Charley and Edie McKee Harper's only son Brett is with curator Tamera Muente in a large Cincinnati warehouse full of Edie's paintings, prints and photographs. They're discussing pieces in an upcoming show of her work at Cincinnati's Taft Museum of Art.
Edie’s artwork is lively and diverse. Geometric angles and lush colors come together in whimsical scenes — from wildlife to sly, playful takes on Biblical parables. Her photography, full of abstract shapes and shadows, provides a kind of roadmap to her use of simplicity and form in her later work. And she branched out beyond these, too, into printmaking, tapestry, sculpture and other mediums.
“She was a huge embracer of all different media,” Muente, one of three curators putting together the Taft show, says. “And she really mastered all of them.”
There are themes that run through the work — always simple and perfectly composed on the surface, but often complicated underneath, happy and playful at first glance but with flashes of sadness, or conflict, or a kind of wry humor that takes multiple visits with a piece to fully catch.
You can find the same subtle depth of feeling in Edie’s career arc. Her work traces the path of a dedicated, habitual artist who balanced motherhood with a disciplined creative practice and who kept her curiosity and ambition through encounters with sexism in the art world.
Brett stops in front of some of his mom's better-known paintings depicting her beloved cats in warm tones and simplified shapes.
“That’s Butchie,” he says, pointing to one of the paintings. “Let’s see… I think that is, too. Butchie was her favorite cat, well one of them, that she had in the 40s.”
Most people probably associate this modernist, pared-down style with Charley Harper, Edie’s husband. He rose to national prominence with his simple, colorful depictions of wildlife. There’s a retrospective of his work happening at the Cincinnati Art Museum while Edie’s show runs at the Taft.
Though Edie's work isn't as well known, she was an accomplished modernist photographer, painter and printmaker. The two met on their first day of art school and seem to have developed this signature style together. But they also were very different artists.
Brett and Tamera approach another acrylic painting from 1976 called Ellis Island. It shows two groups of figures facing each other — one is vibrant, the other is depicted in sepia tones. The Statue of Liberty is visible in a window behind them.
Brett points to the livelier figures in the foreground.
“My own interpretation is that these are kids who have already been processed, and they’re approved,” he said. “They’re citizens. And these folks, they haven’t yet received their papers. They’re waiting for their chance to have that happen.”
Curator Tamera Muente, one of three who worked on the Taft Museum show of Edie’s work, has a different interpretation. She says subtle nuances that suggest multiple understandings of the same piece are hallmarks of much of Edie's work.
“The other thought we had was that these are tourists visiting Ellis Island, and that these are sort of the ghosts of people who have come through in the past,” Muente says. “Or even maybe their ancestors who immigrated to the United States.”
“Oh, I like that,” Brett says.
Edie Harper's early years
Edie was born in 1922 in St. Louis, though her family moved to the Cincinnati area in the 1930s when her father got a job at Procter & Gamble. Edie started painting in her teens. She attended Cincinnati's Art Academy in the early 1940s, where she met Charley, a young artist from West Virginia, on the first day of classes. The two studied printmaking with Maybelle Stamper and color theory with Josef Albers, two art luminaries.
They discovered a blooming interest in modernism together, and would go on to bounce artistic ideas off each other for decades.
As Charley served in World War II, Edie worked for the Army Corps of Engineers, taking photographs of dams and other infrastructure. The experience likely influenced her growing move toward modernism.
Muente says Edie's early photography won her recognition for its abstraction and unique, beautiful composition. She also received a solo show at the Contemporary Art Center in 1961, a significant accomplishment for any artist.
“She was the only woman who was being shown alongside other male artists in Cincinnati,” she says. “There was one exhibition of seven Cincinnati photographers, and she was the only woman.”
'What was sacrificed'
Edie and Charley graduated from the Art Academy in 1947, departed on a famous six-month honeymoon across the American West, and then moved into Edie’s parents’ house in Cincinnati’s Roselawn neighborhood, keeping separate but nearby studios there. Brett was born in 1953, and Edie took up the primary caretaking duties while Charley focused on selling work to support the family.
Brett says he often thinks about what his mother might have given up to raise him in an era when women were expected to stay home and take care of their children.
“I feel like I owe her a debt, which maybe sounds a little crazy,” he says. “But she gave a lot of her time she could have been creating to myself and Charley, and didn’t create as much art as I think she could have or would have. I think it was a function of society at the time… it’s sobering to think about what was sacrificed.”
But he says nurturing was also a big part of who she was, noting she kept a diary where she detailed much of Brett’s early life in it.
“It wasn’t all about work for her,” he says. “She gave a lot of love to a lot of people.”
As they settled into married life, Charley's career blossomed while the limelight largely evaded Edie, something her son and Muente believe was at least in part a reflection of the deep gender biases of the time.
“I don’t think she went around with a chip on her shoulder,” Brett recalls. “She was too busy making art for that. But I remember one instance where someone had asked Charley to come and give a talk. And they said, 'Edie, you can come too and pour tea.’ That set off quite a row between my parents at that time. Charley didn’t think he should turn down the invitation, but he was horrified that she felt so overlooked.”
'Edie kept moving through things'
Matt Distel is director of The Carnegie, an art museum in Covington, Kentucky. He's studied Edie's career closely. He agrees sexism kept Edie from the limelight. He also says her adventurous spirit as an artist bouncing between themes and mediums could explain why she's not more well known.
“Charley found his niche early on in the commercial world,” he says. “Edie kept moving through things. She was harder to pin down, and so it becomes a much more complex story to tell. But to me, it’s a much more interesting story to tell.”
One window into Edie’s subtle, layered approach to her art-making comes through her long series of acrylic paintings depicting Biblical stories. There’s a beautiful, humorous depiction of the Garden of Eden, Joseph’s coat of many colors, and the tale of Samson and Delilah, in which a strongman has his hair cut, ending his nearly-supernatural strength.
“They’re almost like early avatars,” Muente says of Edie’s simplified depictions of these scenes. “They have just enough of the attributes of the person to let you know who they are. To see Delilah’s head just peeking in, and the hair fallen to the floor — it’s very funny, and I think a little feminist.”
Brett says these paintings show Edie’s wit, though sometimes they’re misunderstood. He says he knew she was a spiritual person from her attendance at a Unitarian church during his childhood. But in the course of curators researching the show at the Taft, he learned how deeply she held her religious faith.
“I think they were viewed as almost making fun of religion,” he says of the Biblical paintings. “I don’t think she ever meant that. They were the images in her mind that were inspired by those stories, is what she was trying to get at.”
That ambiguity and complexity — something both sincere and irreverent — is a very modern vibe, Distel at Covington’s Carnegie Museum says.
“Her work is slippery in a way that is hard to pinpoint,” he says. “The individual works are sometimes hard to pin down, and the overall body of work is hard to pin down, which is what makes it so interesting to me. I like art that’s a moving target, and that’s what Edie’s work is. Once you think you’ve figured it out, a curveball shows up. She’s trying something else.”
Edie followed that winding artistic path until her death in 2010. Art lovers will get the rare chance to see the whole sweep of her career at the Taft Museum's exhibition, Edie McKee Harper: Modernist at Play, which opens Oct. 17 and runs through January.
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