Juanita Guccione papers

The Archives of American Art in Washington, DC, contains the "Juanita Marbrook Guccione papers, 1949-1973."

Ms. Patricia Phagan, Philip and Lynn Straus curator of prints and drawings at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, recently visited the archives in connection with the center's For the People: American Mural Drawings of the 1930s and 1940s, which will be exhibited through March 11, 2007, at the college in Poughkleepsie, New York. The exhibition features a Guccione pencil drawing.

A Gift of Susan and Steven Hirsch, Class of 1971

The archives' Guccione papers are insufficient to shed much light on the artist's long career. Ms. Phagan was unable to find any documentation showing that the artist had contributed to the Works Progress Administration's mural program. The artist's son, Djelloul Marbrook, remembers his mother saying she had worked on a mural at the 23rd Street Post Office in Manhattan.

At the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, Ms. Phagan learned that Guccione had entered a study in a U.S. Maritime Commission competition (Entry No. 292). The curator found this information in one of the little used artist card indices. The entry is not surprising, since Guccione, like her sister, Irene Rice Pereira, was fascinated by tug boats, ships and ships' machinery.

The sophisicated Guccione drawing at Vassar is in the first gallery of the exhibition. Ms. Phagan has noted that a critic for The New York Sun, one of New York's major dailies in the 1930s, had singled out the drawing for praise.

WPA drawings at Vassar

Hundreds of artists made drawings for the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s, Juanita Guccione among them. The drawings, works of art in themselves, were for murals executed in post offices and many other types of public buildings. Some of these murals have been destroyed, others—like the five murals depicting historic occasions in local, state and national history, including the Ratification of the United States Constitution by New York in the Poughkeepsie, NY, post office, a WPA design building—are treasured legacies from that period.

Juanita Guccione's work featured on Bou Saada.

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie will exhibit For the People: American Mural Drawings of the 1930s and 1940s, a look inside a public art movement, from January 12 to March 11, 2007. Among these drawings is a fanciful pencil sketch by Juanita Guccione, recently donated to Vassar. Vassar has attributed it to Juanita Rice Marbrook Guccione, all names the artist used at various times in her long career. Today she is known simply as JuanitaGuccione.

Recent acquisition, Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL

The Malden Public Library in Massachusetts has acquired a 1936 watercolor by Juanita Guccione entitled High Tide. The library now has works on paper by Guccione and her older sister, Irene Rice Pereira. They were born in nearby Chelsea, Massachusetts.

Guccione's 1953 oil canvas, She Had Many Faces, is part of the cover design of AKA by Jean Lamore, published by Frank, Paris, and Wynkin deWorde, Galway, Ireland.

When the artist Juanita Guccione returned in 1935 from a four-year sojourn among the famed Ouled Nail bedouin tribe in Algeria the United States was in economic free fall. She had painted Bedouin as no European artist before her had, as friends and neighbors. The Brooklyn Museum showed this work to considerable acclaim, but it was then shut away as she immersed herself in an avant-garde then fomenting revolutionary artistic changes.

She went to work for the Works Progress Administration, helping to paint post office murals. And she began more than seven years of study under Hans Hofmann in Manhattan and Provincetown, MA.

When Nazi Germany occupied France many of Paris's most famous artists came to Manhattan. The French-speaking artist befriended them, and occasionally her work appeared in Pour La Victoire, their exile newspaper. She was already familiar with Italian and Spanish Surrealism, but the French artists imbued her with a sense of the historicity of Surrealism.

Her work progressed through Cubism to Surrealism, but it was quickly apparent that her association with the Ouled Nail, a tribe famous for the fierce independence and beauty of its women, had left its mark. Without being conscious of it, the artist began to create a race of tattooed women in gorgeous environments in which their rule was implicit. The death by breast cancer of her beloved sister Dorothy, whom she had followed to art school, appeared spectrally in her work as one-breasted faceless Amazons. This hieratic race of women became emblematic not only of the plague of breast cancer but of the ascent of women in the latter half of the 20th Century. The large oil, Two Nudes, typifies this period.

This Surrealist work--critics were always trying and failing to find a more apt term for it--was prescient in another way, for while Sigmund Freud was all the vogue in a world that clearly had reason for angst, the artist created a Jungian world of archetypical inhabitants, architecture, topography, and even climate. Her suns and moons are characteristically eclipsed. (See Voyage's End).

But by the 1960s the Sahara reappeared in her work. Her palette, which had been gemmy and sometimes eerie, became light-struck, and configurations absent shape-memory moved whimsically across her canvases. She began using acrylics and larger surfaces. The painting, Harbor of Alchemy, which Washington Post critic Michael Welzenbach called a masterwork, is representative of this later work. Welzenbach suggested in an essay that her career had been hampered by no fewer than three name changes, the inability of critics to categorize her work, and her own reclusiveness. She had changed her name from Nita Rice to Juanita Marbrook and then to Juanita Guccione, and the American Archives of Art lists all three artists.

As a young woman she had been extraordinarily adventurous. Before leaving for Europe and North Africa, she worked as a model and a fashion pirate. She often remarked that the beauty of women makes men foolish, and it may be for this reason that after North Africa men rarely appear in her work. But over time she became increasingly withdrawn and rarely consented to show her work, although she continued working almost until her death in 1999 and left a large and diverse oeuvre.