Irene Rice Pereira, Irene Rice Pereira Modernist Gouache Drawing Painting Abstract Expressionist Art

Irene Rice Pereira,
Mixed Media on Paper (American, 1902-1971)
Titled “The East Wind Carries the Seed”
Hand signed l.r. “I. Rice Pereira”.
Paper: 14.1/8″h x 18.25″w

Irene Rice Pereira (1902 – 1971) was an American abstract artist, poet and philosopher who played a major role in the development of modernism in the United States. She is known for her work in the genres of geometric abstraction, abstract expressionism and lyrical abstraction, as well as her use of the principles of the Bauhaus school. Her paintings and writings were significantly influenced by the complex intellectual currents of the 20th century.
Pereira was born Irene Rice in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, the eldest of three sisters and one brother. Her sister Juanita Rice Guccione was also a painter. During her career, she often gave her year of birth as 1907, which appears on some legal documents. She spent her childhood in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where she spent time reading and writing poetry.
After her father died in 1918 she and her family moved to Brooklyn, New York. In 1922 she began working as a stenographer in an accountant’s office to help support her family in the wake of her father’s death. She briefly attended courses in fashion design at the Traphagen School of Fashion and night courses in literature at New York University, and began taking evening art classes at Manhattan’s Washington Irving High School. She immersed herself in the bohemian world of Greenwich Village and had a brief affair with the poet and novelist Maxwell Bodenheim.
In 1927, she enrolled in night art classes at the Art Students League in New York City. Among her instructors at the Art Students League were Jan Matulka and Richard Lahey. In her 1929 class Matulka provided Pereira with her first exposure to the artistic principles of the European avant-garde that would shape her work; most notably those of the Bauhaus, Cubism, and Constructivism. Here, Pereira was exposed to the work of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse as well as the Cubists and Constructivists. and was encouraged to experiment with Cubist abstraction. In 1931, she traveled to Europe and North Africa to further her painting studies, attending sessions at the Académie Moderne and studying with Amédée Ozenfant in Paris. She also spent time in Switzerland and Italy.
After returning to New York in 1933 she studied briefly with Hans Hofmann at the Art Students League. Her friends and colleagues were Burgoyne Diller, Dorothy Dehner, David Smith, Hilla Rebay, Arshile Gorky, John D. Graham, and Frederick Kiesler.
In 1935, Irene Pereira helped found the Design Laboratory, a cooperative school of industrial design established under the auspices of the WPA Works Progress Administration. The curriculum of the Design Laboratory was similar to that of the Bauhaus. All students were required to take a basic course that included an introduction to chemistry, physics, and art materials. Students experimented with materials in laboratories in order to understand their physical properties. There was an emphasis on social considerations, and students were taught the social implications of technological developments alongside classes in art, music, and literature. Pereira taught classes in painting, composition, and design synthesis.
Pereira painted throughout her life. Her paintings first gained recognition in the early 1930s, when she exhibited at the ACA Galleries and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. With the showcase at the Whitney, she became one of the first women (along with Loren MacIver and Georgia O’Keeffe) to be given a retrospective at a major New York museum. In the late 1930s, she started to move away from figurative, realistic work toward abstraction and experimented with painting on layered glass. In 1943, Pereira was included in Peggy Guggenheim’s show Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in New York Artists included:
Leonora Carrington, Perle Fine, Leonor Fini, Buffie Johnson, Frida Kahlo, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, Irene Rice Pereira, Dorothea Tanning and Charmion von Wiegand. In 1946, Pereira was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition 1946: Fourteen Americans along with Arshile Gorky, David Hare, Isamu Noguchi, Robert Motherwell and Theodore Roszak.
During the latter part of her career, Pereira rejected abstract expressionist art and experienced difficulties with gallery owners and museum directors. She believed that art and literature were being swallowed up in “a chaotic void of mindlessness.” Eventually, she left New York permanently and moved to Spain.
She created “machine paintings” that incorporated images of technological components, including ship’s ventilators, generators, and funnels, as well as hinges, levers, and gears. Boat Composite from 1932, in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art is an example of her “machine paintings”.
Pereira began to explore abstraction in the late 1930s and her work included fewer references to machines. She became known for the geometric and rectilinear paintings created during this period. Abstraction from 1940, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, demonstrates her approach to geometric abstraction. She was interested in finding a way to bring light into her work, and began to incorporate materials such as glass, plastic, gold leaf, and other reflective materials into her paintings. She experimented with radium paint, layers of painted glass, and paint on parchment.
In a 1950 statement, she said “My philosophy is the reality of light and space; an ever flowing–never-ceasing–continuity, unfettered by man made machinery, weight and external likenesses. I use geometric symbols because they represent structural essences and contain infinite possibilities of change and dynamics.”
Pereira signed her work as “I. Rice Pereira,” which caused many people to assume that she was a man.
Irene Rice Pereira’s first husband was the commercial artist Humberto Pereira, a painter, whom she married in 1929. They divorced in 1938 and in 1941, she married George Wellington Brown, a naval architect who shared her interest in applying new materials to art. When this marriage ended in divorce, she married the Irish poet George Reavey in 1950; that marriage, too, ended in divorce in 1959.
Pereira worked prolifically as a writer, but she never received the same acclaim in this area as she did in painting. She published her first article in 1944, titled An Abstract Painter on Abstract Art. Her writings included topics such as structure, time, optics, and space.

The Boca Raton Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), The Phillips Collection (Washington D.C.), the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the University of Iowa Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, Maryland), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City), the Addison Gallery of American Art (Andover, Massachusetts), the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, Texas), the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute (Utica, New York), the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center (Poughkeepsie, New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) are among the public collections holding work by I. Rice Pereira.