Biography
Marianne Appel was born in New York in 1913. She attended Sarah Lawrence College from 1932-1934, studying painting with Bradley Walker Tomlin, sculpture with Gleb W. Derujinksy, and textiles with Lucie G. Jowers. Her freshman work was included in a student exhibit at the Montrose Gallery in New York. In the summers of 1933 and 1934 she studied with Judson Smith and Peppino Mangravite at the Woodstock School of Painting, where she met the artist Austin Mecklem, then married to (but separated from) the sculptor Hannah Small.
Appel's painting "Shade Trees" was completed for a project in Ulster County, NY in 1936. She and Mecklem married in 1936, and the couple lived in Mecklem's cabin at The Maverick Colony just outside of Woodstock, NY for the next decade. In 1937 the couple was selected to be part of a group of a dozen artists to familiarize Americans with life in Alaska. They spent half a year in the Ketchikan and Juneau, with Appel creating landscapes in ink and gouache.
Appel's works from Alaska were featured in a solo show at the Walker Gallery in Manhattan in 1938. The same year she won the Woodstock Art Association's Annual Prize. Her work was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1938-1944 and at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1938-1942. She was mentioned in the book "American Painting Today," published in 1939 and was included in the 18th International Watercolor Exhibition (1939) at the Art Institute. In a national competition to decorate the Carville Leprosarium outside of New Orleans, three of Appel's works were selected. Her painting "Winter '39" was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1940, and she exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington in 1940-1941.
Appel's mural "Rural Highway" was completed for the Middleport, NY Post Office in 1941, and her work was included in a traveling show of the American Federation of Arts in 1942. The April 24, 1944 issue of Life Magazine featured Appel's painting "Juneau, Alaska." Her seascapes were shown in the exhibit "Painting in the United States, 1944" at the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh.
With the birth of her daughters Margaret Merrill "Pixie" Mecklem (1942) and Sarah Greer Mecklem (1944), Appel wrote her first children's book "The Story of Juliet (1945). She designed a War Memorial that was installed on the Woodstock Village Green in 1947.
Following the death of Mecklem in 1951 and his memorial service in 1953, Appel took her children to New York. There she did freelance design work and assisted the muralists Anton Refregier and Symeon Shimin. She began to work for Bil and Cora Baird's marionette company, which led to a job with Jim Henson Associates. Appel married the actor and puppeteer Carl Harms in 1960 and took the professional name Marianne Harms. Under that name she worked as an illustrator and puppet designer. She designed and fabricated puppets for Jim Henson in his pilot the The Muppets and collaborated with him on numerous television specials and movies. She died in Woodstock in 1988.
Critical Analysis
There is a characteristic palette and a characteristic line that make Appel's work identifiable. Her landscapes, such as "Ebb Tide, Juneau," may include a large amount of territory, but she still manages to include detailed renderings of houses and - if you look carefully enough - some people. The effect of the hazier landforms and the precise buildings serves to emphasize the vast scope of the landscape around Juneau and provides an element of drama to the painting. Similar effects are present in the mural she did with Austin Mecklem for the Wrangell, AK Post Office, making her contribution to the work very evident.
Appel's mural for the Middleport, NY Post Office involves a very different, far less dramatic, landscape. There are no mountains, no ocean, only the rural highway of the title leading off to the distant horizon. But a meticulously drawn house and barn dominate the foreground, with a few tiny figures playing their roles in the domestic affairs of the farm. The mural is exceptionally bright, in part due to an excellent restoration in the 1990s, but also due to Appel's choice of a lively palette.
Elements of this great color sense are present in Appel's 1938 self-portrait "Me." Here she chose not to do a precise rendering of her own face and arms, but provided drama to the painting in the way the stripes across her dress are painted. The result is a figure that almost leaps off the canvas in the presentation of the dress, but which remains a bit reserved and enigmatic in the way she presents her face and body.
Murals
- Wrangell, Alaska - Post Office: Old Town in Alaska
- Middleport, New York - Post Office: Rural Highway
References
- Marianne Appel (Wikipedia).
- Marianne Appel (Lincoln Glenn).
- Marianne Greer Appel (Find a Grave).
- Marianne Harms (Muppet Wiki).
- Overlooked: Woodstock Women Artists (Woodstock School of Art).