Blanche Wille — An Artists Biography
By Darren Leno
Blanche Wille (1896–1979) was a social worker, activist self-taught American painter associated with Chicago's mid-century naïve and folk art circles.
Born Pearl Blanche Wille, she seemed to keep "Pearl" for private life and adopted her middle name as her public artist identity. She lived in Evanston, Illinois, and worked primarily in oil on rigid supports — panel, board, masonite, and canvasboard — in a style described in her own time as "primitive" or naïve.
Wille exhibited in curated Chicago shows across more than a decade. In June 1964 her work was included in "Contemporary Chicago Primitives" at the Old Town Art Center on North Wells Street, and in 1977 her paintings were featured at the fifth-anniversary celebration of the Public Art Workshop, a progressive community art center on Chicago's West Side.
She is reported to have created hundreds of paintings and drawings that portrayed the disabled children she worked with, and the humans who populated her activist world. Reportedly, she rarely sold her work, giving most of it away, which left her surviving output scattered and long undocumented.
Wille and her husband, the left wing journalist Wilfred Chester Wille — an early founder of the Chicago Newspaper Guild — were active in the city's progressive, peace, and civil-rights movements.
During the 1950s they supported people targeted in the McCarthy-era HUAC investigations and Smith Act trials, and they were close to the Chicago civil-rights leader Claude Lightfoot, whom Blanche painted. Their activist engagement was public as well as personal: in August 1974 both Willes were named signatories to an Impeach Nixon Committee advertisement in the Chicago Tribune.
Her documented paintings, dating from roughly 1954 into the 1960s, range from socially engaged subjects such as Crippled Children, Children's Play About Vietnam, and All Humankind to portraits and genre scenes including Office Portrait, Man's Portrait, and Mandolin Melody. Her paintings have appeared at auction through Slotin Folk Art Auction, Potter & Potter, and Freeman's.
By Darren Leno
Blanche Wille (1896–1979) was a social worker, activist self-taught American painter associated with Chicago's mid-century naïve and folk art circles.
Born Pearl Blanche Wille, she seemed to keep "Pearl" for private life and adopted her middle name as her public artist identity. She lived in Evanston, Illinois, and worked primarily in oil on rigid supports — panel, board, masonite, and canvasboard — in a style described in her own time as "primitive" or naïve.
Wille exhibited in curated Chicago shows across more than a decade. In June 1964 her work was included in "Contemporary Chicago Primitives" at the Old Town Art Center on North Wells Street, and in 1977 her paintings were featured at the fifth-anniversary celebration of the Public Art Workshop, a progressive community art center on Chicago's West Side.
She is reported to have created hundreds of paintings and drawings that portrayed the disabled children she worked with, and the humans who populated her activist world. Reportedly, she rarely sold her work, giving most of it away, which left her surviving output scattered and long undocumented.
Wille and her husband, the left wing journalist Wilfred Chester Wille — an early founder of the Chicago Newspaper Guild — were active in the city's progressive, peace, and civil-rights movements.
During the 1950s they supported people targeted in the McCarthy-era HUAC investigations and Smith Act trials, and they were close to the Chicago civil-rights leader Claude Lightfoot, whom Blanche painted. Their activist engagement was public as well as personal: in August 1974 both Willes were named signatories to an Impeach Nixon Committee advertisement in the Chicago Tribune.
Her documented paintings, dating from roughly 1954 into the 1960s, range from socially engaged subjects such as Crippled Children, Children's Play About Vietnam, and All Humankind to portraits and genre scenes including Office Portrait, Man's Portrait, and Mandolin Melody. Her paintings have appeared at auction through Slotin Folk Art Auction, Potter & Potter, and Freeman's.
