ARTIST: Virginia True (Colorado, Massachusetts, Missouri, 1900 - 1989)
NAME: Crucifixion
MEDIUM: oil on canvas board
CONDITION: Some foxing. Missing few flakes of paint. No visible inpaint under UV light.
SIGHT SIZE: 10 x 8 inches / 25 x 20 cm
FRAME SIZE: unframed (In-House framing available)
SIGNATURE: unsigned but has artist's estate stamp on verso
SKU#: 119941
US Shipping $42 + insurance.

BIOGRAPHY:
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Virginia True (1900-1989) studied art in the early 1920s at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. The former was known at the time as a bastion of the realist tradition and it was in this mode that True began her career. However, a trip to Colorado and New Mexico in the summer of 1928 exposed the artist to the tenets of southwestern modernism and she entered into a period of stylistic transition. That summer she produced a group of watercolors that signal her journey toward "the more abstract style that she would eventually make her own," as Robin West has written.The next year True moved from Indianapolis to Boulder to take a position at the University of Colorado. Now within easy reach of the New Mexican landscape that had instantly attracted her, she made frequent trips into the mountains to produce plein-air watercolors and drawings of the scenery she observed.Following the lead of the New Mexican modernist painter Victor Higgins, True created images in which she reduced both natural and man-made elements to grand geometric blocks and powerful sweeping lines. Among those images were charcoal drawings that captured in form and composition True's "thrill and deep feeling of the grand things I have beheld."In 1935, True returned east to complete a master's degree at Cornell University, where she eventually received a faculty appointment. Her attention turned increasingly to the demands of her academic career. She retired to Cape Cod in 1965, where she lived until her death in 1989.