Biography from Charleston Renaissance Gallery:
| Margaret Law was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister who was a former chaplain in the Confederate Army. Her family was prominent in upstate South Carolina, and Law was well-educated before she began her career as an artist and teacher. After graduating from Converse College in Spartanburg in 1895, she continued her studies at the Art Students League and later at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Among her teachers were William Merritt Chase, Charles Hawthorne, Robert Henri, and Andre L'Hote.
Her first job after World War I was as an art teacher at Bryn Mawr in Baltimore. While living in Maryland, Law’s style became more expressive and spontaneous. Most of her work began on-site with a palette knife. These studies were then refined in the studio into finished prints or paintings. Though clearly devoted to the themes of American Scene painting, Law incorporated modernism into her work through her repetition of forms, simplified composition, and vibrant color.
Interest in real-life situations is common among students of Ashcan School founder Robert Henri, and this interest is reflected in the titles of Law’s works, most of which were created long before the American Scene idealization of the worker during the 1930s and 1940s.
In 1936 Law returned to South Carolina where she taught school and was eventually named art supervisor for the Spartanburg School District. Remembered by friends and family as a person of "boundless enthusiasm," Law frequently did what were considered outrageous things for a lady of her upbringing. During her seventies, she learned to tap dance, and she drove across Mexico alone. It is said that she would paint on anything available, including the cardboard from shirt packages.
Taken from: Worksong, The Greenville County Museum of Art, 1990.
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MARGARET MOFFETT LAW (1871-1956)
Margaret Moffett Law was born in
Spartanburg, South Carolina to parents of prominent and wealthy
Southern lineage. She graduated from Converse College in 1895 and then
went on to advanced study at some of the nation’s most respected art
institutions. For her era, Law manifested an unusual degree of
dedication and independence in pursuing her career.
Upon her
graduation from Converse, Law continued her training at the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts, Cooper Art School, Art Students League, and
New York School of Art, studying with leading teachers, including
William Merritt Chase, F. Luis Mora, and Robert Henri. She also studied
in Provincetown, Massachusetts with Charles Hawthorne; in Paris, with
André Lhote, a progressive artist associated with cubism; with Lamar
Dodd at the University of Georgia; and in Mexico City. Of the artists
with whom she studied, Henri’s impact was strongest, inspiring her to
paint subjects from the world she knew.
After the conclusion of
World War I, Law worked as an art teacher at Bryn Mawr College in
Baltimore. She also continued to develop her own artistic style—a style
that increasingly favored a modernist approach, more freely conceived
and suggestive than her earlier efforts. Her work of the 1930s and
1940s, employing a vivid palette of color and bold, simplified forms,
reflects her energetic assimilation of modernist principles.
Law
is best known for her unsentimental depictions of African American
subjects in rural and routine settings, usually executed in colorfully
stylized watercolors and prints. As she observed, “I put down what I
see, wherever I am, and the result is a record of life in a small
Southern town.” Though she studied with important and influential
artists, Law developed her own individual style and became a chronicler
of black experience in the South, attesting to her independent spirit
and approach to life.
This
essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not
be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Hicklin
Galleries, LLC.
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