Alice Schille - Ohio Artist:
Her Innovative Spirit
Presented April 27 - May 30, 2001

Sponsored by FirstMerit Bank

Additional funding provided by
The Hoover Company Achievement in the Arts Award

"Mother and Child in a Garden, France" by Alice Schille, circa 1911

Alice Schille (1869-1955) is probably Ohio's most celebrated woman artist of the 20th Century. She was a woman who loved to create art, and traveled the world to search out new styles and subjects. She was also the heart and soul of Ohio's most prestigious art school for forty years. Alice earned international recognition, including top prizes from arts institutions in San Francisco, New York, Washington and Chicago, for her magnificent paintings of street scenes, women and children. Hers was a life devoted to a passion for art.

Born in Columbus in 1869, Alice Schille was the daughter of a prosperous bottle and soda manufacturer. She graduated from the Columbus Art School, which later became the Columbus College of Art and Design, at the top of her class in 1893 and then continued her studies in New York and Paris. In 1904, five of her paintings were accepted for exhibition at Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts, and from that time on her work was included regularly in important American annual exhibitions.

Schille returned to Columbus and began what was to become a life-long career in education, teaching watercolor and portrait painting at the Columbus Art School from 1917 to 1947. Traveling each summer to paint, her unique style expanded to reflect what she had absorbed while in England, Germany, France, Spain, Holland, Yugoslavia, Russia, North Africa, Mexico, Guatemala, Norway, Turkey, Greece and Belgium. She frequently visited Paris and there, her circle of friends included the famous painter Pablo Picasso, the sculptor Rodin and many of the leading writers of the 1920s and 1930s.

Although personally very shy, Schille possessed unusual courage and strength of will, which was reflected in both her independent lifestyle and in her work, as she continually worked to master new modes of painting throughout her career. A German critic once referred to Schille as "this daredevil disciple of art who is interested in anything and afraid of nothing."

For many years after her death in 1955, Alice Schille's work went unnoticed but in the past fifteen years there have been several exhibitions of her work at museums around the country. In 1996, she was inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame. A new book about Alice Schille and her work, by William H. Gerdts, is being published this spring by Hudson Hills Press of New York.