Lucy L'Engle

[8] Although not mentioned in 1922, her grandson reports that in 1909 she may have attended a session of Charles Webster Hawthorne's Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown.

[5] In 1922 she participated in a joint exhibition with Florance Waterbury, an artist, who, like herself, came from a prosperous and well-connected New York family and who, like herself, had studied at the Hawthorne summer school.

[note 2] The critic for the New York Times was interested in her handling of form and color,[3] while the Evening Post contrasted Waterbury's decorative paintings with L'Engle's modernistic ones,[7] and the Evening Telegram admired the "rare personal quality and a freshness of viewpoint, combined with an unusual sense of coloring.

[5][note 4] In 1925 L'Engle was invited to show in a Parisian exhibition of Cubist paintings called L'Art Aujourd'hui that included the principal French exponents of that style.

[5] With her in the 1931 show were Dorothy Brett, Caroline Durieux, Elinor Gobson, Lois Lenski, Alice Newton, Amelie Pumpelly, Ruth Starr Rose, and Helen Woods Rous.

[5] Appearing with her husband William L'Engle in 1956 at the Bodley Gallery, she showed composite works that were called montages at the time and that have since come to be known as combines.

"[26][note 7] She had a solo exhibition at the Lynn Kottler Gallery in 1962[5] and in 1965 showed drawings of archaic Greek sculpture at the Hotel Barbizon.

Writing in 1928 of a complex work showing an interior view with mirror and a through view to a tall building outside, Elizabeth L. Cary of the New York Times credited L'Engle with a "clear precision" and said the work "succeeds quite remarkably in keeping everything in its separate plane without insistence on planar perspective.

"[2] In 1932, when L'Engle showed with Adelaide Lawson and Alice Newton a critic for the New York Evening Post said "her interest in abstractions has enabled her to build up a solid structure of organic design.

"[34] The painting, "Two Nuns," (at left) shows L'Engle's representational style of the 1930s and 1940s and her "Graffiti," (at right) is an example of a pure abstraction from the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Later in the 1950s she made montages incorporating metal foil, wire, wood, plaster, and broken glass as well as paint.

Her parents usually spent the warm months in their mansion in Mount Kisco, New York and the cold ones at a club on Jekyll Island, Georgia, leaving their Manhattan apartment available for the L'Engles to use.

In 1923 the family spent the summer in Cavalaire, a small coastal town near the Côte d'Azur in Provence, with Albert Gleizes and his wife.