A Modern Woman’s Painter

Esther Pressoir: A Modern Woman’s Painter situates Esther Estelle Pressoir’s body of work within the effervescent art scene of the early 20th century, both in America and abroad. The first book to present the wide-ranging oeuvre of this American modernist, it covers the span of Pressoir’s long life (1902-86) with a particular focus on the interwar decades (1920-40). Coming of age in the 1920s, Stella, as she was known to her friends, cast off societal expectations of a working-class immigrant family in New England and moved through the studios, galleries, and nightclubs of New York. Following an unprecedented 18,000 km bicycle trip across Europe in 1927, where she kept a daily journal and made hundreds of sketches, Pressoir developed an expressionistic style that straddled figuration and abstraction. She made provocative renderings of the female nude that challenged historical models, including unabashed self-portraits and intimate depictions of her longtime model, muse, and lover, a black dancer from Harlem named Florita. Pressoir’s work is illuminated here in an examination of her private travel journal, letters, and numerous paintings, prints and drawings, some of which were recovered from the veritable time capsule of her art studio after she died.

Placing Pressoir’s work in relation to trailblazing contemporaries such as Alice Neel, Florine Stettheimer and Suzanne Valadon, this book establishes Pressoir as a force to be reckoned with in the decades of emergent feminism and modern art in America and restores her to her rightful place in the expanding canon of art and women’s histories.