Mary Pinchot Meyer

Mary Pinchot Meyer was an artist who created large-scale abstract paintings animated by dynamic interactions among colors. "In my paintings," she stated, "the color is the form."

Meyer was raised in Pennsylvania by progressive, politically active parents. After graduating from Vassar College in 1942, she moved to New York City and worked in journalism while taking classes at the Art Students League of New York. Meyer married in 1945, and around 1950 the couple briefly resided in Massachusetts where she further pursued art at the Cambridge School of Design. Meyer continued painting following her husband's recruitment to the CIA in the early 1950s, studying art at American University in Washington, DC. After her 1958 divorce, she remained in Washington, maintaining relationships with many important figures in government, journalism, and the arts, sharing studios with artists Mary Orwen, V. V. Rankine, and close friend Anne Truitt.

In the late 1950s, Meyer made color her central concern. As she described, "Someone wanting to paint poppies in a wheat field is probably wanting to put that color red against that color brown, so why not head straight for the real thing." In abstract works of this period, her engagement with color— or "the real thing"— joined a gestural handling of paint.

By the 1960s, she began staining her works, allowing thinned paint to seep into raw canvas to produce vibrant fields of color, like peers associated with the burgeoning Washington Color School such as Kenneth Noland. "Where one color stops and another starts there is an edge," she claimed, "but it is the result and not the cause of the color shapes or forms." Meyer's forms are at times sinuous and at others, especially in her late work, more geometric, but the interplay between form and color consistently generates an expressive energy within her compositions. She also inventively worked with shaped canvases and especially favored the tondo, a circular canvas, as in Half Light (1964, SAAM), the first of her works to enter a public collection.

In late 1963, Meyer exhibited her paintings at Washington's Jefferson Place Gallery, and in 1964 was featured alongside other Washington-based painters in Nine Contemporary Painters: USA, an exhibition organized by the Pan American Union that traveled to Latin America. This momentum was interrupted by her premature death that same year. A posthumous exhibition in 1967 at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art displayed a selection of her tondos, many never before seen. As one key contributor to the show's organization noted, "I don't think any of us has any particular illusions about the fact that she was only just beginning to get to the crest of the wave."

Authored by Katherine Markoski, American Women's History Initiative Writer and Editor, 2024