[Deathwatch] Quita Brodhead, artist, 101

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

American artist Quita Brodhead dies at 101 
Thu Sep 19, 5:45 PM ET

BRYN MAWR, Pennsylvania - Quita Brodhead, a painter whose vivid,
colorful work evolved over 80 years from still lifes to abstracts, has
died. She was 101. 

Brodhead, who lived in Wayne, Pennsylvania, died Sept. 4 of colon
cancer at Bryn Mawr Hospital. 

A retrospective of her work opened around her 100th birthday, March 5,
2001, at the Hollis Taggart Galleries in New York City. Her work can be
found at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Delaware Art Museum, the
Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York, and
elsewhere. 

Brodhead was born Marie Waggaman Berl in Wilmington, Delaware. To avoid
confusion with her mother, Marie, her father William called her
Mariequita (little Marie in Spanish), and the nickname "Quita" stuck.
She signed her paintings with the name for decades. 

Following high school, she entered the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine
Arts, studying classical portraiture, sculpture and painting. She then
took a sketch class by noted colorist Arthur B. Carles where a lifelong
love of color was born. Carles had lived in Paris where he studied
Matisse, Picasso and Braque and Cezanne. 

In a 1997 interview, she said Carles preferred clean lines. "I was on
the smudgy side," she said. "He told me to go home and wash dishes."
Carles later became her mentor. 

Brodhead graduated from the academy in 1925 and lived and painted in
France. In 1927, she married Truxtun Read Brodhead and moved to Wayne.
She continued painting while raising three children, and, with a
friend, opened the Wayne Art Center in 1930. 

She had her first solo exhibition in 1934 at the Bryn Mawr Art Center.
She was called a "buoyant feminine talent," and her canvasses were said
to "have a poetic quality" after a 1938 solo exhibition in New York. 

But by the end of the 1940s, with a failing marriage — she divorced in
1953 — she returned to France, and lived in Europe for more than a
decade with her children. Much of her painting during this time was
representational — portraits, nudes, still lifes and landscapes — but
her use of abstract elements was becoming more prevalent, as seen in
"Conshohocken" (1949). 

By the late 1950s, she moved to Italy where her work became more
abstract and elements of cubism began to appear in such paintings as
"Untitled From Rome" (1959). 

Survivors include daughter Edith Good, sons Truxtun E. and Charles, and
several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. 

Memorial donations may be made to the Wayne Art Center.