JAMES HERBERT FITZGERALD
1910-1973
 
Painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, craftsman.
 
    James FitzGerald along with his wife, Margaret Tomkins were among the most innovative modern artists active in the Pacific Northwest.
    He attended the University of Washington; the Kansas City Art Institute; Art Center School in Los Angeles, with Thomas Hart Benton, Henry Varnum Poor, Boardman Robinson; Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and Yale University (Carnegie Fellow).
He was an instructor at the Kansas City Art Institute, the University of Washington and was Director of the Spokane Art Center in 1941.
    He produced works for various WPA art programs in Colorado, Washington state and California.  He traveled to Mexico where he studied mural painting under Jose Clemente Orozco.
    His exhibition history includes several solo exhibitions including the Seattle Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Art Museum.
Selected Group exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago where he exhibited in the important Abstract & Surrealist Art in America, 1947,  Denver Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, San Francisco Art Museum , Munson, Williams, Proctor Institute, Utica, NY , the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, the Brooklyn Museum and many others.
His Sculptural commissions include the Lake Washington Floating Bridge relief sculptures, Seattle, WA, 1939; The IBM Building, Seattle,1962 (Minoru Yamasaki, architect), United States Federal Building, Ogden, Utah,  Princeton University; the Seattle Public Library and numerous others.
    His work is in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum, The Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Museum of Northwest Art, LaConnor, WA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, the University of Maryland Art Gallery, and several others.
    In 1959, a devastating fire destroyed the home and studios of FitzGerald and his wife Margaret Tomkins, where they lost the majority of their earlier works.
 
 
M. TOMKINS, 1945, MIXED MEDIA ON PAPER.
J. FITZGERALD,UNTITLED, circa 1960’s, BRONZE SCULPTURE.
M. TOMKINS,  ETERNAL TRIAD, 1943, LITHOGRAPH.
MARGARET TOMKINS
1916-2002
    Margaret Tomkins was one of the leading painters of the Pacific Northwest. She is best known for her Surrealist works of the 1940’s that earned her numerous national and regional awards. In the 1950’s and 60’s her work evolved into an abstract and expressionist style that she maintained in various phases and combinations for the remainder of her life.
    Tomkins was born in Los Angeles, California and attended the University of Southern California where she received both her B.F.A and M.F.A.  Her first important national exhibition was at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair, American Art Today, where she exhibited a regionalist style landscape in watercolor while still a resident of California.
    Upon her relocation to Seattle, Washington in 1939, she became Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Washington for a brief period of time. In 1940, she married Seattle artist James H. FitzGerald (1910-1973) who would also become a leading painter and sculptor in the Northwest. In 1941, she had her first solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum. The same year, Tomkins became involved in the Federal Art Projects, working briefly in Seattle and then becoming an instructor at the Spokane Art Center, one of the leading WPA facilities in the country .
    
    In addition to their paintings, Tomkins and FitzGerald were also involved as craftsmen and sculptors, working in ceramics and even furniture design. Their Modernist ceramics were mostly utilitarian objects such as bowls, vessels and lamps but created in a highly imaginative and unique manner.
 
    In 1959, a devastating studio fire destroyed the majority of the works of Tomkins and FitzGerald produced up until that time. Tomkins returned to the University of Washington as guest professor in 1962 and 1972.
Her work was included in numerous national exhibitions including the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; the Metroloitan Museum of Art, New York, Whitnet Museum of American Art, New York, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Seattle Art Museum; Portland Art Museum; Denver Art Museum; Santa Barbara Museum; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and numerous others.
Her work is in the Permanent Collection of the Seattle Art Museum, The Norah Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, Utah, the Northwest Museum of Art & Culture, Spokane, Wa.
 
Tomkins work is illustrated in the following publications:
 
Surrealism and American Art, 1931 -1947, Jeffrey Wechsler,  Rutgers University Art Gallery,  1977.
 
Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945, edited by P. Trenton, University of California Press, 1995
 
Jet Dreams: Art of the Fifties in the Northwest, Barbara Johns, Tacoma Art Museum, University of Washington Press, 1995.
50 Northwest Artists, by Bruce Guenther, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1983
 
Margaret Tomkins, 1975 – 1981, Bellevue Art Museum, Kendall, Sue Ann, 1982
 
Margaret Tomkins, Paintings and Sculpture, 1969 – 1978, Whatcom Museum of History & Art, Bellingham, Wa., 1979
 
 
 
 
 
M. TOMKINS,  UNTITLED,1945 , WATERCOLOR AND INK ON PAPER.
JAMES FITZGERALD, UNTITLED, 1945, WATERCOLOR
Copyright 2008 DAVID F. MARTIN/MARTIN-ZAMBITO FINE ART
IMAGE AND TEXT ReproductIon prohibited  without  permission of the gallery.