Javits Center Abstracted

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1898 to a successful engineer and inventor who created designs for the steel industry, Elsie Driggs was exposed to machine-age designs at an early age. After studying with George Luks, Robert Henri, George B. Bridgman, and Maurice Sterne at the Art Students League, and privately with John Sloan, she traveled to Italy, where she studied the old masters and the work of Cézanne.

One of the few women artists of the 1920s to achieve acclaim in America, Driggs exhibited her early work in New York at the Daniel Gallery alongside that of Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, Niles Spencer, and Preston Dickinson, at a time when it was difficult for women to exhibit and sell their work.

Although best known for her precisionist paintings of the 1920s that take their subject matter from the world of industry and engineering, Driggs explored a diverse range of styles and subjects throughout her long career. At the age of 88, she turned her attention to the just-completed Jacob Javits Center in New York City, producing a series of paintings inspired by the building’s mirrored walls. In the Javits Center Abstracted, she focuses on the building’s glass walls reflecting the mauve tones of a twilight sky.