BIOGRAPHY

Calfee with Messenger Descending at 4817 Bending Lane Studio, Washington, D.C., circa 1963, Photo: Lynn Millar

William H. Calfee (1909–1995) was a Washington, D.C. born painter, sculptor, and educator who helped shape the city's mid-century art scene both through his own work and through decades spent at American University.

Calfee studied sculpture in the 1920s and 1930s at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and at Michigan's Cranbrook Academy, where he trained under the sculptor Carl Milles and first grasped the demands of executing monumental work. During the depression he taught art to children and elementary school teachers for the Resettlement Administration at Cumberland Homesteads, Tennessee — where, in 1935, he married singer and dancer Maria Peverini "Ariel" Hawkins, with whom he had two children before their 1949 divorce. Between 1936 and 1941 he painted eight New Deal murals for post offices in Bel Air, Maryland; Petersburg and Harrisonburg, Virginia; and Selbyville, Delaware, along with two sculptures for the Federal Fine Arts Section. 

His artwork during this early period is defined by social realism mixed with early stylized figuration—work that bridged the gap between literal depictions and soft, geometric abstraction.

His first solo show opened at Washington's James Whyte Gallery (later the Franz Bader Gallery) on December 7, 1941. After a stint as a psychotherapy worker at St. Elizabeths Hospital during the war, he became an assistant to C. Law Watkins at the Phillips Memorial Gallery art school, and in 1945 began teaching at American University, where he chaired the Art Department from 1946 to 1954 and co-founded the Watkins Memorial Collection. Joined by fellow Phillips-trained artists Sarah Baker and Robert Gates, and by visiting instructors such as Karl Knaths, Herman Maril, and Jack Tworkov, Calfee built one of the country's earliest university fine arts degree programs, grounding students in the principles he had drawn from Italian Renaissance fresco painting while pushing them toward innovation of their own; alumni such as Ben Summerford and Luciano Penay went on to join the AU faculty themselves.

His artwork during this mid-career phase is defined by bold, geometric abstraction mixed with organic, surreal elements. Influenced by the Abstract Expressionists he exhibited alongside, his work became far more concerned with form, texture, line, and weight.

Prior to stepping down as chairman in 1954 to concentrate on his own painting and sculpture, Calfee’s taught mural painting at the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince, Haiti (1949) at the invitation of the writer Selden Rodman, and accepted a guest professorship in painting at UC Berkeley (1951). His teaching in the DC area would continue intermittently into the 1970s. 

In 1957, Calfee became the co-founder and equal partner alongside artists Robert Gates, Ben Summerford, Helene Herzbrun (McKinsey), Mary Ryan Orwen, and Alice Denney of the historic Jefferson Place Gallery. The cooperative intentionally bridged regional divides by exhibiting groundbreaking New York Abstract Expressionists—such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning—alongside emerging Washington artists. The gallery also served as one of the primary, trailblazing launching pads for the Washington Color School of Painting, giving vital early exposure to local icons like Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and Gene Davis.

Calfee’s late career is defined by highly expressive figurative works based heavily on allegory and the Italian Renaissance. These paintings focused on layered color and expressionistic mark-making, while his sculptures became stark and evocative.

His later public commissions include the altar and font at St. Augustine's Chapel (1969) and the Monument to Rev. James Reeb, honoring the civil rights activist, later acquired by the National Academy of Sciences; his last major commission was a large abstract sculpture installed in 1980 outside the civic center in Rockville, Maryland. After relocating to Chevy Chase, Maryland, in the late 1970s, he co-taught the Kensington Workshop with fellow artist Patricia "P.M." Friend, with whom he also exhibited at New York's Graham Gallery in 1983.

In 1979 American University mounted a retrospective of his work at the National Academy of Sciences and awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. He remained Professor Emeritus of the Art Department for the rest of his life. Calfee's paintings and sculptures are held today in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Academy of Sciences, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, and The Phillips Collection, among others.