Art Studio
Oil on canvas
40 1/4 x 27 inches
1931
As published in:
Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection
As exhibited in:
Interior Lives: Modern American Spaces, 1890-1945, 2024, Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina
Our Own Work, Our Own Way: Ascendant Women in the Johnson Collection, The Columbus Museum, Georgia, 2024
Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection, 2018–2021, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; Mississippi Musuem of Art, Jackson; Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia; Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina; Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina; Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia
A stalwart advocate of the arts in Richmond, Virginia, Theresa Pollak was as celebrated as a painter as she was as an educator. Born there to Hungarian immigrants, Pollak’s life spanned three centuries, making her a witness to enormous cultural, political, and social change in the American South. Although Pollak’s style evolved from naturalism to Abstract Expressionism as her career progressed, the depiction of her studio was a recurring subject. Executed when Pollak was just beginning her extended tenure as a teacher, Art Studio honors the inspirations and instruments of artistic production. Pollak’s comfortably furnished, sun-lit studio seems a place of refinement and refreshment, a creative haven to which she retreated to record her “reaction to life.”