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Marion Greenwood

Brooklyn, NY, 1909 - 1970, Woodstock, NY

BiographyMarion Greenwood was one of America’s most brilliant and dynamic women painters, and probably one of the most traveled. New York born (1909) she first studied at the Art Students League and in the Academie Colarossi in Paris. Her career is a distinguished one, both as a mural painter in the United States and Mexico, and as an easel painter. Until 1932, Miss Greenwood worked in oils, lithography and portraits in New York and the American Indian country. Then she went to Mexico to study fresco painting and was caught up in the awakening mural renaissance, and from 1932 to 1936 worked on fresco murals for the Mexican Government.

In 1936 she returned to New York and embarked upon several large murals for the Federal Arts Projects until 1940 when, after another visit to Europe, she returned to easel painting. During the war Miss Greenwood was the only woman war-artist correspondent for the United States Army, creating a series of paintings for the Army Medical Department depicting the work of that unit in the rehabilitation of wounded soldiers. She also created many war bond posters. In 1944 she held her first one-man exhibition of paintings in the Associated American Artists Galleries in New York.

When in 1946 an opportunity that afforded travel through India and China presented itself, Marion Greenwood left the United States, and for more than a year, she created many works of art of her impressions and scenes in that part of the world. A one-man exhibition of these works was held in the Associated American Artists Galleries in December 1947, and again in Chicago in March 1948. One of these works from this show was acquired for the permanent collection of the University of Georgia, and more than fifty-five of her oils, gouaches and sketches were sold to privates collections from this exhibition.

Over the years she has exhibited in all the major national group shows—The Metropolitan, the Whitney, Brooklyn Museum, the Carnegie International, National Academy, Corcoran Art Gallery, Worcester Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield Museum, and Art Institute of Chicago. Her canvases and lithographs have been acquired for many public collections including that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Library of Congress, Newark Museum, Encyclopedia Britannica, American Academy of Fine Arts, New York Public Library, New Britain Art Institute, Bibliotheque Nationale Paris, Yale University, and for many private collections – Maurice Wertheim, Joseph Hirshorn, and others.

Her works have been reproduced in many books on American Art and several articles have been written about her. In 1952, she was awarded the First Altman Prize of the 127th National Academy Annual, and in 1951, the Walter Lippincott Award of the Pennsylvania Academy Annual. She has also received the John Herron Art Institute Lithograph Prize in 1946, the Second Prize in the Carnegie Annual in 1944, as well as popular prize votes of the Carnegie and Worcester Museum shows.

She spent several months in the West Indies where she made some wonderfully exciting studies of Haitian life and then worked on the paintings she exhibited in the fall of 1952 at the Associated American Artists Galleries.

In 1954-55 she was visiting Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Tennessee. While at the University she painted a large mural for the University Centre, depicting the music, dance, and the folklore of Tennessee.

Courtesy of Martha Tonissen Mayberry, Registrar/Associate Curator, Mint Museum of Art

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