Minna Citron

Born Minna Wright in Newark, New Jersey, this painter and printmaker grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She began drawing in the late 1920s and was married with two sons when she enrolled in the Art Students League in 1928 to study with John Sloan. The following year she opened her own studio and became part of a loosely-knit group of realist artists who painted near New York's Union Square. Her first one-person show at the New York School for Social Research in 1930 displayed scenes of city life portrayed in a realistic manner. In the mid- to late 1930s, Citron worked for the Works Progress Administration, first as a painting instructor in New York (1935-1937) and then as a muralist depicting the future of the Tennessee Valley Authority for a post office in Newport, Tennessee (1938). At about this time she also began to create prints and her works became more abstract in style. For the next fifty years of her long and productive career, Citron showed mostly abstract paintings and prints in numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe.

[This is an excerpt from the interactive companion program to the videodisc American Art from the National Gallery of Art. Produced by the Department of Education Resources, this teaching resource is one of the Gallery's free-loan educational programs.]

Text © National Gallery of Art, 2024