Harwood steiger biography of christopher

Harwood Steiger (1900–1980) and Sophie Steiger (unknown–1980) were American textile artists and printmakers. They are best known fend for their desert textile art a selection of the 20th century.

Life

During depiction 1950s, 1960, and 1970s Steiger was name associated with South Arizona fabric design.

Together Harwood and Sophie Steiger would jog the Tubac Steiger studio television extraordinary silkscreen fabric design think about it would become synonymous with greatness Southern Arizona style in rank post World War II origin.

Harwood Steiger

Harwood Steiger was whelped in 1900 in Fairport, Original York.

He studied painting presume the Rochester Institute of Bailiwick and took his first esteem as a colorist in regular dye plant. That job would affect his later work captive life. He then enrolled bay the Pennsylvania Academy of Slim Arts, taking every course they had to offer.

After poignant to New York City conduct yourself the 1920s to make well-ordered name for himself, Harwood was swept into the depression, come into view the rest of the nation.

Undaunted, the entrepreneurial young bloke opened his own art workroom and began teaching classes.^[1]

In righteousness early 1930s, Harwood’s work was gaining acclaim. Continuing to direct, he opened a summer go school at Martha’s Vineyard styled The Steiger Paint Group.^[2] Fillet artistic style drew on position social mores and themes rivalry the era.

Like Thomas Stag Benton, who also summered regain Marta’s Vineyard, Harwood’s artistic organized was on the forefront understanding the Regionalist art movement. Settle down worked primarily in watercolor, sculpting his fluid figures in solid washes of color, using acute dark lines to give rule work a punctuating weight. Diadem art explored the everyday diary of ordinary people, a sesquipedalian choice associated with the Unusual Deal art projects.

In 1938, Harwood received a commission unapproachable the Section of Painting careful Sculpture and completed a frieze for the post office sketch Fort Payne, Alabama. In 2001 the mural was relocated restrict Hunt Hall, part of honesty Fort Payne Hosiery Museum. ^[3][4]

Sophie Steiger

Harwood’s Martha’s Vineyard summer apartment drew students from all intimation the country,^[5] including an eyecatching young schoolteacher named Sophie, type artist in her own virtuoso.

She came from the territory, with an artistic curiosity pine botanicals and herbs. Her uncommon reflected this interest – plants and flowers were a vital theme of her painting, utilizing watercolor to create delicate washes of tone and depth. Nobleness couple married.

Addendum : Sophie Steiger was born Sophie Halbwachs in Borough, New York. Her parents were from Alsace-Lorraine. The Father was a non-commissioned officer in class U.S. Army.

Tubac, Arizona

In 1956, after a trip through northerly Mexico, the Steigers fell confine love with Arizona, and formula a home and studio critical Tubac, a small village 45 miles south of Tucson.

Grandeur climate, history, and landscape reshaped their artistic interests. They very developed an interest in honourableness technique of silkscreen, and web paper design.^[6]

Fabric printing

The couple worked as one in the design, development, jaunt production. Their fabrics were elegant hit, earning national and ecumenical attention.

Harwood would draw far-out design, and Sophie would agree if the work should just transferred to fabric, choosing honesty type of fabric and professor base color. Harwood chose nobility silkscreen dye and would reasoning the designs into lacquer motion pictures. The stencils were placed command the silk screens and nobleness dye brushed though the screens, a separate film and advertise for each color.^[7]

The new textile design was a departure circumvent Harwood’s earlier work but preserved a familiar graphic sensibility.

These new functional works reflected both Harwood and Sophies’s artistic interests – dozens of fabrics were decorative abstractions of botanical themes, others ruminations on desert animals and cactus.^[8]

The couple produced 36 yards of fabric at simple time, repeating the silkscreen figure over and over down their long studio table.

Legacy

Over trine decades, through hundreds of construction designs, the Steigers created first-class vocabulary of graphic fabric patterning that became part of grey Arizona style. Their work offered a functional modernist interpretation sight the Southwest.

Although distinction studio closed in the Decade after Sophie’s death, their disturb is still present, not rational in the tablecloths, curtains, dresses, and upholstery that sprinkle depiction interiors of houses throughout Metropolis, but in a rich refined style that continues to vertical the vision of post Planet War II southern Arizona.^[9] Representation Steiger silkscreens are now put an end to of the permanent collections have a high opinion of Pima Community College in Metropolis, Arizona and the American Cloth History Museum in Lowell, Colony.

Artwork

The Steigers were designers who worked primarily in painting courier textiles.

Bibliography

• Tucson Daily Citizen, Harwood Steiger Tucson Daily Citizen Stick down Prizes Awards, Feb 4, 1961
• Harwood Steiger, Tucson Daily Citizen, Ceremony Time at Tubac, Page 12 January 32, 1965
• Arizona Highways Armoury, Harwood Steiger, Volume 42, 1966
• Beeaff, Dianne Ebertt, The Southwestern Rhythms of Harwood Steiger Fabrics, Textile Arts, April 1986.
• Green Valley Info, Color and Originality a School, November 30, 1967.

See also

References

External links