The Art of Diane Esmond

Presented by her son Victor Wallis

Diane Esmond (1910-1981) left an under-appreciated legacy of paintings. Although her artistic eye ranged over many subjects, her culminating evocations of the tropical forest have taken on added importance in the decades since her death. Based for most of her life in France, she displayed her work in Paris in the 1930s and internationally from the ‘50s through the ‘70s. Forced into exile in 1940, she spent the intervening years in New York; the paintings she left behind were seized (and many destroyed) by the Nazi occupation regime. Her later work, inspired by wide travel, showed a continuous evolution of style, but her orientation was more toward creating works of beauty than to keeping up with current trends of the art world.

Victor Wallis remained in the United States when his mother returned to France; he has preserved the extensive correspondence that they maintained over the last 25 years of her life. Although known primarily for his political writings including Red-Green Revolution (2018), Democracy Denied (2019), and Socialist Practice (2020), Victor is also an amateur musician and has long been interested in the social roots of various art forms