Agnes Weinrich (July 16, 1873 – April 17, 1946) was an American visual artist. In the early twentieth century, she played a critical role in introducing cubist theory to American artists, collectors, and the general public and became one of the first American abstractionists. A life-long proponent of modernist art, she was an active participant in the art communities of Provincetown and New York. Early in her career, she traveled widely in Europe and spent extended periods studying in Paris and Berlin. She also studied art in Chicago, Provincetown, and New York. During most of her career, she worked in a Provincetown studio during the warm months and a Manhattan studio during the cold ones. Weinrich's easel work included oil paintings, watercolors, and pastels. She also made block prints and etchings and drew using pencil and crayon. Her paintings, prints, and drawings appeared in solo and group exhibitions throughout her career and she received favorable critical attention both during her life and after her death.
Career in art
Early life and education
Agnes Weinrich was born on July 16, 1873, on a prosperous farm in southeast Iowa. Her father and mother were German immigrants and German was the language spoken at home. Following her mother's death in 1879, she was raised by her father, Christian Weinrich. After retiring in 1894, he moved his household, including Agnes and two siblings, to nearby Burlington, Iowa. There, Agnes attended the Burlington Collegiate Institute from which she graduated in 1897. In May 1898, Weinrich and her sister Helen, then called Lena, traveled to Germany with their aunt, a German-born music teacher named Rose Werthmueller. When Werthmueller returned home, they stayed on, living in Berlin with German relatives.
While in Germany, Helen took advanced classes in violin and piano and Agnes studied art. A year after their arrival, their father died leaving them an inheritance that proved to be sufficient to sustain them for the rest of their lives. In 1904, the sisters returned to the United States and settled for two years in Springfield, Illinois, where Helen taught piano in public schools and Agnes painted in a rented studio. In May 1905, Agnes won prizes in an exhibition held by the Illinois State Fair for the drawings and oil paintings she showed. Later that year, the two moved to Chicago where Agnes studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago under John Vanderpoel, Nellie Walker, Frederick W. Freer, and Ralph Clarkson.
In 1909, Agnes and Helen returned to Berlin and traveled from there to Munich, where Agnes studied painting under Julius Exter and took a short course in etching. They then traveled to Rome, Florence, and Venice before returning to Chicago in October 1910. In 1913, they traveled to Europe for the third, and last time. They spent a year in Paris, where they made friends with American artists and musicians in the local art scene. According to one writer, the work Agnes produced at this time was skillful but unoriginal—drawings, etching, and paintings in the dominant academic and impressionist styles.
Studio in Provincetown
On her return from Europe in 1914, Weinrich continued to study art. She and Helen split the year between Provincetown and Manhattan. In Provincetown, she became a member of the Provincetown Printers art colony and attended classes at Charles Hawthorne's Cape Cod School of Art. In New York, she studied at the Art Students League. In 1914, Hawthorne and other artists established the Provincetown Art Association and held the first of many juried exhibitions the following year. Weinrich contributed nine pictures to this show, all of them said to be representational and somewhat conservative in style. In 1916, she showed what one reviewer called "an interesting collection of etchings" at a Provincetown Art Association exhibition. When she showed paintings at the MacDowell Club in 1917, an art critic for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle said they showed a "strong note of impressionism".
In 1916, Weinrich joined a group of printmakers that had begun using the white-line technique pioneered by Provincetown artist B.J.O. Nordfeldt. At this time, she and the others in the group, including Blanche Lazzell, Ethel Mars, Ada Gilmore, and Edna Boies Hopkins, exchanged ideas and solved problems together. In August the following year, she showed two white-line prints at the annual exhibition of the Provincetown Art Association. A critic for The New York Times said the two prints had an "accomplished design" with "the look of woodblock printing, but with more variety of color and tone than usually is given by the block." In 1919, a magazine called The Touchstone reproduced an untitled Weinrich etching that showed parts of two houses amid trees and behind a fence.
Weinrich, her sister Helen, and Karl Knaths
By 1919 or 1920, while still spending the cold months in Manhattan and the warm ones in Provincetown, Weinrich and her sister came to consider the latter their formal place of residence. By that time, they had also met the painter, Karl Knaths. Like themselves a Midwesterner of German origin who had grown up in a household where German was spoken, he settled in Provincetown in 1919. One author says Weinrich led Knaths to adopt an abstract style of painting; another points out that Weinrich and Knaths shared artistic leanings and mutually influenced each other's increasing use of abstraction in their work. In 1922, Knaths married Helen and moved into the house that the sisters had rented. He was then 31, Helen 46, and Agnes 49 years old. When, two years later, the three decided to become year-round residents of Provincetown, Agnes and Helen used a part of their inheritance to buy land and materials for constructing a house and outbuildings for the three of them to share.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Weinrich received critical notice for works she showed in exhibitions in Provincetown and New York. Her exhibitions in these two places included appearance in most of the annual shows held by the Provincetown Art Association and the New York Society of Women Artists as well as shows held by the Society of Independent Artists and two New York galleries, the Weyhe and Touchstone. She also received attention from critics outside these two home bases. A critic called attention to the still life paintings in a 1932 exhibition at the J.B. Speed Memorial Museum in Louisville, Kentucky and a critic for The Washington Post wrote a review of a solo exhibition in Washington, D.C., in 1938. Her work also appeared and received critical notice from time to time in The Boston Globe and in 1939 that paper reviewed a solo exhibition at the Boston Conservatory of Music. Her appearances in Philadelphia included the block prints she showed in the first annual exhibition of that city's Print Club, noted in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Following her death, her work was exhibited and received critical notice in group shows at places such as Burlington, Iowa; Kansas City, Missouri; Atlanta, Georgia; Iowa City, Iowa; Neenah, Wisconsin; and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In 1997, a gallery in Des Moines gave Weinrich a retrospective exhibition to which the Burlington Hawk-Eye gave a lengthy review.
In the latter stages of her career, Weinrich continued to live with her sister Helen and Karl Knaths, mostly in Provincetown and New York but also sometimes in Washington, D.C. when Knaths was teaching at the Phillips Gallery there. In 1925, she became a founding member of the New York Society of Women Artists, She participated in its exhibitions from then until her death in 1946 and sometimes held positions on its board of directors. In 1988, April Kingsley wrote an article for the Provincetown Arts magazine that called Weinrich a "trailblazing" printmaker who was one of the first American abstractionists and who played a critical role in introducing cubist theory to American artists, collectors, and the general public. Weinrich died in Provincetown on April 17, 1946, at the age of 73. Her obituary in the Burlington Hawk Eye gave heart ailment as the cause of death.
Art activism
Weinrich became a founding member of the New York Society of Women Artists in 1925. Other Provincetown members included Blanche Lazzell, Ellen Ravenscroft, Lucy L'Engle, and Marguerite Zorach. The group's membership was initially limited to thirty painters and sculptors all of whom had the right to participate in the group's exhibitions, each getting the same space. One commenter notes that the group provided a platform for its members to distinguish themselves from the "genteel" and traditionalist art that women artists were at that time expected to show. In 1926, Weinrich joined with Knaths and other local artists in a rebellion against the more conservative artists who had dominated the Provincetown Art Association. For the next decade, 1927 through 1937, the association mounted two separate annual exhibitions, the one conservative in orientation and the other experimental. Both Weinrich and Knaths participated on the jury that selected works for the first modernist exhibition. In 1930, Weinrich put together a group show for modernists at the G.R.D. Gallery in New York. The occasion was the first time a group of Provincetown artists exhibited together in New York. For it she selected works by Knaths, Charles Demuth, Oliver Chaffee, Margarite and William Zorach, Jack Tworkov, Janice Biala, and others.
Artistic style
In 1998, a Provincetown gallery owner told a reporter that Weinrich's career had three phases: one in which realism predominated; a second in which she employed a semi-abstract style; and a third that was purely abstract. The first two presented the viewer with identifiable subjects and the third was wholly non-representational. Weinrich's Drawing of an Old Woman of about 1915 is in a realist style. Her cubist paintings, such as "Woman with Flowers" of 1920, fall into the semi-abstract category, as do works, such as "Still Life" of 1920, that were neither cubist nor realist. Her cubist work called "Collage" of 1923 and her painting called "Night City" of about 1946 are purely abstract. It and her other pure abstracts are, as feminist collector, Louise Noun pointed out, "composed of hard-edge geometric forms" and, lacking a discernible subject, are nonobjective.