Discipline: Visual Art

Jeanne Miles

Discipline: Visual Art
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1966
Jeanne Miles (1908-1980) was an American abstract painter and sculptor. In Paris, Miles studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and with Marcel Gromaire, developing her work in the Fauvist style. She exhibited work in the Salon des Indépendents in 1938. Miles fled the Nazi occupation of France and returned to the United States, where she lived in Greenwich Village, exhibiting with the Betty Parsons Gallery. Miles was a member of the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York during the 1940s, and one of the few women involved in founding the Artists' Club. Miles began to move away from the Abstract Expressionist style in the 1950s, seeking instead to evoke mysticism and spirituality through pure geometric forms, particularly mandalas. She combined these simple forms with a distinctive use of gold and platinum leaf that gave the modernist abstractions a medieval or Byzantine sensibility. Her style was informed by Tantric art, Islamic and Tibetan art, eastern philosophy, and the philosopher P. Ouspensky. In the 1960s she experimented with cast polyester sculpture in spherical forms, but had to stop that work because of the medium's toxicity. Miles was an instructor at Oberlin College, Moravian College, Yale University, and the New York Institute of Technology, and worked as a docent at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Studios

Alexander

Jeanne Miles worked in the Alexander studio.

Originally designed to be a visual art gallery, this facility was built in memory of the late John White Alexander (1856-1915) and funded by Elizabeth Alexander and their son James. John White Alexander was highly regarded as a portrait painter and, in the early part of the 20th century, served…

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