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A Divine Gamble

Catalog design by Clanci Jo Conover

Front cover illustration: Dancer by the Sea, c. 1946

Oil on canvas

34 x 27 inches

Back cover illustration: Plateau, c. 1946

Mixed media on canvas

21 x 30 inches

Foreword

This has been an electrifying and busy season for us. Just as we celebrated one year in our Chelsea gallery space, Forbes 30 Under 30 selected Lincoln Glenn co-owner Douglas Gold to represent the Art & Style category. We were profiled in 1stdibs’ Introspective Magazine and the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired from us a fantastic painting by Ashcan artist Theresa Bernstein on the occasion of the American Wing’s 100th Anniversary. Despite all of these recent causes for celebration and excitement, few events have energized us as much as placing the present exhibition of Juanita Guccione’s (1904-1999) work on our calendar.

This exhibition, which focuses on Guccione’s surrealist works primarily from the 1940s, serves as her first solo exhibition in New York City since 1975. This is a timely exhibition following the major Surrealisme show at the Pompidou, a marquee auction record of over 28 million dollars for fellow female surrealist Leonara Carrington signifying a considerable uptick of interest in the genre, and a global political climate requiring feminist thought leaders.

Many characteristics of Juanita Guccione’s life and actions she took were tremendous gambles. She was openly bisexual, lived amongst a nomadic tribe in Algeria in the 1930s, created Surrealist art which was avant-garde, and chose a career as an artist at a time when women artists were not easily accepted into the market or canons of art history. However, these risks, paired with her intriguing compositions, make Guccione ripe for study and consideration.

Special thanks to Filippo Marino for his photography and cataloguing of these remarkable works, Clanci Jo Conover for her catalogue design, Kendy Genovese for her support, and Susan Aberth for her continued championing of Guccione’s work. We look forward to welcoming you into our galleries in 2025.

Warmly,

Douglas Gold & Eli Sterngass

JUANITA GUCCIONE: QUEEN OF THE NIGHT

Susan L. Aberth

Mercurial, free-spirited, bold, and endlessly searching for new ways to express herself, Juanita Guccione (1904-1999) was an American visionary – an artist difficult to categorize, whose imagery remains mysterious and somehow prescient of things to come in the art world. Juanita Guccione at Lincoln Glenn Gallery returns the artist to New York City, the place where she spent most of her creative life, so that she can be rediscovered and reevaluated through a contemporary lens more attuned to the challenges she faced and the contributions she made.

Once an active participant in the New York art scene, at some point, like many women artists, Guccione disappeared from view leaving a rich and multivalent body of work behind. Thanks to the preservation efforts of her son Djelloul Marbrook, and to the pioneering feminist scholarship of Ilene Fort who included her in the 2011 exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States,[1] Guccione’s oeuvre was revived, opening the doors for a renewed appreciation. A significant retrospective at the Napa Valley Museum in Northern California in 2019,[2] as well as a number of one-person exhibitions in San Francisco at Weinstein Gallery, further presented Guccione to new audiences.

Born Anita Rice in Chelsea, Massachusetts, she had three siblings; one of whom also became an artist - the abstract painter Irene Rice Pereira (1902-1971)[3]. After World War I the family moved to Brooklyn and in the 1920s she changed her name to Nita and got a job as a fashion model. Her father had passed away soon after the move and, independent minded, she was soon able to support herself. It was during this decade that she began her art training, taking courses at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and then attending night classes at the Art Students League in Manhattan, studying drawing, painting and illustration. She demonstrated an early knack for portraiture, a skill that would help her to financially survive later when traveling abroad. In 1931 Nita Rice[4] set off to study in France, but ended up traveling by steamship to more exotic locals like Greece and Egypt and ended up in the French colony of Algeria.

Settling in the town of Bou-Saada for the next three years, she felt more comfortable living amongst the indigenous population as opposed to the French colonists. At times she lived with the young female dancers from the Ouled Naïl tribe, often participating in their rituals and accompanying them on their travels across the desert in caravans. A large body of paintings and drawings recording the locations and people of this region attest to her deep respect for their culture and selections from this made up an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum when she returned home in 1934. After a brief relationship with a local man, Ben Aissa Ben Mabrouk, she gave birth to their son Djelloul. Soon after she returned to the United States, changing her name again, this time to Juanita Marbrook, perhaps to mask her unmarried status, scandalous for a mother at that time.

Nautical themes preoccupied her in the mid-thirties and she often worked at the Brooklyn docks, incorporating ropes, anchors and other boating emblems into her scenes. This is apparent in Ill Wind from Europe, (1936) where she also incorporates a nod to the Italian

Metaphysical School painter Giorgio de Chirico with an arcade in steep perspectival retreat, topped by fluttering flags. As the title indicates, however, this is no simple genre scene but a more nuanced commentary on the menacing rise of militarism abroad where, under an ominous full moon a ship out to sea appears to be exploding. War Gadgets (1943) is a more explicit reference to World War II, which the United States entered into in 1941. This may even be a reference to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th of that year as a naval battle unfolds replete with bombing aircraft, parachuting soldiers, expanses of graveyards with white and black crosses and even a large ghostly gas-mask hovering in the sky. As the title suggests, this is not a heroic statement on the glories of war, but rather a sly reference to deadly weapons treated as destructive toys.

Although Guccione was studying with the German Hans Hofmann at his private school in New York City (she spoke fluent German and could help translate for him), she became increasingly interested in Surrealism. She would have plenty of opportunities to see surrealist art first hand, beginning with the landmark exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936 and Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. With the arrival in New York of so many surrealist artists escaping from war-torn Europe in the 1940s numerous galleries showcased their work. We know from her son that she met André Breton and Marcel Duchamp (she could speak to them in their native French), but these personal associations did not run deep. Nevertheless, the visual language of surrealism gave her the means to express complex psychological and fantastical themes, as well as the impetus to explore her own psyche.

Plateau (c. 1946) is a stunning example of a surrealist dreamscape, employing the more abstract iteration of the movement as seen in Yves Tanguy or Joan Miró. Under a glowing red heavenly body, a strange otherworldly landscape consisting of pastel vaporous mists appears. Lines, orbs, and other geometric shapes appear to dance around the composition forming delicate arabesque spirals and flowing forms. Everything is in a state of flux as water-like waves move horizontally below stream jets of white froth above that suggest the tails of comets. What could be a seated cloaked figure in red is placed in the lower center, observing these miraculous transformations. There is an inexplicable sense of science fiction about this scene, and I can think of no art historical precedent to this unique exploration of other dimensions. Guccione’s Study for Ladders (1948) is painted in a similar vein but this time vertical ladders punctuate the amorphous space, insinuating notions of spiritual ascendance and transcendence.

Guccione also painted in the more recognizable figurative surrealistic style, developing a symbolic language to explore gender, loss and trauma. In an emotionally tumultuous work executed in the 1940s titled Lessons from the Rose (Whither My Destiny), the artist creates a masterful collage of imagery perhaps reflecting her conflicting feelings concerning her marriage to Dominick Guccione in 1943. Openly bisexual, she had numerous romantic relationships with women and, according to her son, probably would have gravitated more towards female partnerships had the social environment been more accepting. Although by all accounts her (older) husband was a kind and generous man who loved her and her son, her decision to marry him may have been partially predicated on the financial security that allowed her to continue painting. Against a gloomy and dramatic sky (with

a full moon) a celebration is taking place at a table set with a long stemmed red rose in the center. Disembodied male and female hands engage in a variety of things – they point, toast with a glass of champagne, smoke a cigarette, hold coins and flower petals while two spider-web shapes resemble shattered glass. Ominously, three female heads are placed even across the composition, one holds a mirror, two have crescent moons cradling their faces while the spectral central figure stares blankly at us with blackened eyes. The “lessons of the rose” – traditionally having to do with the transitory nature of youth and beauty – indicate an important decision must be made (“whither my destiny”). In its melancholy mood this work has much in common with Self-Portrait (1946) (Fig.

1), a painting by another American woman surrealist Gerrie Gutmann. In Gutmann’s work a brooding and ghostly bride sits alone within a ruinous domestic space – an early feminist commentary on the perils of marriage.

Guccione’s father was an inveterate gambler who financially ruined her family and a number of works from the 1940s deal with card games. In The Dealer (c. 1945) a blurred woman spreads cards out on a table while incongruously set against a moonlit dark sky and bordered by a lush red curtain on one side and lush day lilies on the other. More reminiscent of the Fates than the casino, it is an unsettling work full of foreboding. One of her most canonically surrealist paintings, Passport (c. 1949), also emanates a sense of regret with random items scattered across a table placed between a tattered curtain and cobwebs. Time stands still on a Rococo old clock, a mirror reflects nothing, old letters and a passport are left behind as in the distance a ship is literally sailing away. Tantalizingly, a giant key projects into the foreground, but the mystery remains. It is a landscape of the mind, full of nostalgia, dreams and traces of memory and resembles some of the paintings of Dorothea Tanning from the same decade (such as her 1942 A Parisian Afternoon [Hôtel Pavot]) (Fig. 2).

Also in the 1940s monumental amazon-like women make their appearance in a number of Guccione’s dream-like landscapes. Set at the seashore, under her now signature sky streaked with colors and presided over by either a full or black new moon, Dancer by the Sea (c. 1946) has a topless woman in an archaic wraparound skirt wandering alone amongst pylons upon which an odd assortment of birds are perched – an owl, a mallard and a pheasant. In a delightfully odd and surrealist gesture Guccione includes some of the stuffed animals found in her husband’s taxidermy shop. Executed around the same time (c. 1946-47) are Untitled (two women, nets, coil of rope), Woman with Fish and A Good Catch. In these works muscular women clothed in strange and colorful form-fitting outfits that are impossible

Fig. 1: Gerrie Gutmann, SelfPortrait, 1946, Colored pencil on paper © Jeanne and David J. Carlson Private Collection

to place in any time period or culture, populate each painting. Comfortable and intimate with each other, their confident poses showcase their power and strength. Always set by the sea, there are nets, fences, sometimes fish and boats but the setting is utterly alien as if we are gazing onto another planet or plane of existence. In And the Sun Too Will Fade Away (1948) these amazons are accompanied by a group of foxes, again taken from the taxidermy specimens found in her husband’s shop.

Are the women in these paintings reminiscent of the all-female spaces she lived in amongst the nomadic Ouled Naïl women in Bou Saada? Guccione recalled that she accompanied these Bedouin tribes on their journeys across the desert, often traveling at night by moonlight. One senses the memory traces of these past journeys in paintings like The Race (c. 1951) where horses glide through tented pavilions whose supporting columns are covered in strange glyphic scripts or in Stubborn Horse II (c. 1952) where a large nude woman rides a horse through the dark night under a crescent moon, eerily accompanied by flying owls and a shadowy group of other horses. There is often a touch of humor in these fantastical vistas, something celebratory in their imaginative freedom. For example, in Women with Roosters and Balloons (c. 1948-52) wild women with fluttering garments and flying hair joyously let loose bunches of brightly colored balloons as roosters excitedly dance around their feet. Cubic structures in the background remind us of the buildings at Bou Saada, and are topped by crescent moons (which also adorn poles stuck in the earth) – ancient emblems of feminine power.

Disarmingly sweet, Brothers (c. 1949) depicts two teenage boys dressed in fanciful harlequinesque outfits, nonchalantly twirling batons as they stroll along. Guccione has placed her moons in the painting, this time as crescents on their peculiar hats. Tender in their contemplative gazes and intimacy, they bring to mind Pablo Picasso’s 1905 Two Acrobats and a Dog (Fig. 3) which Guccione might have seen hanging at the Museum of Modern Art. Her son Djelloul was around fifteen at this time and might have inadvertently served as a model.

Guccione lived a long life and during the last decades of her career increasingly turned to esoteric subjects such as alchemy, Tarot, Spiritualism and Theosophy. As a young woman she had been interested in Christian Science and the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, but increasingly turned to more New Age practices, as did many artists at this time. In a late work from c. 1991, Don’t Be So Sure, II, the artist has blended arcane iconography to create a startling image whose rectangular format is reminiscent of a Tarot card. A nude female figure, with bird feet and hands, flies on white wings through a violet sky, riding atop a large bird. A blazing orange sun in the lower right corner illuminates this otherworldly space that is further energized by the flashing zigzags of lightning. In her hands she holds two large candles/wands, burning/illuminated at each end and this character resembles the woman in The World card of the Smith-Waite Tarot deck. With her nudity, wings and talon-feet she also calls to mind the ancient clay sculpture from

Iraq in the British Museum of The Queen of the Night (Fig. 4). As usual, a mysterious black sun (or is it a depiction of a total eclipse?) hovers in this liminal terrain of the psyche.

Increasingly esoteric subject matter, particularly in the work of women artists, is being studied and explored within art historical discourses and in this arena Juanita Guccione is undoubtedly an important pioneer. Such subject matter was part of her identity as an untamed individual, subservient to no one, inextricably tied to nature but free to travel in her mind to strange worlds of her own creation.

Susan Aberth is the Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

4: The “Queen of the Night” Relief, 1800-1750 B.C.E., Old Babylonian, baked straw-tempered clay, 49 x 37 x 4.8 cm, Southern Iraq © Trustees of the British Museum

Endnotes

[1] In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, was co-curated by Dr. Ilene Susan Fort, the Gail and John Liebes Curator of American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Tere Arcq, Adjunct Curator at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. Opening at LACMA in November of 2011, the show traveled to Quebec in 2012 and Mexico City in 2013.

[2] Juanita Guccione: Otherwhere was on view at the Napa Valley Museum from July 27-October 27, 2019.

[3] Fighting the same sexist art world as her sister Juanita, Irene often went by I. Rice Pereira in order to disguise her gender.

[4] The artist would settle on the name Juanita Guccione after her marriage in 1943 to Dominick Guccione. Even after he died in 1959 and she remarried, this would remain the name she signed her work with.

Fig.

Ill Wind from Europe, 1936

Oil on canvas 21 1/4 x 27 inches

Lesson from the Rose (Whither my Destiny), 1940s

Oil on canvas

30 x 42 inches

Signed upper right

War Gadgets, 1943

Oil on canvas

21 x 32 inches

Signed upper left

Betty and Her Pet

Acrylic on canvas

32 x 39 1/2 inches

Signed “Juanita Marbrook” lower left

The Dealer, c. 1945

Oil on canvas

36 x 26 inches

Dancer by the Sea, c. 1946

Oil on canvas

34 x 27 inches

Signed lower right

Plateau, c. 1946

Mixed media on canvas 21 x 30 inches

Signed lower left

Untitled (two women, nets, coil of rope), c. 1946

Oil on canvas

32 x 26 inches

Woman With Fish, c. 1946

Oil on canvas

25 1/2 x 18 1/4 inches

Signed lower right

A Good Catch, c. 1947

Oil on canvas

42 1/4 x 36 inches

Signed upper left

And The Sun Too Shall Fade Away, 1948

Oil on canvas

40 x 36 inches

Signed lower right

Study for Ladders, 1948

Gouache on paper 17 x 13 inches

Signed lower left

Women with Roosters and Balloons, c. 1948-52

Oil on canvas

30 x 24 3/4 inches

Signed upper right

Brothers, c. 1949

Oil on canvas

50 x 28 inches

Signed lower right

Passport, c. 1949

Oil on canvas

30 1/4 x 40 inches

Signed lower right

The

Race, c. 1951

Oil on canvas

33 x 43 inches

Signed lower right

Oil on canvas 24 x 32 inches

Stubborn Horse II, c. 1952

Don’t Be So Sure, II, c. 1991

36 x 24 inches

Signed lower left

Acrylic on canvas

Exhibition Checklist

Ill Wind from Europe, 1936

Oil on canvas

21 1/4 x 27 inches

Lesson from the Rose (Whither my Destiny), 1940s

Oil on canvas

30 x 42 inches

Signed upper right

War Gadgets, 1943

Oil on canvas

21 x 32 inches

Signed upper left

Betty and Her Pet

Acrylic on canvas

32 x 39 1/2 inches

Signed lower left

The Dealer, c. 1945

Oil on canvas

36 x 26 inches

Dancer By The Sea, c. 1946

Oil on canvas

34 x 27 inches

Signed lower right

Plateau, c. 1946

Mixed media on canvas

21 x 30 inches

Signed lower left

Untitled (two women, nets, coil of rope), c. 1946

Oil on canvas

32 x 26 inches

Woman with Fish, c. 1946

Oil on canvas

25 1/2 x 18 1/4 inches

Signed lower right And The Sun Too Shall Fade

Away, 1948

Oil on canvas

40 x 36 inches

Signed lower right

Study for Ladders, 1948

Gouache on paper

17 x 13 inches

Signed lower left

Brothers, c. 1949

Oil on canvas

50 x 28 inches

Signed lower right

Passport, c. 1949

Oil on canvas

30 1/4 x 40 inches

Signed lower right

The Race, c. 1951

Oil on canvas

33 x 43 inches

Signed lower right

Stubborn Horse II, c. 1952

Oil on canvas

24 x 32 inches

Don’t Be So Sure, II, c. 1991

Acrylic on canvas

36 x 24 inches

Signed lower left

Solo Exhibitions

1941 New York, Alma Reed Galleries, Juanita Rice Marbrook: Forty Paintings

1942 New York, Bonestell Gallery, Juanita Rice Marbrook

1946 New York, Bonestell Gallery, Juanita Marbrook

1949 Washington, DC, Barnett-Aden Gallery, Juanita Marbrook

1949 Woodstock, Mitchell Gallery, Juanita Marbrook

1950 New York, The Little Studio Inc., Twelve Romantic Paintings of Fantasy

1951 New York, George Binet Gallery, Juanita Marbrook Guccione

1972 Bombay, India, Taj Art Gallery, Juanita Marbrook Guccione

1973 Beirut, Lebanon, Gallery One, Guccione

1975 New York, André Zarre Gallery, Juanita Guccione

1977 Woodstock, Colony Arts Center, Recent Paintings and Watercolors, Juanita Guccione

1986 Paris, Galerie Liliane Francois, Juanita Guccione

1991-92 Algiers, Oran, Tizi Ouzou, De New York a la Casbah: Juanita Marbrouk Guccione

1992 Provincetown, MA, Washington, DC, Wohlfarth Galleries, Juanita Guccione: American Solitaire

2002 Washington DC, Arts Club of Washington, D.C., A Fond Eye: Portraits of Algeria by Juanita Guccione

2004-05 Poughkeepsie, NY, Voyage’s End–Surrealist Paintings by Juanita Guccione 1930s-1970s: Futuristic Visions of a World Ruled by Women

2011 Newburgh NY, State University of New York/ Orange, Paintings by Juanita Guccione

2012 Queensbury, NY, State University of New York/ Adirondack, Paintings by Juanita Guccione

2014 Sugar Loaf, NY, The Seligmann Center at the Citizens Foundation, Juanita Guccione: Defiant Acts

2019 Yountville, CA, The Napa Valley Museum, Juanita Guccione: Otherwhere

2020 San Francisco, CA, Weinstein Gallery, Juanita Guccione: Seeking the Divine