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 1915 - 2014 (98 år)
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| Navn |
Margaret Astor Drayton |
| Kælenavn |
Peggy |
| Fødsel |
20 dec. 1915 |
| Køn |
Kvinde |
| Titel |
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| Link |
https://www.mutualart.com/Artist/Peggy-Reventlow/C1DC03926432CD96/Artworks
https://www.invaluable.com/artist/reventlow-margaret-dhmm1l2wkd/sold-at-auction-prices/?hasImage=true |
| Død |
14 jun. 2014 |
Litchfield, Litchfield County, Connecticut, USA  |
| Begravelse |
East Cemetery Litchfield, Litchfield County, Connecticut, USA |
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| Notater |
Peggy Reventlow was in her 40s before she picked up some Plasticene modeling clay that had been given to her young son, Richard. On a whim, she started to sculpt a bust of her husband, who was then sick in bed.
“It looked just like him,” she reported. “I had been born with art, but I had never thought of it as a career. My parents had no interest in art, nor did my brother, but sculpting was just so easy forme. In the beginning I did heads and then I expanded to animals and people.”
The chance encounter with sculpting offered the socialite heiress a new direction for her life, a direction she has pursued with vigor for the past 50 years and continues as she nears her 95th birthday on Dec. 20.
Mrs. Reventlow, who maintains homes in Litchfield and Florida, has recently endured a spate of ill health that prevents her from climbing stairs and was looking forward last week to returning to the Sunshine State, where she could make use of her ground-floor studio. “I will do more sculpting,” she said, “because it is easy to put a tray to work on across the arms of my wheelchair.”
Soon after she discovered her latent power to sculpt, her artistic career blossomed, eventually bringing her exhibitions in New York, Palm Beach, London, Northwest Connecticut and Nantucket. She studied briefly with Oliver Barrett and Felix de Weldon and had her first solo exhibition at Hammer Galleries in New York City in 1961. In 1964, she had a solo show at Tiffany and Co. and later her work was represented by the Palm Beach Galleries and at The Alwin Gallery in London, as well as in other places. Her sculpture, which reflects her lifelong love of the outdoors and sports, has been describedby critic William D. Allen as similar to the noted German Expressionists Ernst Barlach and Wilhelm Lehmbruck.
Mrs. Reventlow reported that, oddly, her style is very like that of a distant cousin. “I saw one of her sculptures that was very like mine,” she said. “It was so like my work, I thought, ‘How did theyget one of my sculptures.”
Several of her sculptures grace her Litchfield home, including the attenuated figure of a rearing horse—her latest work. She explains that she likes to work in wax to make models for her sculptures because the material is “so free.” The wax models are then transformed into clay molds and cast in bronze.
“I have made quite a few larger sculptures out of stainless steel,” she said, “but that is very difficult and has to be done at special foundries.”
Mrs. Reventlow was thoroughly enjoying her new-found role as a successful artist in the late 1960s when she was invited to lunch by the secretary of the Hammer Gallery in New York City. She was preparing for a new show there and thought the lunch would entail a discussion of the upcoming exhibition. Instead, she was shocked when she was informed that her exhibition had been cancelled.
“She didn’t even tell me why,” the sculptor reported. “I was devastated and was so upset I couldn’t sculpt anything. After six months, I said to myself, ‘I am an artist and I’ll start painting.’”
The cancellation of her exhibition—which she later learned resulted from the sale of the gallery to Bloomingdales and affected all the artists that exhibited there—pushed her art in a new direction. “Painting was 10 times more difficult for me,” she reported.
Still, she attended the Art Students League for six years, studying with Leo Manso and Bruce Dorfman. The resulting abstract paintings are rich and colorful, done in both acrylics and oils. “My paintings are all about movement and color and composition,” she said. “You have to work that way with abstract art. I could no more paint realistically than I could fly over the moon, but with sculpture Ican do both.”
She adds that she prefers figurative work when working in three dimensions and that, although her sculptures are somewhat abstracted, “You know it is a horse, you know it is a bird.”
As she worked to develop her painting technique she gradually recovered from the disappointment of having her exhibition so abruptly and unaccountably cancelled. “Gradually I started sculpting again,”she reported, “and then I did both—but I have always liked sculpting better.”
Mrs. Reventlow was raised in a world of privilege, where young women learned to paint decorously, but where there was no thought of a profession. Her father, William Astor Drayton, was a great-grandson of millionaire John Jacob Astor, and her mother, Helen F. Squiers, was a New York City socialite, daughter of a diplomat. Her parents lived abroad for much of their marriage, and Mrs. Reventlow wasborn in London in 1915. Her parents lived in the British Isles, France and North Africa before divorcing. Her father later returned to the United States, while her mother remarried and lived in the south of France.
In France, the young Margaret Drayton was sent to Le Cours Maintenon, which in 1907 advertised itself as “receiv[ing] young ladies who desire to improve their conversational French” as well as offering lessons “in Music, Singing and Painting.” It was perhaps this emphasis on painting, so much harder for the future artist than sculpture, that delayed her discovery of her artistic potential.
From there she attended classes at Le College Feminin de Bouffemont, a finishing school founded in 1924 for girls between the ages of 8 and 20 from “les grandes familles.” With her schooling over, thestart of World War II found Margaret Drayton in Paris.
“I left Paris the day before the Nazis occupied the city,” she recounted. “I escaped with the thousands of people who were fleeing south. The road was a mass of cars, carts and people.”
She made her way to her mother’s home, but as the Germans drew near again, she decided to escape to Spain. She left her mother’s house early in the morning, ready to make her way to what she believedwould be a little-known border crossing. “I had lived there and I knew of a short cut, a little place where I thought I could get through,” she said. She was surprised to find that many others had thought of the same ruse and that the crossing was clogged with refugees.
Delayed at the border and in danger of being sent back, she ran into the Danish Count Court Haugwitz-Hardenberg Reventlow, a former diplomat whose connections within the American Embassy eased their passage into Spain.
“I had known him before, but running into him at the border was pure luck,” she said. “We escaped together.”
From Spain, she made her way to Cuba and thence on to the United States. “I expected to go back to Europe after the war,” she said, but the chance encounter with Count Reventlow, who had first been famously married to Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, led to their own marriage two years later. With marriage and the birth of their son, Richard, in 1947, the couple never returned permanently to Europe. Count Reventlow renounced his title in 1943 to become an American citizen.
The couple bought a house in Litchfield in 1961, and the former count died there in 1969. His widow continued to live in their large home for another year, but soon longed for a smaller abode. She eyed the stone barn across the way from her house and envisioned it as a new house.
“The pigs and heifers lived in here before,” she said wryly, looking around an elegantly appointed room that betrays nary a hint of its former rustic use.
While she has busied herself for a half a century with a successful artistic career, Mrs. Reventlow has also been deeply involved over the past 35 years in helping the blind. In 1974, she started a pilot program of recording books for the blind, Connecticut Volunteer Services for the Blind and Handicapped. The nonprofit corporation works with the Connecticut State Library’s Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (LBPH) to record books, pamphlets and magazines onto cassette tape for those who cannot hold or read printed material.
The all-volunteer, statewide program now uses five studio locations for recording in East Hartford, Litchfield, Milford, Ridgefield and Southbury. “We have a mass of volunteers,” she reported, addingthat three people—a narrator, monitor and reviewer—are needed for the production of each tape. Once the recordings are corrected and accepted, they are duplicated onto cassettes, labeled in print andBraille, packaged and shipped to the State Library for distribution.
Mrs. Reventlow said the goal of the organization is to provide blind and handicapped persons with the same range and quality of reading materials available to sighted public library patrons. “We havewonderful volunteers and it has been a wonderful experience,” she said, “although it was quite a lot of work.”
She stepped down as president in October because her declining health made it impossible for her to be as active as she would have liked.
She is never idle, however, and said she is just completing her memoirs, which she expects to print for her family. “It’s taken me two years,” she said. “Now I’ll have to think of something for my next project.
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| Person-ID |
I21613 |
Reventlow |
| Sidst ændret |
5 mar. 2024 |
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| Begivenhedskort |
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 | Ægteskab - 30 jul. 1942 - Palm Springs, California, USA |
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 | Død - 14 jun. 2014 - Litchfield, Litchfield County, Connecticut, USA |
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 | Begravelse - - East Cemetery Litchfield, Litchfield County, Connecticut, USA |
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