Indiana Gyberson (1879–circa 1944)
Although Indiana Gyberson received no shortage of critical attention in Chicago during the 1920s, few details of her life are known. Compounding the mystery surrounding her, Gyberson’s name is rendered variously as Gyborson (in recent auction records) and as Giberson (the spelling she adopted temporarily in the late 1910s). The artist is said to have been born in Brooklyn and studied with William Merritt Chase. In 1912, she lived in Paris, where a severe eye injury forced her to adopt a new style. Gyberson was living in the Sherwood Studios in New York when she first exhibited in the annual American art show at the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1904. By 1918, she had moved to Chicago, where she was a resident of the Tree Studios building and a participant in its lively social life. Her 1918 debut in the Art Institute’s Chicago and Vicinity exhibitions was favorably noticed in the Fine Arts Journal as “declar[ing] individuality in no uncertain language.”[i]
From the beginning, Gyberson specialized in paintings of solitary seminude women posed in the studio with exotic oriental objects and costumes; she also exhibited a few portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. She was most active during the 1920s; in 1920 and 1924, her paintings were reproduced in the exhibition catalogues for the Art Institute’s Chicago and Vicinity exhibitions. In 1922, she completed a landscape mural for the Chicago home of retail executive and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. The same year, she reportedly went to New York with a contract from a gallery there, but she retained her Tree Studios workspace. Gyberson was an exhibiting member of the conservative Association of Chicago Painters and Sculptors and of the Chicago Galleries Association, where her paintings won prizes in 1926 and 1928. In 1925 and 1926, she also exhibited in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’s annual exhibitions. The last year Gyberson exhibited either with the Chicago Galleries Association or at the Art Institute was 1928; her address is not listed in the catalogue for the Chicago and Vicinity show that year. By the time Chicago painter Anna Lynch reported Gyberson’s death in 1944, the artist had been living in the eastern United States for several years, but no record remains of her later career.[ii]Chicago Tribune art critic Eleanor Jewett, who had often praised Gyberson’s paintings, remembered them as “among the most beautiful and original produced by the Tree Studio group.”[iii]
[i] Evelyn Marie Stuart, “Chicago Artists’ Twenty-Second Annual Exhibition,” Fine Arts Journal 36 (March 1918): 7-8.
[ii] Eleanor Jewett, “Fort Sheridan Soldiers Form an Art Group,” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 24, 1944.
[iii] Ibid.
Indiana Gyberson, Hula Girl, undated
Oil on canvas, 16 by 11¾ inches
Indiana Gyberson’s image of a young woman in a grass skirt seductively posed against a vivid blue, white, and gold background is one of several images she painted of “hula girls” positioned among exotic objects. Bare-breasted except for a flower lei, the seated model strikes a languid pose as she glances to the side. Her mass of loose dark hair enlivened with bright ornaments is set against the shimmering, uneven surface of the gold drapery in the background. At the lower left stands a tall ceramic jar with a dark reflective surface. Throughout the painting, thick, heavily worked pigment creates a rich surface effect that complements the image’s evocation of oriental luxury.
Gyberson’s images of exotic women and objects evince her era’s fascination with so-called primitivism, particularly as associated with the remote South Seas. Performance exhibits at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco launched a national craze for the indigenous music and dance of Hawaii, including its tradition of hula. Where artists such as Paul Gauguin used the inspiration of an exotic Pacific culture to explore formal modernism, Gyberson instead drew on the conventions of the studio-composed still life and a penumbra of rich, shadowy tones to emphasize the foreignness of her dark-skinned, exotically dressed models. Reviewers found her approach itself seductive. One observed that “her pictures have the dramatic quality of nightborn thoughts. . . . A shadowy feeling pervades them and yet they impress one as being brilliant in color.”[i] The jewel-like effect of Gyberson’s paintings is enhanced by their relatively small scale: in intimate proximity, they function, like the women they picture, as exquisite decorative objects.
[i] Evelyn Marie Stuart, “Chicago Artists’ Twenty-Second Annual Exhibition,” Fine Arts Journal 36 (March 1918): 7.