Speyer’s skillful brushstrokes, energetic lines, and broad areas of flat, vivid color coalesce to create an impressionistic reading of a figure in an interior. Painterly and expressive in her approach, the artist creates tension between her “real and imagined subjects.” Spatial ambiguity results from her placement of the figure’s crossed legs in the foreground and the head and torso in a more distant background space.
Born in Pittsburgh, Speyer enrolled at Temple University's Tyler School of Art when she was sixteen. It was there she became roommates with Lillian Lent and Doris Staffel and met studio artist Sideo Fromboluti, whom she later married and shared a studio with. In 1943, after their marriage, Fromboluti and Speyer moved to New York, where they often saw Staffel and her husband, Rudolf. Speyer knew and exhibited with many of the abstract expressionists, yet her own work always veered more toward the representational, drawn and painted from figures, still life, and landscape.
