of the kind of person she was." Career in art Caparn's first exhibition took place in 1932 a few days before her twenty-third birthday. It was held in conjunction with a concert by baritone Willard Fry held at the Southampton studio of his uncle the artist, Marshal Fry. She showed human and animal figures in marble, clay, and terracotta and the New York Times covered the event in its Society pages. The following year she was given an exhibition with two other artists at a commercial New York gallery called Delphic Studios. Reviewing the show in the New York Sun, critic Henry McBride said she used "the freest lines for forms" to make emotionally charged works to which "the old-fashioned ideas of sculpture do not apply." Archipenko contributed an introduction to the Delphic Studios catalog for the exhibition. In it he wrote, "The idealism of Rhys Caparn and her love for the spiritual permit her to create a new form of sculpture, without her losing the ability to sculpt in a naturalistic form when she so desires." Also in 1933, she made the animal forms that encircled an armillary sphere made by her father as part of his landscape design at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. In 1935 Delphic Studios gave Caparn a solo exhibition in which she showed realist portrait heads as well as animal abstractions. In this period her sculpture was not universally admired. When she participated in a group show sponsored by Salons of America in 1936, Anita Brenner of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle called attention to her "monstrous sculpture inspired by rubber tubes." Late in the decade she received an invitation to join an outspoken group of extreme abstractionists called American Abstract Artists. She joined and remained a member but later said she was not particularly committed to the organization. She said it was not as collegial as the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors which she helped found in 1940. In 1939, Caparn contributed drawings to the annual black-and-white exhibition at Grant Studios. This was the first time she showed her works on paper. She showed them frequently in later years, often in conjunction with her sculpture. In a 1967 interview she said, "I've drawn all my life. You draw for a vocabulary; it feeds your eye" and when, in 1983, an interviewer commented on her freedom of line, she said she drew spontaneously and very