until 1931, when I went to New Mexico that I started thinking in terms of Art. Maybe it was the great John Marin show in 1930 of that western country that inspired me to try." Intending to stay two weeks, she was so impressed with what she found in New Mexico that she remained for the next ten years.
Not long after Schnaufer arrived in New Mexico, she met photographer Earnest Knee who often accompanied her on her visits to Indian ceremonials. While Knee pursued his photography in Santa Fe, Schnaufer studied in Taos with painter John Ward Lockwood, a friend and protegee of the great Marin. When Knee met Schnaufer, she had just changed her name from Virginia to Gina, "pronounced with a hard G." When Gina returned to Santa Fe, their relationship deepened, and the two married in 1933, thus the birth of Gina Knee, the artist. (She later married artist Alexander Brook).
Her New Mexico watercolors initially showed a strong debt to Marin. However, she endowed her eclectic references with a personal note of deftness and charm as she compressed the restless structure of the New Mexico mountains into an ordered stability. From Marin she had learned about spontaneity. And she knew that in the fluidity of watercolor she could best suggest the mutability that is the life and force of nature. Sweeping veils of wet color contrast effectively with drier strokes and deft linear accents. 1935 marked great forward leaps in Knee's technique and in her artistic vision. Van Deren Coke writes of that period for the artist, "she was ready to absorb the lessons of Paul Klee. In her luminous, transparent watercolors, she created a world of symbols borrowed in part from Klee and the Indians. In these pictures, the real and the unreal joined in a primitive concentration of suggested masks and abstractions of nature."
Once she established the language of her unique artistic voice, it did not take long for the art world to notice. Since 1934 her watercolors have been exhibited almost every year in the Chicago International Exhibitions. She held her first solo exhibition at the Denver Art Museum in 1938, the first of the artists several museum exhibitions. She won second prizes at the California Watercolor Society shows in 1938 and 1939, followed by first prizes at the New Mexico State Fair in 1939and 1941. One of her paintings was also included in the 1939 New York Worlds Fair exhibition, and another in the "Artists For Victory" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 1942. Critic and painter Alfred Morang wrote of Knee's painting, Ascending Cloud, exhibited in the 1938 Fiesta show at the Santa Fe museum: "Gina Knee achieves that balance between the real and the imagined that is the keynote of all successful abstraction."
The artist never abandoned the fluid medium with which she began her career, although beginning in 1946, she also painted in oil. Knee continued to create her unique visions and exhibit her work until her death on her eighty-fourth birthday on October 31, 1982. She was chosen for one of the early exhibitions surveying the history of American women in art: "Women Artists of America 1707-1964" which opened April 2, 1965 at the Newark Museum with the work of 129 painters and sculptors. It was extremely gratifying for Knee to be included among the 129 artists chosen to represent the entire history of women in American art.
That same year, at the age of seventy-five, she was given a major retrospective show, sponsored by Skidmore College and the Larcada Gallery in New York. Two weeks before her death, Gina's final exhibition opened, appropriately, in Santa Fe. Twenty-five watercolors from her years in the Southwest were shown at the Museum of Fine Arts.
Knee lived and worked in several American cities in her lifetime including Los Angeles, New York and Savannah, Georgia; however, New Mexico would always remain a special place for Gina Knee, because it was the magical southwestern landscape that gave birth to the artist. As a woman in her seventies she would remark, "I never got over New Mexico the landscape, the mesas, mountains, the green and tan."
Selected Exhibitions: Denver Art Museum (one-person), 1938; Art
Institute of Chicago, 1940, 46, 47; Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1946,
48, 55; California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 1943;
Los Angeles Museum of Art, 1941-44; San Francisco Museum of Art, 1945;
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1947; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts,
Philadelphia, 1948; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1953; Amon Carter
Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, 1963; Newark Museum of Art, New Jersey, 1965.
Selected Publications:
Cassidy, Ina Sizer, Art and Artists of New Mexico, "New Mexico Magazine", February, 1939.
Coke, Van Deren, Taos and Santa Fe The Artists Environment 1882-1942. The University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1963.
Udall, Sharyn R., Inside Looking Out The Life and Art of Gina Knee. Texas Tech University Press, 1994.
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Gina Knee is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Taos Pre 1940
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