American painter, sculptor, designer, and writer, born at Galesburg, Illinois. Except for two weeks of classes at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930 she was self-taught as an artist. In 1935 she settled in New York, where she worked at odd jobs (including being a model and film extra) to support herself whilst she learned about art by visiting galleries and reading voraciously. She was deeply impressed by the exhibition ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’ at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936 and this set her on the road as a painter. Her early work was in the hyper-realistic vein of *Surrealism; most characteristically she depicted the strange fancies of young girls in the creepy atmosphere of the Gothic novel (Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1943, Tate).
Text source: A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press)
