322: ILAH MARIAN KIBBEY (1888-1958) OIL ON CANVAS THE PLAZA

Ilah Marian Kibbey (1888-1958)
The Country Club Plaza (Circa 1930)
The American Impressionist cityscape is signed lower left in the same coral red pigment as the clay tile roofs of the architecture.

Ilah Kibbey worked in public schools before fully devoting herself to fine art study and attending summer art colonies along the New England coast. These summers she studied under Hugh Breckenridge, Charles Wilimowsky, Henry, B, Snell, and Lester Stevens. It was in Gloucester, Nantucket and Boothbay, Maine that, like fellow Kansas Citian, Coah Henry, she painted some of the works that later brought her medals and prizes in exhibitions at the Kansas City Art Institute.

In 1928, she won the purchase prize sponsored by Midland theater and her canvas with children at the beach hung there for many years.

As a member of the Kansas City Society of Artists, she was instrumental in launching, and general manager of, the first Plaza Art Fair on the Country Club Plaza in 1932.

In 1930, she exhibited paintings composed from the cockpit of an airplane at Ferargil Galleries in New York and the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. These aerial views perhaps inspired the aerial perspective of this painting. Kibbey was the first female artist, likely the first artist overall, to repeatedly sketch and paint from an airplane. She explained 'my first air flight from Kansas City to Tulsa and St. Louis showed me the possibilities of expressing an entirely new perspective in painting. '

The fourth annual exhibition of the Kansas City Society of Artists displayed a work by Kibbey titled Near the Plaza. A critic described that painting as ...'a titillating atmospheric snow scene near the Country Club Plaza, the sunny buff buildings of which one sees through the lonely trees with an increasing warmth.' This could be a description of this painting, explaining the depiction of the street in loosely painted whitish color.

Kibbey's work is held in the collections of Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Library of Congress, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Kansas City Museum.
Canvas measures 20 x 24 with a framed size of 24.25 x 28.25 inches.
Very good original untouched condition. There are no issues of major scratches, losses, repairs, in-painting or touch-up.
$1,500 - $2,500