Patrick Henry Bruce was an American artist. He was associated with the style of Cubism. He was well known for a small group of original, geometricized still lifes created in the 1920s.
Background
Bruce was born in Campbell County, Virginia, United States, on March 25, 1881. He was a son of decayed Virginian gentlefolk. Patrick Bruce was the second of four children. His family had once possessed a huge plantation, Berry Hill, where over 3,000 slaves worked. Originally, Berry Hill Estate was part of a 105,000-acre (420 km2) tract granted by the English Crown in 1728 to William Byrd II. However, the Civil War left the Bruces' wealth greatly reduced.
Education
Patrick Bruce began his artistic training in Richmond, where he grew up, taking evening classes at the Art Club of Richmond in 1898 while working in a real estate office during the daytime. His earliest known extant painting dates from 1900.
In 1902 he moved to New York; there he studied with Robert Henri, William Merritt Chase, and Kenneth Hayes Miller at the New York School of Art (now Parsons School of Design). By early 1904 he was in Paris, where in 1906 he met Arthur Burdett Frost Jr., who became his close friend. He and Frost were among the first to enrol in Matisse's school in 1908.
Career
Bruce exhibited regularly his works in the Salon d'Automne and met many of the leading artists of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. During a period of 1912-1914, he worked closely with Sonia and Robert Delaunay. As a result, his paintings became influenced by Orphism, but Patrick Bruce never formed an attachment to any school. He emulated Robert's use of discs to organize abstract compositions.
Although he never took part in exhibitions with the Synchromists or gave his paintings Synchromist titles, in 1916 Patrick Bruce developed a form of abstract painting that strongly resembled Morgan Russell's synchromist compositions of muscular, flat colour areas. A good example was Bruce's Composition I.
Around 1917, Patrick Bruce reintroduced limited representation into his artworks. He assembled still life objects, radically reduced to simplified volumes, into spatially ambiguous arrangements. The style of his mature oeuvre related to the Purism developed by Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant in the 1920s. His work was admired by Marcel Duchamp and may have influenced the style adopted by his former teacher, Matisse, in his mural La Danse (1932-1933).
Bruce destroyed a great many of his paintings in the early 1930s, moved to Versailles, and almost ceased painting. Only about one hundred of his works survived. In 1936 he moved back to the United States for the first time since his visit in 1905. A few months later the artist committed suicide in New York.
Personality
Partick Bruce was an intensely self-critical person.