Jacqueline Morreau

Jacqueline Morreau(18 October 1929-13 July 2016) was a US born figurative painter who moved to London, UK in 1972. She is best known for her distinctive draughtmanship and her use of mythology to describe the female experience, and critique the political climate of her time. Her works are part of key public collections in Britain, including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Arts Council Collection

Born into a middle-class secular Jewish family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Morreau was the daughter of Eugene Segall, a furniture dealer, and his wife, Jennie (nee Horowitz), a milliner. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1943, where she studied at Dorsey High School,majoring in French and French literature. While in her second year at high school, Morreau's confidence in her talent for drawing led her to obtain entry to Chouinard Art Institute even though, at 14, she was below their required age. In 1946 she won a scholarship to Jepson Art Institute where she studied under the distinguished emigre Italian artist Rico Lebrun. She qualified as a medical illustrator in 1958. These two streams in her education – artistic and anatomical – enabled her to ground in observed reality her more abstract themes: identity, desire, memory, power and resistance.

She married Patrick Morreau in 1959 and when, in 1972, he was offered a job in London, she and their children moved with him. She soon began to exhibit, and produced portfolios of prints with publishers such as Paupers Press. Her drawings also appeared on book covers from the Women’s Press and Bloodaxe Books, and Scarecrow Press in the US.

A US born figurative painter working on the representation of women from a feminist viewpoint, Jacqueline Morreau studied with Rico Lebrun in Los Angeles and completed a training in medical illustration before settling permanently in London in 1972. Technical skill and concern with depicting the human body have both remained central to her work, even when this commitment contravened feminism's 1970s rejection of oil painting as too traditional to be politically valid. Although Morreau's art is traditional in appearance, it is revolutionary in content. Morreau was one of the four artists who organized "Women's Images of Men" - an exhibition which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and toured Britain in 1980-81 - and, in her paintings and drawings, she has continued to express what she has described as `the divided self'. Through metaphorical scenes, often derived from classical mythology, Morreau presents complex and often conflicting views of women which not only reclaim and represent familiar stories from a female perspective, but also act as allegories for the values of contemporary society... Just as Greek mythology is underpinned by strata of complex and ambiguous sexual messages, so are Morreau's paintings.A series of male and female figures in water, painted in 1990, combines confident handling of paint and line with an ambiguity of emotion. Morreau is one of the few artists to produce work that is both didactic and open to wide interpretation.

Louisa Buck, The Sexual Imagination, ed Harriett Gilbert, Jonathon Cape, London 1993

Timeline

1943–1947 attended Susan Miller Dorsey High School and Chouinard Art Institute Los Angeles; 1946 began studies with Rico Lebrun at Jepson's Art Institute; 1947–1949 Los Angeles City College and Jepson's Art Institute; 1949 travelled to Paris and New York; 1950–1951 Los Angeles City College and continued studies at Jepson's; worked with ex-Lebrun students at communal workshops; 1953 moved to Berkeley, California; 1953–1960 worked as research assistant at University of California for various groups, notably with Dr. Ellsworth, C. Doughery, and Dr. Timothy Leary; 1955–1958 University of California Medical School, San Francisco, received a diploma in medical illustration; 1959–1967 post-graduate studies in etching with Kathan Brown at Berkeley, and Gordon Cook at San Francisco Art Institute; 1967 moved to Massachusetts; 1969 lithography studies with Herb Fox, Boston; 1972 moved to London; 1989 Theatre Design, Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, London; 1989 – 1995 visiting lecturer in drawing, Oxford Brookes University and Professor of Art, Regent's College, London; since 1995 visiting lecturer in drawing, Royal College of Art, London.

Feminist Art Movement

Known primarily for her figurative paintings, Jacqueline Morreau's work is often discussed in the relation to the feminist art movement. Together with Joyce Agee, Sarah Kent and Pat Whiteread, Morreau organised the touring exhibition 'Women's Images of Men' which opened at the ICA in 1980 and went on to tour across Britain at a number of Galleries including the Arnolfini. Morreau and Kent went on to edit and write the acompanying book.

• British Museum
• Victoria and Albert Museum
• Arts Council
• Ferens Art Gallery, Hull
• New Hall Art Gallery, Cambridge