Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Art: Lucille Corcos Levy.
A family scene in winter, probably South Mountain Road, Rockland County, NY. In the collection of Victor Lloyd.

Would someone please make a Wikipedia entry on artist/illustrator Lucille Corcos? I tried a decade ago, but a Wikipedia moderator took it down. I love the wavy aesthetic of her art — so full of energy and love of life.

At the time that I made my one and only Wikipedia entry, internet links were not considered good enough for citations, and that was the reason given for removal. I have since read that Wikipedia is prejudiced against posts about women and/or by women. I haven’t seen any statistics on that and don’t know if it used to be the case but is no longer.

Lucille Corcos (1909 to 1973) was a working artist who was the main breadwinner for her family, although artist husband Edgar Levy also had a following. She trained at the Art Students’ League in New York City and began professionally as a children’s book illustrator.

I knew the family when I was a child because my father wrote the Upjohn Company’s 10-year-anniversary book with artist Will Burton, who was a Levy neighbor. More recently, I noticed Corcos’s work in a museum. Still, there’s a huge Wikipedia entry for one of her artistic sons, and nothing for her.

I might as well share some of the information I collected on Corcos before giving up, starting with a fascinating book I read (Cipe Pineles Golden and Martha Scotford, Cipe Pineles: A Life in Design [New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999]).

“Lucille and Edgar left the city in 1941 with their son David,” wrote Martha Scotford. “Son Joel was born a couple years later. They moved to South Mountain Road in New City. … Corcos was a successful painter and illustrator by this time. In the 1930s, fashion, culture and home magazines published her work and her popularity continued into the 1960s.

“[Designer] Cipe Pineles’s close friendship with Corcos had begun when Pineles commissioned Corcos’s work for Seventeen and Charm. Her humor in personal interactions and in her art made her an engaging collaborator.

“Corcos’s paintings were densely packed with many small stories and commentary. The compositions had detailed multiple subjects; perspective and scale were distorted for practical and expressive purposes. This new modern primitivism was considered part of a native tradition in American art and its ‘unacademic’ nature was celebrated.

“Corcos’s subjects included rural landscapes and urban scenes, ranging from Christmas Eve, Rockefeller Center, to the Oyster Party to Everybody Meets the Boat. In addition to doing commissioned illustration, Lucille Corcos built her career as a fine artist and was a steady participant in New York gallery shows from 1936 to 1954. During the same time, she was a part of major exhibitions in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and other institutions in New York.”

Click here for the Corcos books held in the University of Minnesota’s Children’s Literature Research Collections, where you can also find a write-up about her work for Fortune magazine and links to the pictures.

I remember the family’s actual Fire Island house (painted in 1950), here, and I want to point out that Everybody Meets the Boat is another classic Fire Island scene.

If any reader is better at research than I am, maybe you could find an article I heard was in the July 12, 1954, issue of Life magazine showing two Corcos paintings, one of her life in a wintery Rockland County, another of activities around the Fire Island house in summer.

Sorry this is all a bit jumbled. Maybe that’s the real reason the moderator deleted what I wrote at Wikipedia. Someone more knowledgable should tackle this worthy subject.