Florence Melva Pierce (July 27, 1918 – October 25, 2007) was an American artist best known for her innovative resin relief paintings. Her work has often been linked with monochrome painting and minimalism.
Early life and education
Florence Melva Miller was born on July 27, 1918. She grew up in Washington, D.C. where her parents owned and managed a large boarding school named the Countryside School. As a child traveling to New Mexico to visit her mother's family in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Miller became familiar with the landscape which would later become her home. At fifteen Miller began to study art with a private tutor, May Ashton. It was Ashton who introduced Miller to the Phillips Collection, considered to be the first museum of Modern Art in the United States. It was a rare opportunity for the young girl to develop an appreciation of some of modern art's greatest masters. Miller spent considerable time at the museum and began to take classes at the Studio School there in 1935.
Following her graduation from high school, she wished to continue her study of art. Having learned of noted artist Emil Bisttram's School of Art in Taos, New Mexico, Miller convinced her parents to allow her to attend by arranging a meeting with Bisttram while he was visiting Washington, D.C. mounting a mural exhibition. The following summer, at only eighteen, Miller traveled alone to the remote village of Taos to study with Bisttram. While in Taos that summer, she and the other students painted mostly traditional Southwest landscapes, still lifes, and portraits.
Following her return home to Washington, D.C., Miller studied briefly at the Corcoran School of Art. During this time she met Theosophists Auriel Bessemer and his wife. The couple had studied with Annie Besant, who was herself a student of Theosophical Society co-founder Helena Blavatsky. This meeting would prove to be a connection to ideas Miller encountered later in the Transcendental Painters Group. Bessemer offered Miller a scholarship to his school, but she decided to return to Taos. She arrived back in Taos in January in the middle of a snowstorm.
Miller found that the winter program at The Bisttram School of Art was very different from what she had experienced in the summer. With fewer students the dynamic was much more intense and the focus was entirely on abstraction rather than on figurative painting. It was also hard work. The students were responsible for keeping the studio's woodstove alight and were required to work eight hours a day. During this period she met fellow art student Horace Pierce. The two began a friendship which eventually became a romance. They were married in 1938.
Of her years studying at the Bisttram School Miller later said, "It wasn't so much an education as an initiation into art." Before founding his own school in Taos, Bisttram had taught at the Nikolai Roerich Museum School in New York. The Russian mystic painter, Roerich, felt that art had the ability to change world consciousness and promote peace and brotherhood. Bisttram had brought these spiritual values with him to Taos, where in addition to rigorous exercises in composition and color theory, he expected his students to read books on Transcendentalism and Theosophy, including works by Emerson, Nietzsche, Jung, and Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
Career
In 1938 Bisttram invited Miller and her husband Horace Pierce to join the Transcendental Painting Group, which he co-founded with artist Raymond Jonson. Miller was one of only two women (along with Agnes Pelton) to belong to the group and, at only 19, she was certainly the youngest member.
Although Miller and her husband only attended two meetings of the Transcendental Painting Group there are elements of the group's philosophy that remain apparent in her mature work. The definition of Transcendental as "beyond common thought or experience" suggests an exploration of new forms and new visions. The idea, as Miller Pierce said, was “not to paint the world literally ... what one sees, but to create new emotional forms through the psyche.” Light was very important in transcendental painting as a vehicle for expressing color, form, and rhythm. As attested to by the titles of numerous essays written about Miller (for example: "Traveling Light", "A light-filled domain", "In Touch with Light") – light would become fundamental to Miller's work, particularly in her resin reliefs.