Juliette Steele

Geometric Abstraction Oil Painting on Masonite by Juliette Steele, Framed

circe 1950

Juliette Steele, an American artist, was an accomplished printmaker, painter and teacher. Steele was part of the Geometric Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism movements. Her peers included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Clyfford Still. Steele was born in 1909 in Union City, New Jersey. In the late 1920s, she moved to New York to study art and fashion design at the Traphagen School of Design. A decade later, she moved to San Francisco with her husband Edward Steele and earned a bachelor of arts degree from San Francisco State College. In the 1940s, Steele found inspiration from the new city and produced a series of lithographs depicting San Francisco landmarks. At the same time, she earned a master of fine arts from Stanford University and continued her studies at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Here, she studied with Ray Bertrand and Clay Spohn, followed closely by summer with Stanley William Hayter, from whom she learned the process of intaglio printmaking. Steele first exhibited with the San Francisco Art Association in 1945 and was represented by her lithograph, Fisherman’s Wharf, in the “Ninth Annual Exhibition of Drawings and Prints”. She exhibited in the annual exhibitions through 1948, her two abstract surrealist lithographs namely, Cyclonic Night and Fire Dance. Her first solo exhibition was mounted at the Artists Guild Gallery in San Francisco in 1947 and the following year an exhibition of her prints was featured at the Weyhe Gallery in New York. She was a member of the San Francisco Art Association, the San Francisco Society of Women Artists and the Laguna Beach Art Association. She also served as president of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. Steele returned to her alma mater at the California School of Fine Arts, where she taught lithography and etching alongside other faculty such as Ansel Adams, Richard Diebenkorn and Clyfford Still. Her works can be found in the collection of the Laguna Art Museum, as well as in numerous publications, including Painting and Sculpture: The San Francisco Art Association in 1958, Who Was Who in American Art, 1564–1975 in 1999, Artists in California: 1786–1940 in 2002, Davenport’s Art Reference: The Gold Edition in 2005 and Emerging from the Shadows, Volume Four: A Survey Of Women Artists Working in California, 1860–1960 in 2015. Juliette Steele died in 1980 in California.