Paul Fontaine

Paul Fontaine (1913–1996) was an American painter.

Abstract-colorist painter Paul Emile Fontaine was born in 1913 in Worcester, Massachusetts to Elzear and Mary Fontaine, both of French Canadian descent.

Fontaine had two younger brothers, Russell and Leo Fontaine.

Paul Fontaine was encouraged to be a painter early on, deciding to pursue this artistic path as a teenager.

Virginia was born in 1915 to Paul and Myrtle Hammersmith of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (founders of the Hammersmith Printing Company).

Following their marriage, the Fontaines went to the British Virgin Islands, primarily Tortola, on Paul's fellowship.

However, with war breaking out in the 1930s, Fontaine used his fellowship to take himself and Virginia to the Virgin Islands.

He enrolled at the Worcester Art Museum School following completion of high school and remained there from 1932 to 1935.

Fontaine graduated in 1935 and followed his studies with a six-month term in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

In 1936, Fontaine worked as a Works Progress Administration (or Section of Fine Arts, US Treasury) painter in Springfield, Massachusetts, painting murals in the city's Post Office under Umberto Romano.

Following employment as a WPA painter, Fontaine continued his studies at Yale's art school.

Francis H. Taylor, director of the Worcester Art Museum, secured a matching grant for Fontaine to engage in further studies at Yale University, the only time the Worcester Art Museum School donated significant funds to a student's career.

Fontaine began at Yale in 1938 and graduated among the top of his class in 1940.

Fontaine was awarded the Winchester Wirt Traveling Fellowship the same year, but due to wartime exigencies, chose instead to study and paint in the Caribbean.

Paul Fontaine married fellow Yale art student Virginia Hammersmith in 1940.

Virginia Fontaine was trained as a painter at Yale but did not graduate, and she became a major force in Paul's subsequent creative activities.

During the late 1940s, Fontaine's Italian watercolors toured the United States to acclaim in an exhibition organized by Virginia Fontaine.

They lived mostly in Tortola, but also spent time in Puerto Rico, Guana Island, and Virgin Gorda through 1940 and '41.

With the conditions posed, it was a source of inspiration for Fontaine's later abstract works.

After this year abroad, the Fontaines returned to the States where they built a studio in Worcester called Rocky Tor.

In 1941, Paul Fontaine returned to Worcester where he worked in a factory and painted regularly.

He submitted several watercolors for government tours and founded the Worcester Artists Group with Herbert Barnett.

He also exhibited his work at the Grace Horn Galleries in Boston and built a studio behind his mother's house known as “Rocky Tor.” In 1943, Fontaine was drafted and sent to Italy where he worked as an illustrator and painted commissions for the US Army and Red Cross.

His first daughter, Carol, was born that same year in Worcester.

In 1943, Paul was drafted and sent to Italy as an infantryman.

Following a group show at the Worcester Art Museum in May 1943, his next exhibition and second official one-man show was a touring one, first held at the Margaret Brown Gallery in Boston in March 1945 after his tour of duty, which focused entirely on the war watercolors.

The show was also displayed at Ripon College, the Fitchburg Art Center, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, and the Kalamazoo Museum of Art.

In 1945, Fontaine began working as an Army cartographer in Paris before settling in Frankfurt as the graphic director for the Army's regional headquarters.

His second daughter, Eugenie (Paula), was born in Frankfurt in 1948.

He remained in this position until 1953 and was able to witness the city's artistic community being rebuilt.

In 1953, the Fontaines moved to Darmstadt, where Paul became the art director for Stars and Stripes, the Army's European circular.

The Fontaines' third daughter Claudia was born in Darmstadt in 1956.

During this period, Virginia began to focus more on her own work, which included curating and photography.

At the request of Gordon Gilkey, the print curator for Oregon State University at Corvallis and former Adjutant General in charge of salvaging looted European art, she curated and procured prints for an exhibition of contemporary German prints in 1963.

She was also the translator for the first definitive work on Hans Hartung published by Ottomar Domnick, who was a major collector of contemporary works from that time period.

This was his principal source of income until his retirement in 1969 at age 55.

In 1969, the Fontaines moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, following Paul Fontaine's retirement.

In 1992 at age 75, Paul moved to Austin, Texas to be nearer to his daughters.

He died in 1996 at age 82.

Paul Fontaine sought a European sojourn as a way to put into practice what he had gleaned from his studies at the Yale Art School, a traveling fellowship (the Winchester Wirt Fellowship) that would have taken him to Paris and to Italy.