Jacqueline Morreau was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 1929, attending the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and moving to London in 1972. In her work she often reinterpreted ancient myths placing them in 20th century contexts, using disturbing figures as an allegory for the values of contemporary society. She also advanced the feminist art movement in Britain by fighting the sexism restricting women’s access to exhibition spaces and by staging two important touring exhibitions of figurative work by women artists.
Artist, curator and art teacher, Jacqueline Morreau was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA on 18 October 1929. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1943, where she attended the Chouinard Art Institute, winning a scholarship to the Jepson Art Institute in 1946. In 1949 she spent a year studying in France before returning to Los Angeles. In 1955 she separated from her first husband and moved to San Francisco with her son, where she qualified as a medical illustrator in 1958. She subsequently attended postgraduate courses in etching at Berkeley and San Francisco Art Institute and in 1967 she moved to Massachusetts. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, she focused primarily on drawing and printmaking. In the 1960s her work dealt with the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Second World War and the consequences of the Vietnam War.
In 1959 she married Patrick Morreau and in 1972 they settled in London, where she took art classes in Camden and began to exhibit and produce portfolios of prints with publishers, including Paupers Press. Her drawings also appeared on book covers published by the Women’s Press and Bloodaxe Books, and Scarecrow Press in the USA. She held her first solo exhibition, Drawn from Life, at the Women’s Arts Alliance in London in 1978. In 1982 she exhibited at the Pentonville Gallery, The Tribune review noting parallels between her ‘large drawings, full of vitality’ and the work of Kathe Kollwitz, although Morreau ‘is obsessed by fear and apprehension more than by grief and anguish’ (Richards 1982, p. 7). In the exhibition Paradise Now at Odette Gilbert Gallery (1990) Morreau focused on the human body and the complexities of cultural identity. She reinterpreted ancient myths and legends, placing them in 20th century contexts and using disturbing, distorting figures as an allegory for the values of contemporary society. Morreau often chose mythical women – Eve, Pandora, Persephone and Psyche – as figures expressive of women’s agency and independence, and the ways in which such agency has been labelled as disobedient or disruptive. The Pink Magazine noted that in front of her painting the viewers ‘feel that we are both the voyeur and paradoxically the subject of the canvas providing us with a mirror image. The past, present and future intermingle in Morreau’s work and we are very aware that these paintings are the work of a contemporary artist yet her originality beguiles us with her traditional style’ (Jamieson 1990, p. 13). Morreau believed that a use of mythological subject matter had particular relevance ‘since myths have always been rewritten for whoever’s in power. So now let’s re-write them from our point of view, and try to recover some of the original positive messages of women that used to exist’ (Buck 1989, p. 21).
Morreau’s representation of the human figure was informed by a broad range of influences from the twentieth century, including the German painter and sculptor Max Beckman, whom she considered the most important artist of the twentieth century, and painters in the USA such as Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, whom she described as getting ‘at the feeling of narrative without its overt subject matter’ (Morreau, artist’s statement, in ICA 1980, n.p.). Morreau also advanced the feminist art movement in Britain by fighting against the sexism restricting women’s access to exhibition spaces and by staging two touring exhibitions of figurative work by women artists: Women’s Images of Men (also co-editing the accompanying book with art critic Sarah Kent) and About Time, co-curated with Catherine Elwes, Pat Whiteread and Joyce Agee, which opened at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1980, and then toured internationally. Morreau held a retrospective at Hull's Ferens gallery in 1994. She also promoted women artists in her work as a curator of the Wales Drawing Biennale and as a trustee of the Rootstein Hopkins Foundation. In an interview she declared that ‘I’m not just a woman painter; I’m also a political artist. Maybe I’m a didactic person but I think art is about teaching’ (Buck 1989, p. 21).
From the 1990s onwards, she was visiting lecturer in drawing at London’s Royal College of Art, Oxford Brookes University, and Regent’s College (now Regent’s University), where she was a professor of drawing until 1998. Jacqueline Morreau died in London, England on 13 July 2016. A retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Nunnery Gallery at Bow Arts in London in 2017. Morreau's oral testimony is held at the British Library’s Artists’ Lives archive, and her work is in many UK public collections, including the Ben Uri Collection, British Museum, Arts Council, Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Jacqueline Morreau in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Jacqueline Morreau]
Publications related to [Jacqueline Morreau] in the Ben Uri Library