Bernice Cross

Bernice Cross
Born	1912 Iowa City, Iowa
Died	1996 Washington, D.C.
Nationality	American
Education	Wilmington Academy, Corcoran School of Art, Phillips Gallery School of Art
Spouse(s)	Married (1937) to James Moore McLaughlin and later divorced.

Bernice Cross (1912–1996) was an American artist and art instructor born in Iowa City, Iowa, who was based in Washington, D.C. for most of her professional career. Known for her originality, creative imagination, sense of humor, and love of fantasy, she painted with a deceptive simplicity and handled color and form with subtlety and a sure touch.

Cross was an only child. She was born on August 22, 1912, to Frank Wallace Cross, a lifelong Iowa resident, and Constance Mabel Bunting whose family came from England. Her full name is Bernice Francena Cross. In her late teens Cross enrolled at the Wilmington Academy in Wilmington, Delaware. A few years later she began study at the Corcoran School of Art and, in about 1933, became a student at the Phillips Gallery Art School in Washington, D.C. Begun in 1927 the Wilmington Academy was run by N. C. Wyeth. In 1933 C. Law Watkins established the Phillips School at Studio House, adjoining the gallery.

Although critics credited her with growing maturity over the next few decades, Cross rarely departed from an approach that was noted for its spontaneity, sense of fantasy, and good humor. Over the five decades of her professional career she experimented with a variety of techniques and the tone of her work was sometimes light and airy and other times dark and Gothic but, as the critic for the New York Sun pointed out, she was a painter whose work was always recognizably her own, that is one who, he wrote, "has her own signature."

During the 1930s, Cross made genre paintings of circus people, African-Americans, and characters out of fairy tales. She also painted still lifes, particularly flower arrangements. She drew attention to the two-dimensional area of her canvas through experiments with surface texture and she established a balance between realism and abstraction that favored the latter. Her paintings were often childlike and made to please children. They gave a deceptive appearance of primitivism but were sophisticated in their composition, balance of forms, and use of color contrasts. She became known for the whimsy she displayed and a light-hearted, youthful spirit. Some of her early paintings show racial caricatures that went unremarked at the time, but today appear to be insensitive.

In 1933 Cross was awarded first prize for a still life painting in a student exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery and two years later she won first prize in the Greater Washington Independent Art Exhibition, shown in galleries of nine downtown department stores.

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