Gina Knee was one of the most distinctive American modernist watercolorists of the 1930s, a self-taught Santa Fe painter whose distilled geometric reading of the New Mexican landscape and Pueblo culture made her, in the judgment of later critics, one of the most daring abstract painters working in the Southwest in that decade.
Gina Knee (October 31, 1898 – October 31, 1982) was an American modernist painter, born Gina Schnaufer in Marietta, Ohio, and raised in a genteel Virginia household oriented toward the conventional path of marriage and southern social life. She married for the first time at nineteen, but a 1930 encounter with the watercolors of John Marin in New York reshaped her sense of what her life might be. She divorced, moved to Santa Fe in 1931, and spent her first year in New Mexico attending Pueblo ceremonials and dances and absorbing the colors, patterns, and landscape that would become the basis of her mature work. In 1933 she married the Canadian-born photographer Ernest Knee, whose name she kept for the rest of her career.
Largely self-taught, with only a handful of drawing classes at the Art Students League in New York, she developed a distinctive watercolor practice that combined Marin-influenced geometric distillation of natural form with the introduction of gouache and tempera and a steadily increasing degree of abstraction. She exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago beginning in 1934, won prizes in California and New Mexico through the 1930s, was included in the New York World's Fair of 1939, and showed at the Whitney Museum of American Art's 1941 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting. In 1965 she was selected as one of 129 artists for the Newark Museum's Women Artists of America 1707–1964, and in the same year received her only retrospective. Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Anschutz Collection, and the New Mexico Museum of Art, among others.