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Mary Petty Exhibit
MARY PETTY Mary Petty began her career with The New Yorker magazine in 1927. Over the next four decades she created a singular style of illustration characterized by a gentle satirization of New York City's Victorian era society. In a series of thirty five covers produced over twenty six years, Mary Petty created and chronicled the lives of the Peabody family. Central to her imagery were the characters of Mrs. Peabody, dowager of the family, and Fay the whimsical, fragile maid who cared for the aging mistress and her family. In 1922 Mary Petty graduated from the Horace Mann School in New York City and five years later married Alan Dunn, a cartoonist for The New Yorker and other magazines. For more than thirty years they lived in a modest, three-bedroom apartment that also served as their studio. They rarely left the city and while they joined clubs or attended social events, Mary Petty and Alan Dunn spent a great deal of time developing their art and a unique view of life. It is not difficult to imagine Mary working diligently over her drawing board, a well-worn platform where she created hundreds of cartoons and numerous watercolors. In fact, Mary published over two hundred cartoons in The New Yorker and painted more than thirty watercolors for the front cover of the magazine. Often laboring for months to develop a cover illustration for the magazine, Petty built up her image beginning with an ink drawing. She skillfully layered a limited palette of transparent colors over the drawing to develop her virtuoso watercolor paintings. This exhibition includes most of her cover illustrations and a selection of her cartoons that appeared early in her career. Mary had no formal art training but she did have the support of Alan Dunn when she began drawing cartoons in 1927. Dunn (1900-1974) studied at Columbia University, the National Academy of Design and the American Academy in Rome. By the time he met Petty, he had begun to submit cartoons to the newly established New Yorker magazine. He encouraged her originality and natural talent for drawing, giving her artistic guidance. Heartened by his support, Petty was publishing in the same periodical by 1927. Several of Petty's early cartoons featured independent, free-thinking women, many of whom worked for a living. During the next decade the artist became more and more preoccupied with the upper class society who inhabited the brownstones and mansions which dotted New York's upper east side. The lifestyle and attitudes of wealthy, 'old money', Victorian style society were the grist for Mary Petty's keen observations. Her satire, nearly always on target, was of a gentle variety that poked fun at human frailties and never seemed mean spirited. Mary's cover illustrations so successfully identified and depicted the personality traits of this class and their hired help that people would write to remark that they knew a family that must have been the model for these paintings. Mary named her principal characters Mrs. Peabody and Fay. "I have named her Fay as that name seemed the one that most nearly expressed her quality, something rather gossamer and fragile, easily crushed and blown about by the harsh winds of life, yet very occasionally experiencing the unexpected touch of a benevolent zephyr which wafts her up to small heights of timid happiness." Mary Petty and Alan Dunn believed that gentle, pictorial satire could be as effective as political or editorial comment. They spent their entire careers creating thousand of drawings that commented upon issues that are still important to us today. This exhibition reminds us that a genteel manner of examining our culture can still be effective. Mary Petty's work was exhibited nationally and internationally during her lifetime, in recent years Syracuse University has traveled a version of this exhibition to European and American museums. Today, examples of her art are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of the City of New York and the Wichita Art Museum in Wichita, Kansas. The largest single collection of her work is owned by the Syracuse University Art Collections, a gift from the artist. In memory of her generosity to Syracuse University, the University Art Collection has named a study room in her honor. Literally thousands of students visit the Mary Petty Study Room each year to view art from the University's extensive collections. Domenic J. Iacono, Associate Director, University Art Collection Click here to view/download a printable list of works included in the exhibition. (PDF) |
Mary Petty Exhibit |