Lucia Wilcox: LUCIA

Lisa N. Peters Ph.D., 2025

Excerpt from  Lucia Anavi Wilcox (1899–1974): “My Only Way of Writing Poetry,” with an All-Female Cast 

By Lisa N. Peters Ph.D.

 

Lucia Anavi Wilcox reinvented herself several times and lived an extraordinary life at the center of the Paris and New York art worlds. As noted in the New York Times in 1973, her life is “intertwined in the history of twentieth-century art.” The artist grew up in Beirut and moved to Paris in 1921. There, until 1938, she was part of the avant-garde community of artists—including figures such as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, and Raoul Dufy—and designers including Elsa Schiaparelli. In 1930, she was photographed in raking light by the Bauhaus-trained American expatriate Florence Henri. In her close-cropped, abstractly composed composition, Henri emphasized Lucia’s stylish sophistication and intense persona. Throughout her career, the artist—who married three times—preferred to identify herself by her first name, which is also how she signed her work.
 

In Paris, Lucia supported herself as a textile and costume designer, while according to archival notes, she was included in several group shows as “part of the Picasso, Léger, Dufy avant-garde group.” However, her artwork from those years has been lost to history. In September 1938, she emigrated to the United States, traveling alongside her friend Léger. Like several other women artists—including Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Kay Sage, and Remedios Varo—Lucia found a voice in Surrealism in the 1940s. In that decade, women artists diverged from the dominant male Surrealists—whose work of the 1920s and 1930s had been driven by a love of hallucination and erotic violence, inspired by women as muses and mediums. As Whitney Chadwick notes, women artists replaced such ideologies “with an art of magical fantasy and narrative flow.”

 

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Essay and Biography by Lisa N. Peters, PhD 

Designed by Mark Robinson 

Published by Berry Campbell and printed by GHP Media