This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Active in Cincinnati, Ohio, from about 1907 to 1927 and a member of the Cincinnati Women's Art Club, Lilian Whitteker was interested in painting from childhood and designed a Broadway play of Alice in Wonderland. She also starred in an operetta just before World War I, and then moved to the Loire Valley in France to a ruined chateau, which she gradually restored. Her life-long love was William Dudley, who was ten years younger, and she would never marry him because she thought that could never work. They lived together in the tower in the ruins of the chateau and ran around the countryside in their three-wheeled car, all in the beautiful surroundings of the chateaus of the Loire Valley.
In World War II, she was taken prisoner by the Germans and placed in the American Concentration Camp. One story says that she escaped from the camp.(Charlton Hall). Another story, is from her niece, Sandi Whitteker, who interviewed in France in 1980, Madame Fromenty, a close friend of the artist. Fromenty said that she succeeded in getting Lilian out of the camp, but that Lilian told the commandant she refused to leave because it was winter; she had no income, and would die out there, and to please ask her again in the Spring.
In Europe, Whitteker was a friend of sculptors Jo Davidson and Alexander Calder, who organized her exhibitions in Europe. In 1975, the City of Tours emptied their civic museum to devote the space to an exhibition of her work.
Source:
Sandi Whitteker, Note to AskART, April 2004
Charlton Hall Galleries |
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|