Gertrude Greene: A Sense of Architectural Structure

Gertrude Greene - Construction - 1935 - Painted wood, board, and metal - 16 x 24" (40.6 x 61 cm) - Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (click photo for larger image)Gertrude Greene (1904-1956) was an abstract artist from New York, NY. Gertrude and her husband, artist Balcomb Greene, were heavily involved in political activism to promote mainstream acceptance of abstract art. They were founding members of the American Abstract Artists organization.

Greene was one of the earliest American artists, possibly the first, to produce non-objective relief sculptures in the early 1930s. She synthesized Cubist and Russian Constructivists themes into her work. By the 1940s, her work showed an interest in Mondrian and Neo-Plasticism. She produced her last sculpture in 1946. Although for the rest of her life Greene concentrated on abstract painting, her paintings embodied a "sense of architectural structure"