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A talented and serious painter who assimilated avant-garde precepts of color and form to create a highly individual style, Patrick Bruce is recognized today as a pioneer of American Modernism.
A great-great-grandson of Patrick Henry, an important figure in the American Revolution, Bruce was born on a plantation at Long Island in Campbell County, Virginia, into an affluent and aristocratic family. As a boy growing up in Richmond, he became interested in art, copying reproductions from art books and perusing the ancestral portraits that graced the walls of antebellum homes of family and friends. During his teens he attended evening classes under the academic painter Edward Valentine at the Art Club of Richmond (1898-1902) and received instruction in mechanical drawing and drafting techniques at the Virginia Mechanics Institute (1900-01).
In 1902, Bruce went to New York, continuing his training at the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, and Kenneth Hayes Miller. During this period, he fraternized with a coterie of young artists that included Edward Hopper and Guy Pène du Bois. Few examples of his paintings from this period are extant, but Bruce appears to have worked in a fluid, painterly manner informed by the figural style of his teachers, Henri in particular.
Seeking to expand his artistic horizons, Bruce traveled to Paris, settling in the French capital by early 1904. For the next two years he continued to work in a Henri-inspired mode. However, after meeting the Canadian Impressionist James Wilson Morrice, he began to take a closer look at the art of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, going on to evolve a style that suggests the impact of painters such as Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, and especially Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Other factors contributed to Bruce’s growing concern with Modernism, including his friendship with the American expatriate painter Arthur B. Frost, Jr., who shared his interest in vanguard art. By the end of 1906, Bruce had also met Gertrude, Leo, Michael and Sara Stein, leading collectors of contemporary European art, and by 1907 he had become a regular visitor to their salon. Through the Stein connection, Bruce was introduced to the Fauvist painter Henri Matisse, who would exert a great influence on his work. Indeed, in January of 1908, Bruce enrolled in the famous Académie Matisse at the Couvent du Sacré Coeur, where he studied until 1911. Inspired by his teacher’s use of rich color harmonies, he became “one of the early and most ardent Matisse pupils” who made “his own little Matisses.” 1 Following his teacher’s advice, Bruce also familiarized himself with the late still lifes of the Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, embracing that artist’s emphasis on form, structure and carefully-articulated compositions. He went on to paint landscapes, leaf studies and remarkable still lifes of fruit and flowers in which he combined Cézanne’s use of multiple viewpoints with bright, interwoven hues.
Bruce’s belief in the power of color was further enhanced in 1912, when he became friendly with Robert and Sonia Delauney, exponents of Orphic, or colored, Cubism. He soon became a full-fledged Modernist, painting dynamic abstractions with brilliant colors and shifting planes akin to the Synchromist paintings of Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald Wright. By around 1917, Bruce had moved on to a more classical style, producing hard-edged, purist still lifes, composed of geometric elements such as blocks, wedges and half-cylinders, in which he conjoined the stylistic innovations of late Cubism with the pictorial concerns of Cézanne and Matisse. As scholars have noted, his late work anticipated the colorful geometric abstractions of a later generation of American painters who came of age during the 1960s, among them Al Held and Frank Stella.
Bruce was a noted figure in the Parisian art world, exhibiting at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants and associating with prominent members of the School of Paris, ranging from Francis Picabia and Pablo Picasso to Marc Chagall, Man Ray, and Jacques Lipchitz. In the United States, he participated in the Armory Show (International Exhibition of Modern Art) of 1913 and had a one-man exhibition at the Montross Gallery in 1916. However, despite the inventive nature of his work, Bruce sold few of his paintings. His disappointments were further compounded in 1919, when his wife and son left him and returned to the United States.
During the 1920s, Bruce lived a quiet and reclusive existence, supporting himself by dealing antique furniture. Although he continued to paint, he rarely exhibited; instead, he showed his canvases to close friends such as Henri-Pierre Roche, the author of Jules and Jim, who was vital in preserving much of the artist’s late work.
Bruce remained in Paris until 1933, when he moved to the town of Versailles and abandoned art altogether. Frustrated and discouraged, and feeling that his work was misunderstood, he destroyed most of his paintings from the 1920s, with the exception of about two dozen pieces which he gave to Roche. He returned to New York in the summer of 1936; on November 12th of that year he took his own life at the age of fifty-five.
Examples of Bruce’s work can be found in major public collections throughout the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; and the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts. A retrospective exhibition of Bruce’s work was held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 1979.
CL
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1 Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, from Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, edited by C. Van Vechten (New York, 1962), p. 140.
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