For the The Art Show 2024, Ortuzar is pleased to present a survey of works by American artist Maybelle Stamper (1907–1995), dating from 1933 to 1964. Stamper was a reclusive artist, who produced deeply personal and enigmatic prints, watercolors and paintings that draw from multiple twentieth-century modernist modes, including expressionism, surrealism and constructivism. Her art finds affinities with myriad artists: woman visionaries such as Agnes Pelton, Hilma af Klint, Gertrude Abercrombie and Dorothea Tanning, as well as the Symbolist Odilon Redon and modernists like Paul Klee and George Tooker.

Born in 1907 in Dublin, New Hampshire, Stamper (then Richardson) studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in 1927 and the Art Students League in New York from 1930 to 1937. After marrying the painter Wilson Y. Stamper around 1937, the couple moved to Ohio to teach at the Cincinnati Art Academy, where she established the school’s printmaking program. Though by all accounts professionally successful—her work was featured in solo and group exhibitions, won awards and was acquired by multiple museums—Stamper abandoned Cincinnati with the breakdown of her marriage in 1946. She permanently relocated to Captiva Island, Florida, a small, sparsely populated island on the Gulf Coast, where she lived for nearly fifty years until her death in 1995.

On Captiva, Stamper lived frugally and intensely, devoting herself with hermit-like discipline to art making, reading, meditating, gardening and journaling. Despite this prolificacy, she largely rejected showing or selling her art, only making exceptions when she needed money. Stamper avoided most social contact, preferring the companionship of her cats. Her paintings, drawings and prints encapsulate her singular imagination and life in their exquisite and intuitive imagery and often record her thinking in their titles. As one of her few close friends remembered, “until the day she died, all of her energy was spent in the struggle to pull perfection into and from herself.” She practiced yoga and astrology, and was influenced by sources as varied as Søren Kierkegaard, Henry David Thoreau, Baba Ram Dass and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. In an interview in 1966, she said: “I am interested in Zen and the power of concentration…The work grows out of what you’re thinking and how you live.” Stamper truly believed that art and life were fundamentally interlinked and struggled to achieve a kind of purity in both.

Mainly a printmaker, Stamper made a small number of paintings and watercolors throughout the shifts in her career. Self-Portrait (1933), an oil painting on wood, displays the artist’s natural talent as a student. With cropped hair and a strong jaw and neck, the androgynous Stamper glances out of the picture as if it were a mirror, her hand gripping a paintbrush-like a pencil. The variety in paint handling, from smooth and delicate on her cheeks and eyes to flickering and chunky for the interior and her smock, indicates her sophistication and ability. Two untitled oil paintings on paper circa 1940 to 1943 are entirely abstract. The artist creates crescendoing or expanding compositions that emanate from their centers out. One, in teal, lilac and gray, seems to depict a digesting stomach or perhaps a womb; the other, marked by green and yellow, feels more mechanical than human.

Stamper’s watercolors and drawings range from abstraction to representation. The figurative works veer towards surreal or mystical imagery. For example, One with Pale Blue Eyes (1948) depicts a veiled figure, as thick and strong as a monolith, staring widely beyond worldly perception. Stamper’s titles are particularly enigmatic and often direct interpretation. Softly layered swooping forms are Some Thing at Rest (c. 1950s); an ovoid form populated with a puzzle of interlocking shapes acts To Save All of the Things and Unthings… (1948). Interestingly, there is consistency across her chosen media, as most of her watercolors on paper mimic the scale and proportion of her lithographs, even the frame she draws around each composition.

Most of Stamper’s oeuvre comprises lithographs, though many of these prints are in fact unique because of the artist’s tendency to rework impressions. Even in her primitive cottage on Captiva, she made space for a Fuchs & Lang lithographic printing press and stones, which allowed her to modify artworks over years-long spans. Stamper often modified prints by either running them through the press again after altering or re-inking the stone, or by adding color, drawings or writing by hand. Along with the signature, title and date she wrote along every print’s bottom border, Stamper recorded the dates of any modifications in the margin of the sheet.

Stamper called her works “songs” and sometimes gave them that title. She compared the visual arts to music, explaining that the artist “speaks with colors, shapes, lines, etc., because he wishes to say things that might be impossible for him to say with words. In this way, paintings are like music: Both speak in areas where words are not needed.” In Spring Song, another stoic, ungendered figure softly emerges from an active, scribbly background. At the top, crisp thin lines trace deliberate, yet unrecognizable patterns. The title suggests a representation of spring, picturing its soft, fluttery emergence. Viewing two versions of the same print—as is possible with The Jungle and A Song A-Float (both 1951)—reveals Stamper’s ingenuity with the medium. Her trialing, experimenting and perfecting,adds valances to the works’ meanings and effects. Three Lines of Writing (1956) provides an excellent example of the invented hieroglyphic script Stamper sometimes inserts into her works, signifying the hermeticism of her art, understood by her alone.

Some prints, especially those with only black ink, are multiples. This is true of Stamper’s early lithographs like Seeds (1937), Planting Crocus Bulbs in November (c. 1937–1940) and Three Floating Masks (c. 1940) that recall Odilon Redon with their gothic and romantic scenes of disembodied heads, spindly gardens and spirit entities. Later examples, like To Be Seeing and Worshiping God In One Another (1953) and the Very Isness is Unknown-ness (1950), capture Stamper’s eccentric stream-of-consciousness. Their long titles reveal the artist’s inner thoughts and existential ruminations. For a 1950 image of a strange-looking, awestruck figure emerging from a dark, scratchy background, Stamper asserts the following truth: I Consider the Miracle of Being an Existing Unit of Life and the One Great Danger That There Is: To Consider That One Knows, or Moans Thinking That One Aught to Know, Forgetting That the Very Isness is Unknown-ness.

Recent institutional solo exhibitions include Maybelle Stamper: Works on Paper, The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois (2005); and The Songs of Maybelle Stamper, Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia (2006), McKissick Museum, Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Edison Community College, Fort Myers, Florida (2000), Gulf Coast Museum of Art, Largo, Florida (2000); University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina (1999); and Cincinnati Art Museum (1999). Stamper's work has been included in the recent institutional group exhibitions Art, Music & Feminism in the 1950s, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, Michigan (2023); and Multiple Identities, Grey Art Museum, New York University, New York (2005). Institutions holding Stamper’s work in their permanent collections include The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire; Grey Art Museum, New York University; The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois; and the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, among others.