Monologue

Edith London grew up surrounded by avant-garde art and culture in Berlin, Germany, where she also received her education. There, London became enamored with the Fauvist work of Henri Matisse. She married a noted theoretical physicist, Fritz London, in 1929, and together they spent a year in Rome before they had to flee the Nazi party, living temporarily in England and France before finally moving to the United States in 1939. The family eventually settled in Durham, North Carolina, where London returned to art and began working as the slide librarian for the art history department at Duke University.

She began working with paper collage around 1960, an extension of her interest in Cubism, which she gained in Paris while a student of André Lhote. London’s collages were largely abstract and made from various papers, but all of her work reveals a blend of stylistic influences from her life in Europe and the United States.