{{Short description|American painter (1926–2013)}} {{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}} {{Infobox artist | name = Ellen Lanyon | image = Photo of Ellen Lanyon.jpg | imagesize = | caption = | birth_name = | birth_date = {{Birth date|1926|12|21}} | birth_place = Chicago, Illinois | death_date = {{Death date and age|2013|10|7|1926|12|21}} | death_place = | education = {{ubl|School of the Art Institute of Chicago| University of Iowa School of Art and Art History|Courtauld Institute of Art}} | field = Painting | training = | movement = | works = | patrons = | awards = | spouse = {{marriage|Roland Ginzel|1948|}} | partner = }}
'''Ellen Lanyon''' (December 21, 1926 – October 7, 2013) was a painter and printmaker from Chicago, Illinois.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.suntimes.com/news/obituaries/23061929-418/chicago-painter-ellen-lanyon-dies-at-86.html |title=Chicago painter Ellen Lanyon dies at 86 |publisher=Chicago Sun-Times |date= |access-date=2013-12-02}}</ref> She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC),<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|title=Past Speakers and Honorary Degree Recipients|url=https://www.saic.edu/life-at-saic/commencement/speakers/past-speakers|access-date=2021-03-06|website=School of the Art Institute of Chicago|language=en}}</ref> her MFA from the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History<ref>{{Cite web|title=Ellen Lanyon {{!}} University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art|url=https://stanleymuseum.uiowa.edu/exhibitions/feed-me-weird-things-collaboration-visual-mixtapes/fmwt-7-daniel-wyche-w-justin-k-comer-july-28-2018/rene-magritte-2/|access-date=2021-03-06|website=stanleymuseum.uiowa.edu}}</ref> and studied restoration at the Courtauld Institute of Art.<ref name=":1">{{Cite web|last1=Cascone|first1=Sarah|date=2013-10-08|title=Ellen Lanyon, 1926-2013|url=https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/ellen-lanyon-1926-2013-59548/|access-date=2021-03-06|website=ARTnews.com|language=en-US}}</ref> She also received an honorary doctorate from SAIC.<ref name=":0" /> Her works are in the permanent collections of many major American museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Ulrich Museum.<ref name=":1" />
==Life== Lanyon was born in Chicago to Howard and Ellen Lanyon.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Biographical Note {{!}} A Finding Aid to the Ellen Lanyon papers, circa 1880–2015, bulk 1926–2013|url=https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/ellen-lanyon-papers-9118/biographical-note|access-date=2021-03-06|website=www.aaa.si.edu|language=en}}</ref> As a child, she visited the "Midget Village" at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933, a rather surreal experience that had a strong impression on her as an artist.<ref name=nmwa_lanyon>{{cite book|last=Lanyon|first=Ellen|title=Ellen Lanyon: transformations, selected works from 1971–1999|year=1999|publisher=National Museum of Women in the Arts|location=Washington, D.C.|isbn=9780940979420|pages=33–34|oclc=44602974}}</ref> She attended Hyde Park High School while holding a part-time job as an artist in the foundry where her father worked, drawing machine parts. She credits her careful rendering of line to this experience.<ref name="lanyon/pearlstein">{{cite book|last=Sandler|first=Irving|title=Ellen Lanyon & Philip Pearlstein: objects/objectivity|year=2011|publisher=Valerie Carberry Gallery|location=Chicago|isbn=9780981597362|page=5|oclc=754623226}}</ref>
In 1944, Lanyon was invited to a work-study program at the Ox-Bow School of Art.<ref name=":2">{{Cite journal|date=2010|title=Artist Insights|url=https://issuu.com/chigallerynews/docs/septdec2010|journal=Chicago Gallery News|pages=21|via=issuu}}</ref> It was her experience there, including her work at the Museum for Contemporary Arts and the Department of Prints and Drawings – which inspired her to pursue painting and printmaking.<ref name=":2" /> In 1948, she completed her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.<ref name=":1" /> That same year she married classmate and fellow artist Roland Ginzel. She also became a leader of the Exhibition Momentum, a juried venue started in 1948 in protest of the Art Institute of Chicago's annual exhibition.<ref name=":3">{{Cite journal|last=Weyl|first=Christina|date=2016|title=Ellen Lanyon: The Objects of Her Obsession|url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/26408659|journal=Art in Print|volume=6|issue=2|pages=10–15|jstor=26408659}}</ref> Earlier that year, the Art Institute had restricted students from entering the juried exhibition. In response, Lanyon joined with other students to recruit New York artists and curators to jury the Momentum. Three years later, the Art Institute opened its exhibition to students again.<ref name=":2" />
Lanyon subsequently competed her MFA at the University of Iowa in 1950<ref name=":1" /> and did postgraduate work at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, UK while on a Fulbright Fellowship. In 1953, Lanyon returned to Chicago with her husband. Together with three other printmakers from the University of Iowa, they founded the Graphic Arts Workshop (1953–1956).<ref name=":3" />
==Career== Lanyon spent the early years of her career in her hometown, where she was often identified with the Chicago Imagists.<ref name="Apparitions">{{cite book|last1=Pesenti|first1=Allegra|title=Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now|date=2015|publisher=Menil Collection and Hammer Museum|location=Houston and Los Angeles|isbn=978-0-300-21469-7|page=122}}</ref> Her first paintings were of cityscapes.<ref name=":2" /> The perspective she chose was influenced by her travel on the Chicago "L", as well as the 15th-century Sienese paintings she viewed in the Art Institute galleries.<ref name=":2" /> This "sophisticated primitive" work continued until the late 1950's when she became inspired to paint larger works in oil.<ref name=":2" /> Her works from this period (late 1950s to the 1960s) include portraits of relatives and the rooms they inhabited. Several years later, Lanyon developed an allergy to the solvents used in oil painting. Although Lanyon had worked in printmaking before, the allergy marked a major transition back to her earlier medium.<ref name=":3" />
In the 1970s, Lanyon moved to New York City and became a member of the Heresies Collective, which created ''Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics''.<ref name="Apparitions"/> In 1976, Lanyon received a commission from the Department of the Interior to work in the Everglades, which she says "awakened [her] to the environmental crisis" and led to art with a heavier focus on flora and fauna.<ref name=chicagoartistsbymonth>{{cite web|title=Ellen Lanyon artist statement|url=http://www.chicagoartistsmonth.org/featured-artists/ellen-lanyon|access-date=12 April 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150923202646/http://www.chicagoartistsmonth.org/featured-artists/ellen-lanyon|archive-date=23 September 2015|url-status=dead}}</ref> Toward the end of her life, she began depicting objects from her collection of curios, many of which were inherited from relatives, such as a tobacco jar which once belonged to her grandfather. The jar, which is shaped like a toad wearing a red waistcoat, appears in several of her works.
Lanyon's art has been characterized as Surrealist or Magical Realist, and she sometimes used the term "dreamscapes" to describe it.<ref name="strange games">{{cite book|last=Lanyon|first=Ellen|title=Strange games: a twenty-five year retrospective|publisher=Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois|year=1987|location=Urbana|page=4|oclc=38689258}}</ref> Her fantastical compositions often feature animal, vegetal, and floral motifs. Later works frequently depict everyday objects imbued with both domestic and menacing overtones and have been compared to the metaphysical art of the 1910s and ‘20s.<ref name="Apparitions"/>
== ''Index'' and ''Curiosity'' == ''Index'' came about from Lanyon's desire to catalogue the 292 items that appeared in her earlier artwork. Over three years (2001–2003), Lanyon created numbered, pen and ink drawings of each artifact and compiled them into five encyclopedic books: Personae, Folly Animale, O.J. Darr, Mechanique, and Smoking Guns. Several of these drawings are accompanied by poems written by her friend, Lynne Warren, who was separately inspired by Lanyon's collection. In 2002, ''Index'' became a long-distance collaboration between Lanyon and Kip Gresham, a master printer and owner of The Print Studio in Cambridge, England. Lanyon mailed her drawings to Gresham, who printed two editions of the book.<ref name=":3" />
Lanyon's ''Index'' was strongly inspired by Louis Poyet's wood engravings. This relationship became clearer as Lanyon began creating ''Curiosity,'' a series of works that overlaid ''Index'' prints with Poyet's engravings. In 2013, Lanyon traveled to England to develop a pencil-and-watercolor technique that blended with the lines of the engravings. When she returned to the US one week later, she had a heart attack in Newark Airport.<ref name=":3" />
== Notable works == Lanyon has had over seventy-five solo gallery exhibitions and eleven museum exhibitions, including three major traveling retrospectives.<ref name="Website, bio">{{cite web|title=Ellen Lanyon Biography|url=http://www.ellenlanyon.com/Biography.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140730082516/http://www.ellenlanyon.com/Biography.html|url-status=usurped|archive-date=30 July 2014|access-date=February 22, 2018}}</ref> Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Museum of American Art; the National Museum of Women in the Arts; the Walker Art Center; the Milwaukee Museum of Art; the Spencer Museum of Art; and the Wadsworth Atheneum, among others.<ref name="Website, collections">{{cite web|title=Collections|url=http://www.ellenlanyon.com/Collections.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140730081407/http://www.ellenlanyon.com/Collections.html|url-status=usurped|archive-date=30 July 2014|access-date=February 22, 2018}}</ref> Lanyon has also taught art at several institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cooper Union and the School of Visual Arts.<ref name=":1" /> Her mural, ''Nine Notable Women'', is featured on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.<ref>{{cite web|title=Back Bay West|url=https://bwht.org/back-bay-west/|website=Boston Women's Heritage Trail}}</ref> She also painted the 28-panel historical mural along Chicago's lakefront Riverwalk Gateway.<ref>{{Cite web|date=2016-06-13|title=Best Outdoor Art In Chicago|url=https://chicago.cbslocal.com/top-lists/best-outdoor-art-in-chicago/|access-date=2021-03-06|language=en-US}}</ref>
== References == {{Reflist}}
==Further reading== * {{cite book|last1=Seed|first1=Suzanne|title=Saturday's Child : 36 women talk about their jobs|date= 1974|publisher=Bantam Books|pages=20–25|oclc=5462796}} *[https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015014054095 Lanyon, Ellen (1989). ''Strange Games, a Twenty-Five Year Retrospective.''<nowiki> [Urbana, IL].</nowiki>] *Lanyon, Ellen and Bricker Balken, Debra. ''Ellen Lanyon: Transformations, Selected Works from 1971–1999.'' Washington, D.C.: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1999.
== External links == * {{usurped|1=[https://web.archive.org/web/20130119172331/http://www.ellenlanyon.com/Home.html ellenlanyon.com]}} * [https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/ellen-lanyon-papers-9118 Ellen Lanyon papers, 1944–1991. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution] * [https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-ellen-lanyon-11523 Oral history interview with Ellen Lanyon, 1975 Dec. 5. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution] *[https://www.artic.edu/artists/35391/ellen-lanyon Ellen Lanyon Artworks. Art Institute of Chicago] *[https://washingtonian.com/2019/11/22/photos-this-exhibition-revisits-feminist-art-from-the-1970s/ Feminist Art from the 1970s. Archives of American Art]
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Lanyon, Ellen}} Category:1926 births Category:2013 deaths Category:Painters from Chicago Category:School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni Category:University of Iowa alumni Category:Alumni of the Courtauld Institute of Art Category:American women printmakers Category:20th-century American women painters Category:20th-century American painters Category:20th-century American printmakers Category:21st-century American women painters Category:21st-century American painters Category:21st-century American printmakers Category:American women muralists