Study for the Saint and the Sinner #4 - Fables series

June Claire Wayne

In the mid-1950s Wayne and UCLA's philosophy department head Abraham Kaplan began a suite of fables, for which Kaplan would write the fables and Wayne would create lithographs as illustrations. However, Kaplan's work was interrupted, and Wayne abandoned the project to begin new ones.

This early, rare drawing was done utilizing a "Flit gun", a hand-pumped insecticide sprayer used to dispense Flit, a brand-name insecticide widely used against flies and mosquitoes.

Wayne comments on this image on page 116 of her raisonné: "The fable is a good one: a sinner is caught off guard by the arrival of the Messiah at the gates of the city. He mounts his donkey and flees in the opposite direction."

Though it was exhibited in four major venues in the late 1950s, this drawing is not illustrated in the catalogue raisonné. Cataloger Robert Conway notes: "Despite it having been exhibited in four important venues, this drawing has not been located. It was most likely destroyed by the artist. Since it and the following entry are numbered in a series of five, we can assume that at least three other unrecorded studies are also lost."

This drawing was exhibited at the deYoung Museum, 1956; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1958; and L.A. County Museum, 1959. When a surprised June Wayne saw this again at the Annex Galleries in January of 2011 she commented that she had also done a painting of this subject which was destroyed by water from a leak in her studio and this drawing was the only record of the study. She was informed that it was from the estate from the widow of Santa Barbara Museum director Donald Bear. Bear, who had died in 1952, was an early supporter of Wayne's work.

June Claire Wayne, painter, printmaker, educator, and administrator, was born in Chicago, Illinois on 7 March 1918. She was primarily self-taught as an artist and had her first exhibition at the Boulevard Bookshop in Chicago in 1934 at age seventeen.

The following year her first major exhibition was mounted at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Wayne moved to New York City in 1939, where she worked in the garment industry, an endeavor that continued to inform her work throughout her career. With the advent of World War II, she traveled to California where she studied technical drawing at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. After a brief return to Chicago where she worked in the WPA program and wrote for a radio station, she moved to Los Angeles in 1946.

In 1948, Wayne attended Lynton Kistler's lithography classes in Los Angeles, working in his studio on numerous occasions. Dissatisfied with the limitations of the workshop, Wayne traveled to Paris in 1957 to work with Marcel Durassier, hoping to find the encouragement to funnel her vision of experimental fine art lithography into a reality. Working with master printers and fine paper made it apparent that a comparable workshop was needed in the United States. She consulted with artist Clinton Adams in 1959 and, with a grant from the Ford Foundation, the Tamarind Lithography Workshop was founded in Los Angeles in 1960. Adams served as the founding associate director and Wayne served as its director. After ten years of co-operating the workshop, she arranged to hand over the workshop to the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where it remains a magnet for artists from all over the world.

Wayne then explored large-scale tapestry production at the historic Manufactory des Gobelins in Paris. After creating designs for tapestries, Wayne worked directly with the weavers at the factory, unlike many artists of the time who left their projects in the hands of the institute. She also focused on oil painting and sculpture, and often explored physics and astronomy in her subject matter. She continued to work in color lithography and often pared down her editions to focus on perfecting her technique.

June Wayne's experiences as a woman in the Modern art world made it obvious to her that there was a need for representation and support for women in the arts. Despite her outright rejection of the label "woman artist," she created a forum to instruct female artists how to self-promote. In 1972, Wayne held her first seminar for aspiring women artists, curators, and directors hoping to bolster their knowledge in navigating galleries, museums, universities and other institutions; these events would eventually become known as the "Joan of Art" seminars.

June Wayne died at her home in Los Angeles on August 23, 2011.