21 Facts About Elsie Driggs

Elsie Driggs was an American painter known for her contributions to Precisionism, America's one indigenous modern-art movement before Abstract Expressionism, and for her later floral and figurative watercolors, pastels, and oils.

Elsie Driggs's works are in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Houston Museum of the Fine Arts, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the James A Michener Art Museum in Pennsylvania, and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others.

Elsie Driggs was married to the American abstract artist Lee Gatch.

Elsie Driggs attended the evening criticism classes held at the home of painter John Sloan.

Elsie Driggs spent fourteen months in Europe from late 1922 to early 1924, drawing and studying Italian art.

Elsie Driggs introduced her to the works of Piero della Francesca, the Renaissance artist for whom she felt throughout her life the greatest admiration.

Elsie Driggs eventually settled in New York City, where she found representation with the progressive Charles Daniel Gallery.

Elsie Driggs was an attractive and engaging woman, but her demeanor belied a strong ambition and a clear sense of what it would take to make her mark in the New York art world.

Elsie Driggs was part of the pre-eminent first group of Precisionist painters, including Demuth and Sheeler, who exhibited at the Daniel Gallery in the 1920s.

Elsie Driggs called the picture "my El Greco" and expressed surprise that viewers in later years interpreted the painting as a work of social criticism.

Actually, Elsie Driggs went to Detroit to make studies from the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge Plant.

The abstract, brown and white shaded background recalls contemporaneous paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, who Elsie Driggs was known to meet at least on one occasion.

Elsie Driggs exhibited in group exhibitions at the Whitney Club, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Chicago Art Institute and in the Whitney Museum's first Biennial.

Elsie Driggs dedicated her efforts to Gatch's erratic career and to raising their daughter Merriman.

From this, Elsie Driggs got the idea of creating watercolor collages, which became a major focus of her work.

Elsie Driggs then began to create canvas collages, in which she would attach cutout pieces of canvas to a canvas, and then paint over them with oil paint.

Elsie Driggs was included in many historical surveys of Precisionism.

Elsie Driggs continued to follow the contemporary art scene, admiring in particular the work of Helen Frankenthaler and Francis Bacon.

Elsie Driggs sided with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during his controversy at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC.

At the time of her death in 1992 at the age of ninety-four, Elsie Driggs was considered the most underrated as well as the most long-lived of the Precisionist painters.

Elsie Driggs was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York.