Theme/Style – Modernism, figurative art, landscapes, still lifes
Media – Oils, watercolors
Artistic Focus – Employing Cubism and beautiful arrays of colors, Henry Lee McFee’s carefully crafted still lifes and interiors reflect his training in the artistic techniques of the day. Certain of his still life compositions from the late teens and early 1920s rival the best of the European avant-garde Cubists. And his later landscapes display his modernist approach to that otherwise traditional genre.
Career Highlights –
- A native of St. Louis, Henry McFee studied art at Washington University, and went on to study in 1908 with Birge Harrison at the Art Students League in Woodstock, New York, and also at the Stevenson Art Center in Philadelphia.
- McFee’s work began to receive public acclaim from the time he entered paintings in the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, and by the 1920s and 1930s he was dividing his time between Woodstock and Los Angeles.
- McFee’s first one-man show was in 1927 at New York City’s Rehn Gallery, where he continued exhibiting into the 1940s.
- During this time McFee also served as an art instructor variously at Los Angeles’s Chouinard Art School and Claremont College.
Bibliographic references are available upon request.