Jacqueline Morreau (18 October 1929 – 13 July 2016) was an American artist.
She was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was the daughter of Eugene Segall, a furniture dealer, and his wife, Jennie (née Horowitz), a milliner. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1943, and at the age of 14 Morreau attended Chouinard Art Institute; in 1946 she won a scholarship to Jepson Art Institute. At that time, the school was dominated by returning servicemen taking advantage of the GI Bill; it was overwhelmingly male. "I was considered a great prodigy. That was very nice, very ego-gratifying. I worked very hard."
In 1949, she spent a year in France and some time in New York City, returning to Los Angeles where she married; her first child was born in 1951. Four years later, she left her husband and, with her son, moved to San Francisco, where she studied medical illustration. She qualified 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 had three more children. Of this period of her life, Morreau has written "In 1950s and 60s’ San Francisco, I was doing more printmaking than painting because I did not have a place to paint but I did have an etching press in my garage......There was the Vietnam War and the violence of the civil rights movement in the American South. I couldn't ignore these and my prints reflect my anger and horror. The etchings I made at that time prepared the way for the political triptychs I did later: The Children's Crusade, Lessons of History, and the Gulf War triptych.
In 1967, the family moved to Massachusetts where Morreau found a studio and started painting again, while continuing to develop her printmaking. She exhibited and gained some recognition for her work. When, in 1972, her husband 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.
However, her primary commitment was to the field of fine art and in 1978 she staged Drawn from Life, an exhibition of figurative drawings and prints at the Women's Arts Alliance in London. Galleries at that time were dominated by conceptual art, colourfield painting and electronic media, and both the mainstream art world and the avant garde rejected figuration. Certain factions within feminism also regarded any direct representation of the female body to be retrogressive. In her view, unity was strength and, together with Cate Elwes, Pat Whiteread and Joyce Agee, she spent two years seeking out female artists working with figuration. The result was Women's Images of Men and About Time, two touring exhibitions commencing at the ICA in London in 1980.
Morreau edited the book of the Images of Men show with the critic Sarah Kent, and continued to exhibit with many other female artists, including Sue Coe, Marisa Rueda and Pam Skelton. She promoted female artists in her work as a curator of the Wales Drawing Biennale and as a trustee of the Rootstein Hopkins Foundation. She also influenced generations of students as a visiting lecturer in drawing at the Royal College of Art, London, and Oxford Brookes University, and at Regent's College, London (now Regent's University), where she was a professor of drawing until 1998. Morreau's vision as an artist is recorded at the British Library's Artists’ Lives archive, and her work is in many private and public collections, including the British Museum, the Arts Council, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.[1]
National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C466/135) with Jacqueline Morreau in 2002 for its Artists' Lives collection held by the British Library.[2]
Known primarily for her figurative paintings, Jacqueline Morreau's work is often discussed in relation to the feminist art movement.[3] 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.[4] Morreau and Kent went on to edit and write the accompanying book.
"We have only a small space of time in which to make our marks on paper and canvas, to effect permanent changes in society before the barbarians once more close in … We must work harder than ever to make what gains we can in the consciousness of civilised people."[6]
| Year | Work | |
|---|---|---|
| 1983 | Power Plays, exhibition catalogue, introduction by Bryan Biggs and Sarah Kent | |
| 1984 | Pandora's Box, exhibition catalogue[7] | |
| 1984 | Paradise Lost, exhibition catalogue, introduction by Sarah Kent, Ikon Gallery | |
| 1984 | Women in War and Peace, exhibition catalogue, introduction by Moira Kelly University of Houston | |
| 1985 | Women's Images of Men edited by Sarah Kent and Jacqueline Morreau, Rivers Oram Press/Pandora List[8] | |
| 1986 | Jacqueline Morreau: Drawings and Graphics, by Sarah Kent, Scarecrow Press[9] | |
| 1986 | Women Live, video interview, ITV | |
| 1987 | Framing Feminism, R. Parker and G. Pollack, Pandora, London[10] | |
| 1989 | Americans Abroad, exhibition catalogue, edited by Stephanie Crawford, introduction by Keith Wheldon | |
| 1989 | Jacqueline Morreau: Myth and Metaphor, exhibition catalogue, introduction by Keith Wheldon | |
| 1989 | The Nude: A New Perspective, Gill Saunders, Herbert, London[11] | |
| 1990 | Paradise Now, exhibition catalogue, Odette Gilbert | |
| 1992 | The Sexual Imagination, edited by Harrier Gilbert, Jonathan Cape, London[12] | |
| 1992 | Strategies for Women Artists, Open University programme, BBC | |
| 1995 | Fold Upon Fold, exhibition catalogue, introduction by Judith Kazantzis, Artemis, London[13] |
Solo exhibitions unless otherwise indicated:
| Year | Exhibition | |
|---|---|---|
| 1950 | Frank Perls Gallery, Beverly Hills, California, students of Rico Lebrun. | |
| 1970 | Edna Stebbins Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts | |
| 1972 | Edna Stebbins Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts | |
| 1978 | 'Drawn From Life', Women's Arts Alliance, London | |
| 1980 | Amwell Gallery, London | |
| 1982 | Pentonville Gallery, London | |
| 1983 | 'Power Plays' with Sue Coe and Marisa Rueda, Pentonville Gallery, London; Bluecoat Gallery,[14] Liverpool; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull | |
| 1984 | 'Paradise Lost', Ikon Gallery, touring with Pam Skelton | |
| 1986 | 'Original Sins', Art Space Gallery,[15] London | |
| 1988 | 'Myth and Metaphor', Art Space Gallery, London, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull | |
| 1988 | Odette Gilbert Gallery, London | |
| 1989 | 'Three Women' with Sandra Fisher and Haidee Becker, Odette Gilbert Gallery, London | |
| 1990 | 'Paradise Now', Odette Gilbert Gallery, London | |
| 1991 | 'Beyond Reason', with Marisa Rueda, Battersea Arts Centre, London | |
| 1992 | 'Recent Work', Isis Gallery,[16] Essex | |
| 1993 | 'Disclosing Eros', print portfolio, Nuffield College, Oxford, | |
| 1994 | 'Fold Upon Fold', Isis Gallery, Essex | |
| 1996 | 'Themes and Variations', Ferens Art Gallery, Hull | |
| 2017 | 'Re: Jacqueline Morreau Mythologies and the Marginalised', Bow Arts, London |
| Year | Tour | |
|---|---|---|
| 1980 | 'Women's Images of Men', Institute of Contemporary Art, London and tour | |
| 1984 | 'New Acquisitions', Arts Council Collection tour | |
| 1984 | 'Pandora's Box', Rochdale and tour | |
| 1986 | 'Women in War and Peace', Houston, Texas | |
| 1989 | 'The Nude: A New Perspective', Victoria and Albert Museum, London | |
| 1990 | 'Marks of Tradition', Museum of Modern Art, Oxford | |
| 1995 | Sharjah International Art Biennial,[17] United Arab Emirates | |
| 1997 | 'From the Interior', UK/China exchange |
"At first it astonishes me: Jacqueline Morreau ... has left the human form behind her and journeyed into an extraordinary terrain of coasts and desert mountains... But this radical departure into landscape is a development, not a break. She has always painted metamorphoses, transformations. Here earth and mountain become sea, sea becomes earth, earth becomes the furniture of my sleep and my eroticism. In the etching series, `Disclosing Eros', I re-enter Jacqueline Morreau's love affair with the human body, its passion expressed by yearning torsions of bone and muscle. Again I am at the interface of the human and the divine, this time within a retelling of the ancient encounter of soul and body, intellect and passion."