"Abstract painting is an intellectual process. To be a modern painter and to make a truthful statement is the sum total of all I am.", Janet Lippincott
Janet Lippincott (May 16, 1918 – May 2, 2007) was an American abstract painter and printmaker, born in New York City and a leading figure of the New Mexico Modernists from the late 1940s onward. The daughter of an international banker, she spent part of her childhood in Paris, where her exposure to European modernism began early, and was enrolled at the Art Students League in New York at the age of fifteen. Her formal training was interrupted by the Second World War, she served with the Women's Army Corps and worked on General Eisenhower's staff in London, and after the war she used her GI Bill stipend to study at Emil Bisttram's Taos School of Art beginning in 1949. There she trained with Bisttram, a founding member of the Transcendental Painting Group, and with the painter and writer Alfred Morang, and briefly extended her studies at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.
She made New Mexico her permanent home and was settled in Santa Fe by the mid-1950s, where her assertively modernist position helped to "shake up" the local art scene and made her one of the central figures of the city's postwar abstract community for the next half-century. She received the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2002 and the New Mexico Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts Arts Achievement Award in 2003. Her work is held in the collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the New Mexico State Capitol Art Collection, and the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, among others, and her estate of paintings, sketchbooks, and personal documents was donated upon her death to St. John's College in Santa Fe.