To spend time with Adele Lemm's art is to discover a sense of summer-the season's color and heat, recreation and restoration, fun and fancy. For summers were all these things and more to Adele Lemm (1904-1977), a Memphis teacher-artist. Time spent by the cool New England coast meant relief from relentless Southern heat and fresh-air hours with her soft palette and dry brush. Those precious months also offered time to become the student, to hone her craft with masters such as Vaclav Vytlacil and friends like Hans Hoffman at the Provincetown Art Association. For Adele Lemm, summer was the beach, boats, birds, gardens, friends and frolic-and the chance to preserve all these joys with paint and pastels. Working in the Post Modernist era, Lemm approached traditional subjects with a contemporary perspective. Her pieces are warm-spirited, with a touch of whimsy applied to discernible subjects. Her landscapes and seascapes are idyllic, imbued with light and lightheartedness. An essentialist who omitted unnecessary details, she insisted on representation, on her strokes revealing a specific object that could be recognized as a flower, house or harbor. Adele Lemm's passion for her art was borne out not only in her products, but also in her living. For a quarter of a century, Lemm was a dedicated and popular instructor at the Memphis Academy of Art. She exhibited at the National Academy of Women Artists' annual show, winning five prizes, and at many galleries and museums throughout the East, including the Ward Eggleston Gallery in New York City, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and the Delgado Museum in New Orleans.

For more information on this artist or the Southern masterworks in our collection, please visit our gallery website.

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