BIOGRAPHY

 

Marion Huse’s career as an artist spans several decades and multiple art movements from regionalism and American scene painting of the 1930s, to her expressionistic style of the 1950s. She was deeply involved in the Works Progress Administration, the founder of an art school and a pioneering innovator of serigraphy.

​

Marion Huse was born in born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1896. She attended the New School of Design in Boston and the Carnegie Institude of Art and Technology in Pittsburgh. Like many New England artists, Huse participated in summer classes at the Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown under Charles Hawthorn.

​

Huse moved to Springfield, Massachusetts in 1924. She ingratiated herself with the lively Springfield arts community, becoming an active member of the Springfield Art League and the Springfield Artists Guild. Huse founded the Springfield Art School in 1925, where she was both the administrator and head instructor.

​

Like many artists of the day, Huse was involved with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) throughout the 1930s. She was commissioned by the Public Works of Art Projects (PWAP) to paint the portrait of Springfield’s mayor. In 1936, Huse served as a non-relief artist under the WPA. She became a supervisor of the program in the Springfield area. The WPA and the overall interest in American Scene Painting of the ‘30s greatly influenced Huse’s painting style and subject matter.

​

Huse was a pioneer of serigraphy. She joined the National Serigraph Society of New York which afforded her many opportunities to exhibit her screenprints in various museums and institutions. Another avenue for Huse’s creativity was the monotype, a medium which involves directly applying paint on a plate and transferring and imprinting that to a sheet of paper. This technique generally only creates one impression.

​

Huse lived in various places throughout her life including Albany and Boston. She traveled extensively to places such as the Caribbean, Maine, New Mexico and Quebec. In the early 1930s, Huse acquired a summer studio in Pownal, Vermont and became a member of the Southern Vermont Artists Association. The natural beauty of Vermont’s rolling hills and grand vistas had a profound influence upon her work. Many of her paintings depict the everyday life of rural Vermont and its people such as scenes of farming, daily chores, roadside attractions and the overall goings-on of small-town life.

​

Huse married Dr. Robert Barstow in 1944 and moved her studio to his farm on Mount Anthony Road in Pownal. In 1946, Huse joined her husband who had been stationed in Europe in the Army Medical Corps. Having direct exposure to European Modernism and the School of Paris influenced Huse’s artistic style and approach to painting. Huse also became interested in Cubism and the Post-war art movements emendating out of New York.

​

Huse’s paintings became more abstract throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s. Her color palette became more saturated and mark making more gestural. Rich impasto brush work also dominates much of her work. Many of her later paintings appear more like abstract compositions, including many of her landscape paintings of Vermont. The rolling hills and sweeping vistas of Pownal were consistent subjects within her body of work. Huse remained active in her later years. She died at age seventy in 1967.

​

The Marion Huse Papers are archived in the Smithsonian Institution. Her works are included in the collections of the Fuller Museum in Massachusetts, the Library of Congress, the Lyman Orton Collection in Vermont, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the U.S. General Services Administration Fine Arts Collection, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.