Wilhelmina Weber Furlong
(1878-1962) St. Louis, Missouri
Was a German American artist and teacher.
Among America’s earliest avant-garde elite modernist painters Weber Furlong was a major American artist who pioneered modern impressionistic and modern expressionistic still life painting at the turn of the twentieth century’s American modernist movement. She has been called the first female modernist painter in the early American Modernism scene, and she represents the struggles of many women artists in the late 1800s and early 1900’s as they became subjugated to the many realists who opposed the modernist movement and serious women artists.
Beginning in 1892 her teachers included Emil Carlsen, William Merritt Chase, and Edmund H. Wuerpel with significant time in Paris from 1898 to 1906. She was present at the Salon d’Automne or Autumn Salon for three years and she knew Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and others who exhibited at the Paris Salon.
In the American modernism movement she painted between 1892 and 1962 where she thrived during the modernist movement in St. Louis, New York, and Paris from 1897 to 1906. She painted in Mexico City from 1906 to 1913 and again in New York City from 1913 to 1950. It was in New York, that she helped to set the stage for the climax of the American modern art movement.
Her popular Manhattan, New York City studio and art gallery which exhibited her work was described by the New York Tribune as “Futurist” on May 10, 1914 she is also pictured among her many works.