Japanese Magnolias
A writer, dancer, and artist, Fitzgerald is remembered as a defining figure of the Roaring Twenties. She and her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby (1925), met in Montgomery, AL, in 1918, marrying in 1920. She took up art in earnest in 1925, quickly becoming a skilled painter in both watercolor and oil. Fitzgerald’s subjects included paper dolls, Cubist cityscapes, and floral paintings such as this close-up view of Japanese magnolia blossoms. Fitzgerald exhibited her work only once during her lifetime and remained largely unknown as an artist until the late 20th century. The scarcity of her work, as well as her status as a neurodivergent, female artist, also contributed to the lack of recognition for her art. Diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1930, Fitzgerald spent the next 18 years of her life in and out of institutions, including Asheville’s Highland Hospital, where she died on March 10, 1948, in a fire. Despite the fact that her family destroyed much of her art following her death, she has received recognition posthumously for her written and visual work.
Exhibition Title: Asheville Art Museum: An Introduction to the Collection
Label Date: 2021
Type: Catalogue Entry
Written by: Graham Boettcher, PhD
Zelda Fitzgerald was a dancer, writer, and artist whose creative accomplishments are typically overshadowed by her legendary public persona as an icon of the Roaring Twenties and wife to Jazz Age writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda took her first formal art lesson during the mid-1920s when the Fitzgeralds were fixtures in Paris’ artistic circles. After suffering several mental health crises during the 1930s, Zelda embraced painting as a form of therapy. She created most of her work—including many paintings of flowers—in the last fourteen years of her life (1936-48) while she was a patient at an Asheville psychiatric hospital.
Exhibition Title: Flora Symbolica: The Art of Flowers
Label Date: 3/7/2025
Written by: Jessica Orzulak and Robin s. Klaus
- Intersections in American Art , 9/11/2019 - 00/00/00
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