Gina Knee Brook
| Gina Knee | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Gina Schnauffer October 31, 1898 Marietta, Ohio |
| Died | October 31, 1982 (aged 84) Long Island, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Ward Lockwood |
| Known for | Painting |
| Style | modernism |
| Movement | Rio Grande Painters |
| Spouse(s) | Ernest Knee Alexander Brook |
Gina Knee Brook (1898 - 1982), nee Gina Schnauffer and better known as Gina Knee, was a twentieth century American artist who lived and worked in New Mexico, the American South and Long Island, New York.
Born Gina Schnaufer to an affluent Marietta, Ohio family for whom art was not considered a serious activity, she studied at Smith College and eventually left an unhappy first marriage. On seeing a group of John Marin's New Mexico watercolors in a 1930 New York gallery exhibition, she was inspired to move to the state by his depictions of Native American Pueblo life. Arriving in New Mexico in 1931, Gina Schnaufer spent her first year in the Land of Enchantment attending Native American ceremonials and dances, paying close attention to the colors and patterns in the scenes she witnessed.
On her visits to various Pueblos, Schnaufer was accompanied by a young Canadian artist, Ernest Knee, a photographer whose landscape images are a valuable record of New Mexico's photographic history. Although there was a nine-year age difference, Schnaufer married the younger artist in 1933, and is best known by his surname despite a subsequent 1945 marriage to painter Alexander Brook. The two made a home in the vacant house of Walter Mruk, one of Santa Fe's Los Cinco Pintores, and were welcomed into the burgeoning but largely male Santa Fe arts community. Brought up to defer to men and their interest, she knew that "...it was one thing to call oneself an artist in a town of artists and quite another to rearrange her life priorities into a list headed by 'ART'."
Moving north to the Tesuque Valley, the Knees built a home using local materials that welcomed the outside in, with portals and patios aplenty. Once the house was complete, Knee concentrated on her painting. Aware that she would always be an outsider to the local Pueblo culture, she turned to the New Mexico landscape for inspiration. Her early landscapes were traditional and often imitative of her mentors, but she progressed rapidly, and in 1933, she joined a new group of artists who named themselves the Rio Grande Painters, regionalists whose work "is composed of painters bound together mainly by a preference for the Southwest, both as a place of residence and a perpetual mine of paintable material." Knee was attuned not only to the landscape itself but also to the spiritual connection to the land that she had witnessed in the New Mexico Pueblos.
As the 1930s drew to a close, Knee began to move away from formalist figure-ground painting traditions and to more abstracted work, often a meandering mix of color and forms, with calligraphic lines and agile brushwork. In the 1940s her husband left for California to work in the war effort and she remained in New Mexico. After meeting dealer Marian Willard, she was invited to mount her first solo exhibition at Willard's Gallery in New York. Willard introduced her to the work of Paul Klee, and the fantasy element so prominent in Klee's oeuvre began to appear in Knee's work. She began to incorporate mixed media, adding gouache and tempera to he preferred medium of watercolor and adopting more modernist conventions. Her work was both praised for "restraint [and] lovely color" and demeaned by gender-specific comments that likened her work to "samplers" that were "replete with little things" but overall the results were encouraging.
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