Newly cleaned paintings

Two paintings representative of Juanita Guccione’s major mature oeuvre styles—Conversation By Lamplight and the larger Revelations (above)—have been painstakingly cleaned by the Manhattan conservator Roxanna Lehmann-Haupt.

Conversation, a 40 x 30 oil, 1953, is an example of Guccione’s mid-career figurative Surrealist period. Revelations, a 56 1/4 x 42,  1976, acrylic canvas, is characteristic of her later Abstract Surrealist work.

Guccione’s major mid-career influences are likely to have been  Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Yves Tanguy and Joan Miro, among others.

She studied with Hans Hofmann on and off during this period, having begun her studies with him while still executing Cubist paintings in the late 1930s. Hofmann was unfailingly enthusiastic about her work, although he never saw the later Abstract Surrealist work.

It was also during this period that she befriended Arshile Gorky. They had nearby studios on the east side of Union Square just north of S. Klein, the hurly-burly discounter. Guccione was deeply influenced by Gorky, who was drawn to both the artist and her work. But his strong influence appears in her work only later in her career in her Abstract Surrealist period, in such paintings as Harbor of Alchemy and Blue Harbor.

Even before his friend Willem de Kooning became his champion, Guccione, then painting as Juanita Rice Marbrook, was telling friends that Gorky was the greatest painter in America. Strange as it is to believe now, it was it was a hard sell at the time.

The French-speaking Guccione was intensely involved with French Surrealist expatriates during the war in Manhattan, often making drawings for their newspaper, Pour La Victoire. But she was more drawn to Spanish Surrealism, finding many of the French Surrealists a bit too literary for her taste.—DM