Businessman lawyer painter art administrator
Edward Bright Bruce was born on April 13, 1879 in Dover Plains, New York, the second of three sons of James M. and Mary (Bright) Bruce. His mother wrote children's stories; his father, of Scottish descent, was a Baptist minister in Yonkers, New York.
Young Edward Bruce attended public and private schools in Yonkers and New York City. From earliest boyhood he hoped to become a painter, and at the age of fourteen he began drawing and outdoor sketching under the guidance of Arthur Parton and Francis J. Murphy. As he acquired technical skill, however, he found that he had nothing important to express, and gave up the idea of painting as a career. Influenced also by the desire to assist his family's precarious finances, he entered Columbia University - where he was a notable football player--and after receiving the A. B. degree in 1901, went on to the Columbia Law School, from which he graduated with honors in 1904.
Edward Bruce began practice with the firm later headed by Paul D. Cravath, but after three years moved to Manila as attorney for the American Philippine Railroad Company. The next year he formed his own law firm in Manila and became part owner of the Manila Times.
For the next ten years Bruce was involved in various business ventures, after 1911 in China, where as president of the Pacific Development Company he sought to promote Oriental trade. During this time he collected Chinese paintings and curios and learned a deep appreciation of their serenity, dignity, and rhythm. He began to look at nature anew, and resumed painting, finding that he now had something to say.
In 1919 he and his wife returned to New York City. As Oriental trade began to encounter difficulties, Bruce turned more and more to artistic work; in 1921 the Bourgeois Gallery showed three of his paintings in a group exhibition, and the critic Henry McBride gave them an enthusiastic review. The Pacific Development Company failed in 1922, and although Bruce received a number of lucrative offers in business and banking, he decided at this point to become a professional painter.
He burned his first year's production but later had shows at Scott and Fowles (1925) and at the New Gallery (1927) in which every picture was sold. He bought a villa in Settignano, near Florence; lived, traveled, and painted in Italy and France; exhibited successfully in Paris, selling a landscape to the Luxembourg Museum; and returned to New York just after the stock market crash of 1929. Contemporaries such as Leo Stein, who compared him to Matisse, recognized Bruce as an important painter. He produced very few portraits and only one mural, a view of San Francisco and the bay for the board room of the city's stock exchange.
In 1930-31 Bruce lived and painted in Oregon and California. While visiting San Francisco, he was persuaded to become a lobbyist for the Manila Chamber of Commerce, to help promote Philippine independence, and in 1932 he moved to Washington, D. C.
His acquaintance with Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, led to his appointment as silver expert for the United States delegation to the London Economic Conference (1933).
In years of depression and unemployment he was well informed about the innovative proposals of the New Deal, and when the Civil Works Administration was set up he was asked to organize an emergency program to give employment to artists, using CWA funds under the Treasury Department.
Established as a temporary measure in December 1933, this first government-supported art project in the United States employed some 3, 750 artists before it came to a close the following June. It was succeeded by two new programs, one in which artists were given jobs on the basis of need, and another (later the Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts), which Bruce directed, in which artists chosen through anonymous competitions were commissioned to execute murals and sculpture for federal buildings such as post offices and courthouses.
Perhaps owing to the great pressure of work, Bruce suffered a stroke in 1935, which partially paralyzed his left side. He recovered sufficiently to direct the Section of Fine Arts and to paint with a new interest and eye for color.
Early in 1943, while on a winter vacation, Bruce suffered a third stroke and died, at the age of sixty-three, in the hospital at Hollywood, Florida. His ashes were buried in the Santa Barbara (California) Cemetery.
Vigorous and full of enthusiasm, with great personal charm and humor that could deliver a critical wallop in a joke, Bruce was uniquely the right man to create and administer this small but important experiment in government encouragement of the arts.
On November 29, 1909, in Yokohama, Japan, he married Margaret Stow of Santa Barbara, California. They had no children.
