Florence Ballin Cramer (1877–1971) was an American modernist artist known for her landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and nudes, each tending to have what one close observer called "a clearly expressed a mood or attitude as well as presenting an easily recognizable subject". Describing a retrospective exhibition in 1957, a curator said her paintings were "characterized by a pervasive impressionism which ranges from color-wrought realism to gentle abstraction." Augmenting her career as professional artist, Cramer established and directed an art gallery on 57th Street in Manhattan that was devoted to showing works by young artists and for many years she ran a shop in Woodstock, New York that sold antiques and books. During the early part of her adult life, she divided her time between Manhattan and Woodstock and later lived year-round in Woodstock. After her death, a friend, author Frank Leon Smith, said she had found in Woodstock "just the right place and at precisely the right time for her gifts and talents."
Early life and training
Cramer was born and raised in New York City. Her art instruction began when she was eleven. In 1894, Cramer's widowed mother, Adelaide Ballin, took her and her younger brother to Europe for several years. There, along with The three Rs, she received art instruction from a tutor whom her widowed mother had hired. After the family returned to New York, Cramer finished high school and, in 1902, began study at the Art Students League. Among her teachers there were the American impressionist painter Frank Vincent DuMond and the illustrator Frederick Coffay Yohn. Cramer's long association with the art colony in Woodstock, New York, began in 1909 when she took painting classes from Birge Harrison and John Carlson at the League's summer landscape school in that town. During these years, her fellow students included Hermine Kleinert, Henry Lee McFee, Grace Mott Johnson, and Andrew Dasburg. In 1910, she returned to Europe to visit museums and galleries and to meet with artists in their studios. While in Munich, she met and fell in love with the artist, Konrad Cramer. A year later the two of them married in a London registry office and, on returning to the United States, began spending the warm half of the year in Woodstock and the cooler half in New York.
Career in art
One source claims that while she was still a child and traveling in Europe with her family, Cramer submitted a drawing in a contest held by the Herald Tribune and was awarded a silver medal for it. The New York Herald European Edition was probably meant since the Herald Tribune did not then exist. In 1907, she held her first public exhibition in her studio at 30 West 59th Street in Manhattan. Two years later, she showed paintings along with other members of the Woman's Art Club at Knoedler's Gallery in Manhattan. She continued to exhibit with this group over the next few years. A critic for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle praised work in the 1909 show as "distinguished for careful handling" and called Cramer's painting, "The Hill Road", "an honest work, thoroughly done." A critic for the New York Times said her painting called "Margot" in the 1910 show contained "some charming drawing and tells at a distance fairly well, but the delicacy with which the profile is modeled is somewhat sacrificed by the lack of delicacy in the relation between the figure and the background."