Elizabeth Cooper was a highly regarded Modernist painter in Seattle during the 1920’s and 30’s. An early member of Women Painters of Washington, she exhibited with the organization as well as the Northwest Annuals at the Seattle Art Institute and the Seattle Art Museum.

She was born in Nottingham, England and after moving to the U.S., attended the Mark Hopkins Art Institute in San Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute). After moving to Seattle in the early 1920’s, she attended the University of Washington where she studied with Walter Isaacs, Eugenie Worman and others.

Cooper was a member of the prominent “Group of Twelve”, a group of Modernist artists in Seattle that included some of the major regional painters of the period (Morris Graves, Ambrose Patterson and Kenneth Callahan). She is one of the last of this group to be studied and re-discovered.
She assimilated modern movements in art, the European Post-Impressionists, Cubists and the German Expressionists within her work and produced some of the most daring and progressive regional art of her period.

In Cooper’s own words,…”Aims: To interpret rather than represent, to achieve good composition, that is, fine arrangement of line, mass and color, irrespective of subject matter or emotional appeal. To stimulate in others, appreciation and understanding of the aims of modern painters, who, by individual technique, endeavor to interpret life and to communicate their aesthetic experience..”

Cooper, like so many women artists, had the responsibility of raising her two children and balanced her family life with creating art. In middle age, she created an interesting body of work that was cut short by her untimely death in 1936. “…Art creation is not the exclusive domain of youth. Middle age and old age find in creative art a wellspring of eternal youth. Renoir in his eighties, did his best work. Art, like mercy, is twice blessed; it blesseth him who gives and him who takes..”

The 75th Anniversary Exhibition will re-introduce Cooper’s work for the first time since her Memorial exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum in 1936.

Untitled (Still-life with
Flowers), c. 1930

Untitled (Still-life with
Two Heads), c. 1930

Untitled (Female
Figure ), c. 1930