Marion Greenwood

Marion Kathryn Greenwood (April 6, 1909 – August 20, 1970) was an American social realist artist who became popular starting in the 1920s and became renowned in both the United States and Mexico.

She is most well known for her murals, but she also practiced easel painting, printmaking, and frescoes.

She traveled to Mexico, Hong Kong, Burma, and India, depicting peoples of different cultures and ethnicities and paying special attention to oppressed people in underdeveloped locations, which has at times resulted in critical reception in the modern-era due to issues of ethnic and racial stereotypes.

Marion Greenwood was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1909, to Walter Greenwood and Kathryn Boyland.

She was the second daughter and last of six children.

Her father was a painter and her older sister, Grace Greenwood Ames, was also an artist.

She exhibited artistic talent at a very young age and left high school at the age of fifteen to study with a scholarship at the Art Students League of New York.

There she studied with painters John Sloan and George Bridgman.

She also studied lithography with Emil Ganso and mosaic with Alexander Archipenko.

At age eighteen, she made multiple visits to Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York.

There, she painted portraits of intellectuals-in-residence and gained experience and knowledge through conversation.

In the mid-1920s, Greenwood studied with Winold Reiss, a German-born artist and designer who had contributed to the Harlem Renaissance movement.

In 1929, both of the Greenwood sisters participated in the famed Bohemian event, the Maverick Festival (1915–1931) at the Maverick Art Colony in Woodstock, New York.

Still in her teens, Greenwood used the proceeds from a portrait of a wealthy financier to begin her travels through Europe.

While she was there she studied at the Academie Colarossi in Paris.

She returned to New York in 1930, but continued to travel extensively over the next four decades, mostly throughout the United States, Mexico, and China.

In her work she employed multiple mediums: oil paint, fresco, lithography, etching, charcoal, and ink.

Her first trip to the Southwest began a theme in her work which involved depicting ethnicity and culture in different parts of the world.

As she visited different locales throughout her life, Greenwood would spend time learning about the people there and use them as subjects for drawings and paintings.

When creating large murals later on, Greenwood would often use these studies to place figures in a larger composition.

The first visit to Taxco, Mexico in 1932 marked a crucial turning point in her career, as she began to work on fresco murals for the Mexican government.

Between 1933 and 1936, Greenwood and her sister painted five separate murals in Taxco and Morelia, Mexico.

Her older sister Grace served as her painting assistant while working in Mexico.

There she met the artist Pablo O'Higgins, who introduced and taught her fresco painting.

As a result, she began focusing her efforts on fresco-mural painting.

Greenwood's first fresco mural was Mercado en Taxco (1933), located in the stairwell in the Hotel Taxqueño in Guerrero.

The success of this piece led to commissions from the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo in Morelia, and the Abelardo L. Rodriguez Market in the historic center of Mexico City.

An example of her process is evident in the preparation for the decoration at Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo in Morelia, Greenwood spent a year studying and immersing herself in the Purépecha Indians culture before completing this project.

Her work during her Mexican mural period had revolutionary themes and was influenced by the stylization of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera in its figures and dynamic compositions.

Greenwood was the first woman to receive a mural commission from a foreign government.

Shortly after these projects, she returned to the United States to create a mural for the social hall of the Westfield Acres Housing Project in Camden, New Jersey.

In 1937 she was hired to teach fresco painting at Columbia University, and a year later was commissioned by the Section of Fine Arts to paint an oil mural, The Partnership of Man and Nature for the post office in Crossville, Tennessee.

Greenwood's murals were often large dramatic scenes with groups of people engaged in cultural practices or in the case of a social works project, workers in their environment.

Often the murals had themes of optimism, democracy, and diversity.

For example, Rehearsal for African Ballet depicts a group of African-Americans playing music, singing, and dancing together.

In Blueprint for the Living, workers are laying bricks and building while a family looks upon the construction.

In 1937, she married British-born Charles Fenn.

In 1940, she was commissioned by the Federal Art Project to paint frescoes for the Red Hook housing project in Brooklyn.

This project, titled Blueprint for Living, was meant for low-income citizens in government housing and expressed optimism for a more harmonious future.

Around 1940, Greenwood began to focus on easel painting and printmaking, generally depicting powerful, gritty scenes of working classes or insightful portraits.