Patrick Henry BRUCE
1881–1936, USA
Patrick Henry Bruce
From an old Southern family and a descendant of American statesman Patrick Henry, twenty-year-old Bruce moved from Long Island, Virginia, to New York, where he studied with William Merritt Chase and then Robert Henri. In 1903 he went to Paris...[where he] met Matisse and other artists by way of the regular Saturday salons held at the home of Gertrude Stein and her brother, Leo. By 1912 he was associating closely with the Orphists Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and remained in Paris until 1936. During the 1910s Bruce was a noted modernist figure, exhibiting at the Salons d'Automne and the Salons des Independants, and showing four works back at home in the 1913 Armory Show. The same year he was only one of four Americans--the others being Lyonel Feininger, Albert Bloch, and Marsden Hartley--invited to participate in Berlin's Grand Survey of Modern Art, at the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon. Three years later the artist had a solo exhibition in the United States at the Montross Gallery. Ultimately, however, Bruce found limited support for his work...The painter's self-criticism, his frustration with the misunderstanding of his works, and his 1919 separation with his wife left him increasingly reclusive. Abandoning art altogether and moving to Versailles in 1933, he returned to New York in 1936 and took his own life a few months later. Art historian M. Sue Kendall has succinctly divided Bruce's oeuvre into four periods. Accordingly, his first phase lasted until about 1907 and reflected the influence of Robert Henri in its bravura brushwork and deep tonalities; this was followed by a five-year period dominated by still lifes illustrating the artist's appreciation of Cézanne and Matisse. Next, until about 1920, Bruce produced hard-edged abstractions influenced by Orphism; and the last period before his death was marked by Cubist still lifes based on architectural themes.
According to Dr. Patrick Shaw Cable, "Unfortunately the master colorist Patrick Henry Bruce committed suicide at age fifty-five and destroyed much of his work, so that only about one hundred of his paintings remain.
Source: http://www.ha.com/