Women Breaking Through Flora Crockett (1892-1979)

Flora Crockett (1892-1979), Untitled, c. 1940s - 1950s, oil on canvas board, 18 x 24 in.

In celebration of Women’s History Month, we are sharing breakthrough moments of some of the gallery's women artists.

When she arrived in Paris in 1924, Ohio-born Flora Crockett had already trained as an artist and worked as an art administrator, but she had yet to fully focus on her art practice. That changed when she joined Fernand Léger’s Académie Moderne in 1926. Although she had previously studied at the Sorbonne and the Louvre Museum School, with Léger, she found an academy that “gave to us the consistent training and the constructive modern viewpoint such as inspired us in the advanced art gallery exhibits . . . we wished for a really live criticism that could give us insight, individual development and not make us copyists and imitators.”

Académie Moderne exhibition brochure.

In addition to studying with Léger, Crockett also served as director of the Académie Moderne for five years. Working among an international student body with Léger and Amédée Ozenfant, who had also joined the faculty, was critical to her artistic formation. Crockett returned to the United States in the late 1930s after spending a decade in France. While her highly innovative abstractions of the 1940s and 1950s go well beyond her Parisian studies, they are grounded in the teachings of Académie Moderne, which crucially oriented Crockett’s artistic practice.

Crockett (far left) with Léger (center) in his class at Académie Moderne.

Flora Crockett's work is represented in the collection of Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, and is also on view at the Colby College Art Museum, Waterville, Maine, and the Cummer Museum of Art, Jacksonville, Florida. To view more of Crockett's paintings available through the gallery, please visit our website.