Often diminished to a footnote in the life of her husband, the painter Jules Pascin, Hermine David was an artist in her own right who gained recognition in the early twentieth century. She worked in a variety of media and styles, including watercolor, pastel, charcoal, drypoint, and lithography.
American poet, writer, and visual artist
A wealthy American patron of the twentieth-century arts movement, Mabel Evan Dodge Sterne Luhan (Mabel Dodge) hosted modernist salons in Arcetri, Italy (outside of Florence), New York City, and Taos, New Mexico, presiding over her guests as an intellectual provocateur, a financial supporter, organizer, and creative contributor for some of the most radical figures and ideas of the early twentieth century.
She consorted with the major 20th-century avant-garde movements—Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, and wrote poems, plays, and experimental prose; created drawings, paintings, sculptures, and assemblages; designed lampshades, toys, Christmas lights, cleaning tools, and corselets.
After fleeing Nazi France in 1942, she opened the gallery Art of This Century in New York City. In 1943, Guggenheim held the first collection of the soon to be star of her gallery, Jackson Pollock.
As a female artist in the male-centric Dadaist movement, Wood posed a conundrum, resisting the labels of “female muse” and “feminist artist.”
Artist whose work is represented in private collections and galleries in New Zealand and in galleries in England, Australia and France.
Acclaimed as ‘one of the best portrait painters New Zealand has produced.’
Curator and director of Dunedin Public Art Gallery Society
As an artist she was extremely self-critical, maintaining the highest standards of professionalism, but she was generous in her help to young artists. Although well regarded as a landscape painter, her major contribution to New Zealand art lies in the way she revitalised formal portraiture in the 1920s and 1930s.