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Welcome to the official website of Irene Rice Pereira (1902-1971). I. Rice Pereira, as she was known, was one of the foremost modernist artists of the 20th Century. Her paintings can be found in museums around the world. The purpose of this website is to direct inquirers to her paintings, publications about her, museums and galleries exhibiting her work, archives and relevant websites. One such site, www.juanitaguccione.com, is devoted to the painting career of her sister. Correspondence and original appreciations of Irene Rice Pereira’s work and life are invited. Images of Pereira works in museums are now on the Gallery page.

Pereira, “Boat Composite,”
(circa 1932, is in the center slightly to the left)

Excerpt from the April 30, 2015, New York Times review of the Whitney opening in Manhattan:

The Whitney is palpably a different order of achievement. Art looks better here, to my eyes, than it did in the old Whitney, and it is amazingly comfortable to be in. I didn’t understand this fully until last Friday night, my third time inside the building. To cite but a few:  Among the works unfamiliar to me were I. Rice Pereira’s “Boat Composite,” a large, vivie yet grisaille canvas from 1932 that dominates a gallery of Precisionist paintings and photographs with its bold scale and paint handling, learning from Fernand Léger while presaging the great late works of Stuart Davis and Philip Guston.

“New Whitney Museum Signifies a Changing New York Art Scene,” by Roberta Smith
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/arts/design/new-whitney-museum-signifies-a-changing-new-york-art-scene.html?hpw&rref=arts&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

This essay about I. Rice Pereira appears in Poul Webb’s art blog, Wednesday, June 6, 2012.

By Djelloul Marbrook

Mid-Century Modernism: Origins and Evolution, a lecture scheduled by the Detroit Institute of Arts at 6:30 on April 27th, examined the work of Irene Rice Pereira and several of her peers. By 1955 many American artists, architects, and designers broke free of European precedents and developed distinctively American forms of modernism. Independent curator Susan Larsen looks at mid-twentieth-century painters, showing the ways in which they drew on the progressive political ideals of the 1930s, with a focus on artists represented in the Detroit Institute of Art collection, including Josef Albers, Pereira, Mark Rothko, and Vaclav Vytlacil. Pereira’s 1950 oil painting, Bright Beyond, will be featured. The presentation is sponsored by the Associates of the American Wing.

A newly conserved parchment painting by Irene Rice Pereira, Composition In White, was among the works shown in an exhibition at the Newark Museum called Constructive Spirit, Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s. The show opened Feb. 17, 2010, and closed May 23, 2010. Dr. Karen A. Bearor, Pereira’s biographer, contributed an essay to the catalogue entitled Light Play in Abstract Art and Film. In her essay she discusses Pereira’s work in relationship to other artists in the show who were also interested in light and light projection.

Three White Squares, a 1940 Pereira oil painting, was on exhibit at The D. Wigmore Fine Art Inc., 730 Fifth Avenue, New York City, in an exhibition called Explorations in Black and White: The 1930s through the 1960s. This painting has been reproduced frequently and was included in the seminal 1953 Loren MacIver/I. Rice Pereira restrospective at The Whitney Museum. The show continued through December 23, 2009.

Women Artists by Margaret Barlow (Rizzoli, 2008, 328 pp) offers an insightful appreciation of Pereira’s career and a color plate of the rarely reproduced What Is Substance?

Ms. Barlow is co-editor of the Woman’s Art Journal. The journal is associated with the Institute for Women and Art at Rutgers.

Pereira wrote extensively about the concept of substance and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, UK, has twelve volumes of Pereira notes on the subject.

Women’s Arts Journal.

Among a small group of art works donated by Sidney Mishkin to his alma mater, Baruch College, is Irene Rice Pereira’s Affluent Surface. Other paintings in this highly refined selection are Max Ernst’s Mother and Daughter, Barbara Hepworth’s Bimorphic, Marsden Hartley’s Mount Katahdin Snowstorm, Alfred Henry Maurer’s Two Women and Girl in Grey, Georges Mathieu’s Festival in Norwich, and untitled works by
Alexander Calder and Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Echauren.

Djelloul Marbrook, Pereira’s nephew, said of the gift that it would have pleased Pereira on several counts, not the least being that she spent a good part of her life painting in a studio an easy walk from Baruch’s present location. He remarked that Pereira thought highly of Ernst, Hartley, Hepworth, Matta and Calder.

A 1964 Pereira oil painting, Light Extending Itself, is part of the Non-Objective Art exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum. This exhibition is itself part of the larger Modern Life exhibition on the 5th floor. Light Extending Itself is the gift of Howard Weingrow.

Pereira had a special connection to Brooklyn. She, her two sisters, brother and mother lived near the museum when Pereira first went to work as secretary to help support the family. She and her younger sister, the artist Juanita Guccione, then called Anita Rice, followed their younger sister, Dorothy, into art studies, but Dorothy died in her early thirties.

Both Irene and Anita studied at Pratt Institute and traveled to North Africa in the 1930s. Irene visited various places in Morocco and Algeria. Anita settled in Bou Saada, Algeria, for several years. Their experience of
the quality of light in North Africa had a lasting impact on their work.

In 1935-6, Anita, who then painted under the name Juanita Marbrook, exhibited a number of paintings she had made in Algeria in The Brooklyn Museum. The work received considerable media attention at the time. These works are now part of 174 oils, watercolors and drawings permanently exhibited in Algiers by Sonatrach, the Algerian national energy company. It is believed the artist is the first American woman painter to receive this kind of attention by a Muslim nation.

The Pereira archive at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, is receiving a significant addition of documents and photographs.

Djelloul Marbrook, the artist’s nephew, recently discovered two boxes of papers and photographs overlooked in his initial donation of the Pereira papers to the Schlesinger.

The original papers were given to the Schlesinger after the artist’s death in 1971 and subsequently Mr. Herrick Jackson made a grant to the library to pay for organizing the archive. The library is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ms. Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Schlesinger curator of manuscripts, said, (We are excited at the prospect of seeing this wonderful collection grow.)

The artist’s personal library resides at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, DC.

This is the Schlesinger Library’s official description of its Pereira holdings:

Author : Pereira, I. Rice (Irene Rice), 1902-1971
Title : Papers, 1929-1976 (inclusive)

Finding aids : Unpublished finding aid.
Description : 10 linear ft.
History notes : Abstract painter, poet, and philosopher, Pereira was a major figure in the art world from 1930. She worked with the WPA Federal Art Project in New York, 1935-1939; in the 1940s she experimented with new media (glass, plexiglass, and plastic) of the constructivist school; and in the 1950s she returned to paint and canvas. She published numerous books on aesthetics and the philosophy of art. For further biographical information, see Notable American Women: The Modern Period (1980).
Summary : Correspondence, manuscripts of her writings, notebooks on philosophy, articles, poems, painting inventories, photos, both personal and of art work, exhibition catalogs, financial records, grant applications, and printed material pertain to Pereira’s interests and career.
Restrictions : At least one location has information and/or restrictions on access. Click on the holdings link(s) for specific information.
Notes : Portions of the collection are available on microfilm at the Archives of American Art.
Cite as : I. Rice Pereira Papers. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard university.