Gertrude Greene

Gertrude Greene
b. 1904, New York, New York
d. 1956, New York, New York

Gertrude Greene, née Glass, was an American artist best known for her role as one of the founding members of the American Abstract Artists group. Greene began studying sculpture in 1924 at the Leonardo da Vinci School while also working as a kindergarten teacher. At the Leonardo da Vinci School, she excelled in the conservative practices of traditional sculpture making, developing a set of skills and dexterity in three-dimensional work that would remain foundational throughout her career, even as she transitioned into abstraction.

In 1926, she married Balcomb Greene, and the couple spent time in Vienna and Paris before settling in New York. Inspired by the avant-garde movements she encountered during her travels and by the work being shown at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art, Greene developed a strong interest in abstraction. In 1931, the couple returned to Paris for a second trip, during which Gertrude became deeply influenced by the vanguard movements Abstraction-Création, Art Nonfiguratif, and Constructivism.

As a political leftist and social activist, Greene was particularly inspired by the Russian Constructivists' ideas about uniting politics and art. She was especially drawn to the Constructivist belief that "purified" art could lead the way toward societal reorganization. Greene focused her practice on capturing the purity of form, drawing inspiration from figures such as Vladimir Tatlin, Naum Gabo, and Antoine Pevsner. After returning from Paris, she began using her skills as a draftsman to create Constructivist drawings characterized by continuously compounding geometric purity.

In 1935, Greene began creating wood constructions, which would become her most critically acclaimed works. These pieces have been credited as the first completely abstract American wood reliefs, and today they reside in major collections of modern art, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. During the 1940s, as the Greenes divided their time between New York City and Pittsburgh, Greene began making studies for her constructions using small paper collages—an easy-to-transport medium that allowed her to quickly explore ideas that she could later translate into wood.

In addition to her artistic practice, Greene worked tirelessly throughout the 1930s to support fellow artists. Notably, she helped found the Unemployed Artists' Group, which advocated for federal unemployment assistance for artists and played a key role in the creation of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935. In 1937, Greene became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group, an organization formed to promote public understanding of abstract art. She also served as the group’s first paid employee.

By the early 1950s, Greene had shifted her focus almost entirely to painting, incorporating gestural elements as her style moved away from Constructivism and toward a more expressionistic approach. Gertrude Greene passed away in 1956 at the age of fifty-two. Despite having had only three solo exhibitions during her lifetime, her remarkable contributions to Constructivism in the United States and her tireless efforts to promote the dissemination of abstract art have often been underrecognized.