In April, 1918, L'Engle contributed two paintings to the second annual exhibition of the
Society of Independent Artists, an organization that abided by the slogan "no jury, no prizes" and that welcomed all artists to show their work on payment of a small fee. She contributed paintings to subsequent exhibitions in 1920 through 1923, 1925, and 1936. In the summer of 1918 she set up a studio in Provincetown and showed at the fourth annual exhibition of the
Provincetown Art Association. From this time until 1946 she contributed paintings to the association's annual exhibitions almost every year. In 1922 she participated in a joint exhibition with Florance Waterbury, an artist, who, like herself, came from a prosperous and well-connected New York family and who, like herself, had studied at the Hawthorne summer school. Held at the newly-opened Art Centre, the show attracted notice of the prominent New York critics. The critic for the
New York Times was interested in her handling of form and color, while the
Evening Post contrasted Waterbury's decorative paintings with L'Engle's modernistic ones, and the
Evening Telegram admired the "rare personal quality and a freshness of viewpoint, combined with an unusual sense of coloring." Later in 1922 L'Engle participated in a group show held by Salons of America and did so again in 1925 and 1934. In 1925 L'Engle was invited to show in a Parisian exhibition of
Cubist paintings called L'Art Aujourd'hui that included the principal French exponents of that style. That year she also became a founding member and subsequently an officer of the New York Society of Women Artists, an organization that was created to provide a radical alternative for women who were dissatisfied with the relatively conservative
National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. She showed in the society's exhibition of 1926 and in most later years until 1949. In 1930 she showed for the first time in a commercial gallery, the S. P. R. Penthouse Galleries belonging to a group of architects and designers whose goal was the development of a distinctive
American modernism in design. In 1931 and again in 1933 and 1934 she participated in group exhibitions held at a commercial gallery, the
Weyhe Gallery. With her in the 1931 show were
Dorothy Brett,
Caroline Durieux, Elinor Gobson,
Lois Lenski, Alice Newton, Amelie Pumpelly,
Ruth Starr Rose, and Helen Woods Rous. She showed paintings at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts annual of 1934 and showed prints in a group exhibition at the Grant Gallery in 1939. In 1947 she participated in a four-woman show at the Studio Gallery and in 1951 was given a solo exhibition at the Wellons Gallery. Appearing with her husband William L'Engle in 1956 at the
Bodley Gallery, she showed composite works that were called montages at the time and that have since come to be known as
combines. The
Times critic said "Mrs. L'Engle has assembled bits and pieces of many materials in her montages. Her idea is to show, by example, that costly materials are not necessary for creation." She had a solo exhibition at the Lynn Kottler Gallery in 1962 and in 1965 showed drawings of archaic Greek sculpture at the Hotel Barbizon. L'Engle died in Provincetown on March 14, 1978. Posthumous exhibitions include joint exhibitions for both L'Engles in 1978 and 1999 in Provincetown, in 1997 in
Truro, Massachusetts, and in 2010 at D. Wigmore Fine Art.
Artistic style and critical reception L'Engle's early style was Cubist, based on her association with Albert Gleizes. Later, she said she felt she could continue for a long time to express herself in that mode, but then, as later, her approach was eclectic and she also painted in a more individual style which reminded critics of fellow Provincetown artists, Oliver Chaffee and
Agnes Weinrich whose manner of painting could not be easily pigeon-holed. The paintings, "Boats on the Beach at Cavalaire" of 1923 (shown at left) and "Standing Figure" of 1927 (shown at right) illustrate her early style. Writing in 1928 of a complex work showing an interior view with mirror and a through view to a tall building outside, Elizabeth L. Cary of the
New York Times credited L'Engle with a "clear precision" and said the work "succeeds quite remarkably in keeping everything in its separate plane without insistence on planar perspective." As a member of a small group of women exhibiting in 1930, L'Engle subscribed to a practice of evolving "a more modern American style," one that was more in keeping with 20th Century American life than are the prevailing Continental designs." Noting that L'Engle seemed to have stopped making pure abstractions, Helen Appleton Read of the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote in 1931 that L'Engle appeared to have been "always at heart a painter with a painter's sensuous enjoyment of the medium itself." In 1932, when L'Engle showed with
Adelaide Lawson and
Alice Newton a critic for the
New York Evening Post said "her interest in abstractions has enabled her to build up a solid structure of organic design. In 1934, 1936, and again in 1943 critics called attention to her skill in composition. During the late 1940s L'Engle painted pure abstractions that
Howard Devree called "bright" and "well-organized." The painting, "Two Nuns," (at left) shows L'Engle's representational style of the 1930s and 1940s and her "Graffiti," (at right) is an example of a pure abstraction from the late 1940s and early 1950s. Later in the 1950s she made montages incorporating metal foil, wire, wood, plaster, and broken glass as well as paint. She became interested in archaic Greek statues in the 1960s and, during that period, exhibited drawings of pieces she found in the Athens Museum. ==Personal life and family==