Florence Brillinger

[5] In 1911, Brillinger took a job as a designer for J. Horace Rudy, maker of stained glass windows in York.

[6] At about the time she joined the firm, Rudy produced a window for the Heinz headquarters building in Pittsburgh.

She was one of the first women admitted to the York Art Association and showed a charcoal study in the fourth annual exhibition in 1911.

[17][18] By 1931, they had left Knoxville, moved to New York, and then began living year-round in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Fritz's brother, Heinrich, ran an art school and artists' supply store.

[16] During the late 1930s, she painted in a gestural and anthropomorphic abstract style which was said to be influenced by her socialist beliefs.

Her mother was Margaret Catherine Gable Brillinger (1863-1950), Her father ran a general store in Emigsville until 1920 and then worked in local car dealerships.

[33] She had a brother, Harry E. Brillinger (1894-1918), a chemist who died in an explosion at a plant that made TNT for use in World War I.

[34] Brillinger's husband, Fritz (Frederick William Pfeiffer, 1889-1960) was, like her, an artist who made both semi-abstract and pure abstract paintings.

His work received greater recognition than hers and, unlike her, he frequently taught art students.

She attended a socialist function in 1915 and, in the late 1930s, joined a Communist front organization, the American Artists' Congress.

She obtained a divorce in Reno, Nevada, in Aug 1941 and a year later he married Hope Voorhees, a former student of his.

[25] Late in life, Brillinger moved to Andover, Massachusetts, to the home where her unmarried son, Sigmund, lived in retirement.