William Halsey

1915 – 1999

William Halsey is one of South Carolina’s foremost modern artists, well known for his vibrant, abstract style in paintings, collage and sculptures done over six decades, beginning in the 1940s. He was born and lived in Charleston, and continually explored the area’s rich visual and cultural environment as inspiration for his art. Halsey received early lessons and advice from the Charleston Renaissance artists, Elizabeth O’Neill Verner and Edward I.R. Jennings. From 1935-39, Halsey studied at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and upon graduation was awarded a Paige Fellowship, and traveled with his wife, the artist Corrie McCallum, to Mexico. Settling with his family in Charleston in 1945, Halsey continued to build his reputation as an artist by exhibiting in one-man and group shows, regionally and nationally. Halsey’s early paintings of city-scapes, landscapes, still-lifes, and portraits are rendered in a bold, graphic modernist style derived from a Cubist tradition of exploring form in lines, planes and color. He subsequently developed his art into a personal, painterly expressionism, most often with bold coloring, abstracted forms and motifs.