Untitled (The Mirrored Couple X)

Joyce Wahl Treiman

Joyce Wahl Treiman was one of just a few women who worked at Tamarind in Los Angeles in the early years. "The Mirrored Couple X" was one of fourteen images she did in the series titled "Mirrored Couple" in October of 1961. This impression is one of four "Trial Proofs" outside the Tamarind published edition of 20. There were an additional 18 various proofs. Treiman worked with Tamarind Master Printer Harold Keeler to print this image. The Tamaraind reference number for this image is 431.

The work of painter and printmaker Joyce Wahl Treiman ranges from the benign to the bizarre, and is always arresting. As a child her artwork showed earmarks of the genius, and she was put into adult art courses while still in elementary school. As a result, her work features the stylistic stamp of an artist so confident in their technical ability that they do not waste time agonizing over whether their penstroke is sound; Treiman simply dives into a composition’s atmosphere with an all-encompassing fire.

Joyce Treiman (1922-1991) was born in Evanston, Illinois. She earned her associates degree from Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, before beginning her studies at the State University of Iowa. She studied with Philip Guston and Lester Longman, earning her B.F.A. and a Graduate Fellowship in 1943.

Her first solo exhibition was mounted in 1942 at the Paul Theobald Gallery in Chicago and another solo exhibition followed at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947. Treiman taught in Winnetka, Illinois from 1955 to 1959. She moved to Los Angeles in 1960, and her first California exhibition was at the Felix Landau Gallery in Los Angeles the next year. She was a Visiting Artist at the Art Center School in Los Angeles during the summer of 1968, Artist-in-Residence at the San Fernando Valley State College between 1968 and 1969, and a lecturer at the University of California at Los Angeles between 1969 and 1970. The number of her solo exhibitions is eclipsed by a rigorous yearly group exhibition schedule. Her election to membership of the National Academy of Design in 1990 distinguished her long career in art.