China Ducks is a color woodcut created about 1950 by American artist Mina Pulsifer. It is pencil signed and is an unnumbered proof from an edition of twenty. China Ducks was printed by the artist on a delicate ivory wove paper. The image measures 18-3/4 x 11-3/4 inches. An impression of China Ducks is in the National Gallery of Art.
The forms of four ducks standing near what appears to be a blue fence or within a blue cage are presented in an abstracted style that reads like stained-glass, with overlapping shapes and colors delineated by bold white and black lines. The arching shapes of the ducks’ necks and wings are contrasted by the grid pattern in the background, which is borrowed from to create the intricate layers of wing feathers. The lightly offset printing of colors lends a pulsing vibration to the entire composition.
Mina Schutz Pulsifer (nee Wilhelmina Schutz), painter and printmaker, was born to Wilhelmina Elizabeth and Albert Scultz on 3 August 1897 in Leavenworth, Kansas. She graduated from St. Mary's Academy in Leavenworth and continued with art studies at the Kansas City Art Institute. In 1923 she married George Pulsifer, a West Point graduate and retired Major in the U.S. Army, and the couple moved to San Diego the following year. In California, she continued her art training at the San Diego Academy of Fine Arts where she studied with Eugene De Vol and Otto H. Schneider. Later, she studied independently with painters Nicolai Fechin and Frederick Taubes.
Pulsifer was a member of and exhibited with the San Diego Art Guild and received a few awards. She served on the board which included a term as president in 1944. Best-known as a portrait painter, she exhibited her painting Tonio at the California Pacific International Exposition in San Diego in 1935. After the fair, she moved into a studio in the Spanish Village on the former exposition grounds, where she also served on the board of directors. Among her important commissions were portraits of State Senator Ben Hulse and Vice Admiral Charles A. Pownall, former Governor of Guam.
In 1940, Pulsifer exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco and, in that decade, she turned her attention to printmaking, particularly lithography. Associated American Artists of New York published two of her lithographs, La Familia in 1947 and Paulyn in 1950. Her lithographs were also included in two European traveling shows organized by the Boston Public Library. During the 1960s she taught at the San Diego Art Guild giving life drawing and painting workshops. After the death of her husband in 1970, she moved to Fallbrook, California.
Mina Pulsifer's work is represented in the collections of the Boston Public Library, Massachusetts; the National Bezalel Museum, Jerusalem; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris; La Salle University Art Museum, Philadelphia; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Mina Schutz Pulsifer died on February 14, 1989 in Fallbrook, California.
