Edward Renouf (1906-1999) was a mid-20th-century American artist, known primarily for iron sculpture, and abstract paintings and drawings. He was most active during the 1960s and 1970s.
Family background
Renouf was born into a distinguished Boston family. His great-grandfather Rev. Edward Augustus Renouf (1818–1913) attended the Boston Latin School and Harvard College (A.B. 1838, M.A. 1841), and was ordained a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1842. According to one obituary, Rev. Renouf enjoyed traveling, "had visited almost all the countries in the world, and had become familiar with their languages and the habits of their peoples." He bequeathed his cosmopolitan outlook to his son, Dr. Edward Renouf (1846–1934), a professor of chemistry who studied and worked for many years in Germany; to his German-born grandson Vincent Adams Renouf (1876–1910), who taught at a Chinese university; and to his great-grandson, the subject of this article, who was born in China and lived for many years in Mexico.
Early life (1906–1941) Edward von Pechmann Renouf was born in 1906 at Hsiku, a suburb of Tientsin, China, the son of American educator Vincent Renouf (1876–1910), and his German wife, Lilli von Pechmann (1873 – after 1939). Vincent Renouf was a professor of history and political economics at Tianjin University and the author of the textbook Outlines of General History for Eastern Students (1908), intended for use by Chinese students. Lilli von Pechmann was the daughter of Heinrich Karl von Pechmann (1826–1905), from 1888 until 1899 director of the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, and the granddaughter of Heinrich von Pechmann (1774–1861), a civil engineer who built the Ludwig Canal. Her mother, Anna Amalie Lotze, was a photographer.
Vincent Renouf died in China from typhoid fever on May 4, 1910, after which his wife brought their three children first to Munich, and then in 1912 to Richmond, New Hampshire (not far from the home of their great-grandfather Rev. Renouf). By 1920, the family was living on Abbot Street, Andover, Massachusetts, in a house owned by Vincent Renouf's brother. Edward Renouf studied at Phillips Andover Academy, from which he graduated (winning three prizes) on June 13, 1924, and then at Harvard College where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1928.
By August 1935, when The New York Times announced his impending marriage to Catharine Innes Smith, Renouf was living in New York, working as a writer. Catharine Smith was the daughter of Clarence Bishop Smith (1872–1932), an admiralty lawyer, and the granddaughter of Cornelius Bishop Smith (1834–1913), for many years the rector of St. James' Episcopal Church on Madison Avenue. An uncle, Lincoln Cromwell, donated Mount Acadia, and land surrounding it, to the National Park Service in 1919.
The couple wed the following month at Washington, Connecticut, where her New York family kept a second home, and where they would maintain a residence until her death in 1982, and his in 1999. They were counted in the 1940 census living in a townhouse at 183 East 83rd Street, Manhattan with two young children. Catharine Renouf was a "dance teacher" at a "school" but Edward Renouf had no occupation; since 1936, he had been doing post-graduate study in psychology at Columbia University. The following year, Renouf left New York for Mexico in order to study drawing and painting with the muralist Carlos Mérida. By the summer of 1941, he and his family were living at Calle Aida 2, Villa Obregon, Mexico City.
Mexico (1941–1959)
In 1939, the Austrian-born artist Wolfgang Paalen (1905–1959), traveled from Paris to Mexico City to help organize the International Exposition of Surrealism, an exhibition held in January 1940 at the Galería de Arte Mexicano. He remained in Mexico, where he joined a large and growing international group of artists flocking to Mexico City in the early 1940s, and where he became the leader of a renegade group of Surrealists known as the Dyn Circle. From 1942 until 1944, Paalen published and edited the group's journal, called Dyn, selling copies in New York (at the Gotham Book Mart), London and Paris. Edward Renouf was Paalen's associate editor for the first four of five issues, which included the work of artists, writers, and photographers, including essays by Renouf and at least one illustration of his own artwork:
Dyn 1 (April–May 1942), including Renouf's essay, "Regionalism in Art." Dyn 2 (July–August 1942), including Renouf's essay, "On Certain Functions of Modern Painting" and an illustration of his drawing Hellbird. Dyn 3 (Fall 1942). Dyn 4-5: Amerindian Number (Summer 1943). Dyn Number 6 (April 1944).