Obituaries - March 3, 2000

Louisa Matthiasdottir; Postwar American Painter

Louisa Matthiasdottir, 83, postwar American painter known for a cool and direct style in works that often depicted her native Iceland. Matthiasdottir was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1917, but moved to New York in 1942, where she held her first solo show at the Jane Street Gallery. She lived and worked in New York for the next five decades. Her paintings, which included portraits, self-portraits, still lifes, interiors and landscapes, were showcased in 17 solo shows between 1964 and 1991 and is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, the Indiana Art Museum in Bloomington and the National Gallery of Iceland in Reykjavik. Her first American retrospective was held in 1996 at the Watkins Gallery of American University in Washington. Jed Perl, in a review of the show for The New Republic, called her a realist who “doesn’t care to startle us with the very fact of her being a realist” and whose work was underappreciated by the mainstream art world. She was married for 47 years to painter Leland Bell, who died in 1991. On Saturday at a hospital in Delhi, N.Y.