Irene Rice Pereira:; An Examination of Her Paintings and Philosophy

The desire to understand one's position in the whole scheme of the cosmos is as ancient as humankind itself. Throughout history, artists have devised various means to reconcile their pictorial views of the universe with prevailing cosmological theories. However, only in recent years have art historians explored the relationship between twentieth-century graphic representations of the universe and the cosmological theories proposed by contemporary scientists and philosophers. One artist, whose work should not be overlooked in this context, is the American painter Irene Rice Pereira (1902-1971). The main purpose of this study is to show how Pereira grappled with contemporary developments in science and psychology to formulate a philosophical framework uniting human experience, art, and the infinite expanses of the macrocosm and microcosm into a whole. In this effort, she renewed ties to an artistic tradition that had been virtually severed in the West. She reinvested art with cosmic meaning by creating symbols of the structure of the universe, somewhat analogous to Buddhist mandalas. Yet, the foundations of her beliefs were firmly rooted in contemporary theories. An examination of her paintings, writings, and library holdings reveals that the philosophy she began to promote in the 1950s was primarily dependent upon the utopian views of Bauhaus artists and the psychological theories of Carl G. Jung. Through Jung, she encountered the symbolism of the alchemists, in whose work she found a metaphor for the investigations of modern scientists. Through contact with her third husband, George Reavey, she was led to study Neo-Platonic mysticism, upon which her own light metaphysics was based. Finally, in the work of the Neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer, she found a model upon which she based her expanded views concerning the evolution of culture.