Early in her career, Grayce Cutler painted traditional landscapes and floral works. At the end of it, with a nudge from Hans Hofman, she produced water scenes in forceful, expressionistic modes. In between, when the Utah art world was experimenting with new and often controversial idioms, she painted music.

Cutler grew up in comfortable circumstances, with family connections to Utah’s political, cultural and financial worlds. When she was born, in 1906, her paternal grandfather, John C. Cutler, was governor (the state’s second); one of her maternal uncles, Alfred Lambourne, was a poet, writer and one of the state’s most prominent early artists; and her father, John C. Cutler, jr., was a successful investment broker: he was able to provide the family a comfortable 5-bedroom home at 184 E Street, in the Avenues neighborhood of Salt Lake City. The circles Grayce Cutler ran in were privileged. They were not immune to sorrow, however: her father made it through the crash of 1929, but not its aftermath, and, reeling from a nervous breakdown, he used his revolver to commit suicide in 1932. His own father, the former governor, ill at age 82, had done the same in 1928.

By the time of her father’s suicide, Grayce had begun a family of her own. In 1926, when she was 20, she married Charles Francis Solomon, who would become a successful real estate broker and assessor: he was involved in real estate transactions that transformed Salt Lake City, including the expansion of 700 East, the construction of the interstate highways and the development of the Salt Lake City airport. In the city’s expanding suburbs surrounding the Sugar House area, the couple built a home at 1471 Browning Ave., where they raised their daughter, Sherie Grace.

By 1942, when Sherie was in high school, Cutler began exhibiting her paintings on a regular basis. A former student of A.B. Wright and J.T. Harwood, she had also traveled to the Chicago Art Institute for instruction. She “excelled as a colorist and also in design” according to the Salt Lake Tribune (Sep. 1, 1946, p. 76). Her work found a home at ZCMI’s Tiffin Room, an exhibition space in the city’s largest department store curated by the state’s most influential art patron, Alice Merrill Horne. Under her married name, Cutler developed a reputation for her watercolors, especially her florals. A later reviewer would look back on this work and comment, “… the late Alice Merrill Horne considered her one of Utah’s finest talents” (The Salt Lake Tribune, Mar. 25, 1951, p. 62). Despite the success she experienced during the war years creating these traditional works in a respected style, Culter decided soon after to throw herself in with the modernists.

In the summer of 1947, an impressive exhibition from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum, featuring 100 years of American painting and dominated by modern trends, was installed at Utah’s Centennial celebrations. It caused a rift in Utah’s small art community. Over the next year, and beyond, artists, critics and the public debated the merits of the new, experimental idioms. For her part, Cutler seems to have been struck by the spirit of experimentation unleashed by this exhibition. The pastel work she sent to a local exhibit in 1949, after a short absence from exhibiting, showed “a new technique of striking simplicity” (The Salt Lake Tribune, Sep. 11, 1949, p.90 ).

Soon after, Cutler introduced her “music paintings.” Not to be confused with musicalism, a movement that developed in France in the 1920s which attempted to use color and design to create vibrations analogous to those created in music, Solomon’s abstract works were attempts to express the experience of listening to a specific piece of music. It was a subjective, expressionistic method rather than an objective or analytical one.

As Utah blossomed with modernist experimentation in the postwar years, James Fitzpatrick at The Salt Lake Tribune was tasked with making sense of it all, and he cited Cutler as an example of the “health of Utah’s art.”  On the occasion of an exhibit at the short-lived The Gallery, in Salt Lake City, Fitzpatrick described Cutler’s art as having passed through three stages: the first, her realistic early period, while “exceptionally competent, reveals very little inner unity;” the second included her strict abstractions, “which display a very studious attention to ‘form-space relationships.’” The last, and in his opinion, the best, were her music paintings: “Her sensitivity to the world about her demands a wider freedom of expression than can be offered by ‘realism,’ and so she has reduced forms to their simplest dimension, broken up her visual world, and, through an act of the creative imagination, reassembled the whole into a work of art.” Fitzpatrick considered these works her “most interesting and lively, and one of the remarkable things about them is a talent for calligraphy. Some of the lineal work in the paintings is first rate.”

As Fitzpatrick described the process, Cutler would listen to music on a phonograph and record her responses in watercolors.  In an astute critical observation, he noted, “…  it does not matter to the viewer of the works whether she was listening to a symphony or to a pair of alley cats. There is no recognizable music content. However, the music apparently unleashes deep feelings which the artist has managed to put in terms of paint” (The Salt Lake Tribune, Mar. 25, 1951, p. 62).

This “music painting” by Grayce Solomon, reproduced in The Salt Lake Tribune (Mar. 25, 1951, p.62), was inspired by a Ravel concerto.

Cutler’s rendition of one of Ravel’s concertos, exhibited at the time, produced a very open watercolor with both soft and hard-edged spots and squiggles sprinkled across the canvas. It calls to mind a hazy interpretation of the work of Joan Miró. The forms in “Chinese Music,” exhibited at the Stanley Perkins gallery in 1952, are much crisper, and as Fitzgerald noted in his review of that show, by this time Solomon was becoming more analytical, experimenting with Goethe’s color theories.

Cutler’s experimentation was part of a broader trend of the time — artists working nonobjectively as the means for the expression of an interior experience, whether it might be tapping into the subconscious, as in the case of the surrealists and abstract expressionists, or a spiritualist experience, as in the case of the “cosmic painters” (among whom was Cutler’s Utah peer Elaine Michelsen).  Merwin Fairbanks, writing for the Deseret News during this period, seemed to be half-joking, half-serious, when he said artists working in such methods might even discover the visual representation of the atomic world. “Should your little boy or girl dash into the house after an art class and display a blotched canvas declaring that he or she has discovered a ‘new art,’ don’t be too hasty in voicing your disbelief,” Fairbanks wrote. “The child may have discovered what the pulsating flow of electronic power looks like” (May 30, 1948 , p.50). For Cutler, nonobjective styles opened up new realms of expression. “There is room [in nonobjective art] for an artist to express greater feelings and more profound thoughts,’” she told Fitzpatrick in 1951 (The Salt Lake Tribune, Mar. 25, 1951, p.62).

Cutler was never content with one style and continued to look for new inspiration and instruction. Shortly after she revealed her music paintings to the Salt Lake City public, Cutler traveled to New York to study with Yasuo Kuniyoshi, an artist whose work had been part of the centennial exhibit in 1947, as well as the Brittanica exhibit of 1949 (which had a similar impact on Utah’s art world). A Japanese-American artist, Kuniyoshi was one of the less-remembered elements of what Roberta Smith called “the vitally mongrel nature of American modernism, a collaboration among artists of different cultures, nationalities and races, often influenced by indigenous forms like folk art and Native American art” (The New York Times, July 23, 2015). He was known principally for his stylized figurative work, but especially in the last years of his life (he died in 1953), Kuniyoshi was incorporating elements of abstraction into his paintings as well as large color planes executed in a heightened color palette. Cutler never embraced the figure, Kuniyoshi’s principal subject, but she may have taken from Kuniyoshi a new sense of color and design, as in the “big red and green water color of a flower which seems to echo Georgia O’Keefe ever so slightly” she exhibited at the Tiffin Room later that year (The Salt Lake Tribune, Aug. 12, 1951). She certainly was influenced by the city itself, and in the following years exhibited several works inspired by New York’s dynamic skyline.

An image from The Salt Lake Tribune in Oct. 1953 shows Grayce Cutler working on a painting dominated by geometric abstraction with possible hints of a cityscape. (SLT, Oct. 18, 1953, p.86

By 1952 Cutler was being grouped with what the Salt Lake Tribune called “the ever-growing colony of younger artists … technically accomplished youngsters [who] have tried everything from realism to dada” (Jan. 13, 1952, p.91). “Young” is a relative term and at 46 Solomon was by no means old; but most of the artists she was exhibiting with — artists like Gloria Cortella, Frank Bacher and Noel Betts (all of whom exhibited with her at The Gallery in 1951) — were a decade or two younger than Cutler. In fact, Utah’s experimental generation in the postwar years was an interesting mix: a few had come of age just before the war while others were only just graduating from university; but there were several, like Cutler, who after having established a career in a traditional vein, chose to strike out for new claims in the promise of modernism. In 1952, many of these artists came together to form the Utah Creative Artists.

Since at least the 1930s, Utah artists had exhibited within formal organizations, which allowed the artists to stage group exhibitions and represent themselves in a united front to the larger public.  Informally the artists in the state had been called the Utah Art Colony, but in 1937 they organized formally as a Utah Chapter of the American Artists’ Congress. Though the national organization was overtly political (it was organized to advocate against war and fascism) and decidedly left-leaning (it had ties to the Communist party),  the Utah chapter pitched a large tent and included artists of different generations, and different stylistic and political inclinations. In 1940, when political fissures split the national organization, the Utah chapter dissolved. The more experimental/modernist elements of the organization, calling itself the successor to the AAC chapter, organized in August 1940 as the Utah Artists Council. Mabel Frazer was elected its first president and its informal base of operations was the Federal Arts Project’s Utah Art Center. A second organization, attracting more traditional and conservative artists, coalesced into the Associated Utah Artists, with Florence Ware as president and its base of operations at the Tiffin Room.

Because by midcentury most of the artists who had formed the core of the Utah Artists Council had left the state and the organization was for all purposes nonexistent, Utah Creative Artists stepped in to fill the avant-garde void. When a couple dozen artists, mostly from Salt Lake City and Logan, formed the UCA in 1952, Cutler was elected its president. A Salt Lake Tribune article from 1953 indicated Cutler had worked for years to create the group. At mid-century, women were at the helm of many art organizations in the state and Cutler would serve in the position for two terms. As president, she was responsible for organizing the group’s first traveling exhibit, which went to Washington, Oregon and Idaho. Other exhibitions traveled to Colorado and New York. At a time when modernism was still trying to find fertile ground to grow, UCA allowed Utah artists to join forces to convince a skeptical public and represent Utah’s modern trends to the outside world.

For the first Utah exhibition of Utah Creative Artists, in July 1952, Cutler exhibited what Fitzpatrick described as “a stark, spare abstraction, predominantly white, with accents of red, blue and yellow, which seems to me to be the culmination of several years of earnest experimentation on the artist’s part. She has come to a technical solution of her needs that suits them and her subject most adequately” (The Salt Lake Tribune, July 06, 1952). In 1953, when she was appointed state director for American Art week (a position she would hold through 1957, by which time it had become American Art Month), a photo in the Tribune shows that while she was still working in a representational mode — a seascape is featured — she continued her experiments with music painting. “Beyond Reality,” painted while listening to a violin concert by Isaac Stern in Aspen, Colorado, is dominated by hard-edged, irregular forms dancing across the painting.

Even as she experimented with her music painting and other forms of abstraction, Cutler never wholly gave up the type of representational work that had helped establish her reputation. She did, however, range beyond the pretty floral arrangements and pastoral landscapes that were in vogue in the early 1940s.  A review of the UCA’s traveling exhibit in the Idaho Statesman, for example, noted that “Grace Solomon’s city roof tops with two pigeons is reminiscent of John Sloan’s dingy alley scenes” (Apr. 4, 1954 p. 26). Cutler was not the only Utah modernist who, having already established a career before embracing modernism, never quite gave up their more formal work: Stanley Perkins, Elaine Michelsen and others all continued to exhibit traditional works alongside more experimental ones.

As the horizon of her professional life was becoming bright, that of her personal life was darkening: In 1956, after 30 years of marriage, the Solomons divorced. On the heels of the divorce, Cutler left to study with Hans Hofman for the summer in Provincetown, Rhode Island. It was the iconic teacher’s last session in Provincetown, a place that had attracted, in large part because of his teaching, artists from all over the country. Don Olsen, a fellow member of the UCA, had studied with him a few years before. Many of the artists of the New York School, which by then was dominating the avant-garde art scene, were regulars in Provincetown and after studying with Hofman, Cutler made plans (which never came to fruition) to study with Robert Motherwell.

“Beach Scene,” part of the Utah School District Art Collection, shows Cutler’s interpretation of the California Coast.

By the mid ’60s, Cutler began living and working, at least for periods of time, in California, where her daughter had relocated. She also reclaimed her maiden name for her professional work. She was principally based in the San Francisco Bay area, and would live between there and Utah for the next two decades. She began working as an interior designer and continued to paint and exhibit. Leaving Utah was good for Cutler’s career. From San Francisco, Carmel and Berkeley, she painted works that garnered praise, attention and awards. Though in 1963, an  exhibit at the Artists Guild of America galleries in Carmel featured abstract work as well as landscapes and still lifes, but Cutler was increasingly gravitating towards more naturalistic work. In 1965, her “Look to November,” an oil which depicted light passing through a group of trees with heavy brushwork, was accepted into the New York World’s Fair (Salt Lake Tribune, July 25, 1965). In 1966, her watercolor “The End of Summer” was accepted to the 25th Annual Exhibition of the de Young Museum. The Saudi royal family purchased a work the following year. By 1970 she was exhibiting in New York and in 1972 her “Sundown” won an honorable mention at the National League of American Pen Women Biennial exhibit.

Though rooted in the landscape, Cutler continued to see her work in a broader, modernist vein. In a letter to Hoffman written in 1965, she described her current work: “Surrounding Utah mountains, cascades and huge rocks have influenced me in an ‘expressionistic style.’ Your vigorous approach influenced me greatly, I am sure.” She was careful to note that these works were situated in a broader context.: “This is not regional art as it is only a source I have drawn upon.” The paintings were large — about 40×50 inches — and she found it difficult to exhibit them. “[T]he oil paintings … require large wall space, am waiting until arrangements can be made with the right gallery. … It is difficult from Salt Lake City; we are rather isolated from major art centers, but hope to move to the West coast in a month or so and it may open up new avenues” (August 2, 1965).

Grayce Cutler, “The Source,” ca. 1980, watercolor, 34×40 in. State of Utah Alice Merrill Horne Art Collection.

Cutler’s move to California was also good for her social life. She became a member of the American Artists Professional League, SF Women Artists, Society of Western Artists and American Penn Women, and she went with a group of California artists to paint in Europe, including London, Amsterdam, Paris, Lake Como, Florence, Milan and Rome. She also met Earl A. Stein, an executive with MGM in Los Angles and RKO Studios in San Francisco. They married in 1966 and the couple moved back to Salt Lake City when he retired in 1971. He died two years later.

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s Cutler continued to exhibit in Utah, with important solo shows in Brigham City, Park City and Springville. She also created a foundation that provided scholarships to aspiring artists and donated several of her works to public collections. Her watercolors and oil paintings, though anchored in abstract principles and enlivened by expressionistic brushwork, were rooted in the natural world. “My landscapes, seascapes and city scenes are an expression of my personal vision about the poetry and mystique of naure and life,” she told the Springville Herald in 1989 (July 19, p. 6). She was especially attracted to water, whether the rushing force of spring runoff in Utah’s canyons or the majesty of the Pacific Ocean. After the 1950s, there was no more mention of her music paintings — a body of work which seems to have been unleashed by but remained in Utah’s heady days of experimentation at midcentury. Cutler died in 1998.

Grayce Cutler, “Big Cottonwood Canyon, Spring Runoff,” oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in. Courtesy Springville Museum of Art.

You can find more images of Grayce Cutler’s work at The Springville Museum of Art and the State of Utah Alice Merrill Horne Art Collection.

If you have any information regarding this artist, especially images of her work, please contact 15 Bytes editor Shawn Rossiter at editor@artistsofutah.org.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.