Ethel Wallace: Modern Rebel
Explore the paintings, batik portraits, and textile designs of the previously overlooked artist Ethel Wallace (1886-1968)
Ethel Wallace: Modern Rebel
Featuring batik “paintings,” garments, oil paintings, and archival material, this exhibition celebrates Wallace as an artist and feminist amid an era of upheaval, recapturing her place in the New Hope artist colony and the New York avant-garde art scene.
Untitled (Delaware Canal Scene) (ca. 1910) by Ethel Wallace (1886-1968)James A. Michener Art Museum
Sauce for the Gander and the Goose
Wallace began her artistic career in Lambertville, New Jersey, and New Hope, Pennsylvania, training with one of the New Hope art colony’s founders, William Langson Lathrop (1859-1938). She then studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia for a few years.
In her early paintings, Wallace captured the charm of the Delaware River and the canals around New Hope, Pennsylvania, in lush, warm greens, yellows, and pale reds rendered with the expressive brush strokes of Impressionism.
Ethel Wallace Installation Shot - Sauce for the Gander and the Goose (2023) by Christian GiannelliJames A. Michener Art Museum
Wallace’s move to New York around 1912 was pivotal. There she witnessed the 1913 Armory Show, married and separated from her husband, befriended modernists like Joseph Stella whose work dramatically transformed her own, and participated in the women’s suffrage movement.
Wallace came to believe in women’s equality, stating that, “What is sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose—she regarded herself as equally free [as men].”
A Medieval Celebration (possibly Ballad of Life) (ca. 1920) by Ethel Wallace (1886-1968)James A. Michener Art Museum
A World of Romance
Ethel Wallace Installation Shot - A World of Romance (2023) by Christian GiannelliJames A. Michener Art Museum
In the 1920s, Wallace developed a decorative style rich with natural forms and flowing lines that drew from a variety of styles and cultures, including Egyptian, Asian, medieval Europe, and Mediterranean art.
Wallace earned praise for her selection and incorporation of motifs, designs, and techniques from different cultures based on Western conceptions of the “exotic,” even though she did not necessarily understand their original meaning, significance, or intention.
Critics emphasized the exoticism of her work, calling her creations a “world of romance” and “an art of escape.”
Fabric sample with green and yellow floral pattern (ca. 1920) by Ethel Wallace (1886–1968)James A. Michener Art Museum
Shimmering Moonbeams and Songs of the Fairy Forest
Around 1919, Wallace began experimenting with batik on luxury fabrics like velvet and silk. Batik is a Javanese method of dyeing cloth that requires patience and finesse. First, a design is sketched on fabric. Next, areas that should not be dyed are filled in with a wax resist. Lastly, the fabric is successively dipped in baths of various colors, thereby dyeing everything except for the wax-covered areas.
Ethel Wallace Installation Shot - Shimmering Moonbeams and Songs of the Fairy Forest (2023) by Christian GiannelliJames A. Michener Art Museum
The Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 introduced batik to American audiences through its display of Javanese art and people, who were presented as exotic objects for Western consumption and entertainment. Knowledge of batik spread through publications and the work of artists who appropriated the technique. Wallace was at the heart of a group of artists working with batik in New York City’s Greenwich Village, including Marguerite Zorach (1887-1968).
Untitled (Figures in a Garden) (ca. 1920s) by Ethel Wallace (1886-1968)James A. Michener Art Museum
By 1921, the press declared Wallace a pioneer in batik, and Vogue Paris described her portraits as “personal and original” and “modern and unexpected” in its July issue.
One enthusiastic critic wrote, “Her velvets and silks seem to glow with passion, shimmer with moonbeams or sing with the songs of the fairy forests in a manner which has not been possible to oil paint on canvas."
Ethel Wallace Modeling a Batik Robe (ca. 1920) by Unknown photographerJames A. Michener Art Museum
An Original and Alluring Fashion
Ethel Wallace Installation Shot - An Original and Alluring Fashion (2023) by Christian GiannelliJames A. Michener Art Museum
After experimenting with batik, Wallace taught herself to design women’s fashion. Her designs featured a straight and loose silhouette unlike the preceding form-fitting silhouettes. They permitted a greater freedom of movement that corresponded to the idea of the New Woman.
Wallace’s success propelled her to open her own shop in Midtown Manhattan. She designed custom clothing, working with patrons to create “distinctly original gown[s]…entirely personal, altogether alluring,” according to an article in the New York Evening Telegram.
Untitled (Floral Still Life) (ca. 1930-1968) by Ethel Wallace (1886-1968)James A. Michener Art Museum
Prayer to the Great Cat
Wallace’s success as a batik artist lasted for about ten years, from 1919-1929. Two major events forced another shift in her career: In 1925, a fire burned down her Manhattan shop, prompting her to split her time between New York and Lambertville, New Jersey; four years later, the United States’ stock market crashed, catapulting the country into the Great Depression.
In 1930, Wallace moved back to Bucks County permanently and continued work there. She traded fine silks and velvets for canvas and painted with oils again. She kept her love of bold colors and brush strokes and exhibited with New Hope’s modernist art group, the New Group.
(Untitled) Portrait of Rafael Abreu (ca. 1914-1935) by Ethel Wallace (1886-1968)James A. Michener Art Museum
Don Rafael Gonzalez Abreu y Lopez Silvero—referred to by Wallace as Rafo, her Great Cat, her Washington Square Cat, and her Lion—was a dashing Spanish Count whom she first met when he visited her Washington Square studio in New York, likely around 1914.
The two instantly connected, and over the next two decades they maintained a casual, romantic relationship. Wallace wrote lengthy love letters to Abreu, in which she teased him, 20 years her senior, for his traditional principles.
Ethel Wallace Installation Shot - Prayer to the Great Cat (2023) by Christian GiannelliJames A. Michener Art Museum
Throughout her life, Wallace lived in a manner rare for her time. She married but soon separated, kept lovers instead of husbands, and raised cats instead of children. She built a career as an artist and a businesswoman, and she used her work to advocate for women. Even fifty-five years after her death, and though much of her work has faded with time or has been lost, her life and the images she created capture an iconic, volatile age of opulence and recession, global conflict, and innovation.
Ethel Wallace: Modern Rebel is curated by Tara Kaufman, Associate Curator of Clothing and Textiles at History Colorado.
Ethel Wallace: Modern Rebel has been generously supported by the Richard C. von Hess Foundation, Jeniah Johnson and Tom Sheeran, the Coby Foundation, Ltd., and the Michener Art Museum’s 35th Anniversary Initiative.
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