Bruce, Patrick Henry

Bruce, Patrick Henry (1881–1936) American painter, born at Long Island, Virginia. After studying with Robert Henri in New York, 1902–3, he went to Paris, where he remained for almost the whole of the rest of his life. He studied under Matisse and became a friend and follower of Delaunay, working closely with him from about 1912 to 1915. Thus he was moving towards abstraction at the same time as two other Americans in Paris—the Synchromists Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell. For a time, in a series of pictures entitled Compositions (1916–17), Bruce was fairly close to them in style, but then in a series of Formes (1917–36) he developed a more geometric style featuring thickly pigmented blocks of bright colour based on still-life forms (there is a kinship with the hard-edged forms of Purism, but Bruce was more subtle and inventive than Le Corbusier and Ozenfant, its chief exponents). In both series Bruce showed outstanding gifts as a colourist. His work was exhibited at the Armory Show in 1913, but he remained almost unknown in the USA. Disillusioned by his lack of success, he destroyed most of his paintings in 1932. He returned to the USA in 1936 and committed suicide a few months later.