Lakeside Studio

Columination

lithograph, 14" x 21", 1971

$600.00

Printed and published by the Lakeside Studio, Lakeside, Michigan

I received a phone call on April 12, 2005, from the woman who wrote this article. The correct information is:

but I found it at the archives of AskART.com.
A painter and graphic artist, Minna Citron was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1896, but did not begin studying art until 1924. By then married and the mother of two sons, Citron sought a change from her conventional life.

She began studying painting under Benjamin Kopman at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, New York City, and then went on to become a student for three years at the New York School of Applied Design for Women, New York City, from which she graduated with honors. In 1928 she enrolled at New York City's Art Students League. There, her primary mentor and strong early influence was Kenneth Hayes Miller, the leader of what was often called "the 14th Street School", home to such artists as Reginald Marsh, muralist Edward Laning, Rafael Soyer, and Isabel Bishop. Following the lure of freedom, Citron divorced her husband in 1934 and turned completely to her art career, never remarrying.

Like many of her fellow 14th-Street artists, during the 1930s she painted
numerous scenes of Union Square, New York City, where she had her studio. The Daumier-influenced Citron tended to observe Union Square humanity and society in general, with a humorous eye, satire being her favorite mode of expression. "Femininities" (1935), one of her first solo exhibitions, was typical of her witty style as she depicted women in unflattering situations; "Beauty Culture," for example, mocks the vanity of beauty parlor patrons, who seem virtually imprisoned by their hair-dryers.

Citron could find humor almost anywhere: while finalizing her divorce in Reno, Nevada, she visited some casinos and came away with several "spicy scenes" of the players and dealers she encountered. Some time after that, she served on a jury and recorded in paint her wry testimony of that experience.

With the growth of government-sponsored art in the late 1930s, Citron's
artistic interests evolved from satire to social awareness. Employed by the
Work Projects Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project in New York City, she taught painting from 1935-1937, and between 1938 and 1942 she traveled to Tennessee, enthusiastically creating Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) murals at the Newport and Manchester post offices. She also painted a series of Tennessee Valley scenes, which she exhibited at Manhattan's Midtown Galleries.

Citron was drawn to printmaking in the late 1930s after seeing some
unusual work by Stanley William Hayter, whose Atelier 17 had been forced to relocate from Paris, France, to New York City with the beginning of World War II. This famous graphics workshop attracted many refugee artists from Europe, notably Jacques Lipchitz, Andre Masson, Salvador Dali, and Marc Chagall.

Citron spent much time at the Atelier 17, learning new techniques from the Europeans and embarking upon her own innovations. She combined the deliberate with the accidental, for example, happily exploiting the opportunity a broken etching plate provided to recreate a design. Her goal was to find "an actual third dimension in painting as well as printmaking". Toward this end, she piled on paint and varnish, creating raised surfaces on her canvases or plates. Later, she began cutting into the surfaces. Her art became progressively more abstract, thanks in part to her continuing association with Atelier 17, which she visited often after it was moved back to France at the war's end.

In the 1950s she exhibited a series of experimental prints at the Peter Deitsch Gallery in a show titled "The Uncharted Course," which showed the journey of a plate through several incarnations made possible by breakage, other accidental effects, and Citron's own creative energy. Citrons art hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), both in New York City; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (among other leading museums).

On her ninetieth birthday she was honored at Rutgers University's Douglass College Library, New Jersey. The celebration, a part of the library's Women Artists Series, included a retrospective of Citron's work. "Models of Persistence" was the show's theme, which the ebullient Citron epitomized as she continued to create and display works of art into her nineties. Her last exhibit was held in 1990 at the Susan Teller Gallery in SoHo, New York City. The following year Citron died in New York City at the age of ninety-five.