Esther Pressoir

B. Philadelphia, PA, 1902
D. 1986

Esther Estelle Pressoir was the daughter of French-Canadian immigrants who worked in the textile mills of Woonsocket, Rhode Island. She attended Rhode Island School of Design, graduating from the department of painting and drawing in 1923. Settling in Greenwich Village, Pressoir studied at the Art Students’ League in New York and, during summers, with the progressive Provincetown Art Colony.

In July 1927, Pressoir embarked on a transformative seven-month bicycle trip across Europe. Keeping handwritten journals and making hundreds of sketches along the way, Pressoir honed an economy of visual language and distillation of character and place that would define her practice, which includes decades of illustrations she contributed to the New Yorker along with paintings, prints, and ceramics. She created nudes of herself, models, and lovers, including a dancer from Harlem named Florita. Her erotic renderings of the female nude, a subject which she returned to throughout her career, reflect the artist’s explorations of her fluid sexuality and challenge canonical depictions of the figure as an object of male desire.

Pressoir rendered traditionally academic subjects of still lifes and landscapes with a bold, expressionist approach. Her oeuvre reflects her enduring attention to the environments and communities around her. She depicted coastal living in Maine and Rhode Island, where she spent summers camping and visiting family, and documented regional farming and industry in rural Pennsylvania after she bought a defunct one-room schoolhouse in the town of Mount Bethel.

Pressoir exhibited in the inter-war period at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Gallery.