“Nature does not hold back. With sublime opulence, she gives us blue skies, azure waters, brilliantly colored flowers, birds and other creations, with infinite variations.”
Vicci Sperry “The Art Experience”
Vicci Sperry (1900-1995) was born in New York City and began her career as an avant-garde abstract expressionist artist in Chicago in the 1930s. After studying with Hans Hofmann, she became one of, if not the only student he entrusted to critique his work, as well as deeply involved in the Greenwich Village ferment of the forties and fifties as a close associate of such noted artists as Franz Kline, Willem De Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and many others. Over the decades, she exhibited in Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and numerous other cities in the United States.
Sperry was married to Albert F. Sperry, who was a jazz piano prodigy in New York City and Chicago in the 1920s and went on to become a nationally celebrated engineer. He wanted to meet his future wife because she was a regional math and chess champion, but she always believed it was probably her long beautiful hair that made him propose. They had two children and six grandchildren. In the 1950s, they moved to Los Angeles
Her many years of painting, teaching, lecturing, and collecting and loving art and artists generated her book The Art Experience, published in 1969 by André Sauret. A follow up collaboration on a book of Drawings was also published. The Art Experience was for many years recommended reading for the docents at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Robert Kirsch, book critic for the Los Angeles Times, gave the book a glowing review in 1970 and used it as source material for his advanced writing class at UCLA. The book has continued to be used in art classes to this day and continues to inspire countless students and lovers of art around the world.
