Edith Branson
She was intensely committed to her craft but made little effort to show in commercial galleries or sell her paintings by other means.
Although her work appeared mostly in extremely large group exhibitions, it was nonetheless frequently singled out for comment in the local press.
Edith Branson has been delving in color for fifteen years, chiefly studying with Charles Martin of Columbia, who gave her the courage to work by herself.
She did not enroll in an art school but studied informally with Charles J. Martin, A. S. Baylinson, and Kenneth Hayes Miller.
[12][note 5] In 1930 Marion Clyde McCarroll, a critic for the New York Post, set a mildly humorous tone for subsequent reviews by making fun of the vague titles she supplied for the two abstractions she submitted.
[15] In 1932 the Brooklyn Daily Eagle's William Weer chided of Branson for calling an abstraction "very conservative,"[16] and Edward Alden Jewell of the New York Times said the same painting was "simply ornamental disintegration.
[16] The ability of her paintings to stand out from the hundreds of others on show in the society's exhibitions most likely came from their quality as works of art rather than any efforts on her part to promote them.
[1]: 36 The selection was significant in that the jurors chose paintings that were broadly representative of art in America, including works by traditionalists as well as moderns, artists with established reputations as well as lesser-known ones.
[note 7] In 1938 she showed paintings in an exhibition held by a Depression-era work relief organization, New York's Municipal Art Committee.
[1]: 13 This form of self-instruction followed advice from two instructors at Columbia's Teachers College who were also members of the Society of Independent Artists, Arthur Wesley Dow and Charles Martin.
In 1935 the introductory statement to an art exhibition catalog maintained that she was "working in purely abstract forms in which she feels she can best convey her joy in color.
[1]: 6 The couple were married in Chapel Hill and initially lived in Atlanta where Smith was an attorney with a local law firm.
[28] Smith served on an Armed Forces committee to prepare a plan for giving military personnel educational opportunities at the close of World War II and was chairman of the New York State Law Revision Commission in 1947.
