Janine Burke is an art historian, biographer, novelist and curator. Between 1977 and 1982, she lectured in art history at the Victorian College of the Arts. Subsequently, she has been a full-time writer and independent scholar. Currently, Dr Burke is a research fellow of Monash University. In 1987, she won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for fiction for her novel Second Sight. Her next novel, Company of Images, was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year award and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. She has written a groundbreaking series of books on the Heide circle, including Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker, which was shortlisted for the 2002 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection, shortlisted for the 2007 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for non-fiction, is the internationally acclaimed survey of Freud’s personal collection.
A brilliant and ground-breaking exploration of the crucial role of nature in forming and inspiring our most enduring artists and writers: Georgi a O’K eeffe Pa b l o P i c a s s o K a r en Bli x en
Source
‘Creativity is a place. Memory is an image. The artistic process itself is a journey, a specific one, the return to a lost and cherished childhood realm, the original source of inspiration and identity.’
Georgi a O’K eeffe Pa b l o P i c a s s o K a r en Bli x en Jack son Pollock V i rgi n i a Woolf Va n e s s a B e l l Cl au de Mon et E r n e s t H e m i n gw a y Em i l y K a m e K n gw a r r e y e
V irgi n i a Woolf Va n e s s a B e l l Cl au de Mon et E r n e s t H e m i n gw a y
Cover photograph: Autumn Moon, the High Sierra from Glacier Point by Ansel Adams © Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust/CORBIS Author photograph: David Sheehy Cover design: Lisa White
Georgia O’Keeffe claimed the New Mexico desert as hers, and the purity of her artistic vision was matched by its stark and haunting landscape. Picasso was never more alive, nor more creative, than when he was on the spectacular Côte d’Azur. Karen Blixen was made famous by her experiences in Africa, but it wasn’t until she returned to the isolation and beauty of her family home in Denmark that she developed her identity as a writer. Springs on Long Island became ‘home, source and refuge’ for Jackson Pollock. It was there he developed a radical new painting method that paid homage to the landscape while giving him the freedom to create massive abstract works. Country life in Sussex became the retreat for sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, influencing the rhythm, shape and content of their work, and their close and often troubled intimacy. Key West dictated Hemingway’s direction and ensured the sea became an important theme in his writing, culminating in his Nobel Prize-winning novel The Old Man and the Sea. Monet created a paradise on earth at his exquisite garden-home at Giverny where Blanche, his artist companion and muse, assisted the master as he created his great Waterlily series.
Jack son Pollock
Em i l y K a m e K n gw a r r e y e
In Source, art and landscape, love and companionship, home and garden are entwined, as award-winning writer and art historian Janine Burke explores the profound connection between creativity and place central to some of the twentieth century’s most significant artists and writers. Linking them is a journey back to Eden, to recreate a lost, beloved childhood sanctuary that inspires major new work.
Source
N a t u r e ’s H e a l i n g R o l e i n A r t a n d Wr i t i n g
Janine Burke
Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s astounding, fluid abstract paintings represent her Country and her Dreaming, providing the intersecting point of the real, physical world — the desert — and the spiritual, symbolic world. For these pivotal artists and writers, the act of re-creating Eden was a life-changing and healing rite, a journey of rediscovery that led to the creation of a personal paradise. Upon arriving at that place, iconic works were forged from that terrain, its light, its colours, its atmosphere. Once they had found it, none of them ever wished to leave. This important book not only illuminates these extraordinary lives and careers but shows that nature is life and art, the source of creativity itself.
BIOGRAPHY
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N a t u r e ’s H e a l i n g R o l e i n A r t a n d Wr i t i n g
Also by Janine Burke Dear Sun: The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed Joy Hester Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection
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N a t u r e ’s H e a l i n g R o l e i n A r t a n d Wr i t i n g
Janine Burke
Every effort has been made to acknowledge and contact the owners of copyright for permission to reproduce material which falls under the 1968 Copyright Act. Any copyright owners who have inadvertently been omitted from acknowledgements and credits should contact the publisher and omissions will be rectified in subsequent editions.
First published in 2009 Copyright © Janine Burke 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au ISBN 978 1 74175 817 7 Text design by Lisa White Set in 12/17.5 pt Minion Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
g Con t e n ts Introduction
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1 The Faraway Home: Georgia O’Keeffe and the Desert
1
2 Earth, Fire, Water: Picasso’s Provence
49
3 Out of Paradise: Karen Blixen’s Homelands
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4 ‘I am nature’: Jackson Pollock on Long Island
133
5 Sharing a Room of One’s Own: Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell in Sussex
185
6 Sea Being: Ernest Hemingway in Key West
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7 La Nymphéa: Monet, Blanche Hoschedé and Giverny
279
8 Myth and Reality: Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s Utopia
315
Bibliography
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Notes
369
Acknowledgements
416
Index
419
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To Susan McCulloch
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g I n t Roduc t ion Perhaps it is true that in the beginning was the Word. But is it not equally likely that in the beginning was a Place—the place of creation itself? Edward Casey1
Childhood is certainly greater than reality. Gaston Bachelard2
Creativity is a place. Memory is an image. The artistic process itself is a journey, a specific one, the return to a lost and cherished child hood realm, the original source of inspiration and identity. For the artists and writers in this book—Claude Monet, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Karen Blixen, Ernest Hemingway, Blanche Hoschedé, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso and Emily Kame Kngwarreye—recreating Eden was a life-changing, art-making, healing rite that provides a map of their careers and an index of their subject matter. What sounds like a fairytale is, in fact, a reality. The metropolis, with its avant-garde, bohemian milieux, is traditionally associated with artistic breakthroughs and maturity. But
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Source suggests a different direction. What unites these artists and writers is a journey of return, of rediscovery, that leads them away from the city to the creation of a personal paradise. Despite the challenges, all achieved their goal. Upon arriving, whether it was Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico or Picasso in Provence, new work emerged, derived from that terrain, from its light, its colours, its earth, its water. None of them wished to leave. They had recovered the place they’d been unconsciously seeking for years. Freud, who built the entire edifice of psychoanalysis on childhood memories, had his own Eden. It is a forest near the small town of Freiberg in Moravia—then part of Austria–Hungary now Pˇríbor, Czech Republic—where he was born. Devastated when his family was forced to leave the area, Freud grieved for the rest of his life for his ‘little paradise’. In ‘Screen Memories’, where Freud illustrates the significance of childhood recollections by drawing on his own, he recalls the ‘beautiful woods near our home, in which (as one of my memories from those days tell me) I used to run off from my father, almost before I had learned to walk’. Nature was Freud’s sanctuary of freedom and beauty. It may partly explain his detestation of Vienna, where he lived until 1938. When a bronze plaque was unveiled honouring his birthplace, Freud, then seventy-five, wrote to the town’s mayor saying that, deep within him, remained ‘the happy child from Freiberg’ who ‘received the first indelible impress ions from this air, from this soil’.3 In Source, art and landscape, love and companionship, home and garden are entwined, providing creativity’s genius loci. Culture is the time-honoured context for creative change; Source cites nature as culture. Traditionally, nature and culture have been seen in opposition to one another. Nature has been conceived either as
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‘a passive, inert, ahistorical burden . . . or else as a romanticised refuge or haven from the cultural’. But on our rapidly changing, environmentally challenged planet, it’s vital to rethink nature’s status and, as Elizabeth Grosz writes, ‘to allow it to account for the very inception of culture itself’.4 Rather than being viewed as static, remote and closed, nature is dynamic, intimate and responsive. Many in this book were animists and pantheists. To Woolf, O’Keeffe, Pollock and Blixen, nature was alive, and they experienced sustaining, ecstatic, personal relationships with it. In pre-Christian, pagan cultures, the natural world was deified and humanity engaged in constant, active, worshipful connection. The earth was sacred, a bond that Kngwarr eye’s people never lost. Source’s journey of return includes a spiritual dimension, as its subjects rekindle a transcendent experience of nature that infuses their art. Source also explores passionate arcs of desire and disaffection, the marriages, friendships and affairs that mark the rhythm of the artists’ lives and oeuvres as decisively as the seasons. Themes of mourning and regeneration also underpin this book, as do grim patterns of illness, alcoholism, syphilis, breakdowns and suicide. Linking the artists and writers is a beautiful, memorable location that inspired major works. Apart from Kngwarreye, well-preserved house museums exist at each place. For Kngwarreye, her traditional land in the Northern Territory provided the spiritual nourishment for her internationally recognised, abstract paintings. While Source evokes a palpable sense of place, the house museums offer readers the opportunity to track and experience spirit of place. This book is a map.
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g Why choose these artists and writers, among the most significant modernists of the twentieth century? Modernism’s primary goal was destruction and rupture: it consciously broke with traditional form and content. It re-invented pictorial space—in the case of Monet, Picasso and Pollock—as well as the construction and the language of the novel—in the case of Woolf and Hemingway. In their personal lives, O’Keeffe and Blixen practised extreme forms of dislocation, setting off on solo journeys to places that were sometimes hostile and dangerous in order to reconfigure self and art. Bell radicalised her domestic geography reconfiguring ‘family’ and ‘home’ by sharing it with her homosexual lover, who was the father of her daughter, and his partner. Could the powerful urge to break with the past, to launch an assault on art and cultural history, inculcate an equally profound need to find a stable, nourishing environment, and not just any environment but the original place of safety and inspiration lost in childhood? The writers and artists in this book were committed to change on a grand scale but they also needed security and constancy, which they searched for, and found, in nature. I must confess I did not choose my subjects programatically: I love and admire their work, and have done for decades. It’s a fine thing to write about what you love, and to go to the places where it was made. Because their stories are separate but linked, the book’s plan is not chronological. This Introduction acts as the template. Also, I needed to be sure. Nairobi, for example, is a long and complicated journey from Melbourne that involves catching a flight
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to Sydney, connecting with another to Johannesburg that crosses the Indian Ocean on a day that never ends, then disembarking for an overnight stay before continuing north directly up the African continent until Mount Kilimanjaro rises in the distance and the green plains of Kenya are in view. At that point, I didn’t want to ponder, ‘Out of Africa? Really such a great book?’ My sense that creativity has a place, a site, was generated by my research into the Heide circle, Australia’s premier modernist enclave that gathered at the home of art patrons Sunday and John Reed in the Yarra Valley, near Melbourne. I knew the Reeds, as well as their adopted son Sweeney, and, over the years, I’d visited both their homes on the property—now the Heide Museum of Modern Art. The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide explores Sunday’s roles as muse, collector, publisher, landscape gardener, cook and interior designer. From the 1930s, Sunday was at the centre of a group of artists and writers whom she nourished with food, money, books and ideas. Sunday translated modernism into the Australian vernacular—rather like her garden, a fusion of French formalism, English romanticism and native flora. On the dining-room table, Sidney Nolan painted the Ned Kelly series, with Sunday assisting him.5 Sunday made Nolan sensitive to changes in the seasons, to typically Australian light and colour, from which he developed his mythos, personified by the outlaw Ned Kelly. After completing my research for The Heart Garden, I was eager to test my thesis, to see the house museums, gardens and landscapes of other artists and writers, and to gauge the connection between the creation of place and the creation of art on a broader scale. It took me to Nairobi, Sussex, Copenhagen, Provence, New Mexico, Key West, Normandy, Long Island, the Central Desert of
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the Northern Territory, and home. We are all homemakers; it’s the creative act everyone shares. Our decision about where we live and how we inhabit a place—if we’re fortunate enough to have a choice in the matter—is crucial, and how ‘at home’ we feel determines our wellbeing. Yet perhaps such life-altering decisions are made less consciously than we’re aware, and, travelling home, we enact an eternal return. As T.S. Eliot wrote, Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of the earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river . . .6
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g Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait—Head (1918) Gelatin silver print, sheet, trimmed to image 23.5 × 18.4 cm Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
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T h e Fa R away Hom e G e org ia O’ Ke ef fe a nd t he De s er t My period of indecision is over—I a[m] going West . . . the Mountain calls one and the desert—and the sagebrush—the country seems to call one in a way that one has to answer it. Georgia O’Keeffe1
Georgia O’Keeffe chose the landscape as her lover. In 1934, when she settled in New Mexico, she was already regarded as America’s most significant woman artist and one of its major modernists. She’d planned to become an artist from an early age but it was an odyssey fractured by family tragedies. Her will and her self-reliance were forged by those circumstances, as was her need to discover, and control, a site of peace and security—the ‘Faraway’, as she named it. It was this place that lured her, and whose bride she became.2 The Faraway was not shared with her husband Alfred Stieglitz, photographer, entrepreneur of New York’s modern movement and Georgia’s devoted champion. He never visited Ghost Ranch and
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Abiquiu. Characteristically succinct, O’Keeffe defined her attitude. ‘That was my country . . . It fitted to me exactly.’3
g Born in 1887 near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Georgia was the eldest girl, and the second child, in a family of seven. Her father, Frank, was a farmer, like his father and four brothers. Frank’s parents had arrived from County Cork, Ireland in 1848, leaving behind a faltering business, and struck out west from Milwaukee to the tiny township of Sun Prairie. They prospered on the fertile land with harvests of wheat and alfalfa. In 1884, Frank had married Ida Totto, a neighbour of the O’Keeffes, whose father was an exiled Hungarian count. Though Count George Totto also made good in the district, he was restless. He and his American wife Isabella travelled around Wisconsin until, in 1872, they bought land adjacent to the O’Keeffe’s. Then Count George, for whom Georgia was named, decided to return to Hungary and reclaim his lost inheritance. He never returned; there were no explanations, and it put Isabella and their six children in dire straits. Isabella sold her land to Frank O’Keeffe and, soon after, he married Ida. Strong-willed and beautiful, Ida had once aspired to be a doctor, an astonishing ambition for a woman at that time. She was also musically gifted and encouraged her children to take an interest in the arts. ‘She told us wonderful stories,’ Georgia recalled. ‘She read to us on rainy days and weekends.’4 Georgia studied the violin and began drawing lessons when she was eleven. But Ida was also stern and distant, making Georgia comment wistfully, ‘As a child, I think I craved a certain affection that my mother did not give.’5
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The land around the O’Keeffe property has been described as ‘inescapably abstract. Uncluttered by trees or underbrush, the sweep of the earth is idealized, non-specific . . . Even at the height of summer, when the crop lies smoothly across the long rising slants, the shapes of the calm earth are always exposed.’6 The clear, uncluttered body of the earth, represented by the plains of Wisconsin, provided a lasting influence on Georgia’s art and psyche, ‘the Faraway’ that was always calling to her. While the O’Keeffes prospered materially, ill-health destroyed the family as, one by one, they succumbed to tuberculosis. By 1899, Frank’s parents and his brothers Peter, Boniface and Bernard had all died. Bernard had been nursed by Ida at the family home. Consumption, as it was then known, was a hideous, usually fatal, illness. Symptoms include a chronic cough with bloody sputum, fever, night sweats, weight loss, pallor and fatigue. It was a slow death. Georgia’s lifelong obsession with her health, with diet and exercise, was no doubt due to the gruesome experience of growing up among the dying. Because it was then unknown that tuberculosis was a virus, Frank and Ida hoped a more temperate climate would prevent the onset of the illness. Sun Prairie is a place of extremes: freezing in the winter and burning hot in the summer. They sold their land at a handsome profit and went south. In 1902, Frank and Ida arrived in Williamsburg, Virginia, a place where they had no family or connections; moving from the egalitarian, hard-working Midwest to the aristocratic, segregated South, from the blond earth, big winds and vast skies of the plains to the lush, moist, verdant South. They were Yankees among Confederates, and they were not made especially welcome. It was the kind of fetid, hothouse landscape which made Georgia feel
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claustrophobic, and which she later associated with being miserable and trapped. When she was twelve, Georgia had been sent to a local boarding school in Wisconsin. Two years later, she was packed off to Madison, the nearest city to Sun Prairie, to attend school and live with an aunt. Of course, sending country children to boarding school is often a necessity, but a pattern of intent emerges as Ida’s decisions about where to educate Georgia become a program of separating her from the family. As soon as Georgia arrived in Williamsburg, Ida sent her to boarding school over three hundred kilometres away in Chatham, though the other six children were enrolled in local schools. Georgia must have wondered what she’d done wrong. At the start of Georgia’s autobiographical essay, published in 1976, she affirms, ‘Where I was born and how I have lived is unimportant.’7 Unsurprisingly, she excludes the pain and confusion she must have felt at Chatham. She was teased about her severe dress style and her Wisconsin accent. ‘I started out not having friends at all but I didn’t pay any attention to it,’ Georgia says gamely.8 It made her an expert in camouflaging her emotions, using silence and withdrawal to mask deep feelings and, when pressed, giving terse replies to personal questions. Her memoir records her teenage years as a list of schools, a narrative of displacement as she is shunted from one institution to another. She offers no explanation as to why she leaves one school and goes to the next. Nor did her parents—like many parents in those times—feel it necessary to explain. Did Ida think it was advantageous for Georgia to attend the Chatham Episcopal Institute? It wasn’t art-oriented; its young ladies were destined to become ‘ornaments of society’.9 Not that Chatham was all bad. Its principal, Elizabeth Willis, was the art teacher, and Georgia was
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her star pupil. Georgia, at sixteen, was lean, handsome, intelligent and individualistic. Perhaps Ida viewed her as the kind of girl who needed subduing. Georgia admired her ‘jolly . . . fun-loving’, adventurous father: his domain was the outdoors where Georgia, the tomboy, loved to roam.10 ‘I think deep down I am like my father,’ Georgia said. ‘When he wanted to see the country, he just got up and went.’11 Georgia was first sent away to school around puberty. Some rivalry, some need to isolate Georgia from the family, seemed to motivate Ida. Georgia reflected that she and her mother ‘had violent differences—we were very different kinds of people. It got so that I would not talk with her about many things.’12 Though the decisions were Ida’s, Frank’s passivity was a form of collusion. Georgia must have felt there was no one to whom she could appeal. For such a determined person, the powerlessness of her adolescent years must have been both hurtful and infuriating. The lesson Ida taught Georgia was that nobody was going to dry her tears. At Chatham, Georgia’s afternoon walks with the other students, ‘out across the hills and the woods’, were her happiest memories. ‘I loved the country and always on the horizon far away was the line of the Blue Ridge mountains—calling—as the distance has always been calling me.’13 What was calling her, and what the landscape represented, was a life not controlled by others, a place to which she could hold fast, that was hers alone. Nature was perceived to be a reliable and inspiring companion, the true friend whose fellowship she sought. Georgia’s stringent, depersonalised memoir illustrates her method of dealing with calamity: withdrawal, dignity, fortitude. If adults do not explain to a child changed or confusing circumstances, the child delves into their own world to
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form appropriate conclusions, relying on imagination to formulate answers. Within itself, the child strives to create a fortress; a safe, invincible place. Imagination, given greater rein, grows stronger. Adults appear untrustworthy and secrecy is imperative. Traumatic though it sounds, it can be an ideal incubation for the artistic temperament. Georgia’s first recollection, rather like Virginia Woolf’s, is of ‘the brightness of light—light all around’. Georgia found herself ‘sitting among pillows on a quilt on the ground’. She was less than a year old. When she taxed Ida with the memory, her mother’s response was to deny it. ‘She laughed and said it was impossible.’ So Georgia minutely described the scene to Ida who was ‘much surprised and finally—a bit unwillingly—acknowledged that I must be right’.14 The anecdote reveals the contest of wills: Georgia’s insistence on her abilities, her specialness, Ida’s resistance and mockery. In that episode, Georgia wins—but she wouldn’t always. ‘When I was near [my mother] I tried to do what she expected—when I was alone I did as I pleased . . . I was not with her very much,’ Georgia noted grimly.15 In 1905, Georgia was again sent away, this time to study at Chicago’s Art Institute. Frank’s business interests were in trouble—he was an excellent farmer but a feckless businessman—and money was needed; it was determined that Georgia should become an art teacher. After life in the country, big, bustling Chicago was a daunting experience and Georgia was nauseous with anxiety as she travelled up north, alone, on the train. She stayed with a maternal aunt and uncle who left her to her own devices. It was a stressful, solitary period but Georgia proved herself a dedicated and talented student. When she returned home at the end of term, she contracted
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typhus—many died from it that autumn in Willamsburg—and she spent months recuperating. It would not be the last time Georgia ‘used’ illness to escape an intolerable situation. As financial circumstances worsened, home became a scene of humiliations. Ida took in ‘tableboarders’, local college students who paid to eat their meals at the O’Keeffe house. Then Frank was forced to sell the house and the family moved to a smaller residence. Georgia was keen to help. Without having finished her diploma, she started applying for teaching positions. Elizabeth Willis, her former principal at Chatham, came to her rescue: she suggested Georgia attend New York’s prestigious Art Students League to finish her training. The O’Keeffes consented and, once again, Georgia was on a train, travelling north, alone. The Art Students League was founded in 1875 by a group of artists frustrated with the restrictions and conservatism of the National Academy of Design, New York’s premier art school. Based on the French atelier system, where the student worked independently and sought individual tuition from an instructor, the League was funded by membership fees and offered life-drawing classes every weekday. Self-motivation was the order of the day. Early instructors, such as William Merritt Chase, Frederick Childe Hassam and Thomas Eakins, were among America’s most prominent painters. The program proved so successful that the League flourished. In 1892, the League built permanent headquarters on 57th Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue. Its reputation remained high and, when Georgia arrived, it was the school for the aspiring artist. Georgia adored the exuberant, charismatic Chase—he is the first character who leaps off the page in her memoir. Her female art teachers are remembered less favourably. Each week Chase arrived
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to assess the still-life studies he’d set the students. ‘As soon as he arrived in the office everyone in the building knew it,’ Georgia recalled. ‘He wore a high silk hat, rather tight fine brown suit, light-coloured spats and gloves, a carnation in his lapel . . . There was something fresh and energetic and fierce and exacting about him that made him fun.’ Georgia wanted to produce work of such calibre—‘alive with paint and a kind of dash and “go”’—that it would earn Chase’s attention and praise. The situation kept Georgia ‘pretty well keyed up’.16 There was another reason Georgia admired Chase: he believed women artists were equal to men, and publicly said so. At the League, Georgia’s sense of herself as an artist was strengthened. She also visited Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. It was a mecca for art students, where Matisse and Picasso were exhibited and they could hear the famed raconteur, with his tousled, greying hair and hooded, piercing eyes, berating the philistines, arguing with the young Turks and persuading the uninformed of the glories and the challenges of modern art.17 On her first visit, in January 1908, O’Keeffe was so overwhelmed by Stieglitz that she retreated to the background and did not speak. At that time, Georgia was twenty years old and Stieglitz forty-four. She’d been persuaded by friends at the League to see a show of Rodin’s drawings. ‘The boys had heard that Stieglitz was a great talker and wanted to get him going.’ Georgia was disconcerted by the free, bold lines of Rodin’s sensual nudes. It ‘didn’t look like anything I had been taught about drawing’. Soon ‘the boys’ and Stieglitz were locked in a heated and violent debate. Intimidated by the masculine contest, O’Keeffe stood at one end of the smallest room. ‘There was nothing
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to sit on—nothing to do but stand and wait’ until, ‘after much loud talk’, her companions returned.18 Back at home in Williamsburg for the summer, the news was awful. Ida was showing the unmistakable signs of tuberculosis, which she may have contracted while nursing Bernard, Frank’s brother. Finances were dismal and there was no money to send Georgia back to New York. She didn’t seem to mind. Though she enjoyed the League, and made good friends there, it was tough to survive in the big city. She reflected, the fight to live up there [makes] it seem this is the place for a girl. It doesn’t seem she should be bumping around New York alone . . . The family are too good to me. Papa told me two or three days ago that he would send me back to the League if he could, but that he couldn’t just now. I certainly like to please him. He is having such hard luck these days but never says much because he doesn’t like to own up to it, even to himself, I guess. My private opinion is that his money is just going down the line and that the wisest thing for [me] to do is wake up . . . and see what [I] can do . . . I am going to get busy and see if I can do anything if I work regularly.19
This time, Georgia sent herself away. She returned to Chicago where she spent the next two years working as a freelance illustrator for advertising agencies—employment she loathed, that paid a pittance and left her exhausted. The battle between struggling to make progress as an artist and wanting to help her family over whelmed Georgia; she decided to give up art. ‘Painting remained her passion,’ one friend recalled, ‘but it was all or nothing. Since
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she could not devote herself to it, she never touched a brush, could not bear the smell of paint or turpentine because of the emotions they aroused.’20 Once again, illness provided a way out. After coming down with a bad case of measles, she left Chicago to recuperate at home. It was a dispiriting place. Ida and her other daughters—Anita, Ida, Catherine and Claudia—had moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where they were running a boarding house. Due to its elevation, Charlottesville’s climate was cooler and drier and there were hopes for Ida’s recovery. Georgia’s brothers, Francis and Alexius, had left home. Francis was in Cuba working as an architect while Alexius studied engineering in Milwaukee. Frank stayed on alone in Williamsburg, trying to sell their house, unable to find even the most menial work. When Georgia recovered her health, she kept house for him. Frank did not rejoin his family for two years. Under the strain of their troubles, the O’Keeffes’ marriage was buckling. Georgia’s sister Anita came to her rescue when, in the summer of 1912, she persuaded her to enrol in Alon Bement’s drawing course for teachers at the local University of Virginia. Bement, a fey, eccentric character, was to be responsible for saving Georgia from sacrificing herself to family problems, and inspiring her return to painting. With gratitude, Georgia recalled: ‘I had stopped arting when I just happened to meet [Bement] and get a new idea that interested me enough to start me going again.’ Until she met Stieglitz, Bement was her mentor. In 1916, she reflected, ‘I have talked over with him most every thing I have done in the past four years.’21 Bement was one of a series of inspiring male guides who awakened Georgia to her creative potential. Though O’Keeffe identified herself as a feminist and appeared proudly self-reliant, women did not
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engage her in the same way, did not offer similarly powerful and enticing examples of professional prowess. Perhaps her mother had provided a negative example. In O’Keeffe’s time, the art world was dominated by men. But it does not wholly explain her response to the sequence of men who, as soon as they became aware of her special talents, encouraged and advised her. It is one of the contra dictions that typified O’Keeffe: a carefully cultivated mask of reserve hid a vulnerable, needy and ambitious woman. It also suggests that O’Keeffe understood the rules of the art world: to rise through the ranks, to gain status and rewards, she needed to ally herself with males who could bestow those rewards. Her extraordinary success was partly due to such alliances. It was Bement’s suggestion of ‘filling a space beautifully’ that galvanised O’Keeffe. Bement followed the ideas and popular teaching methods of his colleague Arthur Wesley Dow, professor of art at Columbia University Teachers’ College in New York. He recommended Georgia read Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art and, impressed with her progress and her teaching skills, offered her a job as his assistant.22 Georgia was thrilled at the prospect but Bement advised her she needed teaching credits to qualify. She decided to head west and took up a teaching position in Amarillo, Texas, on the other side of the country. ‘The Wild West, you see. I was beside myself. The openess. The dry landscape. The beauty of that wild world.’23 Wild. Open. Dry. Beauty. It was the mantra that would one day lead Georgia to New Mexico. Not only did Amarillo’s clean wide spaces recall Sun Prairie but it took Georgia away from Charlottes ville, from sickness, sadness and feelings of helplessness. It was the pattern that Ida had established but Georgia was now using it to
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her advantage. She was no longer the passive subject of her mother’s will, she was the determining agent of her own. It seems Georgia was doing to her mother what her mother had done to her—fixing the distance between them. Georgia taught at Amarillo for the next two years. During the summer, she worked with Bement. In the autumn of 1914, with Bement’s encouragment, Georgia moved to New York to study with Dow. Her destiny as an artist was beginning to take shape. Dow’s attitude towards art was practical and straightforward. He presented foundation principles, a clearly defined strategy, the nuts and bolts of structure and design. Georgia knew his book, Composition, published in 1913. As Sarah Whitaker Peters notes, in six decades of work O’Keeffe never lost her faith in Dow’s exercises, which provided the grammar of her forms.24 Dow isolated three key formal elements—line, colour and notan. The last, a Japanese word meaning the interaction between dark and light, was a tonal method of realising form. Colour should be ‘taught like music’, and music was Georgia’s favourite art form aside from painting. ‘I like it better than anything in the world,’ she declared.25 Dow also emphasised individual vision. Dow was an interesting guide for O’Keeffe. No apologist for modernism, he believed Chinese and Japanese art were superior to contemporary Western art; O’Keeffe also admired Asian art’s elegant forms and minimalist aesthetic. Given O’Keeffe’s destiny in New Mexico, it is also worth noting that Dow taught his students about Native American art and sought to promote ‘a new national style derived from prehistoric Indian art’.26 Nor was his course at Columbia designed to create artists but had the more humble goal of training teachers. O’Keeffe was not in awe of these men. She regarded Dow’s work as ‘disgustingly tame’ while she had no
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‘respect’ for Bement.27 Despite such dismissive remarks, O’Keeffe was reliant on these men. She selected male mentors with traditionally feminine qualities, who were receptive, sympathetic, intuitive and articulate—even if, in the case of Dow and Bement, she sneered at their weaknesses. What she sought—and received—was their unqualified approval and support. Dow described her as ‘one of the most talented people in art that we have ever had’.28 Georgia needed a new teaching post. She hadn’t been invited back to teach at Amarillo. While Georgia longed for the country, country folk did not often take to her, making her love affair with the wide open spaces an increasingly solitary journey. She found a job at a Methodist girls’ college in South Carolina. Even though she felt she was stagnating there, she revelled in the change in the seasons, telling Anita Pollitzer, a friend from the Art Students League, the autumn weather was ‘wonderful . . . it would be hardly possible to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed it—All the little under growth in the woods has turned bright’ and ‘way up high—the pines—singing—It makes me love everybody I love it all—almost a hundred times more.’29 In September 1915, a transformation occurred in Georgia’s life and work when she fell in love with the dashing Arthur Macmahon, a professor of political science. Three years younger than Georgia, he was as keen on the outdoors as Georgia was. When Arthur announced he would visit, Georgia was so thrilled ‘I’m almost afraid I’m going to die’. She and Macmahon shared long walks in the countryside and exciting discussions about their future, ‘the greatest plans you ever heard of’. When Macmahon left, O’Keeffe felt ‘stunned—I don’t seem to be able to collect my wits—the world looks all new to me.’30 While it is unlikely they made love, the
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encounter awakened strong sexual feelings in O’Keeffe, that she poured into her work. That Christmas, she chose not to return home but stayed on alone at the college, and continued her experiments. Her breakthrough occurred as her mother was dying, as if that allowed her to take steps towards artistic freedom and maturity, a whole new life. Georgia was reading Kandinsky’s influential text Concerning the Spiritual in Art and it was helping her to shape a new visual language. It is easy to see why Kandinsky appealed: he worshipped the natural world in a similarly ecstatic manner to Georgia. Concerning the Spiritual in Art is a plea for abstraction as art’s new and most valid language as well as a spiritual force that privileged personal inspiration. ‘That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul.’ Kandinsky also regarded ‘Music [as] the best teacher’ because it expresses ‘the artist’s soul’. The painter who abandons realism ‘naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art’. Music’s abstract and rhythmic form is the ideal solution for ‘setting colour in motion’.31 The book’s black and white reproductions also gave Georgia the chance to study major works by Kandinsky, including the floating biomorphic shapes of Improvisation 29 (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art) and the explosive rhythms of Little Pleasures (1913, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York).32 Georgia reached a watershed when she scrutinised her recent work. All she saw was the influence of her teachers. ‘I said to myself, “I have things in my head that are not like anyone has taught me—shapes and ideas so near to me—so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.” I decided to start anew—to strip away what I had been
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taught—to accept as true my own thinking.’ It was one of the best times of her life. ‘I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown’—a metaphor resonant with travelling to the ‘Faraway’.33 To Anita Pollitzer, Georgia eagerly conveyed the urgency and daring of the new work. ‘Did you ever have something to say and feel as if the whole side of the wall wouldn’t be big enough to say it on and then sit down on the floor and try and get it on to a sheet of charcoal paper . . . I’ve been crawling around on the floor till I have cramps in my feet.’34 Georgia sent the drawings to Pollitzer for her comments—and Pollitzer, on a rainy New Year’s Day in 1916, took them to Stieglitz at 291. O’Keeffe had not given Pollitzer permission to show the drawings but, as Pollitzer explained after her own rapturous reponse, ‘I had to do [it], and I’m glad I did it, it was the only thing to do—I’d have—well I had to that’s all.’ It was evening when Pollitzer arrived and the gallery looked ‘thoroughly exquisite’. Stieglitz agreed to view the drawings. Pollitzer ‘went with my feelings & your emotions tied up & showed them to a giant of a man’. Stieglitz was ‘thoroughly absorbed . . . he looked again—the room was quiet . . . It was a long while before his lips opened—“Finally a woman on paper”.’ Stieglitz’s response was canny, gendered and intuitive, it was his strategy for promoting O’Keeffe. ‘“She’s an unusual woman—She’s broad minded. She’s bigger than most women, but she’s got the sensitive emotion”.’ Not only were the drawings ‘“the purest, finest, sincerest things that have entered 291 in a long while”’ but Stieglitz wanted to exhibit them.35 O’Keeffe, isolated and miserable in South Carolina, could hardly believe her eyes when she read Pollitzer’s letter. There was nothing to say ‘except thank you . . . It makes me want to keep on—and I
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had almost decided it was a fool’s game’. She savoured the possibility of a show with Stieglitz. ‘Wouldn’t it be a great experiment—I’ll not even imagine such luck.’36 The drawings Stieglitz saw that New Year’s evening marked O’Keeffe’s breakthrough, announcing her mature style with its distinctive iconography and signalling a clear break with previous work. For example, Untitled (Horse) (1914, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe) is a charming and timid study painted in pointillist strokes and is nothing more than the plodding exercise of a student.37 But No 2—Special (1915, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC) is a strange and startling charcoal drawing where the image of a stylised fountain encloses a rearing central form holding what seems to be a dark stone. Its pictorial language is semi-abstract, deliciously fluid, intensely emotive and authentically her own. O’Keeffe’s universe has suddenly come alive with organic shapes, slithering, dripping, rearing, burning and whirling. Distance, space and perspective are expunged in a grip that is close-up, immediate, visceral. O’Keeffe had adopted Kandinsky’s maxim—that the rhythm and spirit of the natural world are best evoked in complex, abstract patterns. But there was another element, one that Stieglitz decoded and—to O’Keeffe’s unending fury—so did her audience: her art’s powerful and alluring feminine sexual energy. To Georgia, nature was alive with the sexual momentum she registered in her flesh, her bones, her blood. Her paintings say: the landscape is me and I am it, we belong to one another, we are one. But, being a secretive soul, she loathed the way her message was analysed. It did not, however, stop her pursuing increasingly voluptuous images. In 1916, she returned to New York to continue her studies with Dow. In May, two extraordinary events took place. On 2 May, her
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mother died in horrible circumstances. The rent was overdue and the landlady stood at the front door, demanding to confront Ida and refusing to accept the excuses of Claudia, Georgia’s younger sister. Weak and emaciated, Ida struggled down the hall, only to collapse and die from a massive haemorrhage. Georgia took the overnight train home. She desperately needed Arthur Macmahon’s emotional support. She wrote, ‘I’m very much afraid. I wish you would love me very very much for the next few days.’38 Georgia stayed for the funeral—her father was away and did not return for it—and then, in a state of grief and shock, caught the train back to New York. Later that month, a fellow student told Georgia that ‘Virginia O’Keeffe’ was having an exhibition at 291. Stieglitz had not bothered to inform her that he was showing her work. Outraged, she rushed to the gallery and demanded that Stieglitz take the drawings down. Georgia felt ‘the drawings were private and the idea of their being hung on a wall for the public to look at was just too much’. It was a raw and vulnerable period for Georgia. Her parents were gone—one dead, one absent—and Macmahon was distancing himself, seemingly unable to comfort her, to love her as fully as she wished. Once again—always, as it seemed—Georgia was alone. Of course, Stieglitz knew none of this. He announced, ‘You have no more right to withhold these pictures . . . t han to withdraw a child from the world.’39 His words, recorded later by Dorothy Norman, are probably accurate. Stieglitz had a gift for hyperbole and histrionics. His high-handed action also reveals his benevolent style of despotism. It was what made him such a brilliant impresario: argumentative and infuriatingly stubborn, he was also idealistic, generous and dedicated, a guiding star for many artists, an unusual
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combination of pioneering avant-garde photographer and shrewd, determined art dealer. Stieglitz faced down Georgia’s righteous anger and persuaded her not only to leave the drawings on show, but to have lunch with him. Stieglitz was enchanted by O’Keeffe, the girl with the ‘Mona Lisa smile’.40 Though Stieglitz believed women’s creativity was biologically determined, he was a fervent supporter of women’s rights. ‘Woman feels the World differently than Man feels it,’ he wrote. ‘The Woman receives the World through her Womb.’41 The first critical reaction to O’Keeffe’s work presaged its future treatment. ‘All these pictures say,’ scoffed one reviewer, ‘is “I want to have a baby”.’42 But Stieglitz believed, correctly as it turned out, that it was precisely because of their eroticism that the works generated such interest. ‘You should have seen what happened to the faces of women, young women, and middle-aged women when they saw [the drawings],’ he noted.43 Indeed, women became, and have remained, O’Keeffe’s most devoted admirers. In June, Georgia returned to Charlottesville to teach. But she struggled with grief and depression. For once, nature didn’t help. ‘It has been wonderful weather here—cool—and rain—so that everything is wonderful heavy dark green—and the green is all so very clean—but I hate it.’ She couldn’t paint but ‘spent most of the time in bed—it seems absurd—but I get so tired that I almost feel crazy’.44 She was unable to fully rest: she had to teach a class each morning. Georgia had taken Stieglitz into her confidence about her mother’s death and he was giving her the support she craved. She told Anita Pollitzer, ‘I think I have never had more wonderful letters than he has been writing me . . . they have been like fine cold water when you are terribly thirsty.’45 He also sent her photographs of her
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291 exhibition that she was ‘simply crazy about’. She told Pollitzer, ‘Really—Anita—he is too good to be true.’46 By August, Georgia had taken another teaching job, this time in Canyon, Texas. The Western landscape was helping her to heal. Tonight I walked into the sunset . . . the whole sky—and there is so much of it out here—was just blazing—and grey blue clouds were riding all through the holiness of it . . . I walked out past the last house . . . a nd sat on the fence for a long time—looking—just looking at—the lightning—you see there was nothing but sky and flat prairie land—land that seems more like the ocean than anything else I know . . . It is absurd the way I love this country.47
Georgia is describing what Gaston Bachelard calls ‘an imaginary beyond, a pure beyond, one without a within’. It was what she wished to describe in paint. ‘Extreme solitude . . . before a sky,’ Bachelard continues, provides the ideal reverie. The result is ‘intuitive clarity . . . the happiness that comes in being clear about one’s feelings, acts, and thoughts’.48 Stieglitz was also part of the healing process, continuing to write Georgia long, intense letters. ‘Sometimes he gets so much of himself into them that I can hardly stand it,’ Georgia confessed to Pollitzer. The letters were like ‘too much light—you shut your eyes and put one hand over them—then feel round with the other for something to steady yourself by’.49 In April 1917, when Georgia had her first solo show at 291, it called forth a clear, sexually defined response. ‘Miss O’Keeffe,’ wrote Henry Tyrrell, ‘quite independently of technical abilities quite out of the common, has found expression in delicately veiled symbolism
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for “what every woman knows” but women have heretofore kept to themselves, either instinctively or through a universal conspiracy of silence.’50 He was, of course, talking about orgasm. What prompted such a reaction? O’Keeffe’s show comprised blue-toned abstract watercolours as well as some rather clumsy landscapes. Uniting the works was their vocabulary of form—rising, swelling, swirling and merging. The most startlingly innovative was Blue Lines (1916, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), atypical compared to the rest of the show with its clean, geometric, abstract minimalism.51 Two thin blue lines, one jagged, one straight, stand side by side. There is nothing to see but brushstrokes, space and the incisive clarity of the artist’s intent. Tough and elegant, bold and delicate, Blue Lines offers a breakthrough in early American modernism, more radical than the work of Stieglitz’s stable of male artists at that time: John Marin, Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove. To Tyrrell the lines symbolised ‘mutual attraction’ between a man and a woman, the lines undulating in ‘unconscious rhythmic sympathy, as they act and react upon one another’.52 Faced with a genuinely original woman artist’s vision, it seemed sex was the only way of interpreting it. The erotic energy galvanising O’Keeffe’s iconography was recognised by critics and public alike—and Stieglitz did his best, despite Georgia’s reserve, to publicise her work in those terms. O’Keeffe had triumphantly thrown off ‘the Male Shackles’, he declared. ‘In O’Keeffe’s work we have the Woman unafraid . . . finally actually producing Art!’53 Georgia’s time in Canyon came to an abrupt, unpleasant end. She’d contracted influenza, the pandemic that raged after the First World War, and her condition had veered dangerously close
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to tuberculosis. It was not the only reason she had to leave; as in Amarillo, Georgia was the subject of growing disaffection from local townspeople who were critical of their unconventional, outspoken art teacher. Once again, illness provided Georgia with an escape from an intolerable situation. When Georgia arrived in New York in June, Stieglitz met her at Grand Central Station and whisked her away to the comfort and privacy of a studio on 59th Street, arranging medical care and supervising her convalescence. How could she resist? The admired artist who praised her work, the kind, sensitive man who nursed her, was the father figure par excellence; the strong, responsible male she had lacked in her life. Stieglitz also provided for her financially, enabling her to give up teaching and devote herself to art. For Georgia, it must have been marvellous to have, for the first time since childhood, someone to take care of her. Stieglitz’s marriage of twenty-five years had been desperately unhappy and, with Georgia as the spur, he fled his wife and daughter, and joined Georgia at the studio. Stieglitz’s exquisitely intimate photographs of O’Keeffe record the temperature of their passion, providing a unique document, a diary of Georgia’s body, an ardent and meticulous record of her flesh, a gaze so possessive the camera seems to be making love to her.54 Several of the most luminous were taken in the flush of post-coital bliss as O’Keeffe reveals her enraptured expression, her breasts and belly, thighs and buttocks to her lover/the camera. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait—Head (1918, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC) shows her clad in a white slip, leaning, her hands raised, her hair loose, against one of her drawings, her pose echoing the drawing’s forms as though the work is emerging
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from her or she from it. It images Stieglitz’s idea that ‘The Woman receives the World through her Womb’. The photographs celebrate his view that the woman artist’s source of creativity is her sexual identity, which is awakened by a man. In Georgia’s case, it is not far from the truth. She found certain men—Bement, Dow, Macmahon and Stieglitz—inspiring on a profound level, and their support and understanding of her as a woman and an artist empowered and transformed her. The photographs record that alchemy. In 1978, when a selection of the photographs was first published, O’Keeffe recalled the ‘heat and excitement’ of the photo sessions— though they weren’t always easy or comfortable. Holding a pose for three or four minutes meant she often spoiled photographs ‘because I couldn’t help moving—and a great deal of fuss was made about it’. While the images show Stieglitz’s love for O’Keeffe, they also indicate how she provoked him to produce some of his best photographs. Their relationship as artists, a rare balance of mutual respect, faith and encouragement, would be the spine of their marriage. At ninety-one, O’Keeffe reflected, in her usual unsentimental fashion, ‘I believe it was the work that kept me with him—though I loved him as a human being.’55 In 1921, when Stieglitz held his first exhibition of photographs for nearly a decade, he included forty-five of O’Keeffe. Though not the most revealing, they were, in those times, shocking in their frank sensuality. Two years later, when O’Keeffe had her first big solo show, it received excellent reviews, once again emphasising the works’ sexual symbolism. Given Stieglitz’s photographs, how could her work avoid being interpreted thus? O’Keeffe’s show presented the triumvirate of forms that dominate her oeuvre: flowers, landscapes and abstractions, or combinations of
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the three. Comprising nearly one hundred paintings, watercolours and drawings, it unquestionably placed O’Keeffe at the front rank of American art. It attracted five hundred visitors a day, for Georgia had succeeded where other modernist American painters had failed: she made modern art popular. Georgia seemed not only a new kind of woman artist but a new kind of woman. Wrapped in her signature, unadorned, stylish black garb, her hair severely coiffed, the strong, angular lines of her face untouched by make-up, she presented a starkly dramatic persona, so coolly in control as to be nearly inscrutable. Stieglitz helped create the myth and the market for O’Keeffe, cleverly and shamelessly exploiting her talent and her enigmatic character. Henry McBride, the witty, waspish critic for the New York Herald, could see how such celebrity status, especially the admiration of women, could distract O’Keeffe. His advice? She should ‘get herself to a nunnery’. Georgia was amused by his comments. In bed with influenza, her typical reaction to stress, she wrote, ‘Your notice pleased me immensely—and made me laugh—I thought it very funny.’56 In 1925, Stieglitz opened a new space, a small light-filled room appropriately called Intimate Gallery. Georgia decorated it, covering the walls with unbleached white cheesecloth. She always helped hang the exhibitions: her sense of arrangement was flawless. The year before, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe had married. They seemed the art world’s perfect couple. But Stieglitz was a hopeless romantic, vain and flirtatious. Women were attracted by his warmth and frankness, by a man who didn’t talk down to them. When Dorothy Norman arrived at Intimate Gallery in 1926, she was twenty-one years old, around
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the same age as Georgia when she’d first visited Stieglitz’s gallery. Norman, married with a new baby, was dark-haired, doe-eyed, serious and shy. She yearned to be involved in contemporary art. Like Stieglitz, she tended to hyperbole. ‘It was his presence,’ Norman declared. ‘His magnetism . . . Confronting the world without mask . . . Drawing forth buried truths.’57 Stieglitz’s manner was disconcertingly familiar. After quizzing Norman about the sexual side of her marriage, he asked if she had enough milk to nurse her child. He then ‘gently and impersonally’ touched one of her breasts.58 Norman welcomed such advances and soon became a fixture at the gallery, ably assisting Stieglitz with every practical matter. By 1927, an affair had begun. Georgia did not confront Stieglitz or make a scene; that was not her style. After all, she’d trained herself to conceal her emotions. Instead, she withdrew into dignified silence and, as the affair continued, made plans to get away. Annual summer holidays spent at Lake George in upstate New York with Stieglitz’s large, voluble Jewish family grated on her nerves. Nor did the lush, verdant Lake George landscape appeal to her, the ‘heavy dark green’ that reminded her of Charlottesville, of loss and death. In April 1929, she decided to take up an invitation from Mabel Dodge Luhan to stay at Taos, New Mexico. It was not O’Keeffe’s first visit: the landscape had impressed her when she passed through in 1917 with her younger sister Claudia. Mabel Dodge Luhan, the wealthy, much-married and redoubtable hostess, was an assiduous collector of creative people. Her salon in Florence had welcomed Gertrude Stein, Eleanor Duse and Bernard Berenson. Later, at her Greenwich Village apartment, Emma Goldman and radical journalist John Reed were guests.
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Like many of the artists and writers who found their way to New Mexico in the 1920s, Mabel was in flight from the twentieth century, seeking a primal and spiritual relationship with the earth. An epiphany awaited her in New Mexico. ‘For the first time in my life I heard the world singing in the same key in which my own life inside me had sometimes lifted and poured itself out . . . “Holy! Holy! Holy!” I exclaimed to myself.’59 Mabel not only fell rapturously in love with New Mexico, but with Antonio Luhan, a tall, handsome Tewa who was a member of the Taos pueblo. The two divorced their spouses to marry. Though it seemed an unlikely match—Luhan was stoic, reserved and dignified, Mabel adventurous and irrepressible—it proved an enduring union. As Lois Palken Rudnick observes, Mabel ‘dreamed of establishing Taos as the birthplace for a new American civilisation’.60 Native American values were perceived as ‘an antidote to the ills of modernity’ while the Indian community was ‘a symbol of simplicity in a world become overly complex: small, holistic, natural, rural, agrarian, and ceremonial’.61 Mabel wished to enlist O’Keeffe, America’s pre-eminent woman artist, in her schemes—though such plans often had mixed results. In 1922, Mabel had lured Frieda and D.H. Lawrence to Taos, providing a house and a project. ‘She wants me to write this country up,’ Lawrence complained. ‘God knows if I shall.’62 Though benevolent, Mabel was also jealous, demanding and meddlesome. Soon she and Lawrence were feuding, and the Lawrences removed themselves to a ranch a healthy distance from Taos. Over time, Lawrence and Mabel reconciled, even though Lawrence pilloried Mabel in some of his writings.63 In 1928, when Mabel asked Lawrence for an article about New Mexico, he described it as ‘the greatest experience of
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the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me for ever.’64 It seemed Mabel also made the right choice for Georgia: New Mexico located O’Keeffe’s artistic and personal destiny, and her paintings introduced its splendours to a wide audience. That first summer, Georgia stayed at Los Gallos, Mabel’s bustling and sociable home. Evening meals were attended by local or visiting culturati while afterwards members of the Taos pueblo were invited to perform drumming and dances. Georgia felt happy, healthy, stimulated and free, despite Stieglitz’s fractiousness at her absence. She wrote to art critic Henry McBride, ‘You know I never feel at home in the East the way I do out here—and finally feeling in the right place again—I feel like myself—and I like it . . . It is just unbelievable—one perfect day after another.’65 New Mexico is a visually exhilarating environment. The sky is an enormous bright blue bowl, cupping the earth with dazzling clarity and throwing into relief the landscape’s vivid colours and rugged contours. At over two thousand metres above sea level, the air is pure and clean. The horizon line has a ‘world-creating character’, as Edward Casey writes; a ‘unique capacity to bring earth and sky into active contiguity with one another while respecting their differences as distinct cosmic regions’.66 At night, the sky drips with stars that appear so close to the earth it seems galaxies are within reach of the hand. There are no comparisons to draw with New Mexico because it is unlike anywhere else. Words and images rarely do it justice. D.H. Lawrence felt its ‘far-and-wide magnificence’ put it ‘way beyond mere aesthetic appreciation’.67 The artists and writers who flock there encounter the area’s grand, luminous, expectant energy that seems ready to offer unique experiences, privileges and inspiration. The landscape radiates a sense of its own presence,
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its identity, which it commands the viewer to witness. As Lesley Poling-Kempes observes, it gives ‘a mythic sense to the physical and a tangible sense to the transcendent’.68 Georgia registered it, too. She felt the country had been waiting for her. O’Keeffe’s new work was redolent with spiritual symbolism derived from her new environment. Powerful images of crosses and skulls were acclaimed in exhibitions held between 1930 and 1933. Helen Read commented that O’Keeffe ‘is regarded by many critics and art lovers and hosts of romantically minded young people as the high priestess of woman’s expression in the arts’.69 Black Cross (1929, Art Institute of Chicago) shows O’Keeffe’s fascination with the dominating form of the cross in the New Mexico landscape, and the mysterious cult that created it. The Penitentes were a secret Catholic sect who practised rituals of flagellation and other mortifications of the flesh, acts of penance designed to absolve them of sin. In the desert, they erected tall wooden crosses to commemorate the sufferings and crucifixion of Jesus. Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose (1931, Los Angeles County Museum of Art) combines death, humour and beauty in a macabre and arresting work. Arranged in the skull’s eye socket is an artificial rose of the kind used to decorate New Mexican graves. Delicately and insistently, the rose, a symbol of femininity and regeneration, mocks the grisly tableau, the memento mori. These works register the pain, combined with the hope of its release, that O’Keeffe was experiencing in her marriage. The cross suggests that suffering can be both heroic and redemptive. The skulls, fearful images of torment and death, have been cleansed and transformed by nature into objects of majestic and lasting significance.
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Georgia seemed invincible, an artist who was delivering fresh and resonant images, at an impeccable standard of craftsmanship, and who was earning plaudits. But her emotional balance was imperilled as relations between Stieglitz and Norman intensified. In 1932, matters came to a head. That year, Georgia had agreed to paint a mural for Radio City Music Hall. Stieglitz was vociferously opposed to the project, perhaps because O’Keeffe had accepted the commission without consulting him, undermining his role as her agent and, more subtly, her mentor. In June, Stieglitz proposed two equally unsettling notions: first, that Georgia abandon the mural and second, that she accept his friendship with Norman. His photographic portraits of Norman made her central to his creativity, a role that O’Keeffe once occupied. Meanwhile, construction problems delayed the Radio City project and the commencement of O’Keeffe’s work. Through it all, Georgia struggled to maintain an attitude of sangfroid and wry humour. In mid-November, after an ‘hysterical’ confrontation with Desmond Deskey, the project’s administrator, O’Keeffe quit.70 The following day, Stieglitz rang Deskey and announced that Georgia was unable to complete the mural because she’d had a nervous breakdown. She was experiencing shortness of breath, chest pains and difficulty in speaking. After a brief period of rest at Lake George, her symptoms grew worse. She suffered from fatigue, migraines, agoraphobia and weeping fits. On 1 February, O’Keeffe was admitted to New York’s Doctors Hospital, an elite rehabilitation clinic, where she was treated for ‘psychoneurosis’.71 Freud believed ‘anxiety neuroses regularly disclose sexual influences which have in common the factor of reservation or of incomplete sexual satis
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faction’.72 Edward B. Janks, O’Keeffe’s doctor, advised Stieglitz not to visit. Stieglitz’s affair with Norman may have meant Georgia found sex with him distasteful, and the collapse of a deeply sensual relationship must have caused her distress. On 15 November, Georgia turned forty-five. She was approaching menopause, perhaps even in its early stages. Change of life, as it was popularly known, meant the end of her fertility. She’d badly wanted to have a child but Stieglitz refused. His daughter Katherine had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was incarcerated in an asylum for life; Stieglitz was terrified a second child could inherit the disease. When Georgia was released from the clinic late in March, the photographer Marjorie Content, who was an old friend, whisked her off to Bermuda. Not only had illness once again proved to be Georgia’s rescuer, extracting her from an impossible situation, but flight into nature was part of the healing process. Georgia’s breakdown had been a long time coming. Since early adolescence, she’d braced herself against calamity with steely self-restraint. Her marriage to Stieglitz seemed to represent security but that, too, had been exposed as vulnerable. For the rest of the year, Georgia was an invalid; tired, listless and rarely able to work. In August, she observed, ‘I just sit in my effortless soup and wait for myself.’ But on a trip to New York before Christmas she was relieved to discover she could ‘again walk the street a little without fear of losing my mind’.73 Guilt-stricken and desperate, Stieglitz wrote to Ansel Adams, ‘She is not painting. May never paint again.’74 Georgia’s decline achieved its unconscious goal: the ties between Stieglitz and Norman were loosened, and Norman was no longer a constant presence at the gallery.
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It took another man to awaken Georgia to health and artistic renewal—and the shift to New Mexico. Jean Toomer was a charis matic African-American writer and the author of Cane, a highly regarded modernist novel. Sensual and richly poetic, Cane explores racial prejudice in the South, interweaving tragic connections in the lives of black and white, male and female. Stieglitz and O’Keeffe had known and admired Toomer for over a decade. Sensitive and empathetic, Toomer was an engaging speaker and a warm and intelligent man. But 1933 was a dreadful year for Toomer. The previous year, Margery Latimer, his wife of less than a year, had died giving birth to their daughter. Toomer’s own career had stalled, partly because he was unwilling, despite Cane’s critical success, to identify himself as an African-American. Increasingly isolated from the avant-garde that nurtured him, Toomer penned a succession of novels, stories and plays that found little favour with publishers. Grieving for Latimer, Toomer decided to collect and edit her correspondence for publication. He contacted Georgia, who had known Latimer, to ask if she had any letters. Late in November, Georgia and Toomer met in New York where she gave him Latimer’s correspondence. She also invited him to spend Christmas with her at Lake George. Fragile and reclusive, Georgia could sympathise with Toomer’s sense of loss, his aloneness. Her marriage was still troubled and when Georgia visited New York, she did not stay with her husband. Stieglitz recognised the problems but felt helpless. Just after Toomer arrived at Lake George, Stieglitz wrote to him, ‘Georgia has no idea how much she worries not only now but has worried me all these years.’75
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After a few days, Toomer wrote to Stieglitz that Georgia had ‘suddenly’ emerged into ‘this aliveness’. She was an ‘extraordinary person’ who remained ‘always herself ’.76 The two went driving through the snow-covered landscape and spent quiet evenings together. What Stieglitz may have guessed from Toomer’s letters was no doubt evident to him over Christmas: a strong attraction had developed between the two. Now Stieglitz had to be the stoic one. He kept his peace and, after a few days, departed for New York on 26 December, which was also Toomer’s birthday. O’Keeffe wrote to Paul Strand, ‘Toomer being here with me has made the days so vivid . . . It all seems very perfect.’ He was ‘an unusually beautiful—clear person—with a very amusing streak in him’.77 Just before New Year, Toomer left. Georgia wrote him a rush of frank and ardent letters, detailing what the interlude had meant to her. You seem to have given me a strangely beautiful feeling of balance that makes the days seem very precious to me—I seem to have come to life in such a quiet surprising fashion—as tho I am not sick any more—Everything in me begins to move and I feel like a really positive thing again—seems to have very little to do with you or me—Something you give me that has very little to do with anything you said or did.78
Whether or not the two made love—their correspondence is oblique on the matter—it was an intimate episode. Georgia refers to the morning of Toomer’s farewell when she told him only ‘half of my difficulties of the night before’. Perhaps Toomer had made an advance she rejected, prompting his decision to leave. But there
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was more to it than sex. Georgia recognised ‘that very large ego of yours’ might overwhelm her, as Stieglitz’s sometimes did. She observed that ‘we can not really meet without a real battle with one another and each one within the self’. But it did not stop her longing for him. ‘I wish so hotly to feel you hold me very very tight—and warm to you,’ she wrote. ‘I like knowing the feel of your maleness and your laugh.’79 Toomer had awakened in Georgia the desire and the capacity to once again make art. On 2 January, she started to paint. ‘It will undoubtedly take quite a period of fumbling before I start on a new path—but Im started—and seem to settle down to it every day as tho it is the only thing I do.’80 The situation was similar to the one she had experienced with Arthur Macmahon in 1915. The unconsummated passion meant Georgia poured her feelings into her work, fomenting a breakthrough. But Georgia recognised she needed distance from Toomer as much as intimacy, and she was not prepared to commit herself. ‘I want you—sometimes terribly—but I like it that I am quite apart from you like snow on the mountain—for now I need it that way.’81 The situation gave her insights into her own personality and how it would shape her future. ‘I am—moving it seems—more and more toward a kind of aloneness—not because I wish it so but because there seems no other way.’82 Barn with Snow (1934, San Diego Museum of Art), O’Keeffe’s only painting from that period, was completed ‘with much effort . . . I had never painted anything like that before’.83 O’Keeffe described the barn’s big, simple form, and the crisp white earth, with clarity and precision. The barn is viewed from a distance, not close up like the paintings of flowers, skulls or crosses, and represents the detachment and autonomy that O’Keeffe was seeking to establish in
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her emotional life. It is indicative of the depth of that struggle that she faltered and was unable to continue. Or did she lack Toomer’s inspiring presence? The barn was an important male symbol for Georgia, her father’s workplace at Sun Prairie, one that she returned to several times in her oeuvre. ‘The barn is a very healthy part of me . . . It is something that I know . . . it is my childhood.’84 Toomer’s contact with Georgia signalled a rebirth. When Margery Latimer had met Toomer in 1932, she experienced a euphoria similar to Georgia’s. She was ‘warmed by the sun of this man’ and could feel herself ‘changing inside, growing quieter, all merging inside, all turning to cool moving water, all my elements’. Latimer noted, ‘I got what I have longed for in men—rebirth.’85 Georgia, too, had experienced a rebirth with Toomer but, wiser and less idealistic than Latimer, she saw the difficulties ahead, the inevitable battle between two strong, competitive, creative people. It was the same struggle she encountered with Stieglitz. She told Toomer, ‘My advice to you is to look about for something that is just a woman. The sort of thing I am is no use to you.’86 Georgia made plans to return to New Mexico. Marjorie Content, her capable friend, had agreed to accompany her. Shortly afterwards, Georgia was astonished to learn from Toomer that he’d fallen in love with Marjorie and they were planning to marry. Georgia’s feelings for Toomer were complex. Her letters, while deftly analysing their differences, were also flirtatious. But she gallantly told him, ‘I feel deeply fond of both of you—and something wonderful should come out of it for both of you . . . everything is alright.’87 In June, Georgia joined Marjorie in Chicago, where she was staying with Toomer, and the women drove west. They had booked a cottage at H&M Ranch at Alcalde, about a hundred kilometres
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from Taos. Toomer would meet them there in July. On the journey, Marjorie and Toomer were constantly in touch, exchanging telegrams as well as passionate letters that often ran to eighteen pages. Poor Georgia. Her marriage was rocky, her health was shaky and, after a hiatus of more than a year, she’d made a timid return to painting. The man who had effected that miracle was smitten with her good friend, and she was going to spend the summer with them. Perhaps it is no surprise that soon after O’Keeffe and Content arrived in Alcalde, Georgia set off on her own expeditions. Georgia had been told about a marvellous landscape at a place called Ghost Ranch, near Abiquiu, a village north of Alcalde, but she was unable to find it. One morning early in August, as O’Keeffe was driving her Model A Ford near Alcalde, she noticed a truck with the initials gr painted on its side. When she asked the cowboy driving the truck for precise directions to Ghost Ranch, he told her that a steer’s skull hanging on a post marked the entrance. Georgia set off on a perilous, three-hour journey. The roads in those days were mere wagon tracks across the desert and it was considered safer to travel with two cars because one could pull the other out of the sand or the mud. O’Keeffe’s trek led her along the Chama River, past the village of Abiquiu and over the Jemez Mountains on a narrow, cliff-hugging road. She drove through ‘the tortuous Chama Canyon and finally up and out across across a sea of dry grassland dotted with juniper and pinon’. The road of poorly graded clay was rough. Then, after finding the steer’s skull at the Ghost Ranch turn-off, she followed a rutted track north before she ‘slid down an incredibly steep hill, crossed a creek on a narrow log bridge and wound up on the other side beneath a spectacular array of cliffs’.88 O’Keeffe had reached Ghost Ranch,
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part of the Piedra del Lumbre, or Valley of Shining Stone—the place that would sustain her for the rest of her life. ‘I knew the minute I got up here that this was where I would live.’89 The eight and a half thousand-hectare property was managed as a dude ranch by Carol Bishop Stanley and Arthur Pack. It offered simple, stylish accommodation for the well-to-do and, even during the Depression, rates were high. That day, O’Keeffe found she could rent a room in one of the adobe cabins, or casitas—but only for one night; Ghost Ranch was booked out for the rest of the month. Undeterred, she turned around and drove a hundred kilometres back to Alcalde, farewelled Toomer and Content, collected some belongings, and returned to the ranch. Not only had Georgia found her home, she’d removed herself from the happy couple. It is a measure of how keenly O’Keeffe sought a refuge that she was prepared to make the gruelling journey from Alcalde to Ghost Ranch twice in the same day. Her determination paid off. That night, a boy who was staying with his family at Ghost Ranch became ill and in the morning, the family left to seek medical assistance, vacating their cabin. Georgia moved in. Ghost Ranch has a rich and evocative history. In the late nineteenth century, it was home to the Archuleta Brothers, a pair of notorious cattle rustlers, and their gang.90 It was said that travellers who wandered into the brothers’ lair were never seen again. Tales abounded of ghosts who wailed in the night, cows that turned into flying witches and a huge, deadly, underground snake called Vivaron. Local people, fearful of the brothers, dubbed the place El Rancho de los Brujos (Brujo is Spanish for male witch). The reign of the Archuleta brothers ended, so the story goes, when one brother murdered the other in a fight over hidden gold.
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In 1932, the ranch became the property of Carol Bishop Stanley, whose husband, Richard Pfaeffle, apparently won it in a hand of poker. Though Stanley had great plans for Ghost Ranch, she struggled to maintain the property. The following summer, one of her guests was Arthur Pack, the millionaire conservationist and founder of Nature magazine. Ghost Ranch had the same effect on Pack as it did on Georgia: as soon as he arrived, he wanted to live there. Pack decided to go into partnership with Stanley, who was an old friend, eventually buying the property from her in 1936. He commissioned the building of a large casita for his family, which he named Rancho de los Burros (donkeys), a pun on the ranch’s grim earlier title that also referred to his children’s herd of pet donkeys. Situated five kilometres from Ghost Ranch headquarters, the casita’s floor-to-ceiling windows offer spectacular views of the sheer pink and gold canyon walls and, to the south, Cerro Pedernal, the arresting, flat-topped mountain that dominates the valley. O’Keeffe got to know Stanley during her first summer at Ghost Ranch. Stanley was one of a number of determined, independent women who moved to the Southwest, attracted by its beauty, freedom and challenges. O’Keeffe stayed in the Garden Casita, later the ranch’s health centre, that faced the luscious vegetable garden with its rows of lettuce, tomatoes, cabbages, beets and cauliflower, along with ripe strawberries. The sweet baby carrots and ripe melons were particular favourites of Georgia’s and she would often ask the gardeners for some. The road beside her casita was lined with fruit trees. Through the orchard, she could see the tip of Pedernal. Georgia was deliberately unsociable, spending her days out in the landscape, walking, riding, driving or sketching. As Phoebe Pack observed, ‘Georgia was a very unique person.
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There’s no question about that. Her aim in her life was art and her painting . . . not people.’91 In the evening, O’Keeffe preferred to take her meals not with the guests but, at an earlier hour, with the staff. It marked another turning point: from that time, Georgia made the rules about who could enter her world and woe betide those who crossed her boundaries unbidden. Her breakdown had taught her that she must, at all costs, preserve her sense of autonomy. Most importantly, her creative energy needed to be replenished by large doses of solitude. By provoking Georgia’s flight, men had, in a sense, led her to Ghost Ranch. But once there, she effectively banished them. Was it because of the negative situations associated with Stieglitz and Toomer? O’Keeffe remained dutiful, constant and loyal. In September 1934, she was a witness at Toomer and Content’s wedding in Taos, and remained friendly with them. Each winter, she returned to New York, and cared for her ageing husband until the spring, like Persephone’s return to the underworld. Whether it was due to Stieglitz’s increasing frailty or because he acknowledged that New Mexico was his wife’s domain, he chose never to visit. Nor, it seems, did Georgia press him, though the two maintained a copious and lively correspondence. Luce Irigaray considers that the female body all too often becomes a place for man rather than a place enjoyed by woman for itself and on its own terms. The woman’s body is the man’s home, his idea of home. How to effect a transformation? Irigaray suggests women should cultivate their own places that reflect their sexual identity, and so create a re-gendered space.92 That would involve, as Elizabeth Grosz points out, ‘a series of upheavals in the organisation of personal life’ such as ‘the ways in which the two sexes relate to
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each other’.93 It was precisely this sovereignty Georgia sought, and ruled. The Faraway was, for Georgia, ‘a transcendental quest’, ‘the longing for the beyond’.94 O’Keeffe did not lack male company. In New Mexico, she developed staunch friendships with writers and artists, as well as local farmers and cowboys, but it seems none won her heart—that belonged to the bright, vast, harsh, clean desert. O’Keeffe had met her match, a fulfilling partnership with the natural world, a healing connection that, despite New Mexico’s challenges, offered wholeness without loss of self, without wounding. It was a relationship both sensual and possessive. As O’Keeffe said, ‘That was my country . . . It fitted to me exactly’, like the body of lover. In the desert, after a lifetime of moves and personal disappointments, O’Keeffe claimed her soul’s domain. During that first summer at Ghost Ranch, O’Keeffe continued to draw. Interestingly, the subject that helped her to reconnect with painting was not the landscape but its embodiment, a kachina, an indigenous emblem of the land’s regenerative, spiritual energy. Like most visitors to the Southwest, O’Keeffe was fascinated by Native American culture, and regularly attended dances and ceremonies held in the region. After one ritual which involved the men dancing for two nights, she commented that ‘the dance was so beautiful—so terribly alive . . . the human thing that happened to them all—the change from almost stolid indifference to that great aliveness’. She also liked and admired Tony Luhan, Mabel’s husband, and enjoyed exploring the countryside with him. She told Mabel ‘that next to my Stieglitz I have found nothing finer than your Tony . . . your Tony is a rare—rare person’.95 But O’Keeffe did not immerse herself in Native American culture or become involved in campaigns
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championing the rights of indigenous people, like Mabel. She kept her distance. But she shared with Native Americans a reverence for the earth and an intrinsic belief in its sacredness. After all, it had saved her. Kachina (1934, private collection, Newtown, Massachusetts) was O’Keeffe’s first oil since Barn with Snow, painted earlier that year. Based on drawings titled Kachina of the Eagle Dance,96 the figurine actually represents a powerful fertility being called Crow Mother.97 The kachinas (or katsinas) are benevolent spirits who act as messengers and intermediaries between humans and the gods. One of their main purposes is to bring rain for the spring harvest, of crucial significance in such an arid area, and they appear in February to help prepare for the growing season. The men don elaborate costumes, impersonating both male and female kachinas, and take part in rituals that are observed by the whole pueblo. The term kachina also applies to the exquisitely carved and painted cottonwood ‘dolls’ made by the Hopi and Zuni to instruct their children in the lore of the kachinas. Tourists and locals acquired the figurines to decorate their homes, and O’Keeffe had several examples. She remarked how a kachina in her studio possessed ‘a curious kind of live stillness’.98 As Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall points out, ‘throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s [O’Keeffe] painted the kachinas, a half-dozen or more in all’, giving them ‘a monumentality far outstripping their modest stature as “dolls”’.99 Crow Mother, who appears at the February ceremony when the beans are planted, is considered by many Hopi to be the mother of all kachinas, a Great Goddess. O’Keeffe’s Crow Mother is a study in abstraction and geometry. With her black headdress carved in wood to resemble feathers, her blue and black mask, and long white
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cape, she appears, despite her small size, an elegant and dignified figure. Crow Mother is part-human, part-divine, able to travel between earthly and spiritual realms. O’Keeffe’s triumphant return to painting is best evidenced in Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock—Hills (1935, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York), completed the following year. It celebrates all the things Georgia loved and that inspired her: the Ghost Ranch landscape, the grand New Mexico sky, the animal bones she found in the desert and the hardy flowers that grew there. Ram’s Head may not, in fact, be a ram’s skeleton but a goat’s.100 Whether goat or ram, both animals are renowned for their toughness, stubbornness and agility. Rampant male sexuality is also associated with them. Stieglitz, who was fascinated by astrology, was born on 1 January, the sign of Capricorn, the goat. Characteristics of this sign include ambition, persistence and resourcefulness. Ruled by Saturn, other traits are melancholy and obsessiveness, also aspects of Stieglitz’s personality. Floating above the Ghost Ranch hills, the skull’s curling horns fan out like wings. Is the skull flying towards the viewer? Does it hover or rise? The hollyhock, with its radiant yellow centre, is positioned near the base of the right horn like an earring, feminising the horns’ vaulting male energy, creating a balance between what seems fragile and delicate, and the stark confrontation of the eyeless head. The background of heavy, grey clouds suggests the succour and fertility of coming rain while the low, warm orange hills are as soft and voluptuous as a body. Is it a double portrait of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, of love triumphant? Does it celebrate the revivification of their marriage, the harmony between masculine and feminine, the ideal union O’Keeffe sought and needed
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for herself and her art? Together, skull and flower present an image of unequivocal victory, augmented by the landscape. Not all marriages survive their strains. In the same year that O’Keeffe painted Ram’s Head, Eleanor, Arthur Pack’s first wife, ran off with their children’s tutor, the archaeologist Howard Hibben, and Pack, understandably, no longer wanted to live at Rancho de los Burros. The following summer, Georgia established a studio there and subsequently rented the whole house, becoming profoundly attached to the location. ‘It’s the most wonderful place you can imagine,’ O’Keeffe told a journalist. ‘It’s so beautiful there. It’s ridiculous . . . I go out of my back door and walk for 15 minutes and I am some place that I’ve never been before, where it seems that no one has ever been before me.’101 Georgia’s walks into the landscape mirror self-discovery, the inner journey and sense of arrival made manifest by her New Mexico home. Each day, O’Keeffe explored the peaks, canyons, mesas and plains of Ghost Ranch, the ancient, wind-bitten landscape with its extraordinary palette of colours—gold, blood, mauve, orange. The atmosphere’s brilliant clarity amplified the precision with which O’Keeffe represented form. On her wanderings, she searched for stones, feathers and bones, returning to Rancho de los Burros where she arranged the mementoes with artful simplicity and respect. In 1940, O’Keeffe was thrilled to have the opportunity to buy the house and its parcel of seven and a half acres from Pack. She was fifty-three, and it was the first home she had ever owned. The house had been built solidly with mud-and-straw bricks, and had hand-carved lintels and other fine details. The viga, or beamed ceilings, were painted white. Everything was subordinated to the view, as Georgia sought to relate herself and her home to the
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landscape as completely as possible. Several walls were knocked out and replaced with huge panes of glass while her bedroom had entire walls of glass to the north and west. Furnishings were minimal. There were massive wood work tables, plain white cotton curtains and bedspreads, muted Navajo rugs and an occasional bright red pillow or two. Visitors thought the house looked like a monastery. ‘I think a house should just be a shelter,’ Georgia remarked. In the patio, the heart of the U-shaped house, she let wild grama grass, grey-green sagebrush and jimsonweed sprout. Birds built nests in the overhanging shelter of the roof, and lizards and snakes sunned themselves on the tree stumps she had placed on the patio for seating.102 But having her own place came at a cost. As Pack’s paying guest, O’Keeffe had received fresh food and some housekeeping services. But now that the property was hers, she was responsible for its maintenance and for finding fresh produce—journeys that took her to Abiquiu, or all the way to bigger towns such as Espanola or Santa Fe. A major problem in the desert was, of course, water—and Georgia’s had to be obtained from Ghost Ranch. The generator that provided her electricity was unreliable. There was no telephone, and the letterbox was more than a kilometre away. During the 1940s, O’Keeffe relied on the assistance of Maria Chabot, a sturdy, energetic young woman who dreamed of becoming a writer. Chabot was devoted to O’Keeffe, and the two developed a dependent and often cantankerous friendship. Chabot accompanied O’Keeffe on painting expeditions, camping at the Black Place, as O’Keeffe dubbed it, a hilly region about two hundred and fifty kilometres from Ghost Ranch. O’Keeffe was drawn there by its ‘beautiful, untouched lonely-feeling—part of what I call
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the Far Away’. But unpredictable weather could make such trips hazardous. Once, she and Chabot had to ‘sweep the snow off the frozen ground to put down our sleeping bags’, so all the next day Chabot kept a fire burning ‘to warm the earth where we intended to sleep’. Georgia commented, ‘That was the only time I stood on a rug and wore gloves to paint.’103 Black Place III (1944, private foundation, extended loan, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe) shows a dark and terrifying storm country: black and grey hills collide with one another in a series of sharp angles, while the broken green line of the creek, which splits the composition in half, is as harsh and dynamic as a bolt of lightning. O’Keeffe’s rendering of the storm is not entirely fanciful. As Arthur Pack recalled, rains gathered swiftly in ‘great black clouds whose strange fingers extend[ed] suddenly earthward with jagged lightning. Upon the spot those fingers touch descend[ed] a deluge.’104 Reflecting on a Black Place painting, Chabot wondered ‘if any could know—what a physical job it is to achieve that record of the spirit—the dust, the storms, and the desolation’.105 O’Keeffe also regularly painted a magnificent canyon near Ghost Ranch which she named the White Place. The natural cathedral of tall, glistening white cliffs was formed around 30 million years ago from compacted volanic ash. Apart from the occasional raucous cry of a crow or the scuttling of a beetle across a dry creek bed, it is awe-inspiringly silent. The White Place in Shadow (1943, Phillips Collection, Washington DC) indicates its dramatic scale as well as the tonal techniques that O’Keeffe used to soften and gradate the cliffs’ blinding whiteness to a range of gentler greys and greens. It was Chabot who made possible O’Keeffe’s next project: the renovation of a house and creation of a garden in Abiquiu. The
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winters were bitter at Rancho de los Burros, and the difficulties of getting fresh food almost insurmountable, especially with rationing in force during the Second World War. O’Keeffe decided to find a property where she could safely and productively spend the colder months. Late in 1945, after much deliberation, she bought a ruined hacienda on three acres—which she’d had her eye on for some years—in the village of Abiquiu, hidden above the road that passes from Espanola to Ghost Ranch. One of the property’s chief attractions is its commanding view of the Chama River valley and the winding road to Santa Fe, though the landscape is not as spectacular as Rancho de los Burros. Georgia was now part of a village, most of whose residents were poor. In their eyes, she was a wealthy Anglo, an eccentric artist, a woman who chose to live without husband or family. O’Keeffe, swathed in black, determined and reserved, was destined to be an outsider, even if she did employ local people and contribute financially to village projects. It was similar to the feelings she’d aroused in Amarillo and Canyon, but this time she had money, and could choose to ignore the opinions of others. Chabot offered to supervise the arduous reconstruction of the house—five separate crumbling buildings—as well as planning the garden, a project she completed with tenacity and verve. Adobe bricks were made and large panes of glass installed. When the house was ready to be plastered, local workmen mixed mounds of brown mud and carried it to women who stroked it on by hand, giving the pinkish, uneven, rounded walls the look of human skin. ‘Every inch [of my house has] been smoothed by a woman’s hand,’ Georgia remarked.106
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The house is a model of simplicity and practicality, combining the low, open style of pueblo architecture and its earth-coloured adobe walls with O’Keeffe’s signature taste for space and clarity, giving the rooms and courtyards a feeling of Zen-like calm. O’Keeffe liked to describe it as ‘naked’.107 As Christine Taylor Patten writes, ‘Rooms were furnished frugally and in harmony with the shapes of the spaces themselves. Bare bulbs gave the light. Muslin cloth served as bedcovers.’108 O’Keeffe also decorated the house with exquisite objects: a mobile by Alexander Calder, an Eames lounge chair, paper lampshades designed by Isamu Noguchi, as well as a changing array of her own paintings and works by artists whom she admired, like John Marin and Arthur Dove. Georgia’s inclinations may have been ascetic but she enjoyed the good things in life. Her kitchen shelves are crammed with cookery books, many emphasising diet, vitamins and the prevention of disease through healthy eating. She scrawled ‘Good Tea’ on one kitchen canister that held her favourite China Black variety. She liked to bake her own bread and make salads from leaves freshly picked from the garden. Occasionally, she had guests to stay: family members, like her sister Catherine, or old friends, like Marjorie Content or Doris Bry. Of course, there was also a steady stream of admirers—curators, collectors, photographers and journalists. But Abiquiu was a home designed primarily for work. The biggest room was the studio whose huge glass wall faces the Chama valley and the road, a view that generated confident abstract landscapes like The Winter Road (1963, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC). Though it was Chabot’s dearest wish to share the Abiquiu house, and her life, with Georgia, by 1949, when O’Keeffe moved in, their friendship had soured. It was a situation typical of Georgia’s later
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years, when she expelled many people from her life regardless of former intimacy or loyalty.109 In 1968, her old friend Anita Pollitzer completed Georgia’s biography and sent her the manuscript. The work, completed over eighteen years, had been written with Georgia’s assistance and approval. In a cool, cruel reply, Georgia, after enumerating the manuscript’s faults, told Pollizter that she was refusing to allow publication and threatened to sue. In 1946, Stieglitz died. He was eighty-three. For the next three years Georgia had little time or energy to paint, she was so completely immersed in settling his estate. It was an act of duty, and also her work of mourning. Unfortunately, her creativity did not fully survive Stieglitz’s death. It seems Georgia needed an active male element to maintain her drive, her balance. She continued to paint as vigorously as ever but few major works emerged after 1950, though O’Keeffe lived to ninety-eight. Land, sky, flowers and stones continued to engage her but nature needed to be underpinned by a relationship with a man of a particular energy. In 1980 another such man came into her life—Juan Hamilton, a young potter. She was besotted with the handsome, rangy drifter and soon Hamilton became O’Keeffe’s full-time assistant. Their close and complex relationship lasted until Georgia’s death. As she aged, O’Keeffe’s lean, masculine and sun-weathered features lent her the appearance of a venerable and ancient Native American—proud, self-contained, asexual. She became the landscape’s personification. Serene and meditative letters register her unfailing sense of wonder at New Mexico. To her friend, the painter Cady Wells, she wrote, ‘I am in the beautiful country—our beautiful country—It is quite green—cloudy—and very cool—And Oh
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Cady—how I love it—it is really absurd in a way just to love country as I love this.’110 Georgia has made New Mexico famous. To visit the Ghost Ranch area is to visit a living exhibition of O’Keeffe’s paintings. New Mexico is known not only because of her magnificent renderings of the landscape but because of how she dramatically placed herself within it. Following Stieglitz, a succession of major photographers from Ansel Adams to Arnold Newman sought to depict O’Keeffe. In the desert, she is a totemic figure, dressed in black and white, stark, remote, the landscape’s austere, authoritative representative. At least, that is how she chose to see herself and to have others see her. O’Keeffe admirers can visit Georgia’s places. The Abiquiu house is open to the public from spring to autumn. The Ghost Ranch property, which was bequeathed by Arthur Pack to the Presbyterian Church (much to Georgia’s fury) is a popular conference, camping and accommodation centre. Georgia’s Ghost Ranch home is a private property, owned by Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, and there are no plans to open it to the public.
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g Robert Capa, Françoise Gilot and Pablo Picasso at Golfe Juan, 1948. © Robert Capa/Magnum.
g 2
E a rt h, Fi r e , Wat e r Pic a s so’s Provence There is also a Picasso country, without any mystery, clearly marked on all the maps: a series of places that Picasso has looked at more often than others, in which his life and work have been intimately woven. This country is bounded by Fort Carré and Le Suquet, Antibes and Cannes; in the interior are those lines of steep hills between the Siagne and the Brague, on whose slopes cling Vallauris and Mougins. Here Picasso once remarked: ‘It’s strange, but I never draw fauns, centaurs and minotaurs when I’m in Paris. You’d think this was the only place they lived.’ Pierre Daix1
On a summer afternoon in July 1946, Picasso decided to visit the annual pottery exhibition in Vallauris. Nestled in the hills behind Antibes on the Côte d’Azur, the village had been a ceramics centre since Roman times but, from the 1920s, its fortunes had declined. Picasso’s visit was not made by chance. Georges Ramié and his enterprising wife Suzanne had approached Picasso on the beach
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at Golfe-Juan where he was sunning himself, surrounded by his usual entourage of friends and hangers-on, including his new love, Françoise Gilot. The Ramiés were keen for Picasso to visit their studio-shop, Atelier Madoura. When Picasso arrived, he casually modelled some small figures in soft clay, statues of fauns and bulls.2 That seemed the end of it. But the following summer, Picasso arrived in Vallauris to check on the works. He was delighted when the Ramiés showed him the figures cast in bronze. He had a surprise for them, too: a cache of drawings, studies for ceramic figures. After asking the Ramiés for a potter to take care of technical matters, Picasso set to work and, over the next two years, created nearly a thousand plates, bowls, vases, jugs and figures. As word spread that Picasso had become a potter, ‘a renewed interest arose in the practice of all the arts of fire’. Until then, as Georges Ramié observed, ‘ceramics had always been considered a minor art . . . nobody paid it any attention . . . And then, all of a sudden, this imp of a man took it into his head to devote himself [to it] heart and soul.’ Vallauris was transformed. ‘The world had never seen so many ceramists!’3 Picasso not only created a new body of work that revitalised the craft of ceramics, he had found a new home. Even when Gilot abandoned Picasso, he did not abandon ‘Picasso country’. Instead, he found a new amour and a new residence to shelter and site his genius. Picasso revelled in the Côte d’Azur: the white heat of its summers, the shimmering Mediterranean, the cypress-covered hills, the blond, stony earth, the olive groves and lavender fields. Since 1920, Picasso had been a regular visitor, spending summers in the small
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zone between Juan-les-Pins and Antibes. He told his biographer Antonina Vallentin that he’d dreamed of a sun-drenched landscape. ‘I don’t claim to be clairvoyant but I was astounded. There it was, exactly as I had painted it in Paris. At that moment I realised that this landscape was mine.’4 The Côte d’Azur was an inspiring region for artists and writers—an added attraction was the low rents—and devotees included Matisse, Marc Chagall and Jean Cocteau. Later in the decade, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant rented La Bérgère, a villa behind the little port of Cassis. Vanessa told Clive Bell that La Bérgère was ‘another Charleston in France—even nicer in some ways’ and she lured Virginia and Leonard Woolf there with promises of splendid walks and cheap accommodation.5 Picasso, who grew up along the Spanish coastline, had returned to his primal element, the sea. He was born in Málaga, a harbour town on the Costa del Sol, on 25 October 1881. Like Monet, his astrological sign was Scorpio whose element is water and associated with intrigue, drama, sexual passion and a chilly ability to remain detached. When he was ten, the family settled in La Coruña, facing the Atlantic in the northwest, the furthest point on the Iberian peninsula. In 1895, they headed south to live in Barcelona, where thirteen-year-old Pablo enrolled in art school. The family’s coastline caravan was dictated by the fortunes, or lack thereof, of Picasso’s father, José Ruiz Blasco. A kindly but hapless fellow, José was an art teacher who specialised in mediocre paintings of pigeons. Disappointed by his lack of advancement in Málaga, José unwillingly took a job in La Coruña, a place Picasso came to adore. In his first long autobiographical poem, Picasso wrote of La Coruña, ‘Although I come from far away, I am a child
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and have a desire to eat and swim in salt water.’6 He loved to play in the surf on the pristine local beaches. John Richardson comments that La Coruña provided Picasso with his first taste of freedom. ‘In Málaga, the ladies of the parental household [including Picasso’s mother, María Picasso López] helped by countless aunts, uncles, cousins and friends, had kept their precious Pablo under constant surveillance.’7 Picasso was secretive about his mother. Françoise Gilot is one of the few in whom he confided and who recorded his thoughts about her. While José was ‘the idealised image, the parent [Picasso] could identify and emulate’, he was subject to ‘withdrawal, melancholy, and depression’. María was ‘wilful and stubborn . . . limited intellectually . . . constricted and constricting’. She had ‘high ambitions for [Pablo] and soon proclaimed him to be a future genius, but behind the lofty words there was no understanding of what it entailed’. His love for his mother, and hers for him, was ‘accompanied by hatred and suppressed violence’.8 It was a parental combination similar to Hemingway’s and Pollock’s: a father who was adroit in practical skills, which he taught his son, yet who was passive and defeatist; and a virile, triumphant mother, who was immensely proud of her son but whom the son resented and did not trust. In La Coruña, Picasso became an artist; it was where he began to draw assiduously, where he produced paintings—like Girl with Bare Feet (1895, Musée Picasso, Paris)—which can be taken seriously as works of art and where he located tales of his early, prodigious talents. ‘When I was twelve I drew like Raphael,’ Picasso declared.9 It was where he found his first ‘studio’, an ancient lighthouse with spectacular views of the Atlantic. The granite Tower of Hercules was
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built by the Romans during Trajan’s reign, 98–117 ad. Hercules was the Roman name for Heracles, Greek mythology’s hero of superhuman strength, courage, ingenuity and sexual prowess. In one episode of Hercules’ adventurous life, he rescued Hesione, a princess of Troy, from a marauding sea monster. When the monster chased Hercules inland, he took refuge in a high fortification built by the Trojans on the shore. Picasso’s studio was thus a magical place of monsters, gods and maidens. He was enclosed in a commanding phallic structure, named for a hero, surrounded by water. He recalled how, ‘The place heightened my sensations . . . the tower was also a retreat for lovers . . . and I spent hours making drawings there even when it rained.’10 Lovemaking, art-making and the sea became Picasso’s constant, intertwined themes. Perhaps it was why the creatures of myth and metamorphosis—centaurs, nymphs and minotaurs—emerged on the Côte d’Azur. In that liminal realm, where margins are drawn and dissolved by the tides, Picasso’s proliferate imagination gained classical form, and antiquity’s fantastic creatures appeared to him. Picasso studied in Barcelona and Madrid, making his first trip to Paris in 1900 and finally settling there in 1904. Later, when he could afford it, he summered down south.11 But the Second World War put an end to southern holidays. That summer on the beach at Golfe-Juan, Picasso was relaxing. The stressful years of living in occupied Paris were over. Many French intellectuals, including members of the Surrealist circle, had fled the country. By staying put, Picasso had emerged from the Liberation an international celebrity, a symbol of freedom and resistance to fascism. When he announced that he had joined the Communist Party, he became, as Pierre Cabanne drily remarks, ‘a
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card-carrying Party star’.12 Privately, Picasso admitted he’d never read a word of Marx but he was opposed to Franco and ‘the only way I have of publicising this is to join the Communist Party and demonstrate that I am on the other side’.13 Picasso’s personal life had also undergone change. He had divested himself of Dora Maar, his mistress of ten years, and was in love with another young, beautiful, talented, intelligent, dark-haired woman: Françoise Gilot. Not that Dora was out of the picture. Like his wife Olga Khokhlova and his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, Maar did not disappear from Picasso’s life. Part of the instability that rivered Picasso’s relationship with Gilot was his apparent passivity regarding his troubled harem. As the women competed for his attention with scenes and stratagems, tears and demands, Picasso observed them, sometimes with detachment, sometimes with amusement, occasionally with irritation. Was Picasso, as Mary Mathews Gedo wonders, attracted to vulnerable women, selecting those who demonstrated psychological frailty?14 Unfortunately, that was the case with Maar, Khokhlova and Walter. The Marquis de Sade was one of Picasso’s favourite authors and required reading for the women in his life. It is also true that Picasso’s women were usually smart, sensitive, sexy and ambitious, with strong personalities, opinions and ideas. Maar, an edgy and intense artist associated with the Surrealist circle, had been beside Picasso as he painted Guernica (1937, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid), and documented its progress in photographs. Picasso prized Maar’s intellectual rigour and imaginative daring. When Picasso ended what had become for Maar a damaging relationship, she suffered a breakdown. From then on, she lived an increasingly reclusive existence. Khokhlova, a
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former dancer with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, was a stylish society hostess who degenerated into a manic and obsessed creature, trailing Picasso from one love nest to another, while Marie-Thérèse Walter, who inspired some of Picasso’s most erotic works, lived in seclusion, awaiting Picasso’s visits. Picasso’s pattern of courtship had followed the same course since 1905 when he wooed the lovely, indolent Fernande Olivier. He was ardent in the chase, refusing to take no for an answer until, after months or even years of persistence, he achieved his goal: a deep and lasting commitment from the woman concerned. A period of contentment followed, accompanied by a flurry of new work. Indeed, it was ‘Dora’s law’ that when the woman in Picasso’s life changed, so did everything else—his artistic style, the house or apartment they shared, even the dog that rarely left his side.15 Picasso was an inventive and romantic lover, bestowing thoughtful gifts on his new mistress. But gradually his jealousy and possessive ness, a dark need for domination, engulfed the relationship. Each day, he locked Fernande Olivier in their studio-apartment at the Bateau-Lavoir, until a neighbouring apartment caught fire. ‘[Pablo] was frightened when I told him what happened,’ Olivier noted in her journal, ‘and now he leaves the keys when he goes out.’16 As Picasso aged, he needed younger women to prove his virility, as his anxieties about his powers and performance increased. In 1946, Gilot was twenty-five and Picasso forty years older. At her father’s insistence, Gilot had studied law but longed to devote herself to art. Picasso and Gilot met at La Catalan, his favourite restaurant in Paris, in May 1943. He offered her a bowl of cherries and she invited him to her first exhibition. A young artist during the Occupation, Gilot was idealistic and political. Art
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offered a way to bear witness, ‘to express my thoughts and feelings clearly and yet in a manner that would remain enigmatic to the Nazi occupants’.17 The heady combination of her first show and a series of flirtatious assignations with the great artist encouraged Gilot to defy her father, abandon the law and commit herself to art. The Hungarian photographer Brassaï first met Gilot when she was eighteen, ‘mad about painting, eager for advice, impatient to display her talent’. He was struck by her ‘vitality, and her determination to triumph over obstacles. Her whole personality breathed an impression of freshness and restless vitality.’18 Later, he encountered her at Picasso’s studio in rue des Grands-Augustins where she showed him her recent work: highly coloured gouache still lifes. Picasso and Gilot shared a transcendent, ritualistic approach to art. ‘Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation,’ Picasso said, ‘it’s a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires.’19 Gilot agreed. ‘When I am painting, it is as though I am in a trance . . . [my art] is always made in a state of ecstacy.’20 At his studio, Picasso held court and Gilot was a privileged guest amid the throng of curators, collectors, admirers and sycophants. Picasso loved torturing his friends and lovers, setting critics and dealers, the current mistress and the former mistress against each other and watching them fight it out—preferably in front of him. Most were willing victims. To give Picasso his due, as the world’s most famous artist, he was besieged. To gain respite, to rid himself of some of his fans or for the sheer fun of it, he sometimes gave them hell. There were few among his intimates who had not been the target of his wicked, clever, humiliating jibes. Control was Picasso’s desire and he was determined to exercise it over Gilot. She
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learned early that ‘no matter how fond you might be of Pablo, the only way to keep his respect was to be prepared for the worst and take action before he did’ because for him life was a game ‘played with no holds barrred’.21 Brassaï, who genuinely liked both Gilot and Picasso, had seen it all before, even the raw state of Picasso’s nerves, ‘a condition with him which is always the herald of a creative renewal’. While Brassaï wondered in ‘what form the irruption of this new feminine presence will be reflected in his art’, he knew there would be ‘inevitable upheavals’.22 To prove to Gilot that she had a central role in his life, Picasso introduced her to a prestigious inner circle that included Matisse, Braque, Gertrude Stein and André Malraux. But Picasso was frustrated by the fitful nature of their affair and waged a campaign to persuade Gilot to live with him. She remained undecided and elusive. She continued to study, paint and exhibit, developing her own professional networks that included Nicolas de Staël and Jean Dubuffet. As an artist, she developed a cool, streamlined, figurative style with a strong sense of structure, enlivened by a palette often comprising blues, greens and reds. Inevitably, she was influenced by Picasso. Self Portrait (Figure in the Wind) (1944, Collection Paloma Picasso) shows Gilot’s confident use of form while her face, its expression gentle and tentative, is that of a young woman who boldly and fearfully looks towards her destiny. It seems she had few illusions about Picasso. Picasso’s Face (Portrait from Memory) (1945, private collection) combines a grim mouth, short neck, broad shoulders and bald head while the famous piercing dark eyes stare blankly. Gilot represents Picasso as an idol, a mask, compelling but inhuman.
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In 1946, Gilot succumbed and moved in with Picasso. ‘There were moments,’ she wrote, ‘when it seemed almost a physical impossibility to go on breathing outside his presence.’23 In some respects, Gilot had exchanged her combative relationship with Emile, her erudite, overbearing father, for Picasso. Gilot was careful to protect her artistic sovereignty. For the next three years, she ceased painting in order to minimise Picasso’s influence and concentrated on her drawings, which emphasised structure and form. She illustrated her problems with Pablo. Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple II (1946, private collection) shows a man in profile, obviously Picasso, his face realised in sharp angry lines, who is shoving an apple into the mouth of a woman (Gilot) who makes a gesture of helpless resistance. In Gilot’s version of the Garden of Eden, she reverses the myth: instead of Eve seducing Adam, and persuading him to eat the fruit of knowledge, it is Adam who aggressively forces Eve into the compact to lose her innocence. It is an image of rape. Picasso preferred to focus on the affair’s blissful side, not its ugly undercurrents. In his work, Gilot bloomed as La Femme-fleur (1946, private collection), a portrait of her as a flower in delicate greens and blues: her hair the petals, her face the heart, her breasts the leaves, her body the stem, symbolising all that was fertile, feminine, serene and beautiful. In her right hand she holds the Sphaira, an archaic symbol for the cosmos. Picasso commented, ‘That hand holds the earth, half land half water, in the tradition of classical paintings in which the subject is holding or handling a globe. You see now, the woman holds the whole world—heaven and earth—in her hands.’24 Picasso had never before used the image of the flower as woman. It was an image that came into being at the time Gilot decided to
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live with him, her special motif. In other portraits, Picasso imaged Gilot as the sun. To Pablo, Gilot was nature personified—inspiration itself. The relationship with Maar had made him appreciate the intellectual and creative frisson of being with a woman artist. Picasso not only wanted love, sexual fulfilment and a pretty face: he wanted a partner—not an equal, of course, a junior partner—who could contribute a knowledge of art and the creative process from a feminine perspective. No wonder in Picasso’s new work at that time he literally worships Gilot: with her, he had realised these complex desires. She was their embodiment. It was in the sun, on the Côte d’Azur, that Picasso wanted to start his life with Gilot. Though dramas and disagreements continued to erupt between the two, by July they had settled at Golfe-Juan, the little beach near Antibes. It was not long afterwards that Picasso met Georges and Suzanne Ramié and visited Vallauris. Picasso and Gilot were staying at Pour Toi, a villa belonging to Louis Fort, the master-printer who had assisted Picasso in several projects, including his etchings for Ovid’s Metamorphoses, published in 1931. Gilot made use of Fort’s press and, under his guidance, learned the rudiments of printmaking. But, until another meeting on the beach, the artists lacked studio space. Picasso was perverse: he could have afforded the most luxurious accommodation, the best of everything. Though unable to exhibit and sell his work during the Occupation, early success had made him wealthy. In 1946, his dealers Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Louis Carré were vying for his attention while Samuel Kootz, the intrepid New York gallery owner, was literally banging on his door, begging for works to sell in America. Though Picasso was a sharp
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operator who kept his prices high, his taste for an austere lifestyle meant, in those years at least, he did not choose to advertise his wealth. Pour Toi was a case in point; Picasso and Gilot were living in cramped quarters upstairs from the elderly Louis Fort and his wife. As Gilot observed, ‘[Picasso] attached no importance to the façade of living. Any roof would have suited him, so long as he could work under it.’25 Michel Sima, a sculptor and photographer, and a friend of Picasso’s, had an idea. Perhaps Pablo would like to work at Château Grimaldi, a romantic, crumbling twelfth-century castle with magnificent views across the harbour to the Estérel mountains? Picasso was thrilled. Indeed, Gilot recalls, he began to dance up and down for joy. ‘I almost bought that place about twenty years ago,’ he told her gleefully. ‘It belonged to the Army and had been lying empty for a long time. The Army offered to sell it to me for eighty thousand francs. I was on the point of buying it when the town of Antibes got interested. The Army preferred to to sell it to the town rather than to a private buyer since it was part of the national patrimony.’26 Why did Picasso want to buy a castle? Perhaps it was because the château reproduced that other ancient building, cherished from childhood, set on a promontory and surrounded by sea, where Picasso had drawn to his heart’s content: the Tower of Hercules at La Coruña. In fact, it was children who’d first guided Picasso to the château. He’d discovered it in 1923, when he followed some children who were sneaking into the castle through a hole in its walls; the perfect introduction for Picasso, the eternal mischevious enfant. Sima arranged a meeting on the beach at Golfe-Juan with Picasso and a local historian, a distinguished-looking man with an equally
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distinguished name: Jules-César Romauld Dor de la Souchère. A teacher of French, Greek and Latin at the Lycée Carnot in Cannes, he had begun archaeological research at Antibes and discovered traces of the region’s Greco-Roman occupation. To his credit, Dor de la Souchère had persuaded the city of Antibes to buy Château Grimaldi and to establish a museum—snatching it, incidentally, from Picasso. As its curator, Dor de la Souchère knew the château’s importance: it was built on an ancient acropolis, for Antibes (Antipolis) was originally a Greek city founded around the sixth century bc.27 When the Greek empire began to crumble, the Romans moved in. Julius Caesar colonised Provence in 49 bc, making Antibes a Roman town. Antibes had another claim to history; it was where Napoleon, after escaping from imprisonment on Elba in 1815, began his daring campaign to regain control of France. Over the centuries, the site of the castle had undergone various changes. It was sacked during the barbarian invasions. In the Middle Ages, when the castle was built, it functioned as the bishop’s residence until, in 1385, the Grimaldi family was granted the castle as their personal fiefdom. It was abandoned during the French Revolution and, after becoming a military hospital, gradually fell into disrepair. Dor de la Souchère had spent ten years painstakingly researching the town’s history and furnishing the museum with Greek and Roman inscriptions, medieval parchments, maps, coins, arms, posters from the French Revolution and Napoleonic memorabilia. He also recognised the importance of contemporary art. In 1928, when the museum officially opened, he organised an exhibition that included Signac, Utrillo, Bonnard and Vlaminck in order to found the museum’s ‘collection of modern paintings, watercolours,
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drawings and engravings . . . and to introduce the Côte d’Azur to the great movement of contemporary painting’.28 The exhibition was held on the second floor in a huge space known as the Room of the Guards. During their meeting on the beach, Dor de la Souchère ‘very timidly’ asked Picasso for a drawing for the museum’s collection.29 Picasso, typically, evaded such a direct request. Instead, he told Dor de la Souchère ‘of a disappointment all painters share: “I have aways wanted large surfaces to decorate, and the State has never given me any”.’ Immediately, Picasso was offered the Room of the Guards, as his studio.30 Dor de la Souchère took Picasso on a tour of the castle. ‘While I’m here I’m not just going to paint some pictures,’ the artist announced. ‘I’m going to decorate your museum for you.’31 Picasso was given the key to the room—which he attached to his belt with a piece of string—then he produced The Keys to Antibes (1946, Musée Picasso, Antibes), which remains in situ. Drawn directly onto the wall with a lead pencil, three geometric shapes contain small, abstracted heads, a homage to the calm and sweet-faced gods of place who would preside over Picasso’s projects. The Keys to Antibes also heralds a new lightness of mood and form. From 17 September until 10 November, Picasso produced a great quantity of drawings and paintings. ‘I worked there like a convict,’ he said with relish.32 Dor de la Souchère made sure Picasso had everything he needed: easels, tables, a mattress if he wanted to rest, paints and brushes. ‘With assorted objects found in the rooms and the storehouse, he composed a disorderly arrangement that pleased and often inspired him.’33 Early each afternoon, Picasso arrived at the château.
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Mornings were spent swimming and sunbaking at Golfe-Juan. In those days, before the area became popular, Picasso and Gilot often had the beach to themselves. Picasso found the beach inspiring, too, collecting pebbles tossed up on the shore which he later lightly carved or engraved. Showing some to Brassaï, Picasso remarked that the sea had already given the pebbles ‘forms so pure, so complete that all is needed is a flick of the finger to make them into works of art’. To Brassaï they looked like ‘the vestiges of some ancient, Picassoan civilization’. Lunch was taken at Chez Marcel, Picasso’s chosen seafood restaurant on the Côte d’Azur. On such occasions, Picasso was convivial and expansive, the life of the party. At table with friends, Picasso’s conversation attained ‘its full heights of fantasy and humour. At such times he [was] an unquenchable source of maliciously witty stories, of gossip and souvenirs, good and bad puns . . . A born talker and juggler of words, with an inimitable gift of improvisation.’34 Once in the studio, Picasso worked steadily until one or two in the morning, illuminated by two enormous spotlights hired from a photography studio in Nice. He slept late, never rising before 11 am, and was furious if awakened early. His habits were abstemious: he rarely drank wine, and then only in small quantities, and he ate lightly, too. He carried no excess weight, remaining fit and lithe into old age. Picasso was vigilant about his health and, from his youth, he had been quite the hypochondriac. As Kahnweiler noted, Picasso was ‘afraid of having every imaginable disease. In reality, he has never been seriously ill. Basically, he had nothing but neuroses.’35 His indulgence? Chain-smoking strong, unfiltered French cigarettes.
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Picasso celebrated his artist-in-residency at Château Grimaldi with La Joie de Vivre (Antipolis) (1946, Musée Picasso, Antibes), an ode to nature, myth, pleasure and freedom. It celebrates Antibes’ pagan past and his return to the Côte d’Azur after the pressures and restrictions of the war years. There was another more personal event to celebrate: Gilot was pregnant. La Joie de Vivre is an image of release and revival combining love, antiquity and the hedonistic delights of sea, sun and sand. Picasso’s previous major painting, The Charnel House (1945, Museum of Modern Art, New York) depicts, in stark monochrome, a tangled pile of corpses set below a domestic scene, a table with a jug and a loaf of bread. ‘Even a saucepan can cry,’ Picasso told Pierre Daix.36 The face wedged at the base, the eyes dazed with terror, could be a self-portrait. It is a suitably gruesome reflection on the horrors of war where atrocities are as much a part of daily life as eating and drinking. In the centre of La Joie de Vivre, a naked, full-breasted nymph— Françoise—dances ecstatically on the beach, beating a tambourine, her chestnut hair swirling. Françoise was graceful: she had studied modern dance with Marguerite Bougai, a follower of Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham. As a goddess of fertility, Françoise is flanked by a flute-playing centaur and a faun, and two smaller frolicking fauns. Though all are familiar subjects in Picasso’s oeuvre, it was in Antibes where the creatures of metamorphosis surfaced in his work, where ‘this antiquity seizes hold of me every time’.37 The beach at Antibes is a scene for Dionysian abandon, where the pleasures of the flesh are enacted, where Picasso uses Mediterranean myth to recount his own story. In order to emphasise its symbolic heritage, Picasso wrote on the back of the painting ANTIPOLIS 46.
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Dionysus was a complex Greek deity who was not only the god of wine, revelry and orgiastic excess but who also had the power to bring the dead back to life. Dionysus is perhaps best understood as the symbol of the irrepressible and regenerative life force. Nymphs and centaurs were members of Dionysus’s retinue and they roamed the countryside together. Centaurs were wild, lusty creatures, half-man, half-horse, with a fondness for fighting and wine. In Picasso’s mythology, the bull-horned centaur on the left who plays the pipe represented him, a brother-self to the minotaur. The nymphs, known as maenads, were the priestesses of Dionysus. They caroused in ecstatic abandon, playing drums and flutes— Françoise has a tambourine. Picasso places Gilot, his nymph, on the beach. Sea nymphs were called nereids and the most renowned was Thetis. She was so dazzling that both Zeus and Poseidon lusted after her. It was a fitting tribute to represent Françoise as Thetis, ‘the goddess of the waters’.38 In Greek mythology, satyrs—part-man, part-goat—also accompanied Dionysus, but Picasso has substituted the reckless satyrs for fauns, the sweet and playful creatures of Roman myth, the spirits of place who protect untamed nature. The ‘spellbinding frontality’ of La Joie de Vivre is a dynamic new feature of the ‘Periode Françoise’.39 Distortions to face and body are Picasso’s signature, the process by which he revolutionised painting—by shattering and fragmenting form, he destroyed the illusions that Giotto had instigated in the fourteenth century. That modus operandi disappears when he faces Gilot. She is a unity, who fearlessly gazes back at him—too beautiful, perhaps too powerful, to be broken. Picasso observes/creates a modern Madonna—and who is the Madonna but the great goddess of ancient times, repackaged for a Christian sensibility that denied women agency as the divine?
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Each evening, Michel Sima called by the studio to photograph Picasso’s progress, creating a precise record of La Joie de Vivre, as Dora Maar had done with Guernica. It was Dor de la Souchère’s idea. Sima’s photographs, that document Picasso’s studies for the painting as well as his portraits of Françoise and other works, make it possible to view the successive stages of La Joie de Vivre: how Picasso gradually reduced the size of the figures and sections of the landscape in order to gain a unified, rhythmic composition with a sense of monumentality. The château’s damp conditions could wreak havoc on artworks, so Picasso ordered painting equipment and paper from Paris and also stocked up on durable, readily available local materials. At Antibes harbour he bought boat paint, reckoning it was the toughest medium to withstand the conditions. The range of colours—blue, yellow, mauve, grey, umber and olive green—provide the palette for most of the paintings Picasso produced at the château. He also bought house painters’ brushes and ordered large, prefabricated fibrocement panels, used to build houses on the Côte d’Azur. Picasso chose well; La Joie de Vivre remains in pristine condition today. Sima also photographed the friends and fans who visited the studio, including Paul and Nusch Eluard, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Prévert, Matisse and Ernest Hemingway. Gilot is there, too, looking quietly content. She continued to produce still lifes on paper, sometimes using gouache, and filled sketchbooks with drawings. In Sima’s photograph Picasso et Françoise Gilot (1946), Françoise sits at the feet of the master. Behind her is an early version of La Joie de Vivre. Distorted by perspective, it seems the painting rises from her head, like a dream image, a magical manifestation that symbolises Gilot’s role as Picasso’s muse. On a mattress behind her,
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her folio lies open. She has been called away from the business of making art to pose in the spotlight with the star. In November, inclement conditions at Château Grimaldi chased Gilot and Picasso back to Paris. In a magnanimous gesture, Picasso left behind everything he had produced: twenty-three paintings and forty-three works on paper. In Paris, Picasso looked as ‘bronzed as some Indian chieftain, skull shaven, face baked and rebaked in the sun, the salt and the sea still in his nostrils and on his flesh’. Picasso was thrilled that Françoise was pregnant. ‘He has never been so gay, so happy, so overflowing with energy,’ commented Jaime Sabartés, his usually dour secretary.40 He resumed an intensive program of printmaking at Fernand Mourlot’s lithography workshop in Rue de Chabrol, ‘a dim, cluttered, ramshackle place, full of piles of posters, lithographic stones and general confusion’ where he made some of his first portraits of Françoise.41 In the early months of 1947, Antibes’ influence continued to flourish as fauns and centaurs appeared in Picasso’s prints. After Claude’s birth in May 1947, Picasso and Gilot headed back to Antibes, accompanied by a nurse for the little boy. Picasso’s other children—Olga’s son Paulo, who was twenty-eight, and Marie-Thérèse’s daughter Maya, fifteen—were also invited to join the family over summer. Françoise was sensitive to the exclusion these children had suffered and wished to unite them with their father and bring the family together. When Picasso arrived at Château Grimaldi, he was delighted when Dor de la Souchère showed him ‘everything just the way he had left it: the big sheets of fibrocement, as fragile as glass, the plywood . . . Everything was lined up and turned against
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the wall.’ Then the canny curator remarked, ‘Picasso! We can’t just leave all of these paintings and not show them!’42 Dor de la Souchère longed to exhibit the works on a permanent basis and transform the château into a Picasso museum. But it was an uphill battle. Marie Cuttoli, president of the Friends of Château Grimaldi, was a wealthy collector and a friend of Picasso’s. With Dor de la Souchère, she had been discussing fundraising schemes to restore the museum and make it worthy of Picasso’s gift—but first it was necessary for Picasso to officially donate the works. Despite acts of extraordinary generosity, Picasso was disinclined to respond to direct requests; they made him quite cantankerous, as Marie Cuttoli and her husband Paul discovered when they broached the subject over dinner at Chez Marcel. As Gilot reports, Picasso exploded. ‘I invite you here as my guest and you dare say such things to me! Of course I left those paintings at the museum; but what gives anybody the right to start talking about gifts and donations?’ Marie calmed Picasso, and the subject was temporarily shelved. But she did not relinquish her plan. Paul Cuttoli, a lawyer, devised a subtly worded agreement indicating that Picasso ‘entrusted’ the works to the museum. Picasso accepted the compromise but refused to sign anything.43 He liked the haphazard way the situation had evolved, a process akin to creativity—unpredictable and organic. It also meant that he was in control. He told Dor de la Souchère, ‘When we started, we didn’t know what we were doing. If you had told me, “We’re going to make a museum”, I wouldn’t have come. But you said, “I’ve got a studio for you.” You really didn’t know quite what you were going to do; that’s why everything turned out so well, because you didn’t imitate a museum.’44
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But now that the château was undergoing change, Picasso no longer wanted to work there. He had possessed it and now he could abandon it. Anyway, he had a new idea. With a cardboard box full of drawings, he set off for Vallauris to see the Ramiés and find out the fate of the little figures he had modelled the previous year. ‘In a valley surrounded by pine forests,’ writes Roland Penrose, there lay, among vineyards, olive groves and terraces, where lavender, jasmine and other sweet-scented plants were cultivated, the small town of Vallauris. From its pink-tiled roofs smoke had risen for a thousand years. It belched intermittently in great black clouds as the potters lit pine faggots to fire their kilns. The town itself had no particular charm and there was no view out to sea to attract the tourist. Its main industries were the manufacture of scent and ceramics, but although the perfume was still sweet, the ancient traditional style of the ceramists had become so debased and the demand for their produce so reduced that at the end of the war Vallauris was far from prosperous.45
For centuries, the earth of Vallauris (valley of gold) has been providing the raw material for ceramics. In Roman times, its rich red clay made Vallauris a major centre for the production and export of amphorae throughout the Mediterranean. In the eighteenth century, the production of culinary pottery became the town’s primary industry and by 1893 most of the six thousand inhabitants were reportedly potters. But the development of cheap, light, aluminium kitchenware in the 1920s meant a steady deterioration in the market. Though the Second World War offered a brief period of recovery,
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due to a lack of aluminium, it lapsed with war’s end. No wonder the Ramiés had been trying to lure Picasso to Vallauris: it was an economically depressed community. The Ramiés were doing their best to revive the town’s fortunes. In 1936, they had moved to Vallauris from Lyons, where both had studied silk design and ceramics. They set up their studio with a large, traditional wood-fired kiln and hired Jules Agard, a local potter, as their master craftsman. Suzanne designed a range of ceramics derived from well-known Provençal and Greek forms that were thrown by Agard, then assembled and decorated. When Picasso returned to Atelier Madoura, he settled himself at a bench beneath a statue of St Claude, the patron saint of potters, his attitude ‘exacting, diligent, alert, almost feverish, taciturn’, and once again tried his hand at modelling figures in soft clay.46 Entranced by the possibilities of the medium, its delicious tactility and plasticity, as well as by the warmth and friendliness of the Ramiés, Picasso made them an astonishing offer: if Jules Agard could be at his disposal to shape the forms he designed, he would come to work there. Why choose pottery? Picasso was not wholly unfamiliar with the techniques. In 1904, he took over the studio of Paco Durrio, a Basque sculptor, at the Bateau-Lavoir. A friend and admirer of Gauguin’s, Durrio was impressed by Gauguin’s endeavours in ceramics, and insisted Picasso try his hand. In 1905 and 1906, Picasso completed several ceramic sculptures with Durrio’s assistance. But, aside from a few experiments in 1929, Picasso made no more ceramics until he met the Ramiés. Though Picasso enjoyed learning new skills, like ceramics or lithography, or a technical challenge, such as finding the right
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materials to withstand the conditions at Château Grimaldi, he never wasted time over such practicalities, quickly finding the surest route to his goal. Due to Picasso’s radical vision, his assault on form whether pictorial or sculptural, on art’s foundations and conventions, its rules, taste and style, meant that he transformed whatever took his interest. It explains his perennial attraction to the creatures of metamorphosis—goddesses, minotaurs and centaurs—and to birds, denizens of the air, winged beings of speed and grace who defy gravity. Picasso’s menagerie of real and fantastic beings symbolises his restless imagination, his need for rapid innovation, alteration and change. Though Picasso famously said, ‘I do not seek I find’, he was always on the lookout for whatever was fresh, surprising, ignored or untouched. Pottery is one of civilisation’s earliest and most enduring art forms. In Western culture, it reached a zenith of sophistication during the Greek classical period, around the fourth century bc, when sumptuous vessels of all types were painted with mythological scenes. Though pottery’s appreciation and development has never waned in Chinese and Japanese cultures, in the West it came to be regarded as a ‘minor’ art, relegated to the realm of the decorative and the utilitarian. But the Côte d’Azur and his time at Château Grimaldi made Picasso keen to honour and revive Greek culture. But, of course, being Picasso he approached it with originality. Pottery combines the Côte d’Azur’s key elements for Picasso: earth, water and fire. Earth—clay—is mixed with water to create a paste that is moulded into a form, before the object is set by ‘firing’ it in the kiln. Was it at La Coruña that Picasso first began to mix sand with water, as all children do at the seaside, making sandcastles and other fantastic shapes that are then washed away
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by the tide? Picasso plays God by taking the clay and creating new life from it. It is no surprise that Picasso’s wish to touch, mould and paint the soft, responsive forms should occur after watching Gilot’s body swell and ripen with pregnancy. Gaston Bachelard suggests that working with malleable clay correlates with ‘a special will for power . . . the masculine joy of penetrating a substance, feeling the inside of substances . . . conquering the earth intimately . . . rediscovering an elemental force’.47 Picasso began with the humblest of objects—plates. It was another homage to Françoise, to the pleasures of domesticity he enjoyed with her. Of course, Picasso had shared his life with other women, but the serenity Françoise inspired was manifest in the useful things he made, ordinary objects to which he gave a ritual and aesthetic significance. He decorated them with the divine, benign faces from La Joie de Vivre, fauns whose features were derived from Françoise’s almond-shaped eyes and dramatic eyebrows that Matisse described as ‘circumflex’. Picasso also made vases, bowls and jugs—containers and receptacles, feminine symbols. Luce Irigaray writes: ‘the female sex (organ) is . . . vessel . . . a container for man’s sex (organ)’. Woman is a place, the ‘first and unique place’, the ‘maternal-feminine’, for which man longs. ‘[Woman] gives form to the male sex (organ) and sculpts it from within. She becomes the container and the active place of the sexual act.’48 Picasso’s curved vases refer to woman’s body, to the place of conception, of creation itself, the place that ‘formed’ him. Birds were another subject that appeared on the plates, together with one of the most sustained motifs in Picasso’s oeuvre: the bullfight. It was another reason why Picasso loved Provence: during the summer, he could attend bullfights in Arles and Nîmes. He
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even paid for bullfights to be staged at Vallauris. The brutal, bloody spectacle of the corrida was Picasso’s most cherished form of entertainment. Picasso had great affection for animals and allowed his collection of canaries, pigeons and turtle doves to fly freely around his Paris studio. A dog was his constant companion. While it makes his passion for the bullfight seem odd, Picasso used mythology to justify himself, saying it gave him a thrill to witness ‘the survival of a Mithraic cult’.49 In Persian myth, when the god Mithras enacted the ritual sacrifice of a bull, then plants, animals and all things beneficial to the earth sprang from the bull’s body, a symbol of spring and fertility. It is unlikely, though, that Mithraic religion, widely practised by soldiers in the Roman empire in the third and fourth centuries bc, had any formative link with the corrida de toros (literally, running of the bulls). Historically, it is associated with the gladiatorial sports staged in Rome’s Colosseum. Bullfights— man-to-animal contests—often provided the prelude to the real crowd-pleaser: man-to-man combat. Like most Spanish boys, Picasso identified with the matador (from the Latin māctator, the slayer). In later artworks, he represented himself as the bull, the minotaur, the heroic, ugly, lusty, tragic male, the masculine as beast. Perhaps Picasso’s sadistic pleasure in wounding others, and his clinical interest in observing its effects, disposed him, like Hemingway, to relish the corrida. In the twentyfirst century, there are few audiences, outside Spain and some Latin American countries, to whom the bullfight’s sustained and measured orgy of blood and suffering appeals. Temperamentally, Picasso was attracted to colour and movement, the bigger, brighter and noisier the better. Fernande Olivier recalled, ‘He loved everything
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that had strong local colour or a characteristic odour, which he would inhale ecstatically. It was as if nothing abstract could stir his emotions.’50 Picasso’s sheer pleasure in making pottery soon manifested in playful subjects and innovative ways of treating the clay. He incised fish bones into the wet clay or moulded shapes onto the surface that resembled eggs, sausages, fruit, knives and forks. Picasso, untroubled by the distinctions between art and craft, was delighted with the works, asking André Malraux, ‘“Did they tell you I made plates? They’re really fine.” Then, quite seriously, “You can eat on them”.’51 Picasso’s pottery designs have a familiar visual vocabulary: lusciously shaped women, horned bulls, fauns and centaurs, as well as a new subject, owls. At Château Grimaldi, Michel Sima had found an injured bird, a Scops Owl, common to the Mediterranean. Picasso and Gilot tended the little bird, carefully bandaging its hurt claw and, when it healed, they took it back to Paris with them. Picasso was fascinated by the dark, proud, tiny creature with its intense gaze, and the owl found its way into his work, not only in ceramics but in paintings, drawings and lithographs. As Picasso’s mastery of ceramics increased, his forms assumed greater complexity. He designed charming statuettes of women— Françoise, of course—that are based on the ancient, elegant figurines known as Tanagras from the archaeological site in Greece where they were first discovered. He ‘recovered’ the ancient works and made them anew. There were jugs and vases in the shapes of birds, goats and mermaids as well as sculptures of owls, doves, fauns and satyrs, exuberant objects, frisky with life. ‘And on days when his zest for work was on a level with his invention, the pieces flowed
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from his hands at a rate that was hard to keep up with,’ Georges Ramié recalled. ‘Then Picasso would be really delighted and would boast of his powers with the pride of a champion who has beaten a stronger rival.’52 Picasso was also attracted to the communal atmosphere of the village, a haven for artisans. The ambience at Madoura was similar to Mourlot’s lithography workshop where, whenever Picasso visited, he would make a great fuss of the craftsmen, shaking hands with them and calling them by their first names. Picasso had the common touch. As Gilot observed, ‘Workmen always liked him because he was greatly interested in the craft side of any medium. They could see that he was interested in them and the problems they had to solve. In their eyes that made him one of them.’53 The local potters were stimulated by Picasso’s presence, his willingness to break the rules, his touch so adept it seemed like sleight of hand. Jules Agard recalled making a piece over a metre high when Picasso arrived. ‘“Oh, what’s that you’ve made for me?” [Picasso] asked. “What a beautiful shape!” He came closer and with four thumb strokes turned it into a woman, a beautiful brilliant nude.’ When the town had its annual summer pottery exhibition, Picasso insisted on displaying his work alongside the other potters. But the camaraderie did not make him sentimental. When asked what he had learned from the Madoura potters, Picasso snapped, ‘What could they teach me, since they know nothing?’54 While Picasso was engrossed in pottery, Gilot was dealing with the problem of Olga. Picasso’s women tended to follow him, especially when he headed south. Olga, bitterly resentful that she had been abandoned, began trailing Gilot and Picasso around GolfeJuan, shrieking abuse at them. One day, Picasso, infuriated by her
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tirades, had turned and slapped her. But the unhappy woman did not desist. Instead, she avoided Picasso and made Gilot her target. Olga would wait outside Louis Fort’s house for Gilot and harangue her as she tried to enter, Claude in tow. ‘Olga would come up behind me and start to pinch, scratch, and pull, and finally squeeze into the house before me, saying,“This my house. My husband lives here”’.55 The problem was exacerbated because Picasso refused to divorce Olga and, though they’d been separated for more than a decade, he wore his wedding ring. Gilot insisted they leave Golfe-Juan—their quarters at Louis Fort’s were cramped anyway—and so Picasso, irritated by the whole business, asked the Ramiés to find them a house. La Galloise is a small villa set in two acres of garden, close to Vallauris, with views of Cap d’Antibes and the Mediterranean. But their friends were aghast. To John Richardson ‘there was nothing attractive about La Galloise’. It was ‘quintessentially ordinary, and almost impossible to find . . . tucked away in a warren of little roads’ above Vallauris. Even Gilot regarded it as ‘rather ugly’. Madame Boissière, an eccentric neighbour, would pace up and down her balcony shouting at visitors that Picasso was a terrible painter. ‘The perfect concierge,’ Picasso observed.56 Picasso’s purchase of La Galloise indicates his commitment to Provence. Since the turn of the century, Paris had been the focus of his work and life, but Provence offered what Paris lacked: fresh inspiration and a new community. For decades, Picasso had been a leader of the avant-garde, at the centre of an illustrious circle that included some of the twentieth century’s most significant artists, writers, poets, dancers, composers and collectors from Braque to Nijinsky, from Satie to Gertrude Stein. He relinquished that
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for Provence, rather as Hemingway relinquished his modernist associations when he left Paris for Key West. Picasso had probably realised, from his time at the château, that his friends and fans would come to him. But his decision to leave Paris also suggests he had found a potent geography that he wished to inhabit, claim and own. It was no longer enough to visit: it was imperative to put down roots. Pierre Daix, like most of Picasso’s friends, was ‘stunned’ when he first saw La Galloise, but it made him realise how Françoise had changed Picasso’s life for the better. His previous establishments, like his studio in rue des Grands-Augustins, had the air of an improvised and temporary installation. ‘Pablo himself seemed to be camping.’57 With Françoise, he made a home. Provence also offered a certain degree of privacy. Picasso was a celebrity, not only because of his status as a modern master, but because he willingly embraced the role. Matisse and Braque found the glare of public attention abhorrent but Picasso thrived on it. His voracious, outgoing nature meant that, most of the time at least, he was prepared to meet the stream of people who found their way to his door. Picasso had no qualms about being filmed or photographed at work or play and, quite the performer, he was happy to clown for the cameras. ‘I need others,’ he told Gilot, ‘not simply because they bring me something but because I have this damnable curiosity that has to be satisfied by them.’58 But Picasso, now nearly seventy, sought a retreat from the clamouring crowd and Provence provided it. He continued to maintain contact with old friends and soon Matisse, Chagall and Joan Miró were investigating the possibilities of pottery at Atelier Madoura, further enhancing the town’s fortunes. Picasso was not
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a traveller and certainly not a tourist. Art-making defined his journeys. The profound restlessness that constantly generated new forms, styles and subjects did not lead to a peripatetic existence, a search for stimulation in new geographies, cultures, architecture, museums. After leaving Spain, he stayed put in France, making first Paris then the Côte d’Azur his home. Perhaps his family’s travels along the Spanish coast as a child had proved traumatic—losing one place and having to establish another—and Picasso wanted no more farewells. Though Picasso had virtually quit Paris, his reputation was founded there and it was where he continued to exhibit. In November 1948, he returned to display the fruits of his labours: one hundred and forty-nine ceramics at Maison de la Pensée Française. The venue was a Communist Party cultural showcase and, by exhibiting there, Picasso was proving his party loyalty. His choice of venue for the exhibition meant the ceramics were seen in the context of socialism. Les Lettres françaises, the Communist party journal, praised as ‘the harbinger of the social role the artist will play in tomorrow’s society . . . Clay and fire, in Picasso’s hands, become for us the living representations of matter and mind, their struggle and victory.’59 In fact, Picasso, with his wit, daring and imagination, had totally revitalised the craft of pottery but, due to its lowly rank in Western art’s hierarchy, few appreciated the breakthrough. Picasso understood the problem. Modernism’s grand master was not meant to offer his audience delightful figurines and attractive plates at affordable prices. ‘“They expect to be shocked and terrorised,” [Picasso] said wryly. “If the monster only smiles, then they’re disappointed.”’60 Though ceramics were the major part of Picasso’s artistic production
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in 1948, he also completed a set of one hundred and twenty-five lithographs illustrating Pierre Reverdy’s Les Chants des Morts and forty-one etchings for Luis de Góngora’s Vingt Poémes. That winter, the family stayed in Paris. Françoise was again pregnant. In April 1949 she gave birth to a daughter, Paloma, an event that heralded her return to painting. When the family moved back to Vallauris, Picasso decided to find a studio. Since quitting Château Grimaldi, painting had not been a priority, and producing ceramics at Atelier Madoura meant that he had not required much room. But now a safe place was needed to store his huge collection of ceramics—he gave an excellent group to Château Grimaldi—and to begin a new adventure: sculpture. The intensive experience with the tactility of ceramics, combined with a new playfulness, lead Picasso towards fresh experiments in three-dimensional form. Picasso bought Le Fournas, a former perfume distillery near La Galloise, making one section his sculpture studio and another his painting area. Upstairs he stored his ceramics. Until John Richardson saw the works there, he, like many others, had persuaded himself that Picasso’s ceramics were ‘a waste of his time and genius’. But crowded together in their hundreds on shelves and on the floor, they proved a revelation, convincing Richardson that the ceramics ‘bore the same relationship to his sculptures that his drawings bore to his paintings’ with ‘the mysterious look of fertility or funerary figures, or fetishes’.61 Surrounded by waist-high grass, weeds and wildflowers, Le Fournas looked abandoned, a useful ploy to keep unwelcome visitors at bay. Picasso bought two donkeys to control the vegetation but their manure only encouraged the luxuriant growth of daisies and mint. Between La Galloise and Le Fournas was a rubbish tip and,
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fossicking there each day, Picasso discovered all kinds of fascinating rubbish, confirming Cocteau’s opinion of him as ‘the king of the ragpickers’. Sometimes Gilot accompanied him, pushing an old baby carriage, and Picasso dropped in whatever took his fancy. Soon Le Fournas was turned into Picasso’s ‘usual junk shop, its disorder covered with spider webs so thick they seemed like fishnets’.62 Picasso had always been a bowerbird, to the despair of the women he lived with. Fernande Olivier recalled how Picasso’s studio-apartment was crowded with ‘musical instruments, boxes, old picture frames that had lost their gilt, books, old stretchers for canvas [bought] for a few sous, and many extraordinary objects that gave Pablo enormous pleasure. He liked to surround himself with bric-a-brac, ludicrous pieces of furniture or trinkets ideally suited for decorating a concierge’s lobby . . . He was amused in an ironic way by everything that seemed to indicate a complete lack of taste.’63 Picasso’s bold new sculptures employed objects found at the tip, bits of broken ceramics, even his young son’s toy cars. The best example is arguably Girl Skipping Rope (1950, Musée Picasso, Paris). The little girl is constructed from a metal frame, a wicker basket, old shoes and bits of ceramic. The assemblage is ingenious: the face was made from a chocolate box filled with plaster, the body is a round, shallow wicker basket of the type used to gather orange blossoms for the perfume factories, the legs are carved from wood while the shoes were found in the dump. By suspending the girl in the air and giving her a demure expression, her eyes closed, rapt in her game, Picasso undermines what seems cumbersome about her form—the large scale, big shoes and wicker body. As the girl defies
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gravity, she also defies conventions about sculpture and aesthetics: she is raw and delicate, innocent and sophisticated, trash and art. Vallauris was grateful for the good fortune Picasso had brought. By 1950, business was booming. Young potters were drawn to the town, the established studios were making money again and tourists came in droves to catch a glimpse of Picasso and to buy ceramics. Atelier Madoura was especially successful, since the Ramiés had arranged to sell editions of Picasso’s originals. Vallauris had regained its position as one of France’s principal pottery centres. But it was not altogether a happy story. Vallauris has also become ‘a citadel of bad taste’, churning out cheap, debased, ugly ceramics, that were often bad imitations of Picasso’s.64 In 1943, in the studio in rue des Grands-Augustins, Gilot had first seen Picasso’s Man with a Sheep as a plaster cast of the clay original. When three casts were made in bronze, Picasso decided to give one to Vallauris. Not only is Man with a Sheep Picasso’s best-known sculpture, he regarded it as one of his finest works. An apparently simple study, a naked man holds a sheep whose legs are bound. The sculpture conveys the vulnerabililty and dignity of both man and beast, a relationship of mutual dependence, that also resonates with the symbol of Christ the shepherd, protector of the weak and helpless. On a sweltering day in August 1950, the statue was inaugurated in the town square and Picasso was made an honorary citizen. A banner reading a picasso vallauris reconnaissant (To Picasso a grateful Vallauris) hung from a balcony. Vallauris had a Communist council so Laurent Casanova, a prominent member of the Communist Party’s central committee who was in charge of ensuring Communist intellectuals’ adherence to the party line, gave
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a rousing sermon on the virtues of political art.65 The celebrations afterwards may have been more to Picasso’s taste: music, laughter and dancing in the streets. Today, Man with a Sheep stands beneath the trees in the Vallauris square, a touching reminder of Picasso’s commitment to Vallauris and a memento of his presence. Picasso was also given the opportunity to decorate a twelfthcentury Cistercian chapel in the castle of Vallauris. The chapel housed Man with a Sheep before its installation in the town square. Picasso’s interest in ceramics was waning and, having returned to painting, he wanted once again to explore mural-scale possibilities as he had at Château Grimaldi. His agenda was urgent and political. The Korean war, denounced by the Soviet Union as an act of American aggression, had begun and Picasso wanted to state his opposition. During 1952, in total secrecy, Picasso worked on the panels La Guerre and La Paix. The following year, the panels were exhibited in Rome and Milan before taking their permanent place in the chapel. While La Paix reprises the arcadian pleasures of La Joie de Vivre, La Guerre starkly illustrates the evils of war. On the left, a male figure carrying the scales of justice holds a shield that bears the emblem of a white dove. He calmly faces an approaching cavalcade of violence: shadowy figures, their weapons raised, and a charioteer gripping a bloody sword. La Paix and La Guerre face each other on the curving sides of the chapel. On the end wall, between La Paix and La Guerre, is a panel showing four simplified figures, black, yellow, red and white, embracing one another and displaying the dove of peace. Unlike Guernica, which convinces through its passionate, agonised energy and compositional force, La Guerre is clumsy and didactic, both in form and message. Perhaps Picasso
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was dissatisfied, too. When the chapel was finally opened in 1959, he chose not to attend. Surrounded by a young family, a gifted partner, a bevy of friends, an adoring populace and cushioned by immense wealth, it would seem Picasso’s existence was charmed. He was, however, impatient and irritable. ‘[I]f ever a human being was not cut out for total stabilization, that was Pablo,’ Gilot noted.66 Finding him increasingly moody and unpredictable, she coped by focusing on the children and withdrawing into her work. In 1949, when Kahnweiler visited La Galloise, he saw Gilot’s recent paintings: interiors realised in bold, simplified forms, their subject usually kitchen utensils, presented in a tonal range of cool greys and whites. Impressed, he offered her a contract and a solo show. Though Picasso encouraged Gilot to accept Kahnweiler’s offer, it did nothing to bring the couple closer together. Picasso disappeared from La Galloise on jaunts to Nice, St Tropez and Cannes, or took trips to Paris without her. Gilot guessed he was having affairs. Picasso complained to one girlfriend that Gilot made ‘a drama out of everything’ and he felt ‘enveloped in barbed wire’.67 For several years, Gilot had repressed her ambitions as a painter to protect her identity as an artist. But in Provence, Gilot, too, had rediscovered painting as a central creative force. Her process of individuation, of ‘growing up’ and asserting herself as an artist rather than as a muse, disturbed the balance of her relationship with Picasso. Maar was a painter who became a photographer. Gilot was a painter who resumed painting, gaining the confidence to work alongside the genius of the twentieth century. But it was not without cost.
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In The Painters (1953, private collection), originally titled, Homage to Picasso, Gilot comments on the situation. The figure of Picasso dominates the composition with his staring but unseeing eyes. He is dressed Provençal style in a fisherman’s striped top and wide blue trousers, his habitual outfit on the Côte d’Azur. On display on an easel is Picasso’s drawing of Gilot as the dove of peace. (The dove is Picasso’s most widely known and popular image, created in 1949 to promote the cause of peace during the Cold War. ‘Paloma’ means dove in Spanish.) Below Gilot’s face are the words, L’homme en proie la paix se couronne d’espoir—the man who surrrenders to peace is crowned with hope—a line from Paul Eluard’s 1951 poem, ‘Le Visage de la paix’. Two male artists, Édouard Pignon and Pierre Gastaud, gaze at the drawing deferentially. At the far right of the painting, Gilot stands behind Picasso, observing the scene. Her arms are crossed, a gesture of impatience and resistance. Or does Gilot rest against Picasso’s back? Her great, yellow, cat-like eyes stare intently. There is more space, more agency in the composition for Picasso’s portrait of Gilot than for Gilot herself, who is squeezed into the painting’s margin. As Picasso’s muse, denuded of colour, white as an angel, with her beatific smile and mask of serenity, Gilot is triumphant, accorded admiration and attention. Picasso has made her a celebrity: she emblematises and sells the Picasso brand. Gilot surely quotes Eluard’s words, as they apply to Picasso, ironically. Perhaps it is a plea: if only Picasso will surrender to peace (that is, Gilot) there is hope for their union. As herself, the woman-artist, Gilot is a passive presence, an object that gains no regard, though her glaring eyes, pursed lips and hot pink cheeks—a sign of shame and embarrassment—indicate the
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tumult within, the excruciating process of having one’s self/image appropriated and exploited. In 1953, matters came to a head and Gilot moved to Paris with the children. It was the only time that a member of Picasso’s harem walked out on him. He was furious. He made Kahnweiler cancel Gilot’s contract and forbade his friends, on pain of excommunication, to have anything to do with her. Around the same time, Picasso met Jacqueline Roque, an attractive, dark-haired young woman who was working at Atelier Madoura as a sales assistant. Sensitive and submissive—and, importantly, not an an artist—Jacqueline was the last of Picasso’s great loves. She worshipped him, addressing him in his presence as Maître. Soon, portraits of Jacqueline began to appear in Picasso’s work. ‘Dora’s law’ was again in force. In 1955, Picasso bought La Californie, an enormous villa in the hills behind Cannes, where he lived with Jacqueline. The same year, Gilot married Luc Simon, a painter. Though Gilot owned La Galloise, she only summered there. While on honeymoon with Simon in Venice, she discovered that La Galloise had been cleaned out. According to Gilot, it was ‘not only the things Pablo had given me, like paintings and drawings, [that] were gone, but my books . . . my own drawings, and almost all other personal objects had disappeared, even the letters Matisse had written to me over the years’.68 In 1961, Picasso and Jacqueline married, and moved to Notre-Dame-de-Vie, an eighteenth-century castle near Mougins, Picasso’s final chateau, and by far the grandest. Gilot had unfinished business with Pablo. In 1964, she published her memoir, Life with Picasso, written with arts journalist Carlton Lake. Due to Gilot’s frank insights and excellent memory, her portrait of Picasso is both historically valuable and emotionally
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compelling. If the best revenge is success then Gilot had scored. After Life with Picasso was published in the US, where it immediately became a bestseller, Picasso sought an injunction against McGrawHill, Gilot’s publishers. He also tried to stop its publication in France and Germany. Needless to say, such public measures merely inflamed curiosity. Friends of Picasso’s—such as Brassaï and the historical novelist Patrick O’Brian—rushed into print with flattering accounts of the great man. The critics John Richardson and Roland Penrose denigrated Gilot in the media. But the ripostes had none of the depth, power or veracity of Gilot’s memoir. Her book details the life she and Picasso created in Provence. It also explains why he had made it his home—because Gilot had offered an environment of stability, commitment, intelligence and inspiration, a refuge, a precious place. After Gilot, Picasso continued to produce masterpeices, such as The Women of Algiers, after Delacroix (1955, private collection) but they were few and far between. The ‘Periode Françoise’ marks the last truly innovative passage in Picasso’s vast oeuvre. Repetition, the old distortions of form, crudity of colour, claustrophobic spatial tensions and an atmosphere of hysteria infuses much of the late work. Gilot had done her duty as muse—perhaps too well. Today, Château Grimaldi is a grand museum dedicated to Picasso, and displays the works he produced there. At eighty-eight, Gilot continues to paint and exhibit in New York and Paris.
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g Pierre Boulat, Karen Blixen at Rungstedlund, 1958. © Pierre Boulat, Courtesy of Cosmos.
g 3
Ou t of Pa r a dise K a ren Bl i xen’s Homela nd s
When I look back on my last months in Africa, it seems to me that . . . the hills, the forests, plains and rivers, the wind, all knew that we had to part. Karen Blixen, Out of Africa1
Leaving Kenya in 1931 was the bitter end of Karen Blixen’s great adventure: her marriage was over, her lover was dead, her health was wrecked and her farm had gone broke. From these ruins, Blixen constructed a new life. Isak Dinesen was her nom de plume— Dinesen was her maiden name while Isak is Hebrew for ‘he laughs’. Kenya had transformed the wilful, dissatisfied young dilettante into a storyteller, spinning tales that were sensual, perverse, fantastic, mystical and tragic. Blixen included herself in her web of mythologies, fashioning a seductive and enigmatic persona, the writer as enchantress, as heroine; ‘she who has killed a lion and who is spoken of for the Nobel Prize’.2 At Rungstedlund, her family home
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near Copenhagen, she recreated in writing all that she had lost and admired. Hers was an art of yearning. Blixen had shared her childhood Eden, her enchanted realm, with her father, Wilhelm, who’d introduced her to the natural world. In Africa, she sought to reclaim it aggressively by emulating Wilhelm’s constellation of roles as hunter, traveller, friend of indigenous people, amateur naturalist and writer. But it was in the realm of the mother, the home that Karen feared and rejected, and where she was forced to return, that she finally united her geographies of conflicted desire. In 1913, Karen followed her husband, Count Bror von BlixenFinecke, to Africa to run a coffee plantation. Bror had purchased 2.4 hectares in the Ngong highlands, a short distance from Nairobi. ‘The world was crying out for coffee from Kenya,’ Bror recalled.3 The first plan, to farm cattle, was shelved in favour of the potentially more lucrative coffee harvest. It proved to be a disastrous mistake. The property, as Karen writes, was spectacular, ‘a landscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and no luxuriance either; it was Africa distilled up through two thousand metres, like the strong and refined essence of a continent.’ But, unfortunately, it was unsuitable for growing coffee, making Karen’s remark, ‘We were never rich on the farm’, something of an understatement.4 The crop failed, year after year, and even when it was capable of producing a harvest, the returns were minimal. The most plaintive note in Karen’s letters home was her consistent belief that the farm could be saved. The main problem was water. The Blixens were striving to grow coffea arabica, a gourmet coffee grown at a high altitude, that needs
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a sufficient quantity of rain, mist, cloud and humidity to flourish. There were, of course, ‘times of great beauty . . . When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist, and the drizzling rain.’ The coffee bush’s blossom, which has ‘a delicate slightly bitter scent’, appeared before the fruit—the ripe, red berries, the ‘bean’.5 At the outset, Karen and Bror were full of optimism. In 1913, she was twenty-eight and he a year younger. Bror was graced with a title but little cash, so the Westenholz clan, Karen’s mother’s family of wealthy landowners and grain merchants, was underwriting the scheme, hoping to make a tidy profit from the company known as Karen Coffee. Bror and Karen were an odd couple. After falling in love with Bror’s twin, Hans, who rebuffed her, Karen responded to Bror’s advances. The brothers were Swedish cousins of the Dinesen family. Bror was stocky and good-looking, with a devil-may-care charm that endeared him to men and women alike. He was also reckless with money, a gambler and a playboy. Bror spent his time shooting and hunting on estates in Sweden and Denmark. Until he went to Africa, he had no experience of either running a business or managing a large property. As a young woman, Karen chafed at the purposelessness of her life. In a desultory fashion, she had studied art in Paris. She published three short stories, then no more.6 She seemed unable to commit herself to a task, realise a direction, embrace the grand destiny she believed was hers. After excursions to Rome and London, she would return resentfully to her mother’s home at Rungstedlund. There her feelings of failure, of being trapped and helpless, immobilised her with depression.
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Karen had been the apple of Wilhelm’s eye but he had committed suicide when she was ten. He had syphilis and, terrified by the prospect of mental and physical decline, he hanged himself. The event traumatised Karen—‘it was as if part of oneself had also died’—though the reason behind his death was hidden from her at the time.She pined for her father, believing that in the conservative family circle she and her daring, chivalrous father were two of a kind. They ‘shared the same spirit of gallant, debonair . . . fellowship’.7 Wilhelm awoke Karen’s love of nature by taking the little girl on excursions each afternoon through the woods behind Rungstedlund. ‘My very first memory is of being helped up a steep hill in order to see a spectacular view,’ she recalled. Wilhem explained that ‘each bird had a shape and colour and song of its own . . . as every plant had its own leaf form and blossom and seed. He named them patiently again and again, and expected [Karen] to remember them.’8 He also regaled her with tales of his exotic travels. She felt chosen by him, though she was one of five siblings. Their walks led Karen ‘out of the domestic limbo and into the “wild”’, and Karen regarded herself as Wilhelm’s true ‘son’ and heir.9 As a young man, Wilhelm had been a soldier and an adventurer. On a journey to North America in 1872, he explored Wisconsin, seeking contact with Native American tribes. On Swamp Creek, which runs into Wolf River, part of the region’s extensive waterways and wetlands, he bought a log cabin, hunted for his food and kept himself warm at night with furs he’d trapped. Wilhelm wanted to learn about tribes who were maintaining a traditional lifestyle. The area was the ancestral homeland of the Ojibwe [Chippewa], known locally as the Sokaogon Chippewa Community. While a treaty in 1854 had created reservations for
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most of the Ojibwe in northern Wisconsin, the Sokaogon hunted and fished freely in the district. Nor had the timber industry, as yet, arrived to fell the area’s dense pine forests. ‘The Indians are better than our civilised people of Europe,’ he told his daughter; ‘. . . closer to nature, more honest. Their eyes see more than ours, and they are wiser. We should learn from them.’ In the spring, the Sokaogon pitched their wigwams around his hut. In midsummer, ‘the whole tribe arrived, four hundred of them, to celebrate their yearly religious festival’.10 Wilhelm entertained the Sokaogon in his house, visited with them and learned their customs. He even began a relationship with Kate, a Sokaogon woman, who lived with him and cooked for him. (Her family moved in, too, much to Wilhelm’s consternation.) The midsummer festivities Wilhelm witnessed celebrated the harvest of wild rice from a nearby lake. Wild rice was the foundation of Sokaogon legends, songs and ceremonies, the cultural fabric that bound the people together. After the harvest, they gathered in a lodge in the middle of a burial ground where they feasted, drummed and danced. Today, Wilhelm’s log cabin, known as the Dinesen-Motzfelt Cabin, is listed on the National Register of Historic Properties and the Sokaogon community is raising money to restore the house as a tribal historic and cultural centre. At the time Wilhelm was taking Karen on daily rambles, he was writing Letters from the Hunt, a meditation on hunting and conservation that became a minor Danish classic. He published under the pseudonym Boganis, the name given to him by the Sokaogon, meaning ‘hazelnut’. He called his German shepherd Osceola after the nineteenth-century resistance leader and war chief of Florida’s Seminole tribe. The dog accompanied Wilhelm
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and Karen on their walks, and when Karen published her first short stories she chose Osceola as her pen-name—a playful but poignant choice, designating herself as her father’s faithful companion, though perhaps a little wilder than he. Karen was ‘the oedipal child par excellence’.11 After Wilhelm’s suicide, the Westenholz family dominated Karen’s life. She felt an outsider among her sensible and thrifty relatives. Her talents for writing and painting were regarded as amateur feminine accomplishments having no value beyond the family circle, while her dreams of grandeur were considered to be inconsistent with Westenholz values. Nearing thirty, Karen faced the restricted role of a spinster in a bourgeois household. Her marriage to Bror has the quality of a pact, a bold escape engineered by two young friends who, frustrated by the limitations of their world, set off to conquer a new one. Theirs may not have been a love match, but Karen admired her husband’s vitality, humour and physical courage and, despite the problems that Bror visited on their marriage, Karen never wished to divorce him. ‘No one can really judge of the relationship between marriage partners,’ she told her mother, ‘because the outward appearance is so meaningless and can be utterly at variance with what is within.’12 Early safaris were the couple’s honeymoon, a brief period of shared happiness where Karen discovered she relished hunting. Some of the most intense passages in Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass describe the hunt. Late in life she boasted, ‘When I first came out to Africa I could not live without getting a fine specimen of each single kind of African game.’13 Reporting on her first safari to her mother, Ingeborg, Karen wrote, ‘We have had an absolutely marvelous time, I have never in my life enjoyed myself more.’ The
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safari had been ‘tremendously successful . . . six big lions, four leopards, one cheetah. As well as the usual kind of game, eland, impala, gnu, boar, jackal, marabou—I shot one lion and one big leopard.’14 It was a small safari by Kenyan standards—three mule wagons and nine skilled attendants whose roles included guides, porters, trackers, butchers of the kill, cooks and waiters. By and large, women were not welcome in the hunting field—it was a strictly male preserve—but Karen overcame that with a combination of European nobility, natural insouciance and Bror’s support. Karen belonged to Kenya’s elite who, for the first three decades of the twentieth century, individually and collectively supervised ‘the slaughter of wildlife on a vast scale in pursuit of sport and in defence of their investment in Kenya’s land and wealth’. It made Kenya ‘a hunter’s paradise, a cavalier’s Garden of Eden’. Hunting was also a practical matter: ‘Every settler and farmer depended on game for his meat supply.’15 It was a business, too. The trade in ivory was extremely lucrative and the British snatched it, monitoring the native hunters and sidelining the Arabic-Swahili middlemen who transported the tusks to the coast for export. Though Karen admitted that, during her last decade in Kenya, it seemed ‘an unreasonable thing, indeed in itself ugly or vulgar, for a few hours’ excitement to put out a life that belonged in the great landscape’ nonetheless ‘lion-hunting was irresistible to me’.16 She shot her last lion just before leaving Africa. To kill a lion, ‘king of the beasts’, resonant symbol of power and majesty, of wilderness itself, was the ultimate prize, proof that nature had no dominion over modern, armed, European intent. The sheer volume of game in East Africa at that time provides some clue to the motives behind the wanton killing but it does not explain the pleasure taken in the
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spectacle of death, the blood lust that drew hordes of Europeans to Kenya. Hunting gave Karen the opportunity to become acquainted with the African landscape. ‘Out on the Safaris, I had seen a herd of Buffalo, one hundred and twenty nine of them, come out of the morning mist under a copper sky, one by one, as if the dark and massive, iron-like animals with the mighty horizontally swung horns were not approaching, but were being created before my eyes and sent out as they were finished.’17 It heightened all that Wilhelm had first taught her about nature. ‘The grass was me, and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me . . . I breathed with the night-wind in the thorntrees.’18 Bror, who trained Karen to handle a rifle and shoot big game, was full of praise for her. As she was for him. ‘You can’t imagine how splendidly Bror arranges everything for me,’ she told her mother, ‘he is so practical and meticulous and thinks of everything; I have never known anyone so unselfish.’19 Perhaps it was the erotic charge between Bror and Karen that made hunting seem like ‘a love affair. The hunter is in love with the game, real hunters are true animal lovers.’20 Ernest Hemingway, whose father also committed suicide, had a passion for hunting even more fervent than Karen’s. Hemingway’s father, who shot himself, was fifty-seven when he died, and Wilhelm fifty. Perhaps the violence of the suicidal act by the beloved parent, who introduced each to the natural world, traumatised Blixen and Hemingway to such an extent that they were inured to hunting’s brutality—indeed, they relished it. Their acts of violence towards nature may have gone some way to appease, within them, the original act of violence by their fathers that wounded them and had
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such profound consequences for their lives. Violence ignores the sovereignty of others, their suffering and trauma, whether humans or animals, as both Hemingway and Blixen must have felt that their fathers had ignored the responsibility to protect them. Both had deeply dualistic attitudes towards nature: worshipping it in equal proportion to the amount of pain and loss they inflicted on it. Neither, it seemed, could entertain the concept of one without the other. By killing innocent creatures, Hemingway and Blixen could briefly triumph over the feelings of fury, helplessness and vulnerability their fathers’ deaths had incurred. Both were brilliant nature writers, a project that may also have healed some of their hurt by replacing what had been destroyed with arrestingly beautiful prose descriptions of that very thing. Words name and, by naming, control, ‘authorise’, what is seen and felt. As writers, Blixen and Hemingway assume their fathers’ roles: acting as guides for the reader, they introduce and explain nature of an often rare or extreme variety. Though they never met, Blixen and Hemingway admired each other’s work. In 1954, when Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature, he believed it should have been awarded to Karen for Out of Africa. She wrote to thank him for his ‘kind words’ that gave her ‘as much heavenly pleasure—even if not as much earthly benefit—as would have done the Nobel Prize itself . . . It is a sad thing we have never met in the flesh. I have sometimes imagined what it would have been like to be on safari with you on the plains of Africa.’21 Karen’s idylls with Bror were short-lived. In 1914, she was diagnosed with syphilis, the result of Bror’s philandering, and travelled home to Denmark for treatment. It was a difficult journey—the First
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World War had been declared in August. Though Karen confided in Thomas, her younger brother, she managed to keep the true nature of her illness a secret from the rest of her family. A bout of malaria, she informed her mother, necessitated ‘a change of air at home’.22 After spending three months in a general ward of Copenhagen’s National Hospital, where she was treated by leading venerologists, she was pronounced cured. A photograph taken in 1915 at Rungstedlund shows her on a horse, in full riding kit, radiant with energy. The treatment of syphilis was the same for Karen as for Claude Monet’s son, Jean. Arsenic injections were prescribed though they did not effect a cure. The disease was tricky, usually returning with full force decades after the initial infection. Even Carl Rasch, Karen’s doctor for several years and a noted specialist, seems to have ignored that possibility. But Karen was luckier than Jean. Though over the years she endured a host of hideous symptoms—including insomnia, fever, headaches, weight loss and severe pains in her joints—she did not succumb to madness, paralysis or an early death. In fact, some of her problems may have had to with the cure rather than the illness.23 Karen’s powers of recuperation were phenomenal, as evidenced in the photograph of her on horseback. Though she wondered if there were psychological explanations for her pain, it seems syphilis alone was responsible for her banquet of suffering. She had always been subject to depression—perhaps triggered by Wilhelm’s death—but her illness roused a fighting spirit . . . and her taste for irony, perversity, paradox and extremes. Appalling snob that she was, Karen announced to Thomas that, although it might sound
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‘beastly . . . the world being as it is, it was worth having syphilis in order to become a “Baroness”’.24 To console herself during her convalescence in Denmark, she wrote a rapturous poem addressing the African moon ‘in my free land, in my wide land, in my heart’s land’.25 The poem heralds a creative dynamic that was dependent on two countries, two landscapes, two separate but equally potent geographies, two mythic and sustaining terrains. In Africa, she thought of Denmark; in Denmark, she pined for Kenya. Both places were home. ‘I get really homesick, you know, not merely for one particular home, but for the idea of home in every way; as a society, a circle, where one does really belong.’26 It was her life’s task to find it.
g In 1917, Karen and Bror moved into Mbogani House, a gracious, grey stone manor with a long winding drive. (Today Mbogani is the Karen Blixen Museum in the suburb named after Karen on the outskirts of Nairobi.) Their previous home had been small and not at all grand. ‘I am extremely glad to be here,’ Karen told her mother. ‘It is always cool, and wonderful to be in large rooms again; to me they feel like state apartments.’27 The wide verandah offered magnificent views of the distant Ngong Hills. Mbogani, Swahili for ‘in the forest’, is surrounded by wild fig trees and slender Cape chestnuts. To create a lawn, land was cleared around the house. The lawn proved very popular and there were often ‘a hundred Kikuyu goats and sheep and a swarm of little brown youngsters in charge of them here, and with the delicate shadows of the trees on the grass I don’t think there can have been anything lovelier to
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look at in Arcadia’.28 Karen also planted palms and other shrubs. The nearby wood meant there was ‘the most lovely bird song all around the house’ and Karen spotted migratory swallows as well as storks ‘that stroll about the meadows . . . just as if they were in a Danish marsh’.29 The Blixens were living in the style of prosperous plantation owners, though Mbogani was indicative of Karen’s entire sojourn in Kenya: it created an impression that did not match the reality. Her African experience was characterised by a split between what she yearned for—happiness and security, a splendid existence—and the awful truths of isolation, ill health, hard work, bad harvests and financial difficulties. It was the same dualism represented by her homelands of Denmark and Africa—while longing for one, she was forced to deal with the realities of the other. Out of Africa, based on Karen’s memoir, is the 1985 Academy award-winning film that stars Meryl Streep as Karen Blixen, Robert Redford as Denys Finch Hatton and Karl Maria Brandauer as Bror. Following Kenyan independence from British rule in 1963, the Danish government purchased the house and 36 acres of land and donated them to the National Museums of Kenya. Universal Studios, which made Out of Africa, paid $5000 for the restoration in 1985.30 Åke Sjögren, the Swedish settler who built Mbogani in 1912, left behind several pieces of fine Swedish furniture as well as his library. But Karen brought plenty of her own books and household goods from Denmark: high-quality crystal, china, furniture, carpets, linen and silver service, as well as paintings, prints and photographs. Karen decorated her new residence with taste and skill. Then she commissioned a series of photographs, an album for her family in
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Denmark that is today in the Royal Library, Copenhagen. It not only showcases Mbogani but her and Bror, too. Though Karen was justifiably proud of her home, the album was meant to be more than a sentimental keepsake or a collection of exotic postcards—it was an advertisement. The farm was a business and she needed to convince her mother’s family—who were her backers and creditors—that all was going well. In one photo Bror and Karen are shown in the drawing room. He sits, tanned and handsome, his booted legs crossed, his expression preoccupied, every inch the man of action. Karen stands at the fireplace, smiling tentatively, the epitome of cultured European femininity in a soft white blouse, long skirt and black shoes with glittering buckles. At their feet is a leopard-skin rug, a safari trophy and symbol of their journey as a married couple. Old prints hang on the walls. A French clock and porcelain figures decorate the mantle. The room is crowded with elegant furniture and vases of flowers. Aside from the leopard skin, the Blixens could be on a country estate anywhere in Europe. In another photograph, Karen sits at her desk, beaming with satisfaction, surrounded by family photographs, prints of myth ological scenes and Danish seascapes. It was where she wrote letters home. A photograph taken in the high-beamed, mahoganypanelled dining room shows a beautifully laid table with its white linen cloth, Baccarat crystal and gleaming cutlery. At her sumptuous but infrequent dinner parties, Karen entertained guests that included Edward, Prince of Wales. It was at the dining-room table that she began to write her stories, late at night, in the largest room in the house.
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Other photographs taken outside the house show some of the key characters memorialised in the book Out of Africa: Farah Aden, Karen’s Somali major-domo, Kamande Gatura, a young Kikuyu whom Karen had trained as her chef, Lulu, the wild bushbuck Karen reared, her horse Rouge and her beloved Scottish deerhounds, Dusk, Dawn and Pania. In another photograph Karen, all in white, stands smiling proudly next to eight African men, most of whom are her servants. They look less relaxed. Perhaps it is the first time they’ve had their photo taken, let alone with a ladyboss. Karen wears a long amber necklace given to her by Farah and a flower tucked in her blouse. Once again, her European femininity is contrasted with a masculine presence, not her husband’s this time but a group of men more helpful and reliable: her African staff. It offers a ‘true’ image of Karen’s Kenya—she was a singular white female surrounded by, and in command of, African men. Karen Blixen had an immediate and passionate response to African people, whether Kikuyu, Kavirondo, Wakamba, Maasai or Somali. Not long after arriving, she wrote that ‘the natives . . . are my greatest interest out here’. Where the Africans were concerned, ‘the English are remarkably narrow-minded; it never occurs to them to regard them as human beings, and when I talk to English ladies on racial differences and such matters, they laugh patronizingly, touched by my eccentricity’. Observing black and white society made her decide that ‘the superiority of the white race is an illusion. We are able to learn much more than they . . . But when it comes to character I think they surpass us.’31 Karen never escaped her aristocratic prejudices and was guilty of romanticising and infantilising African people, assigning them roles as noble savages, charming children or faithful retainers. Though
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Wilhelm had awakened her passionate interest in indigenous people, he was not interested in ownership. But Africans were part of Karen’s treasured possessions: ‘this lovely country, my dear natives, my horses and dogs’.32 What imperialist fantasies had Karen imbibed? Denmark had been a minor and rather luckless player in the great colonial game, never a major force like England or Spain. In its own region, it retained possession of Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands. From the seventeenth century, it maintained a scattering of small colonies and trading posts in India, the Caribbean and West Africa, all sold to Britain and the United States by the early twentieth century. The curiosity and devotion that African people aroused in Karen, the differences between her and them, quickened her observations, refined her prose, defined her sense of self and shaped her as a writer. As Susan Horton points out, she was ‘becoming real to herself by seeing her reflection in their eyes [and she] becomes real and important to European and American audiences by reporting those reflections’.33 Karen credited Farah—‘straight, candid and very fine to look at’—as the ‘doorkeeper’ of her life in Africa. ‘I talked to him about my worries as about my successes, and he knew all that I thought or did.’ Farah was a Muslim. Islam’s strict moral code and fatalism appealed to Karen and, though she did not closely study the religion, its philosophy consoled her during her hardships on the farm. So did the courage of the Africans, their ‘unadulterated liking of danger’, so similar to her own.34 Karen was a connoisseur of men, and Out of Africa and Shadows in the Grass privilege and foreground masculinity, white and black.
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But when Farah brought his second wife and her female relatives to the farm, ‘a lively and gentle little flight of dusky doves’, Karen was entranced by the women. ‘Small mishaps on the farm, and jokes on our local affairs, set them laughing like a whole chime of jingles in the house.’ More importantly, the Somali women were enchanting storytellers, a troupe of Scheherazades, who entertained Karen with ‘fairy tales in the style of the Arabian nights, mostly in the comical genre, which treated love with much frankness. It was a trait common to these tales that the heroine, chaste or not, would get the better of the male characters and come out triumphant.’ Treating love with frankness became a feature of Karen’s tales, too. Europeans, she observed, ‘have lost the faculty for building up myths or dogmas’ but ‘the mind of the African moves naturally and easily upon such deep and shadowy paths’.35 Karen’s appreciation of the subtleties of language was sharpened by Kenya, a country of enormous linguistic variety. Though there were only two official languages—English and Swahili—there was also a rich diversity of spoken languages as well as an intermingling of languages, and complex patterns of use. Nuance was crucial. Though English had an important role it was not spoken by many, especially in domestic or informal settings. Karen spoke English and Swahili, and probably came to understand local tribal languages. Danish was the language of home in which she wrote letters, and conversed with Bror and her few Danish friends. Karen’s own skills as a Scheherazade developed courtesy of Denys Finch Hatton, her partner in a love affair as grand and tragic as her affair with Africa. In the movie, Robert Redford plays Finch Hatton, square-jawed and blond, ridiculously handsome and oozing machismo. The real man was tall, thin and balding, the son of an earl,
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an Oxford graduate, witty and elusive, adored by all who knew him and a redoubtable hunter. Aage Westenholz, Karen’s canny uncle and chairman of the board of Karen Coffee, visited the farm to oversee the company’s investments. He observed that Karen’s acquaintances ‘belong by and large to the Peerage . . . a class of people on their way downward, who realise this themselves . . . hunters and warriors who have to yield to industry and modern agricultural society: this is why they seek the uncivilised environment here’.36 Karen met Finch Hatton in 1918 at Muthaiga Country Club, the watering hole of Kenya’s elite. It is designed like an English gentlemen’s club with a wood-panelled dining room where native Kenyans discreetly serve the clientele a robust array of roasted meats with silver service in white gloves, where afternoon tea is announced by a lightly rung gong at four, and drinks are on the terrace. In 2006 there was a stuffed lion in the hall and ladies were still not allowed in the Gentleman’s Bar. Surrounded by a swathe of well-tended grounds, Muthaiga remains an oasis of comfort in rough and ready Nairobi. It was the place to seduce Finch Hatton, infamous as it was for the riotous parties and reckless amours of the white mischief-set. For high-born settlers and tourists, Kenya was an adults’ playground, a realm of civilised anarchy. Lust, for the hunt and for one another, with attendant spoors of debauchery and scandal, typified the dazzling crowd who congregated at Muthaiga in the 1920s and 30s, the era of the ‘champagne safari’, the ‘high noon’ of hunting on the colonial frontier.37 Karen pursued Denys with guile, charm and persistence, until he finally succumbed to her advances. Bror provided no obstacle: he pursued his own amorous adventures, based himself in Nairobi, and increasingly excused himself from his duties at the farm. It
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seems that Karen made a man of Denys because, until their liaison, there is no solid evidence he had been romantically involved with anyone, female or male. Sex does not seem to have been central to the affair. ‘I don’t think I am capable of treating a sexual relationship in itself with any great seriousness,’ Karen told her brother Thomas. She added that she had never in her life been able to ‘sit and gaze adoringly into somebody’s eyes . . . I do not in the least like being caressed, I just can’t stand being called by pet names and made a fuss about.’38 But that did not mean Karen lacked a maternal urge. While Thomas was staying at the farm, she had a miscarriage. The child was Denys’, and Thomas, woken in the night to attend his sister, feared she would go mad with grief. Karen chose to suppress, to Denys and also to Bror, traditional feminine urges—the longing for a child, a stable home life and a male provider. Losing Wilhelm when she was ten meant Karen was unable to grow up, to become the mature adult who recognised and articulated her needs. How to become a woman and what sort? Definitely not a housewife like her mother. In Africa, Karen invented a dazzling persona as white hunter and aristocratic landowner but, within, she was lonely and frightened. Her idealisation of Denys made her a victim, for all her apparent worldliness, of a certain kind of (male) neglect. She was attracted to glamorous, nonchalant men but the patina of their allure, the reflection where Karen saw her idealised self, made her unwilling to interrogate them, or herself, about her needs. Keeping her persona in place meant keeping trust and intimacy leashed. For some time, Thomas was the sole recipient of Karen’s outpour ings about Finch Hatton. When Denys stayed at the farm, Karen declared, ‘I have never been as happy, nor half as happy, in my life’
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because she was in the company of the ‘most wonderful being on earth’.39 It was worth ‘having lived and suffered, been ill, and had all the shauries [problems], to have lived for this week’.40 When Denys departed, either to visit family in England or to go on safari, she slumped into depression, often retiring to bed for weeks. It was a scenario similar to the one enacted at Rungstedlund when her father died. The departure of the beloved male (Denys/Wilhelm) made unbearable the place that was the site of the loss, so home became a prison, an infirmary of dreary convalescence, a limbo echoing with absent voices. Karen’s bedroom, with its delicate white furniture, lace bedspread and curtains is a very feminine bower. But it has a wistful air and it is easy to imagine Karen lying in bed, awaiting her lover’s return. Depression extinguishes energy, closing the curtains on hope. She was so often alone on the farm. She disdained most of the English settlers and they regarded her, because of her predeliction for Africans, as bizarre. Social occasions were few. Her home, though atmospheric, feels like an outpost, the product of one person’s determination, and Kenya itself is not an easy place for a woman. Conditions there, Karen observed, highlighted ‘the difference in the physical capacity between men and women . . . in a civilised country . . . t here are no tasks beyond the power of a woman; here there are some things that one cannot join in’.41 Karen was terrified Denys would flee if he knew the extent of her dependence on him, and sternly warned Thomas never to publicly discuss the matter. Denys valued his privacy to an almost paranoid degree. As his biographer Errol Trzebinski notes, Finch Hatton habitually destroyed letters from friends and urged them to follow suit.42 For Denys, intimacy was entwined with secrecy and control.
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Karen shamelessly mythologised Denys in Out of Africa and Shadows in the Grass, eulogising him in direct inverse proportion to the amount of distress he caused her. Thus the ugly, messy, painful details of Finch Hatton’s comings and goings, the terror she experienced at his leave-takings and his final abandonment of her are all erased. The situation provided a salutary and caustic lesson in the art of storytelling: exclude what is unnecessary to the plot. She prepared meticulously for his visits, cleaning the house from top to bottom and decorating the rooms with flamboyant arrangements of roses and long-stemmed lilies. Kamande Gatura produced a feast that might include fresh fish from Mombasa, ham poached in champagne, wild mushroom croustade and strawberries from the kitchen garden. Vintage French wines were served. Afterwards, Karen and Denys adjourned to the sitting-room and shared an opium pipe. Then Denys would ask, ‘Have you got a story?’ He would make himself comfortable ‘spreading cushions like a couch in front of the fire, and with me sitting cross-legged like Scheherazade herself, he would listen, clear-eyed, to a long tale, from when it began until it ended’.43 Near the fireplace was an old French wooden screen painted with exotic scenes. ‘In the evenings,’ Karen recalled, ‘when the fire burned clear, the figures would come out, and serve as illustrations to the tales that I told Denys.’44 In Out of Africa storytelling is presented as a substitute for sex, offering the reader a glimpse into an intellectual liaison, a cool union of true minds and Olympian affinities, where tangled limbs and moans of pleasure are unseemly. It is one of the triumphs of Out of Africa that Blixen convinces the reader of the equation’s value. Delivery from death, as Bruno Bettelheim suggests, is Scheheraz ade’s task in The Arabian Nights.45 An emperor, cuckolded by his
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wife (whom he’d then had beheaded), threatens to avenge his honour by executing another woman each dawn. Scheherazade, courageous and eloquent, steps forward and offers to save her compatriots. For a thousand and one nights, her stories of flying carpets, genies and treasure-filled caves enchant the emperor and deflect him from his purpose. The result is a happy ending when the emperor marries Scheherazade, and her job of healing is complete. For Scheherazade, it must have been a nerve-wracking courtship: conjuring tales so compelling that she manages to elude rejection and oblivion and gain approval and love. Sitting cross-legged by the fire, Karen undertook a similar strategy. The subtle pressures of her role, and the energy and imagination she brought to it, made her, like Scheherazade, a most seductive storyteller. Given the genesis of many of Karen’s tales, it comes as no surprise to find their structure often takes the form of a dialogue between a man and woman, teasing and spirited, layered with metaphor and innuendo. Meanwhile, the farm’s fortunes continued to deteriorate. Karen’s longing for Denys is like the longing for water. When the rains came, the richness of growth and the freshness of fragrance everywhere are overwhelming. But the farmer holds back his heart and dares not trust to the generosity of nature, he listens, dreading to hear a decrease in the roar of falling water . . . He cries to the sky: ‘Give me enough and more than enough. My heart is bared to thee now . . . Drown me if you like, but kill me not with caprices. No coitus interruptus, heaven! heaven!’46
When the water came, there was abundance, the harvest; its lack meant disaster. But in the farmer’s plea to the heavens, with its
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sexual urgency, there is also a fear of betrayal, and the recognition that, after all, enough will never be enough.
g In 1921, when Aage Westenholz arrived in Kenya to assess the viability of Karen Coffee, he was impressed with Karen. She could ‘get everyone here to do what she wants to an amazing degree. Clever and energetic she certainly is, and well liked by everyone, black and white. For KC [Karen Coffee] she is worth her salary and then some.’47 The family had finally discovered that Bror had given Karen syphilis and that he and Karen were living apart. Not only did they demand she divorce him but insisted he be stripped of any interest in the company. It was the right decision; Bror was a hopeless administrator, restless, irresponsible and consumed by the chase for either big game or new women. Karen was negotiating to buy the farm from the board at a reduced price—but it was a deal conditional on severing ties with Bror. Karen was furious, but she acquiesced: she gave the family the written assurance they desired and, soon afterwards, filed for divorce. But she managed to outsmart them on one score. To cut costs, Aage advised Karen to move into a little thatch-roofed cottage on the property and rent out Mbogani. Karen appeared to agree. She waited until Aage returned to Denmark, then wrote telling him it was impossible to get a good rental price for Mbogani, and stayed put. Karen employed about one thousand workers on the farm, many of them Kikuyu ‘squatters’ who earned the right to live on her land by working for her a number of days a week. She had no
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illusions about the situation. The Kikuyu ‘saw the relationship in a different light, for many of them were born on the farm, and their fathers before them, and they very likely regarded me as a sort of superior squatter on their estates’.48 The concept of terra nullius was aggressively applied by the British in Africa. As Simon Lewis notes, land was made available at rock-bottom prices in order to encourage white settler-farmers to immigrate, but it resulted in land speculation, spiralling costs and an inflated market.49 Going broke on the land was a fact of life in Kenya, and Karen’s example was by no means unique. By 1929, the farm was in even deeper financial trouble: the crops had failed each year since 1924. Karen asked Denys for a loan and he tried to bail her out. But his offer of £10,000 was made in August, prior to the stock market crash that presaged the Great Depression. Karen was in Denmark when she received the offer via his solicitors—she’d rushed home because Ingeborg Dinesen was reportedly near death. After her mother’s health improved, Karen met Denys in London to discuss the matter with his solicitors. But the stock market crash made the offer untenable, and the paperwork on the deal was never completed.50 Bitterly, Karen wrote to Aage Westenholz, ‘With respect to the loan, I must also bear the blame for having raised and maintained a false hope and for having such unreliable friends. For my own part, I generously pass along all reproaches to them.’51 Early in 1931, with great reluctance, Karen Coffee decided to sell the farm. Again Karen appealed to Denys for help—he was on safari—but he could not offer enough cash, or did not wish to, and the property went on the market. Karen, suffering from anaemia and dysentery, was on the verge of a nervous collapse, eating and
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sleeping sporadically, her thoughts whirling. In the midst of this catastrophe, she retreated into literature. ‘I have started to write a book,’ she announced to her brother. She was writing in English, the language in which she’d told her stories to Denys, because she thought it would be ‘more profitable’ and she’d already had an encouraging response from a publisher to whom she had sent a section.52 Serious work had begun on Seven Gothic Tales.53 The whole farm became involved in the project. ‘At first I wrote in the evenings only, but later on I often sat down to write in the mornings as well, when I ought to have been out on the farm.’ There were so many decisions to face that she put them off ‘from day to day’ and immersed herself in writing. In the dining room, she was not alone. My houseboys asked me what I was writing; when I told them I was trying to write a book, they looked upon it as a last attempt to save the farm . . . Later they asked me how my book was proceeding. They would come in, and stand for a long time watching the progress of it, and in the panelled room their heads were so much the colour of the panels, that at night it looked as if they were white robes only, keeping me company with their backs to the wall.54
It is a macabre image. Though Karen is surrounded by her sympathetic staff, she seems to be solitary, in a room peopled by ghosts. It was probably how she felt. Next she had to pack up the house and go through the humiliating process of a public sale of her goods at ‘really disgusting’ prices.55 Looking around the empty rooms, she told Farah, ‘This is how we
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ought to have had it all the time.’ Sometimes at night, unable to settle, she would rush out of the house and into the forest. ‘I was driven out of my house by fear of losing it.’ She wandered around the property, watched anxiously by Farah, ‘[l]ike a ghost that is just said to walk, without any definition as to why or where to’.56 In a letter to Thomas discussing her future, where she frankly canvasses the possibility of suicide, Karen is adamant she will not return to Rungstedlund. It was ‘quite out of the question . . . it would be completely and utterly unnatural for me’.57 In April, when Denys moved out of Mbogani, it essentially marked the end of the affair. Reticent and self-contained, Denys was unwilling to shoulder Karen’s burdens and he’d been distancing himself for some time. There was one stroke of good fortune. Karen had been trying to arrange the allocation of a tract of land that would allow her farm workers to resettle together. After long and apparently fruitless negotiations with various government agencies, she received word that land would be made available. Two things gave Karen unqualified pleasure during her last months in Kenya: Denys took her flying and she was rereading the tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Both offered remove from her situation, as well as clarity, inspiration and fresh perspective. While Denmark’s best-known writer was appreciated in his homeland for his sophisticated wit, the rest of the world regarded him as a children’s writer. Karen compared Andersen to Voltaire, declaring that his stories were ‘some of the most edifying that have ever been written. I read them very often.’58 Andersen’s unhappy personal life, replete with unrequited yearnings, probably struck a chord with Karen.
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Tellingly, when Karen came to choose a period in which to set her tales, she preferred the decades between 1840 and 1870, the Golden Age of Denmark’s cultural life. Andersen published his first stories in 1835 and died in 1874. A traumatic era in Denmark’s history, it coincided with a creative flowering. In 1807, Copenhagen was bombarded, and virtually destroyed, by the English military. Six years later, the country was declared bankrupt. In 1849, absolutist monarchy was abolished, parliamentary democracy was established and the aristocratic age was over. During that time, Hans Christian Andersen’s work captivated audiences in Denmark and abroad, Søren Kierkegaard published his massive, influential philosophical tract Either-Or, Bertel Thorvaldsen returned after years in Rome to invigorate local sculpture and a school of nationalist pastoral painting flourished. Copenhagen itself provided the perfect backdrop as it literally re-emerged from the ashes, rebuilt in the elegantly austere neo-classical style. Historian Palle Lauring wonders whether all this activity exemplifies Denmark’s ‘strange ability to recover quickly from disasters and catastrophes’, an attitude summarised by the Danish motto ‘what is outwardly lost is inwardly won’, a sentiment Karen could certainly appreciate.59 As a child, Karen had been given a two-volume set of Andersen’s tales by her nurse, Malla Jørgensen. When Ingeborg sent her another volume, it was received with ‘many, many thousand thanks’, making her appreciate what ‘a wonderful, delightful attribute imagination is—indeed as I grow older I think it is truly divine, the foundation of everything else’.60 Karen told her sister Elle, ‘I don’t think there could be any greater happiness for me in the world than to fly over the African plains and the Ngong Hills with Denys.’ Finch Hatton, a qualified
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pilot, stored his light plane, a Gypsy Moth, in Nairobi, but he was able to land on the fields near Mbogani. ‘Now I can really picture to myself what it must be like to be an angel.’61 Southern Kenya’s green expanse is seen to advantage from the air, ‘the great, spare landscape’ with its plains and rolling hills seems as gentle, fertile and welcoming as an English park; it’s no surprise the English so eagerly adopted the place.62 Joy, release and hope are some of the qualitites Gaston Bachelard attributes to flight.63 To Karen, there was something ‘absolutely natural and reasonable’ about flying, ‘like a dream come true’. It brought to mind Andersen’s tales, particularly ‘The Wild Swans’.64 Transformation, loyalty and rescue are themes of ‘The Wild Swans’. Princess Elisa has eleven brothers who are changed into swans by their evil stepmother. To free them from the spell, Elisa must weave them individual garments of nettle. The brothers take her flying. Elisa thinks she is dreaming; ‘that’s how odd it was for her to be carried across the sea, high up in the sky . . . Everything was constantly changing in front of her and then, finally, she saw the actual country where she was going.’65 In the tradition of fairy tales, Elisa must undergo many trials before she succeeds in finishing the garments, thereby saving her brother’s lives and her own before she marries the king. Karen, too, was preparing to see the actual country where she was going. She had booked her passage home. But she had one more trial to undergo. Shortly before she left, Denys was killed when his plane crashed near Voi. The next day, his funeral took place in the Ngong Hills, at the commanding spot, with its view of the farm, where he and Karen had chosen to be buried. With the assistance of a friend and several farm workers, Karen cleared
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it in readiness. The landscape played its role in the funeral. As his coffin was placed into the grave, the country changed and became the setting for it, as still as itself, the hills stood up gravely, they knew and understood what we were doing in them; after a little while they themselves took charge of the ceremony, it was an action between them and him, and the people present became a party of very small lookers-on in the landscape.66
At some point before her departure, Karen tried to commit suicide by slashing her wrists but staunched the flow before she lost too much blood.67 Friends came to see her off at Nairobi station. ‘On Sunday,’ one recalled, ‘we went and saw the poor little broken Baroness away for good and so pathetic.’68 Farah accompanied her to Mombasa where she sailed for Marseilles. She never returned to Africa. Thomas met his sister at Marseilles and accompanied her to Rungstedlund. She was horribly thin, drawn and exhausted. He felt he was ‘looking at a stranger, the shadow of a woman I had once known. For a moment it went through me: Oh, so it’s the end.’69 In fact, it was just the beginning.
g Rungstedlund, Karen’s family home, is approximately the same distance from Copenhagen as Mbogani is from Nairobi. It is by far the grander establishment. Built around 1680, it was originally an inn with a farm attached, on the coast road from Copenhagen to Elsinore, the setting of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The house is an
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imposing, white, two-storey, L-shaped building and behind it spreads forty acres of fields and woods. Together they comprise the Karen Blixen Museum. In the warm months, the air is alive with birdsong. Swallows arrive in the spring after their long journey from Africa and woodpeckers, jackdaws, chaffinches and robins throng the trees. Rungstedlund faces the shimmering blue Sound, the narrow stretch of water between Denmark and Sweden. From Karen’s modest study at the front of the house, the Swedish coast can be glimpsed, a terrain she used to great effect in her stories. The countryside’s flatness—there is not a mountain in all of Denmark—makes the sea at Rungstedlund an active element in the landscape. In Africa, ‘the chief feature of the landscape, and of your life in it, was the air. Looking back on a sojourn in the African highlands, you are struck by your feeling of having lived for a time up in the air.’70 ‘Up in the air’ also suggests unreality, of being too far from the ground to see accurately, of being deluded. Rungstedlund’s depressing flatness must also have underscored just how far she’d travelled from the heights of Kenya. During one winter, the ice on the Sound was so thick people could walk across to Sweden to drink coffee with their friends. ‘They looked like little rows of black tin soldiers upon the infinite gray plane.’ But at night, ‘when the lights from the houses and the dull street lamps reached only a little way out on the ice’, the ‘flatness and whiteness of the sea was very strange, like the breath of death over the world’.71 Karen also used the Sound as a metaphor for the seductive, treacherous feminine. Peter, the doomed young protagonist of ‘Peter and Rosa’ sets off across the ice, accompanied by his childhood friend Rosa. Peter has confided to Rosa that he is
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going to quit their village for an adventurous life at sea. Rosa feels deserted and betrayed. Aware of the peril on the ice, she stands up ‘straight and grave, accepting her destiny. Yes, they were to die here, she and Peter, to drown.’72 When the ice cracks open beneath their feet, the couple are swept to their death, clasped in an erotic embrace. In ‘The Supper at Elsinore’, the frozen Sound forms a bridge where the dead can cross over to the land of the living. But it was not only a site for metaphor: on warm days, Karen swam there, even into her later years. Though Karen bequeathed Rungstedlund a place in literary history, it was already in possession of one. Johannes Ewald, Denmark’s leading lyric poet who wrote the Danish national anthem, lived there between 1773 and 1775. He was a romantic figure, a man after Karen’s heart, ‘a genius, the swan of the North’. At the time, Ewald was suffering from arthritis and alcoholism. Karen describes him as broken in health and disappointed in love, rather like herself on returning to Rungstedlund. But ‘he still radiated a rare vitality, a bright light’ with his ‘rare, wild, broken and arrogant smile’.73 Karen’s writing room was known as Ewald’s study. In 1881, when Wilhelm and Ingeborg moved to Rungstedlund as newlyweds, it was ‘a lonely fishing village without a school’.74 By the time Karen returned, it was not only connected to Copenhagen by a train line, but had become a suburb on its outskirts. Karen was living in her mother’s house, a place that always roused the fearsome wraiths of failure, and though Ingeborg ‘received the prodigal daughter with all the warmth of her heart’ she ‘never quite realised that I was more than fifteen years old’.75 Perhaps Ingeborg did feel Karen was a child, wayward and irresponsible. After all, it was how she’d behaved according to the
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precepts of Ingeborg’s frugal, industrious family. She was her father’s daughter, an idealist and a rebel. Ingeborg and Karen loved one another and they’d shared the devastating loss of Wilhelm. But Ingeborg, quiet and bookish, was a woman of firm boundaries, clear about her domain. As she confessed to Wilhelm when they were courting, ‘I am never quite myself outside the home. But I am someone quite other within it.’76 Karen demanded her mother’s support, and Ingeborg gave it. She begged Ingeborg to make the arduous journey to Kenya and stay with her, not once but twice. On Karen’s return to Rungstedlund, she required total silence so she could write undisturbed and chafed when visitors, especially Westenholz relatives, arrived. Ingeborg represented home, which Karen needed—stability, continuity, a safe place—but also despised. Initially, Karen was in a state of grief and shock. ‘During my first months after my return to Denmark from Africa, I had trouble in seeing anything at all as reality.’77 Unsurprisingly, a longing to escape that results in frustration or tragedy marks those of Karen’s stories set in Denmark, like ‘Peter and Rosa’ and ‘The Supper at Elsinore’. Adam, the young aristocrat in ‘Sorrow-Acre’ feels ‘trapped and imprisoned, as if the dead people of his name, from the family vault at home, were stretching out their parched arms for him’.78 Karen, too, had much to exorcise. She set to work on the portable Corona that had accompanied her from Kenya, and on which she produced all her manuscripts, writing first in longhand, then typing the drafts. She needed cash and asked Thomas to support her for two years: in that time, she would finish her book and publish it, presumably with such success that she would not require any further assistance from her family.
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Karen’s desperate need to prove her worth must be measured against the fact that her African adventure had cost the family around three million dollars by today’s reckoning. Though she felt wretched, after two decades in Kenya Karen was in a caring environment and relieved of her gruelling responsibilities. She re-entered the maternal space, rejected for Africa and the dramatic and ultimately draining role of the lone and fearless warrior. The proofs of Rungstedlund’s abiding peace and inspiration are manifest in the quality and quantity of Karen’s publications. Between 1934 and her death in 1962, she published a novel, four collections of short stories and two works of non-fiction, as well as giving lectures and readings and, towards the end of her life, a series of popular radio broadcasts from the living room. Karen came back to Rungstedlund a failure, and died there an internationally renowned figure, regarded as one of the country’s finest writers. It could not have happened in Africa. Ingeborg died in 1936 at eighty-two. She’d had the opportunity to see Karen return to health and strength, and to gain critical acclaim for her first volume of short stories. As the new mistress of Rungstedlund, Karen did not attempt to change the house’s style and preserved it as her mother had kept it. Maintaining Rungstedlund provides the best example of how Karen renegotiated her role there, how she made herself comfortable in the place where once she had felt diminished and miserable. Allowing the house to remain recognisably her mother’s, and not making it over in her own image, indicates Karen was reconciled to an aspect of the feminine she’d reviled: the woman defined by the interior, the domestic, the traditional. The creative energy Karen located at Rungstedlund meant she reconnected with her father’s bold
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spirit in her mother’s safe house. Risks and adventures, the great beyond, had been exhaustively explored, and Karen no longer needed to prove to anyone—Wilhelm, Ingeborg, the Westenholzs or herself—that she had to leave home in order to claim her unique identity. There was another liberation—Karen was debt-free for the first time in decades. Her private realm of Rungstedlund was tiny. Her enchanting little wood-panelled bedroom, with its magnificent view of the Sound, is reached by a spiral staircase. Simply furnished with a single bed, it makes Mbogani seem opulent. There are few reminders of Africa in the house. Karen’s continuing sense of anguish meant that most of her twenty-five crates of goods were never unpacked. There were a few exceptions. A brass-bound chest—a parting gift from Farah—and the storytelling French wooden screen were placed in the drawing room, while Denys’s photograph was on her desk and the gramophone he gave her was in the sitting-room. The magnificent collection of Maasai spears and shields on display in Karen’s study was donated by her brother Thomas in 1960. Karen maintained one tradition from Mbogani: luxuriant arrangements of fresh flowers in the rooms. Karen lead a spartan life. There was no central heating until 1960 when she renovated the house and installed some modern comforts. Until then, she warmed her study with a Louis XVI wood-burning stove. During Denmark’s winter there is sunlight for only three hours a day and the temperature hovers below zero. As Karen noted in ‘The Bear and the Kiss’, winter encroached ‘upon the day from both ends’ until, finally, it ‘completely swallowed the day’.79 Spring and summer are brief, precious, lush and green.
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Karen’s stories celebrate Denmark’s seasons, so different to Kenya, which does not have distinct seasons. The landscape appears ‘calm and golden, already marked by the hand of autumn’ or ‘silent and serene, mysteriously wide-awake in the hour before sunrise’.80 It is ‘a landscape out of paradise’ that ‘breathed a timeless life, to which language was inadequate’.81 Though Karen’s nature worship began with Wilhelm in Denmark, Africa sharpened it to an exquisite edge. Out there, she lived so close to nature’s rhythms that it seemed strange on visits home to find ‘your friends of the town [were] living out of touch with the moves of the moon and almost always in ignorance of them . . . You start your Safaris by the new moon, to have the benefit of the whole row of moonlight nights.’82 Karen worshipped the moon and in ancient ritualistic manner regarded the coming of the new moon as an opportunity for renewal. As her friend, poet Thorkvild Bjornvig recalled, she ‘therefore reverently curtsied to it. Quite frankly and literally she considered herself to be of its kind and to have a part in its power.’83 In Greek mythology, Artemis, virgin goddess of the hunt, is associated with the new moon. Representing an adventurous feminine spirit, she is Karen’s perfect archetype. The Roman name for Artemis was Diana. Karen wrote that ‘all my life I have cared more for Diana than Venus’. Not only was she ‘more attracted to her type of beauty’ but ‘I would prefer Diana’s life to that of Venus, however many rose gardens and dove-drawn coaches she might have . . .’84 While Karen’s descriptions of the Danish landscape never equal the rapture with which she extols Africa, Denmark represents a kinder alignment, a compact between humanity and nature. It was ‘amiable, most cordially tolerant Denmark’ while Kenya was provocative, sensuous and fierce.85 ‘A human race had been
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formed’ by Denmark’s ‘soil and weather, and had marked it with its thoughts, so that now no one could tell where the existence of one ceased and the other began’.86 Hierarchies, derived from the land, were preserved in an absolute and feudal manner: the peasants were those ‘nearest to the soil and dependent on it’ while the aristocrats possessed ‘the big fortunes and the good things of the earth . . . The country nobleman in town as well as on his own land, was walking, talking, riding, dancing or making love as the personification of his own name.’87 In Karen’s cosmology, class was destiny, making an idealised past the necessary environment for her tales. Of course, Karen did not have a drop of blue blood in her veins. Though Bror had remarried and she was no longer officially a baroness, she clung to her title, an act regarded as little short of ludicrous among the pragmatic Danes. But it indicates a hunger for specialness and privilege, the urges of her romantic sense of self. In stories such as ‘Alkmene’ and ‘The Dreaming Child’, Karen used an axiom common to fairy tales like ‘The Wild Swans’. Noble children, disenfranchised from their birthright, exhibit regal characteristics that impress those around them. The high-born narrator of ‘Alkmene’ recognises Alkmene as his equal, though she lives with the peasants. ‘We seemed, both of us, to be aware that we were like one another, in a world different from us . . . we were, amongst the people of our surroundings, the only two persons of noble blood and that hers was possibly, even by far, the noblest.’88 But Karen’s taste for tragedy disallowed happy endings, and her characters’ fate is usually grief, leavened with a dose of enlightenment. Brothers and sisters, passionate yet platonic friendships between men and women, predominate in Blixen’s stories. Does she illustrate
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the ideal relationship she had with Denys? Finch Hatton makes several appearances in her tales. In ‘The Supper at Elsinore’, Morten de Coninck ‘had no need to exert himself. When he came into a room, in his quiet way, he owned it and commanded it.’ Fanny and Eliza, his sisters, have wasted their lives. Nothing and no one is good enough for them. Fanny is something of a witch and Eliza, an angel. Together, they create a portrait of Karen. ‘They seemed as unable to keep from one extremity as from the other. In short, they were born melancholics, such as make others happy and are themselves helplessly unhappy, creatures of playfulness, charm and salt tears, of fine fun and everlasting loneliness.’89 Karen had honed her skills on drafts of Seven Gothic Tales and on another form of writing she had practised assiduously in Kenya: letters to her family. For the reader it comes as a shock, after the plangent, elegiac and magisterial tone of Out of Africa, with its saturating mood of loss and its rhythm leading inevitably towards tragedy, to delve into the large volume of Karen’s letters home where she appears as bright and funny, thoroughly modern and very human. In fact, Karen presents two selves in the letters: the good daughter, cheerful and responsible, who tells Ingeborg only what she feels her mother ought to know, and the frank, emotional and often despondent scribe who reveals to Thomas her love for Denys and her desperate strategems to keep both him and the farm. Early in 1933, Karen completed the manuscript of Seven Gothic Tales. After initial rejection, it was accepted for publication in America the following year, where it was extremely successful. Robert Haas, Karen’s American publisher, merged his company with Random House, which subsequently published all her books there.
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Karen’s readers were keen to discover the identity of the mysterious Isak Dinesen—who was he? Karen had chosen a male pseudonym, as she’d done with Osceola. Did she feel her work might be subject to sexist criticism, or did she wish to play with sexual identity and adopt a male persona as a writer? Karen’s pseudonym translates as a sentence. ‘He laughs’ is coupled with Dinesen, which means son of Denis, a common Danish name. Why did the son of Denis laugh? ‘Denis’ could represent both Karen’s father, Wilhelm, and Finch Hatton. She regarded herself as Wilhelm’s ‘son’. It may have amused Karen and Denys to realise they not only shared a name but one derived from Dionysus, the god of wine and transformation, the archetype of the libertine. Karen and Wilhelm had shared other, awful similarities: both suffered from syphilis, and while Karen had attempted suicide, Wilhelm succeeded. Karen surpassed her father and proved herself the resilient one—facing worse odds than his, she had not only survived but triumphed, truly the oedipal daughter. There is another death her pseudonym suggests. In the Old Testament, Isaac is the only son of Abraham and Sarah, a miracle baby, the product of their extreme old age. Karen was thirty-seven when she miscarried. Did the name commemorate the late and longed-for pregnancy? Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son, because God asked him to. But it was merely a test, and the boy was saved. In the Bible, Isaac becomes a wealthy man because ‘the Lord blessed him’. He was lucky. Back at Rungstedlund, writing Seven Gothic Tales, Karen was surrounded by the ghosts of Wilhlem and Denys, her tragic muses, as well as her dead child. Isak’s laughter can only have been ironic. The Danish press searched for Isak Dinesen and, with a few hints from local literary figures, tracked Karen down to Rungsted
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lund—no doubt exactly as she had planned. Soon after, a photograph of Baroness Blixen became widely known in America. Karen, forty-nine when the photograph was taken, presents a fantastic and glamorous persona. ‘Fantastiske’ translates as ‘gothic’ in Danish. Wearing a pale chiffon gown, Karen is fashionably gaunt. Her hair is drawn severely back, her eyelids, darkened with kohl, are lowered, and she appears to smile enigmatically. Her adornments are simple: pearl earrings and a wedding band. In no other photograph from that time, or later, did Karen wear a wedding ring. Was it Bror’s and, wearing it, did she retrieve a former, happier self—the married woman, not the abandoned one? Karen’s appearance is striking, sophisticated, European, adamantine and slightly sinister. Standing against the photographer’s canvas sheet, she is the wallflower at the ball who, though she has not been asked to dance, contemplates her fate with irony and self-regard, her composure no whit abashed because the conventional rewards have not been bestowed upon her. Such rejection, the photograph suggests, defines her sense of self. Karen embodies the modern woman—though ‘modern’ is the last way Karen would want to be categorised—who represents the notion that from singularity, solitude and an uncanny separateness comes the licence to be creative and free, to speak in an original voice, to configure oneself as one chooses. Karen’s life supplies a terrifying equation of those possibilities, and the price involved—a devil’s bargain. She told Thorkild Bjornvig she’d once promised her soul to the devil in exchange for the gift of storytelling. The audience in Denmark was not as enthusiastic about Seven Gothic Tales as America. The collection, redolent with nostalgia for an aristocratic age, with its tone of decadence and irony, jarred
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during the Depression, which accompanied a taste for realism in Danish literature. Karen described herself as a complete stranger in the Danish literary milieu. But she turned this to her advantage, creating a public figure in which the values of a bygone era were ‘dramatically embodied and stylised: the grande dame, the sibyl’, the storyteller with unearthly powers.90 Out of Africa, published in 1937 under Karen’s own name, was an immediate international bestseller, making Karen a celebrity, which she adored. Winter’s Tales was published in 1942, though she had to wait until the end of the war to discover that $30,000 in American royalties was awaiting her. In 1959, Karen was the toast of New York, lionised by Truman Capote, Gloria Vanderbilt, Cecil Beaton and John Steinbeck. At Carson McCullers’ home, where Karen lunched with Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, she dressed in a grey outfit she called ‘The Sober Truth’. There is an apocryphal story claiming Karen and Monroe danced together at the end of the afternoon. Whether or not they did, it is difficult to picture a more extraordinary couple. Karen, the meticulous author of her own image, described Monroe: ‘It is not that she is pretty although of course she is almost incredibly pretty—but that she radiates at the same time unbounded vitality and a kind of unbelievable innocence. I have met the same in a lion cub that my native servants in Africa brought me. I would not keep her.’91 Karen also gave mesmerising performances of her stories. One audience member saw in her eyes ‘a concentration so total as to be almost frightening: the abstracted, trancelike stare of a soothsayer who is living wholly in another space and time’.92 Karen bewitched her American audience because, in part, they desired her to. She
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represented ‘Africa’, not the Africa that is a shameful and indelible chapter of North American history—the slave trade that saw half a million people abducted from their homes and shipped in chains to the new world—but an idealised Africa, an Africa where Karen performed brilliantly as a white woman whose artistry softened imperialism’s brutal facts. Glenway Westcott noted that her readings, which lasted almost an hour, were as gruelling as the major roles in Wagner. ‘She has an ideal voice,’ he went on, ‘strong, though with a kind of wraithlike transparency, which she is able to imbue with emotions . . . What especially colours [her] voice, what gives it overtone or urgency, is rememberance or reminiscence . . . [S]he seems to be re-experiencing what she has to tell, or if it is fable or fantasy, redreaming it.’ Karen was skeletally thin with enormous kohl-ringed eyes, ‘like black diamonds’, as more than one admirer recalled.93 She dressed with drama and elegance, creating an impression of gothic chic, and survived on a diet of oysters, champagne and amphetamines. Back in Denmark, Karen prepared to make one last grand gesture. She wanted to protect Rungstedlund in perpetuity and create a public park, but she did not have sufficient capital. In a radio talk in 1958, broadcast from Rungstedlund, she gave an overview of the house’s history and described the gardens, woods and meadows, the ‘rich woodland floor with anemones, primroses and violets’, comparing it to a setting from one of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories. She told her audience that she had: come to look upon Rungstedlund as belonging particularly to the migratory birds . . . The seasons here are first and foremost characterised by their arrivals and departures. How many
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Georgia O’Keeffe, No 2— Special, 1915. Charcoal on paper, 60 × 46 cm. © Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Gift of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
Ansel Adams, Georgia O’Keeffe Painting in Her Car, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, 1937. Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Kachina of the Eagle Dance, 1934. Charcoal on paper, 60 × 48.26 cm. Gift of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation (1997.12.02). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock—Hills, 1935. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 91.5 cm. Bequest of Edith and Milton Lowenthal. Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York. © Georgia O’Keeffe. Licensed by VISCOPY, Sydney, 2009.
Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. Photograph © Janine Burke.
The White Place, New Mexico. Photograph © Janine Burke.
Robert Doisneau, Picasso at Le Fournas, 1948. © Robert Doisneau/Rapho/Eyedea/Headpress.
Michel Sima, Françoise Gilot and Pablo Picasso in the Château Grimaldi, La Joie de Vivre or Antipolis in the background, Antibes, 1946. © Michel Sima/Rue des Archives.
Picasso, La Joie de Vivre (Antipolis), 1946. Ripolin on fibrocement, 120 × 250 cm. Musée Picasso, Antibes. © imageArt, Antibes, photo Claude Germain. © Succession Picasso, Paris, 2009. © Pablo Picasso, 1946/Succession Picasso. Licensed by VISCOPY, Sydney, 2009.
Mbogani House, Nairobi. Photograph © Janine Burke.
Rungstedlund, Denmark. Photograph © Janine Burke.
Karen Blixen’s study, Rungstedlund. Photograph © Janine Burke.
Bror and Karen in the drawing room, Mbogani House, Nairobi, 1917. The Karen Blixen Collection, The Royal Library, Copenhagen.
Karen with her staff, Mbogani House, Nairobi, 1917. The Karen Blixen Collection, The Royal Library, Copenhagen.
Denys Finch Hatton, 1931. The Karen Blixen Collection, The Royal Library, Copenhagen.
Out of Par adise
times have I not, in the nights around the spring or autumnal equinox, stood outside the house and listened to their flight high in the heavens above the roof!
She hoped the property could become a ‘breathing space in the middle of the big city’ and ‘a true paradise for birds which have come here over the oceans of the world’.94 Karen was going to save Rungstedlund as she had been unable to save the African farm. She asked her audience to assist by contributing one kroner each to a foundation that would administer the estate while she would donate all future royalties. The public response was generous, enthusiastic and gratifying, a tribute to the esteem in which she was held and, in a short time, eighty thousand kroner was raised. Her family also helped.95 Increasingly frail, Karen told Cecil Beaton, one of her last guests at Rungstedlund in 1962, that an ‘intolerable weakness’ made it impossible to write but she was happy in the house where she had been born and brought up. When Beaton embraced her in farewell, he felt ‘a tiny skeleton’ in his arms.96 Two days before her death, Thomas Dinesen sat beside his sister’s bed. ‘Do you find it strange,’ she asked him, ‘when I tell you that I have lived a most happy life?’97 A reconciliation had been achieved. In Karen’s youth, Rungsted lund represented all she wished to escape: convention, constriction, an identity defined by others—the negative aspects of ‘home’, the mother, the feminine. But a journey begun in bitterness ended in fruition, the harvest Africa was unable to offer her. At Rungstedlund, she found a true and stable ground on which to cast her fantastic shadow, an earth on which she could reinvent herself. Her grave at
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Rungstedlund represents it best: a discreet headstone, that records only her name, lies beneath the grand boughs of an old beech. What should be a melancholic sight is, instead, consoling and uplifting, as grave and tree, death and life, mortality and nature, complete a circle, describe a unity.
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g Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock painting, 1950. Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. ©1991 Hans Namuth Estate.
g 4
‘I a m nat u r e ’ Jac k son Pol loc k on L ong Isla nd The land is alive, tells you things when you let it. Jackson Pollock1
When Lee Krasner suggested moving to the country, Jackson Pollock thought it was a terrible idea. In 1945, the couple shared a studio-apartment on New York’s Eighth Street, part of a close-knit Greenwich Village community that included Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline. Acknowledged as an up-and-coming, wildly difficult artist, Pollock was an habitué of the city’s museums, galleries, bookshops and bars. But, after an idyllic summer on Long Island, Krasner wondered if the area’s peace and quiet, as well as its cheap housing, offered a more stable existence. Pollock mulled it over for a while. Then he announced, ‘“Lee, we’re going to buy a house in Springs and move out!”’2 Krasner was astonished. They could barely afford the rent. But Pollock, all enthusiasm, persuaded her to return to Long Island,
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where they found a property at The Springs on Fireplace Road— today the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.3 Built in the nineteenth century, the tall, narrow shingled house is surrounded by copses of beech, cedar and flowering fruit trees. Behind it stands Pollock’s studio on the open grassy land that dips gently to the golden salt marshes of Accabonac Creek. In such a flat and tranquil landscape, the sky seems immense as it meets the water in a liquid embrace. B.H. Friedman, Pollock’s first biographer, described it as ‘an infinite kind of space’.4 The air smells sweet and salty, the light is soft, luminescent. Sea mists arrive at dusk, greeting the forests of oak and hickory. The move to Springs spurred another decision: prior to leaving New York, Lee and Jackson married at the Dutch Reformed Church on Fifth Avenue—the only church whose pastor would marry a ‘non-practicing Jew and an unbaptized Presbyterian’.5 In November 1945, on a rainy night with a nor’easter blowing, they arrived at their new home. Springs was Pollock’s cherished place for the rest of his life. Named for its plentiful water sources, the word implies energy, renewal, hope and purity. For Pollock, Springs was home, source and refuge. It was where he created his greatest works and became America’s first international celebrity artist, more famous even than Georgia O’Keeffe. Like O’Keeffe, Pollock found such reknown rewarding, onerous and intrusive. Also like O’Keeffe, Pollock had endured an unhappy childhood odyssey across America before finding his ‘protected intimacy’. Pollock was highly intuitive and spiritual, a pantheist who felt a profound connection to Native American culture. While Pollock was a sophisticated artist with an excellent knowledge of
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European modernism, the links between nature, mysticism and Native American art, contextualised here thoroughly for the first time, forged a stabilising, inspiring force. It lead him to make his home at Springs with Lee Krasner where, between 1948 and 1950, when Pollock was successfully treated for chronic mental illness, he enjoyed an idyll of near-sobriety and produced his best works, majestic and innovative paintings that are a homage to his Long Island home.
g A fixture of Manhattan bohemia since 1930, Pollock had grown up out west. He was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912, and the family moved to California when Jackson was one. In the next decade, the Pollocks moved six times, across northern California to Arizona and back to California, each shift marking a further decline in the family’s fortunes. Jackson’s parents, LeRoy Pollock and Stella McClure, were a mismatched couple who found little happiness together, despite the five sons they produced: Charles Cecil, Marvin Jay, Frank Leslie, Sanford LeRoy and Paul Jackson. Both LeRoy and Stella were born in rural Iowa of farming stock. LeRoy, who had been adopted by a local family and never knew his birth parents, was a slight, hard-working man, retiring and self-contained. He seemed intimidated by Stella, a big, handsome woman with determinedly middle-class aspirations. LeRoy’s lack of business acumen and Stella’s longing for a better life at any cost meant the family foundered economically. A series of failed ventures including a fruit-tree farm, whose soil turned out to be alkaline, and the purchase of a hotel in Janesville, a remote
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Californian town, at the start of Prohibition led to increasing discontent between husband and wife. After selling the hotel in 1921, LeRoy joined a surveying team and lived apart from his family, rather as Georgia O’Keeffe’s father had done. LeRoy regularly sent money and the family reunited for strained Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Charles, the eldest, recalled his father was a ‘disappointed man’, always ‘looking for opportunity’. To Frank, ‘my dad disappeared’ and his mother ‘ran the whole shebang’. To Stella, keeping up appearances was paramount. ‘She dressed for the day early, every hair in place, tightly corseted and shoes highly polished. Her clothes, of her own design and manufacture, were immaculate.’ Stella ‘loved to spend money’, her sons recalled, she was ‘hopelessly extravagant’.6 LeRoy’s legacy was his boys’ love of the outdoors, like Ed Hemingway with Ernest, and he took them hiking, camping, fishing and shooting. But such masculine pursuits did not bond father and sons: the boys left home as soon as they could and grew distant from their father. Perhaps it was Stella’s unending quest for ‘refinement’, represented by her appreciation of quality materials, her flair for interior decorating and her accomplishments as a seamstress that awakened an aesthetic sensibility in her sons. Despite their itinerant backwoods youth, all five Pollock boys pursued artistic careers: Charles became a painter and teacher, Jay was a rotogravure etcher, Frank was a writer and commercial rose grower while Sanford (known as Sande) was involved in painting, graphic art and silk-screening. Stella instilled in her sons a sense of ambition. How many artists are the products of their mothers’ thwarted dreams?
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Pollock’s rural upbringing gave him an appreciation of nature so profound and abiding it amounted to animism, a vital connection and identification with seen and unseen forces. As Jeffrey Potter, Pollock’s neighbour at Springs, recalled, ‘Land meant a great deal to Jackson and not only because of his love for the [Accabonac] landscape. Land to him also meant Gardiner’s Bay, the Atlantic, the sky, the weather. They were parts of a whole in which he felt as right as he could.’ When Pollock observed Potter accidentally hitting a tree trunk with his bulldozer, he cried, ‘“Don’t you know a tree can feel, chrissake?”’ When Potter remarked that he was more concerned about the damage to his bulldozer than to the tree, Pollock replied, ‘“Shit! Worry about what you’re doing to yourself, shredding a living thing like that into splinters. And don’t think it can’t happen to you, only different—worse.”’ Pollock, noted Potter, was ‘on the verge of tears’.7 As a boy, in the company of his father and brothers, Pollock explored the Grand Canyon, as well as the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the arid Sacramento Valley and the Mojave Desert. Pollock was rarely alone in nature: his excursions were joint ventures, rather like the move to Springs—such an undertaking was inconceivable without Krasner’s support and assistance. Jackson was a complex man, by turns vulnerable, needy, charming, withdrawn, stubborn and aggressive. But, like most artists, he instinctively knew what his art required, and how to nourish it, despite the difficulties. Settling at Fireplace Road was, after his decision to study art in New York, his career’s most important step. Another link to nature was Pollock’s immersion in Native American culture, a potent and longstanding force, as important to his work as the influence of Picasso or Jungian symbolism.
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In 1920, while the Pollocks were installed in the ill-fated hotel at Janesville, Jackson, then eight years old, attended the annual Northern Paiute Bear Dance. Frank recalled how the brothers followed members of the Wadatkut, a branch of the Paiute tribe, ‘out to the burial grounds in the mountains and listened to the chanting in the pine trees’.8 The ceremony must have been a thrilling sight for an impressionable boy. Though the Wadatkut had been decimated by white colonisation and expansion, its remaining members continued to mark the festival. The purpose of the Bear Dance, which took place each spring, was to share food as a community and celebrate the renewal of life after the winter. The medicine man, wearing a bearskin, danced in the centre of a circle of chanting older men and women. The bear was sacred to the Wadatkut, both as a source of food and clothing, and as a symbol of strength and courage. As part of the ceremony, the medicine man would grab onlookers and drag them into the circle, until all were dancing and chanting together.9 O’Keeffe described similar ceremonies as ‘beautiful—so terribly alive’.10 As Vine Deloria Jr notes, a feature of Native American religious traditions is spatiality. Indian ceremonial life and existence are rooted in a profound concept of space and place. The spatial layout for any ceremony takes on paramount significance, so the placement of the Wadatkut’s ceremony would have a specific cosmic representational value reflecting their spiritual relationship with the world around them. It would also mean that the site itself located sacred power, it was experienced as alive. ‘Sacred geography’ situates, within a tribe’s original homeland, ‘a multitude of stories, that recount the migrations, revelations and particular historical incidents that cumulatively produced the tribe in its current condition’.
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A fundamental aspect of Indian religiosity is the ‘precision and specificity’ of its link with the land. The created world, including each human being, is regarded as sentient and filled with spiritual power.11 Place is the manifestation of the divine. A direct contact with Native American myth was provided by Norah Jack, a Wadatkut woman who helped at the hotel and who was a great favourite with the Pollock boys. She enthralled them with creation myths about the local area and the role of totemic figures such as Bear, Snake and Coyote. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith observe that Pollock ‘having grown up in a family that was never religious, a family that never even attended a church service’, must have found Norah’s tales intriguing. Reuben Kadish, who first met Pollock in Los Angeles in 1931, remembered he had ‘a very definite and primary interest in American Indians that went back to his childhood’. Pollock was proud of his first-hand experience of Native American life. Sculptor Tony Smith recalled Pollock ‘felt a rapport with this—the authentic life of the west’.12 In 1928, Stella, Sande and Jackson moved to Los Angeles so Jackson could enrol at Manual Arts High School. Charles, Frank and Jay had left home and, though Sande stayed, his job and a romance with Arloie Conaway, his future wife, meant he was often absent. For the first time, Jackson was without the band of brothers who had provided protection, guidance and direction. It seemed the Pollock boys were following their father’s example as, one after another, they drifted away from home. But Stella still had Jackson; ‘Jack was Stella’s pet. The sun rose and set with him.’ As Freud observed, ‘if a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in
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success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it’. For, despite the setbacks, once Pollock was committed to being an artist, he never lost sight of his goals or his sense of destiny. At nineteen, he announced to a fellow art student, ‘you know I am great’.13 Art was the only subject on the school curriculum that appealed to Pollock. But he was no prodigy, admitting his drawing was ‘rotten it seems to lack freedom and rhythem [sic]’ and ‘the truth of it is i [sic] have never really gotten down to real work . . . i usually get disgusted . . . and lose interest.’14 He was devoted to Frederick John de St Vrain Schwankovsky, the eccentric, inspiring art teacher at Manual Arts High School who was his first mentor. Schwankovsky introduced Pollock to mysticism and modern art. Schwankovsky, who had studied at New York’s Art Students League, was something of a rebel. When he organised life-drawing classes where the female model had ‘nothing on above the waist’, it earned him the censure of the vice-principal. ‘Then I would go back to putting a brassiere on the girl for a month or two until it was all forgotten, and then the brassiere would come off again. Oh I fought my way!’15 A large art department flourished under Schwankovsky and Pollock was attracted to its ‘atmosphere in which the [students] can grow’. Schwankovsky also taught art history, which covered ancient to modern art, and which doubled as spiritual instruction. ‘When I came to the Oriental [art] I told them about reincarnation.’16 Schwankovsky was a member of the Theosophical Society, co-founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in New York in 1875. Blavatsky, a spiritualist and a medium, synthesised tenets of Hinduism and Buddhism—such as reincarnation and karma—and combined them with pantheism and the importance of the individual’s spiritual search. Though the Theosophical Society seemed to offer religious
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freedom, it was in thrall to the concept of the guru who imparted occult knowledge and revelations to the initiated. In California, a magnet for cults in the 1920s, the Theosophical Society was popular not only because of its syncretic spirituality but also due to the charismatic presence of Jiddu Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti’s philosophy emphasised personal responsibility for spiritual growth. ‘You must have the lamp and the match to light it. And you must have the desire to keep the light all the time brilliant.’ Krishnamurti emphasised individuality, which was intrinsic to Pollock’s conception of himself as an artist. ‘The spirit of the bourgeois—which is the spirit of pettiness, narrowness and mediocrity—desires to pull down the spirit of true nobility,’ Krishnamurti wrote. ‘You all want to be free, but freedom can only be achieved when you are . . . above the desire to imitate, to mould yourself to the thought of another.’17 In Krishnamurti’s high-minded, vaguely worded texts Pollock found a spiritual philosophy suited to his own anachronistic personality. Pollock might have been attracted to an inner path but he was becoming brash and confrontational: the rebelliousness of youth intermingled with the onset of his mental illness. He left his former high school Riverside High under a cloud and he was expelled from Manual Arts for his part in writing and distributing a pamphlet attacking the teachers and the school’s emphasis on sport. Though allowed to re-enrol, he was soon expelled again. Stella, it seemed, never tried to correct or discipline Jackson. In her eyes, he could do no wrong. Pollock’s friend Manuel Tolegian was shocked by Stella’s liberal attitudes. ‘She allowed drinking in the house . . . and smoking right there. So being a kid myself I thought evidently this is OK . . . But underneath I thought this was all wrong.’18
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When LeRoy visited, he drank heavily, Tolegian noticed. Pollock had started drinking in the company of his father and brothers. It disguised his shyness and awkwardness, and could make him aggressively uninhibited. Drinking was a major factor in Pollock’s mental illness, which comes under the broad category of ‘borderline’ or ‘antisocial’ personality disorder. Typically, its onset is in late adolescence. Its symptoms provide an index of the negative aspects of Pollock’s personality: difficulty relating to others; hostility and guilt; deep feelings of insecurity; despair leading to thoughts of suicide; a reckless disregard for his own safety or that of others; and violent outbursts. Those who suffer from this illness are exceptionally vulnerable to alcohol abuse and, when drinking, view their own needs and desires as being of supreme importance. Generally, they reject abstinence as a goal.19 Strikingly handsome with a strong jaw, fair hair and intense hazel eyes, Pollock affected a dandyish, unconventional style, wearing his hair long, donning three-piece suits and smoking a pipe. But his outward appearance marked the extent of his sophistication. Painfully shy, Pollock was at a loss with girls and related uneasily to teachers and classmates. He was a ‘very quiet fellow’, Tolegian recalled, a ‘very reclusive man [who] had very few friends’.20 At seventeen, branded a troublemaker and with no discernible talents, Pollock seemed directionless, unable to apply himself or to find his niche. When Charles and Frank arrived from New York for their summer holiday in June 1929, Charles took his young brother in hand, insisting Jackson return to New York with him and study at the Art Students League.
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When Pollock arrived in New York, the city was undergoing dramatic change. During the 1920s, a fantastic building boom had seen the start of the construction of skyscrapers such as the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building and the Rockefeller Center. But the decade of excess, financial speculation and frivolity ended in October 1929, when the Wall Street Crash heralded the beginning of the Great Depression. Pollock arrived in New York just as it started to bite but, given the straitened circumstances of his youth, he was no stranger to privation. Jackson first stayed with Charles and his future wife Elizabeth in their apartment on Union Square, before finding a room nearby. Interestingly, the shy lad from out west was not daunted by the Big Apple which, Charles recalls, Jackson ‘took in his stride’. Pollock felt life there was ‘keener, more demanding, more intense and expansive . . . the stimulating influences are more numerous and rewarding’.21 What did daunt Pollock was the practice of art. In September 1930, he enrolled in Thomas Hart Benton’s life drawing, painting and composition class. Benton was a contentious figure in the small, factionalised New York art world. Together with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was a leader of the Regionalist school that celebrated rural American life in a heroic, realist style with a folksy narrative content. A former abstract painter who’d studied in Paris, Benton’s attitude towards European modernism was belligerent. He declared it had taken him ‘ten years to get all that modernist dirt out of my system’. Stieglitz, O’Keeffe and their circle were ‘an intellectually diseased lot, victims of sickly rationalizations, psychic inversions, and God-awful self-cultivations’.22 Diminutive and combative, Benton was remembered by some students as ‘a macho
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bastard’ who ‘didn’t think women should be painters’ and whose practical advice was useful as long as ‘you did things exactly the way he thought they should be done’.23 What Benton did offer were big ideas—a perspective on American art and its relationship with modernism, and on the role of the artist who was actively engaged in documenting contemporary society. Benton’s classes comprised a dozen students at most. When Pollock began life drawing—which he did for fifteen hours a week— the results were poor. He grappled to master the human figure and render it realistically. ‘He would labor over the most infinitesimal detail,’ recalled classmate Joseph Delaney, ‘that’s how sensitive he was.’ Pollock sometimes found the experience gruelling. Delaney recalled how Pollock, in the midst of a sketching frenzy, suddenly threw down his pencil in frustration. ‘I’ve gotta get the hell outta here,’ he cried, and ran from the studio.24 But Benton’s rigorous, traditionalist methods—he suggested the students copy drawings by Signorelli, Michelangelo, El Greco and Rubens, as well as referring them to his own powerfully rhythmic compositions—helped Pollock to gain control over form, and to imbue it with a distinctive, surging energy. Pollock proved himself disciplined and dedicated. Two years later, he wrote to his father: I’m going to school every morning and have learned what is worth learning in the realm of art. It is just a matter of time and work now for me to have that knowledge apart [sic] of me. A good seventy years more and I think I’ll make a good artist—being a [sic] artist is life its self [sic]—living it I mean. And when I say artist I don’t mean it in the narrow sense
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of the word—but the man who is building things—creating molding the earth.25
One of Pollock’s early paintings, Going West (1934–35, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC), appears to be a Benton look-alike with its strong, flowing composition and rural subject—a cowboy leading a team of mules pulling a wagon through hilly countryside. But the landscape’s dark, swirling, expressionist forms mark the painting as Pollock’s own. Benton’s world was literal, determined, explicable; Pollock’s was allusive, subjective, explosive. A bond between teacher and pupil was their fascination with landscape—how to represent the rural experience and a deeply felt relationship with the earth. In 1944, Pollock remarked that he retained ‘a definite feeling for the West [for] the vast horizontality of the land’.26 For Benton, rural America was a stage for narrative and for characters who symbolised the country. Pollock was in awe of nature but his sense of it was visceral, transcendent, and he had no interest in telling stories or portraying characters. In Going West, the natural world is depicted as a gothic theatre of shadows, threatening clouds and rearing hills lit by the burning brightness of the full moon. Man and animals are dwarfed by nature’s dominion, its whirling unpredictability. Existence seems precarious: in an instant, man and beast could be swept away. Krasner recalled, ‘[Pollock’s] relationship to nature was intense . . . He identified very strongly with nature . . . For example, the moon had a tremendous effect on him . . . He spoke about the moon quite often.’27 Pollock produced several works—Krasner described them as a series—that took Native American lunar mythology as their
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subject: Mad Moon Woman (1941, private collection, Washington DC), Moon Woman (1942, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) and Moon Woman Cuts the Circle (1943, Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice).28 Like many cultures, Native Americans regard the moon as feminine and measure time by its cycle, rather than by the sun. Going West represents the moon’s energy at its most potent and disquieting, creating a tidal rhythm that flows through nature. The painting also symbolically charts Pollock’s journey as a young artist who’d travelled to the metropolis where he came under Benton’s tutelage, then set off in his own direction. Benton’s views were prescriptive but he quickly realised that Pollock, despite his lack of skill, was uniquely gifted. Benton and his wife Rita took Pollock under their wing, just as they’d done with Charles—finding him a part-time job, inviting him to their home and to their holiday house at Martha’s Vineyard, where Jackson spent part of each summer for several years. Benton also favoured Pollock with private tutorials at his home where he corrected Jackson’s drawings. Jackson was especially close to Rita. A former student of Benton’s, Rita was vivacious and warmly maternal. Jackson thrived on the attention and repaid the Bentons with total devotion. In 1950, Pollock commented, ‘Tom Benton . . . did a lot for me. He gave me the only formal instruction I ever had, he introduced me to Renaissance art, and he got me a job in the League cafeteria. I’m damn grateful to Tom. He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right back into non-objective painting.’29 Benton guided Pollock, offering him an entrée to New York’s art community. At the same time that Jackson enrolled at the League, Benton garnered his first public mural commission, America Today, at the New School for Social Research. Not only did Pollock
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serve as a model for some of Benton’s muscular male workers, he had the opportunity to observe Benton’s painstaking preliminary studies as well as his single-handed execution of the large-scale designs. Hailed as a triumph, America Today led to another, more prestigious commission: an eight-panel mural for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which was unveiled in December 1932. Benton’s example not only gave Pollock the urge to paint big but taught him that mural painting was a means to earn both money and reputation. ‘Mural painting is forging to the front,’ he told his father, ‘by the time I get up there there out [sic] to be plenty of it.’ Pollock was echoing Benton’s sentiments when he opined that ‘the new artists job [is] to construct with the carpenter—the mason’.30 By 1934, Benton was so well known his self-portrait was reproduced on the cover of Time magazine. The following year, Benton moved to Kansas City to take up a teaching post but he and Pollock maintained contact. But beside his art there was something else that Benton encouraged: Pollock’s appetite for alcohol. Benton’s rambunctious behaviour was often fuelled by booze and Pollock used Benton’s drunken posturing as an imprimatur for his own addictive tendencies. Benton could handle his liquor but Pollock could not. As the pressures on Pollock mounted—to develop as an artist, to be a contender in the competitive New York art world, to live up to Benton’s expectations and those of his peers, and to survive financially—so did the symptoms of his illness together with his dependence on the bottle. Typically for those with a personality disorder, Pollock had minimal tolerance for alcohol and became extremely drunk on small quantities. Then this usually shy and gentle man would explode into psychotic episodes of rage and violence.
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One evening, Marie Levitt, who later married Frank Pollock, arrived at Charles Pollock’s studio with her friend Rose Miller and a bottle of whisky. After a few drinks, Jackson became abusive towards Rose, ‘rough with her physically’. When Marie tried to intervene, Jackson turned on her, picking up a hatchet. ‘I remember his very words,’ she recalled, ‘“You’re a nice girl, Marie, and I like you. I would hate to have to chop your head off.”’ Then he took the hatchet and slashed a painting by Charles, one that was already sold and destined for an exhibition.31 Perhaps it is evidence of the vulnerability of Pollock’s ugly behaviour that, even under such circumstances, he managed to win forgiveness. Rose, rather than being offended, pursued Pollock and had a brief affair with him.32 When drunk, Pollock threatened and attacked many of his friends, yet few abandoned him. Indeed, those close to Pollock developed a protective attitude, shielding him and helping him out of a variety of scrapes. Pollock’s excesses veered perilously close to suicide. Manuel Tolegian recalled ‘one night we were in a stupor on a Hudson River dock and very mad at civilization. We started throwing change from our pockets into the river, but then Pollock threw himself in too—right off the dock! I had to pull him out—couldn’t wait for help—because he was drowning.’33 By 1935, a pattern had emerged whereby Pollock would disappear for days, perhaps to the Bowery on the Lower East Side, or wherever he could find cheap bootleg liquor, and drink himself senseless, sleeping in the gutter and returning home ‘a horrendous mess . . . and very sick’. Pollock was trying to find a solution, a diagnosis. When he told Peter Busa, a fellow student, he had a problem, Busa asked, ‘Is it alcoholism?’ Pollock replied, ‘No, that’s only part of it. It’s what causes alcoholism.’ But when Pollock tried to describe the
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nature of his dilemma ‘he would break down and cry and say he did not know himself’.34 In 1937, Pollock began seeing a psychiatrist but the situation did not ease. The following year, on the advice of the psychiatrist, Pollock checked himself into the Westchester division of the New York Hospital, an elite rehabilitation clinic, where he was treated for free. When he was released, he began drinking again. Early in 1939, Pollock once more sought help, this time from a Jungian psychotherapist, Dr Joseph L. Henderson. When Henderson left for San Francisco in 1940, Pollock’s therapy continued with another Jungian, Dr Violet Staub de Lazlo. Despite these troubles, Pollock’s art blossomed; he did not drink when he painted. The Flame (c. 1934–38, Museum of Modern Art, New York) is a remarkably prescient work whose burst of passionate, painterly red and black brushstrokes and near-abstract composition presage an authentic visual language. The Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration was an enlightened government incentive that employed artists to complete public commissions, providing them with an income during the Depression. The FAP allowed Pollock studio time: artists were required to submit one painting, of their own choice and subject matter, every four to eight weeks. Other artists employed under the FAP included Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Lee Krasner and Mark Rothko. Though Pollock’s involvement was fitful, due to drinking bouts, the financial security the FAP offered in the depths of the Depression contributed to his work’s development. In 1936, Pollock had the opportunity to attend the workshop of revolutionary Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros who, like Benton, was a decisive, inspiring character. Siqueiros encouraged experimentation with new materials and techniques including spray
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guns and airbrushes, the latest synthetic paints and lacquers—duco among them—as well as the idea of the ‘controlled accident’ and the direct, spontaneous application of paint. ‘Jackson Pollock was very talented,’ recalled Siqueiros. ‘He could make anything that he wanted.’35 Pollock responded to the dramatic, political art of the Mexican muralists, like Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, but Siqueiros, the greatest of the triumvirate, offered Pollock exactly what he needed: intense emotion, symbolic meaning, painterly control and expert draughtsmanship—all on a massive scale. Other resources included a series of stellar shows at the Museum of Modern Art—‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ in 1936, ‘Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism’ later that year and, in 1939, ‘Picasso: Forty Years of His Art’. Pollock haunted the Museum of the American Indian as well as the Museum of Natural History to view the treasures in its dusty cases. Pollock believed Native American art was magical: it ‘transmitted a power’.36 He invested in twelve volumes on Native American culture published by the Bureau of American Ethnology. These thoroughly researched and well-illustrated books formed ‘the most comprehensive view of Native American art and thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’.37 Pollock had a veritable encyclopaedia where he could browse on subjects such as seasonal rites and rituals, totemism and detailed accounts of particular Indian tribes. In 1944, Pollock paid tribute to Native American art. I have always been very impressed with the plastic qualities of American Indian art. The Indians have the true painter’s approach in their capacity to get hold of appropriate images, and in their understanding of what constitutes painterly subject-
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matter. Their color is essentially Western, their vision has the universality of all real art.38
Between 1939 and 1940, in sessions with Joseph Henderson, Pollock explored his psyche. Henderson, a former student and analysand of Jung’s, was later anointed ‘one of the most prominent and trusted of American Jungians’.39 He contributed an essay, ‘Ancient Myths and Modern Man’, to Jung’s most popular book, Man and his Symbols, and he was ‘obsessed’ with Indian culture.40 While in medical school, Henderson visited the Zuni and Sia tribes to see the corn dances, and the Hopis to see the famous snake dance. At the start, Pollock’s treatment went slowly. Baffled and frustrated by his patient’s reticence, Henderson asked Pollock to bring drawings along to their sessions. As Jung noted in his essay on Picasso, he often induced his patients to set down their feelings in a pictorial form in order to make their ‘unconscious contents accessible and so bring them closer to the patient’s understanding’.41 Over the course of the year, Pollock brought in sixty-nine drawings, all of which, including a gouache which he gave to Henderson as a parting gift, the therapist kept.42 Henderson’s comments ‘centered around the nature of the archetypal symbolism . . . my role was mainly to empathize with [Pollock’s] feeling about the drawing . . . without trying to “interpret” them in the ordinary sense. They provided a bridge to communication.’43 Drawings that depict grappling bodies, and wounded horses and bulls, register Pollock’s response to Picasso, especially the compressed forms and anguished images of Guernica (1937, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid) that he’d seen first-hand in MoMA’s Picasso survey. Other repeated images include phalluses, snakes and eyes. Many
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drawings are fragments. Some of the most complete and arresting are abstracted, energised forms that appear to be Native Americans engaged in ceremonial dance. During that period, Pollock made daring explorations of form and subject matter drawn from a vocabulary of myth that Jung had christened the ‘collective unconscious’. It consists of: mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious . . . [It] contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual.
Jung called the primordial images which imprint themselves on the psyche ‘archetypes’. ‘All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes.’44 They are the embodiments, the physical image of myth. Jung not only invoked myth as a transcendent, healing agent, but valorised the animistic beliefs of indigenous peoples as a prime resource for exploring both the individual psyche and civilisation. Pollock’s sessions with Henderson would prove valuable for his artistic practice, and 1941 was a watershed year for him. Birth (c. 1941, Tate Gallery, London) was selected by John Graham for an innovative exhibition, ‘American and French Painting’, that opened early the following year at McMillen Gallery. Works by Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Bonnard were hung alongside a group of talented newcomers: Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Within New York’s avant-garde community, it put Pollock
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on the map. In the same year, in Graham’s company, Pollock saw ‘Indian Art of the United States’. This exhibition included more than one thousand ancient, historic and contemporary objects as well as demonstrations of dance and Navajo sand painting. Pollock returned several times and discussed the exhibition with his therapist. It led to a breakthrough. Birth combines elements that fascinated Pollock in modernist and Native American art, fashioning them into a wildly intense but highly controlled painting—the composition spins with darkly delineated circles that encompass straining, masked faces and screaming mouths. Red, white and blue tones predominate. Pollock adopts the vertical structure of the Northwest Native American totem pole and its elaborate, stylised designs. Like kachina masks, totem poles represent guardian spirits of the tribe and celebrate their active, magical connection through ritual. The mask-like faces refer to an Inuit wooden mask Pollock saw in ‘Indian Art of the United States’. Reproduced in colour in the catalogue, it depicts, in dramatically abstracted form, spirits seen by a shaman in his trance.45 In Birth, Pollock synthesises his knowledge of Native American art with Picasso’s compact forms, and harnesses them both to the force of his painterly brio and his own developing mythos. Birth’s dynamic, tumbling forms suggest less a real birth than a symbolic one, the explosion of the chthonic creative energy that Pollock experienced as he delved into his unconscious through psychotherapy, and which he shaped through the discipline of art. Pollock evoked his own ritual, envisioned his own gods, as he became involved in what Jung called ‘the process of transformation’, a passage of rebirth.46
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Lee Krasner, three years older than Pollock, was brash and savvy. Hearing about Pollock from Graham, she decided to visit him at his Eighth Street studio. Seeing the recent work, including Birth, she was ‘overwhelmed, bowled over . . . I saw all those marvellous paintings. I felt as if the floor was sinking.’ For Krasner, the attraction was immediate, to the man and the art. Krasner, with her cropped hair and bohemian chic, cut a smart figure. She had a strong, intelligent face, a sensual mouth and a lithe, neat form. Though Krasner described Jackson as ‘the sexiest thing on two legs’, Pollock was no longer the handsome boy with the beautiful smile. Though his body was lean and muscular, Pollock, now balding, looked much older than his twenty-nine years: alcohol abuse and anxiety were etched on his face. He rarely smiled and, when he did, he looked embarrassed, uncomfortable. Krasner noted ‘he was not a big man but he gave the impression of being big . . . His hands were fantastic, powerful.’47 Though Krasner’s gregarious personality seemed the antithesis of Pollock’s, they shared traits: both could be stubborn, abrasive and temperamental. Krasner was highly motivated. Determined from an early age to be an artist, she’d supported herself by waitressing. She breezed around the New York art scene making excellent connections. Jackson, on the other hand, needed constant help—and he always managed to get it. After Charles and Elizabeth Pollock left New York, Sande Pollock and his wife Arloie shared the Eighth Street apartment with Jackson. When they departed, in mid-1942, Krasner moved in. As Elizabeth acidly remarked, ‘Sande . . . stopped painting and did nothing but watch over [Jackson] . . . Lee struck me as extremely capable; I knew immediately why Jackson was with her. He had found a “mommy”.’48
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Krasner’s work faltered when she began living with Pollock. The daughter of a Russian Jewish couple who had settled in New York in 1908, she’d won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, before attending Hans Hofmann’s studio school. Hofmann was an esteemed figure in New York modernist circles, an emigré artist who knew Matisse and Kandinsky. Krasner’s bold, semi-abstract still-life studies were influenced by Cubism’s formal imperatives and Matisse’s decorative palette. When Krasner invited her teacher to Pollock’s studio, Hofmann commented, ‘You do not work from nature,’ to which Pollock famously replied, ‘I am nature.’49 After growing up in rural America and studying Native American art, Pollock probably found Hofmann’s comment insulting. By dismissing the senior artist’s view—that he was not adhering to art-making’s timehonoured method—Pollock asserted his identification with nature: he did not have to study it because he was one with it. Nature was not outside but within him, a concept allied to the Native American relationship with the earth. What could European modernism, and Hofmann, its emissary, teach him? He wasn’t interested in others’ rules. But there was an exception. Like O’Keeffe with Stieglitz, Pollock had found an artist who became his confidante and muse. Krasner was essential to Pollock’s creative wellbeing: he sought and respected her opinion. As the art critic Clement Greenberg said, ‘Lee was crucial to Jackson, no doubt about it, but not in introducing him to new art, which he already knew, or even in training his eye, which was his own. Her real contribution was in telling him what was good and was bad in his own work, in being his editor.’50 Krasner proved an entrepreneur as bold, subtle, perceptive and relentless as Stieglitz. But unlike Stieglitz—an older and more established artist whose marriage
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to O’Keeffe did not compromise his own creativity, reputation or success—Krasner repressed her ambition during Pollock’s lifetime. Though she did not cease to paint, she stood in the shadow of Pollock’s career, which she helped to mastermind. It is a tribute to her creative drive that, after Pollock’s death, Krasner’s work bloomed. In the 1970s, feminist scholarship recognised her achievements, consolidated by a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1981. As Pollock fell in love with Krasner, revelling in his first, fully fledged sexual relationship, issues about gender surfaced in his work. Male and Female (1942, Philadelphia Museum of Art) celebrates the mythic qualities of masculinity and femininity. A work of astonishing technical complexity, it is rightly described as ‘one of Pollock’s first masterpieces’, with its compelling totemic figures and delicious, painterly calligraphy of blues, reds, blacks and whites.51 Pollock’s brush seems to dance across the surface, capable of any gesture or invention. Pollock was aware of Jung’s concept of anima and animus: that a man is inhabited by a feminine archetypal self and a woman by a complementary masculine one. Pollock told Peter Busa he was thinking of incorporating it in a painting.52 The mingling of male and female aspects may explain why Male and Female share feminine characteristics: the figure on the left has long eyelashes, as well as breasts, while the figure on the right has an equally curvaceous torso. Does a blue penis extend from the Female toward the pudenda of the Male? What is male and female? Pollock seems to be asking. What is the sovereignty of each sex and what is their shared territory? In Pollock’s empire of myth, the lines of gender
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blur like the tracery of his brushstrokes that first describe, then caress, then dissolve form. By 1945, Krasner was desperate. As Pollock’s condition worsened, the destructive drinking cycle was not only affecting his health but his ability to achieve what both knew he could—a significant contribution to American art. It was why she suggested the move to Springs and why Pollock, though initially hesitant, agreed. Psychotherapy had not realised its goals and, at Krasner’s behest, Pollock had terminated sessions with his new therapist, Violet Staub de Lazlo. ‘When I met Lee,’ de Lazlo observed, ‘I could sense she was going to take over and that would exclude me . . . I respected Lee and thought she was doing an excellent job with [Pollock] . . . she was exactly what he needed at that time.’53 Springs is close to Gardiner’s Bay on the eastern tip of Long Island where it forks into the Atlantic. Pollock commented the locals were ‘so squeezed between the ocean and the Bay, they ought to have scales’.54 Originally, the land was inhabited by the Montaukett Indians, who cultivated corn, hunted deer in the ancient forests and fished the many waterways. Montauk is an Algonquian word meaning ‘place of observation or a fortified place’ and refers to the tribe’s traditional territory at the far eastern end of Long Island.55 Springs earned its name from the water sources where Indians made their camps. For trade and adornment, the Montaukett made highly prized beads, known as wampum, from the purple and white shells found in abundance along the shoreline. They were skilled whalers, too, both in boats and in the more dangerous task of shore whaling. In the seventeenth century, East Hampton’s canny, ruthless founding fathers negotiated the purchase of fertile acreage
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from the Montaukett who, at first, did not realise they were ‘selling’ their land because their relationship with the earth did not include the concept of individual ownership. It began the tribe’s long, slow disenfranchisement. The Montauketts were also ravaged by European diseases. In 1910, the tribe’s legal battle to regain some of its heritage was dealt a severe blow by State Supreme Court Justice Abel Blackmar who declared ‘there was no tribe of Montaukett Indians’.56 A small number of Montaukett continued to live in the area, though many refrained from any public expression of their Indian identity. Pollock may have known descendants of the Montaukett, just as he’d had contact with Native Americans out west. Place names provided reminders: Montauk Point was named for them while Accabonac Creek was named after another tribe. Though Pollock praised the power of Native American art, it is unlikely he had any illusions about the conditions Indians endured after colonisation. Pollock’s own sensitivities—as an outsider, an artist marginalised by society, and as a man wounded by life’s challenges, who had lost, time and again, his own homes—may have prompted an even deeper level of identification. At first glance, Springs seems an odd choice for Pollock and Krasner. Nearby East Hampton, with its ocean beaches and proximity to Manhattan by train, had been an upper-class resort and a retreat for artists since the late nineteenth century. It even had a cultural centre, Guild Hall. William Merritt Chase, Georgia O’Keeffe’s teacher, had run a successful summer school there and her friend, Arthur Dove, paid homage to the coastline in his paintings. When the Depression hit, the neighbourhood was gearing up for a boom. A huge development was planned at Montauk, close
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to Springs. But the grim 1930s economy, and the lack of resources and manpower during the Second World War meant that hopes of real-estate expansion evaporated. The area stayed cheap. It was one reason the Surrealists summered on eastern Long Island. Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, André and Jacqueline Breton, Salvador and Gala Dalí, plus their friends Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger, whiled away the days swimming and playing chess, as well as producing sculptures, paintings and poetry. Their presence enticed the younger Greenwich Village crowd. The summer Pollock and Krasner first stayed there, Robert Motherwell, poet Harold Rosenberg and his wife May were neighbours. Willem de Kooning soon joined them. But they were holidaymakers. Winter changed everything. ‘It was hell,’ recalled Krasner, ‘to put it mildly.’57 Winter, with its snow, sleet and gales, sorted out the hardy locals from those who scurried back to the comforts and the culture of Manhattan. Long Island has a maritime climate shaped by jet streams from the west, nor’easters and summer storms from the Gulf of Mexico and Africa, as well as frigid air from Canada. Pollock and Krasner couldn’t leave because they couldn’t afford to. It was one reason why Springs, East Hampton’s poor, workingclass cousin, attracted Pollock. Airs and graces were not appreciated among its farming and fishing folk. Jungle Pete’s Bar and Grill, a no-frills establishment, was the preferred watering-hole for the reserved, laconic locals. Pollock joined them there. No doubt they reminded him of people he’d met out west in his youth; uneducated people who did it tough, who worked with their hands and whose livelihood was determined by the seasons. Nostalgia was part of Springs’ attraction for Pollock, even if most of its residents initially regarded him as ‘just a crazy artist’.58 Nina Federico, Jungle Pete’s
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proprietor, felt sorry for her new neighbour. ‘To us he was a just a poor man in dungarees’ who arrived every day ‘for eggs and home fries, toast and coffee. He was hungry.’59 Federico loaned Pollock two dollars. It proved a good investment because Pollock bought a bicycle—he and Krasner did not own a car—which he rode most evenings to drink at Jungle Pete’s. Krasner kept her distance from the community and rarely ventured forth. As an outspoken left-wing intellectual, perhaps she didn’t feel Springs had much to offer her. There were no bookshops or cafes, and the area had been staunchly Republican since 1900. Pollock’s politics were left-leaning, too, but he didn’t wear them on his sleeve. Outings were limited to shopping at the nearby general store—Pollock struck up a friendship with Dan Miller, its voluble proprietor—or a neighbour might give them a lift to East Hampton. It was Pollock who got to know his neighbours; Lee relied on visits from the Greenwich Village set. But that was problematic, too. Lee banned any of Jackson’s friends who might start him on a bender. Conditions at Fireplace Road were primitive: there was no central heating or bathroom; the toilet was an outhouse—a visit to which was quite an adventure during fierce storms. ‘I opened the door this morning,’ Pollock wrote to friends in New York, ‘and never touched ground until I hit the side of the barn five hundred yards away— Such winds. It’s all very nice, tho a little tuff on a city slicker.’60 Fuel was expensive. ‘The [Pollocks] were real cold,’ observed one neighbour, ‘living in that big old house with just little stoves . . . so they huddled around the stoves all winter—all they had.’61 The barn was crammed with discarded farming implements, so Pollock painted
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in an upstairs bedroom for his next show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery. Despite the hardships, the area enchanted Pollock, reawakening his intense relationship with nature. In February, he and Lee decided to take up an option to buy the property. The asking price was $5000. A local bank would lend them $3000 and, to make up the shortfall, Lee approached Guggenheim, ‘Mrs Moneybags’. After some tough negotiations, Peggy agreed to the loan.62 Pollock was thrilled. After a lifetime of insecurity, of losing every house he lived in, he was a homeowner. He wrote to Reuben Kadish, ‘All there is to it now is a hell of a lot of work and it doesn’t frighten me.’63 His ‘underneath confidence’ that he could live from his paintings was beginning to pay off.64 Together, Pollock and Krasner decorated the house. Outside it was painted white with blue shutters. ‘It looks grand,’ Pollock exulted.65 Inside, they knocked down walls to make a spacious living room and painted the floor with white enamel to enhance the light. Artworks were hung, pot plants arranged and their library installed. A growing collection of shells, stones, driftwood and glass shards, found on their walks, decorated window ledges and tabletops. The impression was fresh, modern and natural. ‘There was always a pot of coffee on the range,’ recalled a friend, ‘and a neighbourly country feeling to the house.’66 Pollock had a border collie cross, Gyp, named after a dog he’d had as a child, and a mischevious pet crow, Caw-Caw. Pollock was an avid gardener and an enthusiastic cook. When spring came, he dug and planted a vegetable patch. He was proud of the results, especially his canteloupes and ‘the best, most glorious, purple shiny egglants’ which he gave to friends as gifts.67 Holding
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up an eggplant, Pollock exclaimed, ‘Now, there’s real colour.’68 When his mother visited, Jackson spent the entire day before baking pies and cakes. Krasner remarked, ‘[T]he one time I saw temperament in [Pollock] was when he baked an apple pie and it didn’t work. He never showed any artistic temperament. He loved to bake . . . He was very fastidious about his baking—marvellous bread, cakes and pies. He also made a great spaghetti sauce.’69 Long Island is famous for its hard-shelled clams, which make an excellent clam chowder, and Pollock regularly went clamming with friends. It was more than a jaunt; the couple’s poverty made harvesting at least some of their food a necessity. Pollock declared that one year he and Krasner had lived on the sale of a painting ‘and a few clams I dug out of the bay with my toes’.70 As spring warmed Long Island, Pollock set off on longer excursions. ‘He spent hours, sometimes whole days walking around the first spring we were there,’ Krasner recalled.71 Pollock was mapping his terrain, creating a personal geography of colour, texture, scent and space until he knew ‘every inch of the island, the dunes, the northwest woods, the beaches . . . all of them’.72 He wandered through the salt marshes that surround the quiet waters of Accabonac Creek, where sea lavender and black grass flourish. He saw the osprey return from South America to build vast nests from driftwood, seaweed and flotsam, high in the trees. There were other exotic visitors, too, like peregrine falcons from Greenland and tiny iridescent hummingbirds from the Caribbean. In the woods, he might spot a herd of shy, white-tailed deer or a sleek red fox. Then there was Gardiner’s Bay. ‘He loved to go out and look at the dunes.’73 During winter, the dunes freeze and ice crystals cling to the blond sea grass. Pollock spent hours on the dunes, observing
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changes in the light and the water. Tidal variations are dramatic on the island’s South Fork. The currents are fast and strong, slamming the water forward, so the high tide surges nearly a metre. Sometimes Jackson invited Lee on his rambles or ‘we would sit on the stoop for hours gazing into the landscape without exchanging a word’.74 Hans Namuth’s photograph of Pollock, lying on his back in the sun-dappled grass, eyes closed, utterly relaxed, shows his hedonistic immersion in nature. ‘You can hear the life in the grass,’ Pollock told a friend, ‘hear it growing.’75 Settling into Springs had proved a distraction and Pollock had not sufficient time to translate the area’s impact into paintings. His April 1946 show at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery revealed little that was new, though it was well received by the critics. ‘Moving out I found difficult,’ he confessed to a friend, ‘change of light and space and so damned much to be done around the place.’76 Having bought the property, Pollock made an important change. Working in the small upstairs room proved constricting so, in the summer, with the help of neighbours, Pollock moved the barn that stood behind the house to the side, opening up the view to Accobonac Creek. Pollock had a studio separate from his living space, a private creative realm surrounded by nature. In the warm months, it was idyllic. In the winter, it was virtually uninhabitable. There was no insulation and the barn’s old timbers allowed in the daylight as well as icy winds and snow drifts. It meant Pollock’s work pattern was governed by the seasons. In spring and summer, he worked long hours. Intense bursts were the norm in winter. Pollock’s day began late, usually around noon. In the cold weather, he would wrap himself in every item of clothing he owned, brew a steaming mug of coffee and, cigarette clamped firmly in his
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mouth, make his way to the barn. An old kerosene heater provided some warmth. The barn’s main area was roughly square—seven by seven metres—with a high roof and gable. It was not necessarily its size that generated new work—as Krasner pointed out, Pollock’s Manhattan studio covered about the same area—it was the effect of the environment. Pollock placed windows high up on the north wall, telling Krasner he didn’t want to be disturbed by the view. But there was still plenty to see: sky, clouds, birds and trees. He painted solely by natural light, as the barn did not have electricity until 1953. Light was an important component of Pollock’s new work, flooding his paintings as it flooded the studio. Even in winter, Krasner recalled, ‘there was this incredible white light and Jackson would indulge in the experience of light then because of the luminescence of the snow’. In winter, Pollock couldn’t stay there long—his fingers went numb—‘but what he managed to do in those few hours was incredible’.77 In January 1947, at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Pollock showed the treasure culled from the previous year: the series titled ‘Accabonac Creek’ and ‘Sounds in the Grass’. In the house, Pollock had started to paint on the floor, continuing the practice in the barn, where he had more room and could address larger canvases. Shimmering Substance (1946, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Eyes in the Heat (1946, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) are luscious commentaries on the landscape that incorporate dancing calligraphy, richly handled and delicately toned painterliness, with a surging ‘all over’ pictorial composition. Pollock was learning how to take his best qualities—assured draughtsmanship, an ability to handle scale, a sensual use of paint and colour together with a need for resonant, abstracted imagery—to a whole new level. A decisive
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change was taking place in Pollock’s work—and, by extension, in the history of Western painting. The breakthrough was signalled by Pollock’s new technique. After laying the canvas on the floor, he began to pour thinned, fluid oil paint on to its surface with a stick or a brush. In a rare public statement, he described both the process and the experience. With the canvas on the floor, Pollock was: more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the method of the Indian sand painters of the West . . . When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise it is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.78
While the method was not new—members of the Surrealist circle, as well as Pollock’s peers, including Gorky, de Kooning and William Baziotes, had dripped or poured paint—it was the effect that Pollock gained, and the scale on which he worked, that distinguished his results. The pleasure and intimacy Pollock derived from the process— indicated by words and phrases such as ‘ease’, ‘no fears’ and ‘pure harmony’—are underscored by the close, physical relationship he had with his paintings. He felt ‘nearer’ which meant he could literally be ‘in’ the painting. ‘In’ is italicised twice, indicating the preposition’s
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importance as a spatial metaphor. A satisfying and unconscious rhythm emerged, absolving cognisance of mundane actions: ‘I’m not aware of what I’m doing.’ Nor was he anxious about making changes because the painting had established an autonomous organic identity—‘a life of its own’. The flow between artist and painting evoked by Pollock’s statement suggests a relationship based on equanimity and trust, ‘an easy give and take’, a happy marriage or spiritual union. As Herbert Matter, who photographed Pollock at work, commented, ‘The way he stood, the way he looked [at] the canvas, the way he worked it, always made me think of him like a farmer. The paintings were his rocks, his trees, his earth. Art was his landscape.’79 Pollock was ‘possessed’ by ‘his feeling for the land’, recalled Tony Smith, a sculptor and neighbour. Pollock did not paint on the floor ‘just for its hard surface, or the large area, or the freedom of movement . . . There was something else, a strong bond with the elements. The earth was always there.’80 Being ‘in’ the painting made Pollock kindred to ‘the Indian sand painters of the West’, the only authority he invokes for his breakthrough method. Pollock could have seen the demonstrations by sand painters at MoMA’s exhibition ‘Indian Art of the United States’, where the Navajo men sat cross-legged on the floor as they slowly and meticulously constructed their paintings. But how did Pollock’s energetic ‘dance’ around and across the canvas equate with the orderly manner in which the Navajo produced their paintings and the deliberate geometric forms they used? The sand paintings, as Pollock knew, constituted a sacred healing ritual performed by the shaman or medicine man for a person who was physically or emotionally ill. The Navajo word for sand painting (‘iikááh) means ‘place where the gods come and go’. The paintings
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were ephemeral, swept away when the ceremony of restoring the patient’s health and balance—hózhó—was complete. Hózhó, which means ‘beauty’ or ‘beautiful conditions’, is the Navajos’ grand metaphor by which they understand the world and their place within it. It expresses ‘the intellectual notion of order, the emotional state of happiness, the physical state of health, the moral condition of good, and the aesthetic dimension of harmony’.81 Mircea Eliade explains that the execution of the designs symbolises ‘the different stages of the Creation and the mythical history of the gods, the ancestors, and humanity’. They ‘reactualise, one by one, the events which took place’ at the birth of the world. The patient who contemplates the sand painting is ‘projected out of profane time into the plenitude of primordial time: he has gone back to the origin of the world and is thus a witness of the cosmogony’.82 The patient is healed by the act of image-making, by the enactment of myth. Cleansed by an immersion in sacred time and space, he can begin life again. Though Pollock may not have consciously used such knowledge when he began the drip paintings, it seems unlikely that one so well versed in the process and the symbolism of sand painting could be unaware of the connections. And who was more in need of healing than Pollock? Trance is the ecstatic religious experience practiced by shamans.83 ‘When I am in my painting,’ Pollock said, ‘I’m not aware of what I’m doing.’ Of course, any artist enters into a trance-like state when deeply engaged with the work—time vanishes and only the connection with the work exists. But Pollock boldly presented a new method of painterly ‘performance’ that was active, fully gestural, embodied and choreographic. Even if the invention of the technique
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was an accident, its relevance to the shift in his own work, and in the history of art, begs questions about precursors, references and contexts. Like the medicine man who created the sand painting, the shaman’s chief function was healing and his (or sometimes her) magical rituals were curing ceremonies. The shaman could undertake ecstatic journeys at will, fly through the air, converse with the dead and battle demons. His role was to lead and to engage in the tribe’s religious practices, both the traditional kind and the modern forms, like the Ghost-Dance. In that ceremony, men and women, the sick and the well, the old and the young, danced continuously in a circle for several days, during which they went into trances and communicated with the dead. In the ceremony, dancers effectively became shamanic healers and the place where they danced became sacred. Pollock knew about the Ghost-Dance. James Mooney’s article, the subject’s classic text, was published in one of his prized volumes of the Bureau of American Ethnology, together with dramatic illustrations by Mary Irvin Wright.84 Pollock had seen a Pauite dance ceremony as a child. Some of the best drawings he’d shared with Joseph Henderson showed Native Americans engaged in ceremonial dance. During MoMA’s survey of Indian Art, Pollock could have seen ceremonial dances that were performed in front of giant murals, providing a resonant double image of Native Americans’ grace, rhythm and mythology. Pollock liked to dance, recalled Krasner, but he was ‘awkward’.85 But Hans Namuth’s evocative photographs, taken at Pollock’s studio in 1950, show him as lithe, graceful, balanced and strong in the act of painting. The change is dramatic. In other photographs—including those taken by Namuth—where Pollock is not painting, his stance
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is heavy, brooding, still. He seems rooted to the earth. Anxiety and hurt, registered in his furrowed brow and troubled expression, are palpable. His hands hang at his sides like dead weights. There is no lightness to him. But when Pollock paints, Krasner’s remark that he was ‘the sexiest thing on two legs’ is suddenly plausible. Fit and tanned, wearing close-fitting dark clothes like a dancer’s, he moves in, around and over the canvas as cleanly as a cat. Pollock said he was in control of the poured paint, that there was no accident. Looking at Namuth’s photographs, there’s no doubting him. Did Pollock experience a trance-like state when he painted this way? Probably. The experience would have been exhilarating. Dance, like any form of vigorous exercise, releases energy, and the more often he ‘danced’, the more sure and dexterous his movements became. Country life had made Pollock healthier than he’d been in years. He had mapped his own geography, as Native Americans did, by walking through the land, by viscerally inhabiting it. What makes Namuth’s photographs arresting is Pollock’s complete unselfconsciousness before the camera, his confidence in his body, and his absorption in the work. Pollock wasn’t a ‘shaman’ but he’d learned from Native American culture, combined with his own instincts, to seek inspiration and to learn techniques of ecstasy from the earth. It was an equation that resulted in first-rate art. While Clement Greenberg’s incisive formalist interpretation of Pollock’s technique positioned him at the forefront of the modernist tradition of painting, it denied, and served to obscure, the multiple layers of meaning and symbolism in Pollock’s work. To Greenberg, Pollock ‘twisted Cubist space to make it speak with its own vehemence’ and ‘the greatness of his art [bore] witness to the success with which he was able to expand it’.86 Pollock’s
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achievement—he engaged in a contest with modernism’s history, as defined by Greenberg, and won—meant his work was primarily involved with pictorial space; the emphatically flat, non-illusionistic, two-dimensionality of Analytic Cubism. Pollock was involved with pictorial space but part of his originality was to interpret pictorial space through the wide-angle lens nature offered him. Alchemy (1947, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) is one of the earliest poured works. The sheer energy of the painting is breathtaking, as is its scale—114.6 × 221.3 cm—together with the complexity of the brushstrokes and the patterning of the colours: yellow, orange, silver, black, white. While at first glance there seems no background or foreground, only a dense web of paint, closer inspection reveals the pictorial organisation. Across the surface, Pollock lays a ‘grid’ of lightly sketched white horizontals and verticals that dance at tangents to one another. Allied to the gestural semicircles and sharp angles, they enforce a subtle measure of surface control. What seems like an explosion of colour and line is a balance of exuberance and restraint. Pollock often worked collectively with like-minded friends to name his works. In the case of Alchemy, he invited Ralph Manheim, a distinguished translator of major authors including Jung, to the studio. Manheim, who had a house nearby, ‘free associated’ while looking at the works and came up with evocative titles, not only for Alchemy but for other works destined for Pollock’s next exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery, such as Full Fathom Five, Sea Change, Enchanted Forest and Galaxy. But the titles had to resonate with Pollock, and the choice was his. Ellen Landau suggests Pollock was ‘fully cognizant of alchemy’, from reading key texts
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and having discussions with John Graham, an aficionado of the occult.87 Alchemy, a magical process whereby base metals were supposedly transformed into gold, was used by Jung as a metaphor to describe the process of individuation, or personal growth, that was achieved by combining masculine (sulfur/solar/animus) and feminine (mercury/lunar/anima) to find the gold of resolution—an apposite metaphor for energies activitating Pollock’s work. Pollock’s career was blossoming. The ‘drip’ technique had resulted in brave and beautiful paintings. He was championed by Clement Greenberg, an authoritative critic. His new dealer, Betty Parsons, had a prestigious stable of artists, including Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. Though Pollock was not selling much, and finances remained precarious, he was building a solid reputation. Early in 1948, he was awarded a grant worth $1500. There was also the security of his marriage to Lee and his home. But the psychotic episodes continued. Since moving to the country, Pollock’s drinking had diminished, making the outbursts even more spectacular because they were so unpredictable. It is perhaps fitting that in the country, his ‘protected intimacy’, Pollock at last found a treatment that worked. Dr Edwin Heller was a recent graduate from medical school. In the autumn of 1948, at the East Hampton Medical Center, Heller treated Pollock for injuries after he’d fallen off his bike, probably while drunk. Heller persuaded Pollock to open up about his alcoholism, quite a feat given Pollock’s reticence about the matter, even with skilled psychotherapists. Why did Heller succeed where others had failed? Pollock responded to the ‘simple, matter-of-fact’ manner in which Heller characterised Pollock’s problem. Alcohol
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was Jackson’s ‘personal poison’. ‘Some people can’t eat spinach,’ Heller explained, ‘and you can’t drink booze.’88 Crucially, Heller prescribed antidepressant medication for Pollock to soothe the anxieties that triggered the binges. The drug was a barbiturate, probably Phenobarbitol or Amobarbital, both commonly prescribed sedatives in the 1940s—and, to the Pollocks’ surprise, it worked.89 Barbiturates cause a mild euphoria, similar to alcohol. Heller explained that the drugs would ‘do much of what alcohol had been doing for him’ without the damage.90 Though the drug made Jackson even more silent and withdrawn, he no longer regularly drank to excess. If he did fall off the wagon, it was a private matter rather than an outrageous display. ‘He would go to the guest bedroom,’ Krasner recalled, ‘and just sit there, and have fits, and be completely crazed for a while.’91 While Krasner extolled Heller’s miracle cure, the fact Pollock was on tranquillisers and continued to drink was known only to a few, and that did not include his family. It served both Jackson’s self-esteem and his career to promote the fiction that, on his own watch, he was sober. But the happy truth was, for the first time, Pollock had succeeded in gaining some control over alcohol. It is not hard to draw a parallel with the control he now exercised over his paintings. A demoralising cycle of sickness and self-disgust had abated. The relief must have been enormous and the energy, freed up for painting, huge. In 1949, Pollock became a celebrity when Life magazine ran a story on him with the provocative title, ‘Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?’. Pollock, who certainly knew how to strike a pose, was photographed in front of a painting, arms crossed, cigarette dangling from his lips, a hipster in paintspattered denims. The feature was designed to affront the American
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public who answered resoundingly in the negative. But it made Pollock hot property, awakening interest from private collectors and public institutions. The following year, Pollock produced his greatest works, the flawless and majestic paintings Lavender Mist (1950, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC), One: Number 31 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Autumn Rhythm (1950, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). In Autumn Rhythm, Pollock’s line moves with unimpeded velocity, capturing in its wake flecks of yellow, white, black, brown and tan, shot with teal blue. Like the pattern of a river seen from the air, the line’s intricacies curve, wind and double back. The tracery seems casual until it nears the edge of the canvas, then it deliberately retreats. By pulling the line in at the edges, its velocity is maximised because it is compressed. Lavender Mist shows the variety and complexity of the poured technique—puddled, spattered and dripped. Lavender Mist is cooler in hue and more lyrical in composition than Autumn Rhythm. Its palette of mauve and tan is similar to the colours of shells on the Long Island shoreline, clustering and overlapping at the water’s edge. The web of paint is denser and tighter, it seems to float free of the canvas, as though shimmering and quivering in space. Pollock pushes the paint to the very edge of the frame, as though refusing to acknowledge the picture’s boundary, as though space is a continuum in which his painting shares. Pollock’s mastery is such that he seems to have left the earth and entered the realm of air. Why did Pollock develop the poured method? He told the artist Nicolas Carone that ‘he was delineating some objects, some real thing, from a distance above the canvas’. Krasner called it ‘working in the air’.92
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But a series of events derailed Pollock. In March 1950, Edwin Heller died in a car accident and Pollock grieved for him. Heller’s death aroused dark fantasies about oblivion. Pollock decided ‘that’s the way I want go, only not in the hospital the next morning. I want to go then.’93 For reasons that are unclear, Pollock discontinued his medication. The drugs were readily available: Pollock could have seen another doctor for a prescription. Perhaps it was only under Heller’s regime that the drugs, combined with his straightforward style of therapy, helped. When the medication ran out, the withdrawal would have been horrendous, lasting several weeks. Taken over a long period, barbiturates are addictive, and Pollock’s symptoms could have included anxiety, depression, tremors, nausea, insomnia, even seizures and hallucinations. It is interesting that Pollock, addicted to alcohol, had proved that he was not addicted to barbiturates. The last summer of Pollock’s happiness was immensely active. Aside from painting, there was another project close to his heart. Whatever money he earned, he poured into renovating and decorating the house. It was proof that Springs was his sanctuary and that he belonged there. He was ‘always doing something to his place . . . and he was full of projects for developing it, or adding to it’.94 Pollock fossicked in shops and flea markets, searching for cheap, good-quality furniture. Whenever something new came into the house, recalled Roger Wilcox, Pollock would spend hours arranging and rearranging, moving and surveying, until every detail was just as he wanted it. ‘He did it all himself and he made a beautiful house of it.’95 In the garden, he planted new shrubs and flowerbeds, had a pump installed to make watering easier and procured a small tractor to mow the lawns.
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That July, Lee and Jackson hosted a big family gathering at Fireplace Road with his mother, brothers, their wives and children. Pollock was unable to sleep or eat for days beforehand. There were no arguments, and Pollock did not drink, but the day simmered with tensions between the successful younger brother and his not so successful older siblings. Charles Pollock exhibited under the name Charles Pima while Sanford’s career was not flourishing. Pollock bragged about his celebrity status, as did Krasner. In a family photograph taken that day, Pollock stands at the rear, his head thrown back, neck muscles taut, his eyes like a startled animal’s. A highlight through spring and summer were Hans Namuth’s visits. Pollock complied with Namuth’s plan to film him at work to better capture his technique. Peter Blake, a young architect, had conceived of an ‘ideal museum’ to house Pollock’s work that would be sited ‘in that landscape behind your house. That’s where all your paintings come from, that landscape.’ He suggested Jackson produce a painting ‘that was transparent, that you could see the landscape through’.96 Pollock was intrigued by the idea. Pollock and Namuth planned a short film where Namuth would shoot Pollock from below as he painted on glass. On 25 November, Namuth and Pollock spent a cold, blustery day filming outside until the light faded. Krasner had organised a dinner party that included Namuth as well as Peter Blake, Jeffrey Potter, the painter Alfonso Ossorio and his partner, the dancer Ted Dragon. When Pollock and Namuth came in, Pollock marched straight to the sink and grabbed a bottle of whisky from beneath it. ‘This is the first drink I’ve had in two years!’ he announced, and drank a tumblerful. Lee ‘went white in the face’. When the party sat down to dinner, Pollock and Namuth, seated next to one another, began
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to argue in low tones. Then Pollock stood, paused for a moment, and upended the dining-room table, sending everything, including some of the guests, crashing to the floor. Then he slammed out of the house. In the stunned silence, Lee said, ‘Coffee will be served in the front room.’97 Four days later, after Pollock had an opening at Betty Parsons, he was out of control, reeling drunk. While biographers and art historians regard this event as the beginning of the end, it merely advertised, in a spectacular fashion, the return to drinking that had been escalating all summer. The symptoms of Pollock’s personality disorder fed on alcohol like a virus. His fragile psychological state following Heller’s death and the withdrawal from medication had made him vulnerable. It was a vicious circle: he’d probably used alcohol to allay the withdrawal’s excruciating aspects, regenerating the old, ugly psychotic episodes. Pollock’s condition made him acutely sensitive. As Krasner commented, he was affected by the cycles of the moon. He was also affected by the seasons. He painted in cycles. In the warm months, he painted for hours in the studio, as well as spending plenty of time outside—pottering in the garden, wandering through the landscape, sunning himself on the beach. It was also a sociable period when friends rented holiday houses nearby or visited from Manhattan. There were parties and beach picnics, a constant coming-and-going. Though shy, Pollock thrived on company, especially with those he trusted and liked. The winter cut everything short—time in the studio, light, warmth, sociability. Perhaps it is no surprise that Pollock painted Autumn Rhythm in August, at summer’s height. The title is incongruous—the cold weather fractured Pollock’s creative rhythm. Each November announced winter’s long, slow, dark, interior cycle, and the emergence of the demons which had
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not been banished but had merely slept under the enchantment of Heller and his medicine. Pollock’s eighth solo show, which included Lavender Mist, Number One: 31 and Autumn Rhythm, was a financial disaster, even though the critical reaction was favourable, with one critic proclaiming him ‘a phenomenon’.98 To Betty Parsons, it was ‘heartbreaking, those big paintings at a mere $1,200. For Jackson it was ghastly: here was beauty, but instead of admiration it brought contempt.’99 Greenberg considered it was ‘Jackson’s best show . . . [It] was so good, it’s unbelievable.’100 In January, Art News selected it as one of the three best shows of 1950. But Pollock’s disappointment at the lack of recognition and financial reward turned to despair, adding to the urge to drink. He told Ossorio glumly, ‘Last year I thought at last I’m above the water from now on in—but things don’t work that easily I guess.’101 But in 1951, Pollock produced a remarkable and haunting new body of work. In the black paintings, Pollock plunged into figuration, creating enormous, sensual, liquid, monochromatic forms that surge and whirl across the canvas. Pollock had the courage to question the achievements of the poured paintings, and abstraction, and make a fresh and provocative statement. It is drawing writ large. As Pollock noted, ‘some of my early images are coming thru’.102 Metamorphosising creatures, reminiscent of The She-Wolf (1943, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Male and Female, plus the tumbling shapes of Birth, re-emerge as if they’d swum up from the depths of his unconscious. Pollock has peeled back the colourful, painterly armature, the delicate shimmering web, to reveal his art’s bare, chthonic bones.
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Echo: Number 25 (1951, Museum of Modern Art, New York) is a savage, corporeal nightmare where ears and eyes, teeth and fingers, totems and arrows, curves and verticals, clash and pursue each other. Echo images desire, it pictures longing—rapacious, abject, elusive and infinite. If the return to his previous visual vocabulary signals Pollock’s attempt to deal with ancient angst to do with loss and possession, the black paintings provide no solace, no exorcism, only the brutal truth: his illness was as cruel and as entrenched as ever. Springs was no longer a protected intimacy and he was not ‘above the water’ but in its depths. Pollock’s victory resides in his fierce honesty, his willingness to confront his fears, and produce assured and vivid art. Echo is a defiant cry that painting can be used as a weapon against chaos. When Pollock showed the black paintings at Betty Parsons in November 1951, his audience was surprised and discomfited. Pollock had challenged them with the drip paintings, and now he’d changed tack. Why didn’t he use colour? Why had he returned to figuration? Was it a failure of nerve? Krasner recalled, ‘At the opening of the black-and-white show one of the New York dealers, supposedly in the know, told him, “Good show, Jackson, but could you do it in colour?” . . . The arrogance, the blindness was killing.’103 In 1952, Pollock turned forty, and Greenberg christened him ‘the best painter of a whole generation’.104 But Greenberg had abandoned Pollock when he returned to figuration and had a new artist to promote, Clyfford Still. Pollock was losing agility and strength. Heavy drinking had made him bloated and ponderous, and it was difficult for him to summon the same dexterity that had produced the drip paintings. Pollock had bought a second-hand Oldsmobile, giving him the incentive to drive—usually to bars—rather than take
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meditative walks. Drinking was eroding Pollock’s connection with nature, his wellbeing and his work. Pollock knew that, of course. No one was more keenly self-critical than he. In Manhattan, he was seeing a homeopath, Dr Elizabeth Hubbard, as well as a new psychotherapist. The Deep (1953, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) is one of Pollock’s last major paintings. The others are Portrait and a Dream (1953, Dallas Museum of Art) and Blue Poles (1953, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra). Blue Poles tells the story of the end of the drip painting cycle just as Portrait and a Dream closes the calligraphic and figural intensity of the black paintings. The Deep essays a new formal elegance, fresh explorations in pictorial space, a deliciously subtle palette combined with resonant, allusive, nature-based symbolism. The Deep tells a frightening and beautiful tale, a myth of self-exploration. In 1950, Pollock’s story, ‘The Fire Boy’, based on the Navajo creation myth, was adapted as a play by Tibor de Nagy. A visitor to Springs that summer, de Nagy was a Hungarian émigré who’d started a marionette theatre with art collector John Bernard Myers. The Pollocks were charmed by de Nagy and arranged for a performance of his troupe at a church in Bridgehampton. De Nagy recalled that Pollock ‘loved to tell this story about a little boy who wanted to be initiated into a famous clan but he had to do three heroic things before he could become famous’.105 In the myth, Changing Woman, the earth goddess and mother of the Navajo gives birth to twins known as Fire Boy (or Monster Slayer) and Water Boy (Born for the Water). (In some versions of the myth—including one told by Pollock—Born for the Water is absent.)
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Fire Boy was fathered by the sun, while Water Boy was conceived when Changing Woman stood beneath a waterfall. Changing Woman sends the boys on a journey to discover the identity of their Father Sun and to learn skills to protect their people. Monster Slayer is the fierce warrior while Born for the Water is more of an assistant. After many trials and tests, the boys arrive at their father’s home. At first, Father Sun refuses to accept they are his children. He tries to murder them, then he tempts them with gifts, but the boys are canny, and survive. Impressed, Father Sun recognises them as his children and rewards them with magical weapons that enable them to destroy the monsters that are threatening their people. On the twins’ return, they assume the protection, welfare and instruction of their tribe, and hózhó is restored. Pollock had read Joseph Campbell’s influential book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Like his mentor Jung, Campbell synthesised the myths of many cultures to distil an essential, illuminating message about the task of individuation, ‘the hero journey’. Campbell writes, ‘A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory won; the hero comes back from this mysterious realm with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.’106 In The Deep, a fissure opens on the white, lusciously painted surface, like a treacherous chasm on snow-covered ground, a threat to the unwary. Pollock gazes into the abyss, into the darkness of depression and oblivion, and finds it both alluring and terrifying. Nietzsche wrote ‘when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you’.107 Pollock observes the Dark Mother. Freud wrote that at the end of a man’s life, ‘Mother Earth . . . the silent Goddess of Death will take him into her arms’.108 But Pollock’s chasm is
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sexually charged, vagina-like, ‘the womb of the tomb’.109 Feminine energy, coupled with male, had provided a balancing, galvanising force in Pollock’s work for over a decade. Yet facing The Deep, the artist seems immobilised, passive, captivated by its glamour. Despite Pollock’s achievements, the great paintings, the accolades and notoriety, it seems what lies beneath is despair. Monster Slayer wins a decisive victory and returns, covered with glory, from the dangerous realm. In Pollock’s version of the myth, Fire Boy, after enduring various trials, is initiated into ‘a famous clan’—that is, he gains respect, admiration and maturity, and enters an elite company of heroes. But what if that isn’t possible? What if some heroes fail? What if nature and myth cannot transfigure disaster and sadness into art and beauty? What is more powerful, life or death? What if there is no magic? In August 1956, Pollock died in a car accident on Fireplace Road. He was drunk. Krasner was in Europe. Demoralised by Pollock’s return to drinking, his inability to paint and the arguments that erupted between them, Krasner had decided to leave him. Pollock had started an affair. In the car with him was Ruth Kligman, his young lover, as well as Edith Metzger, her friend. Metzger was killed, while Kligman survived. The answer to Pollock’s questions, posed by The Deep, resides in his studio at Springs. After Pollock’s death, Lee Krasner used the studio as her own. In 1987–88, when the studio was restored as part of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, the fibreboard flooring that Pollock had installed in 1953 was removed. What lay beneath, intact, were the thick skeins of paint, the tangled tracery, the kaleidoscope of colour, the opulent palette made by Pollock’s brushstrokes as they danced off the edge of the canvas. The visitor
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takes off her shoes and puts on the slippers provided, so as not to damage the floor’s fragile surface. She climbs the steps and crosses the studio to stand where Pollock did, stands on another kind of masterpiece. Suddenly, she feels energy rushing up from the floor, from the web of painted lines, so fast and intense it seems she is lifted off the ground. Floating. Exhilarated. Astonished. A moment of transcendence, courtesy of Jackson Pollock. She hears from other visitors to the studio it is a common experience. Perhaps magic triumphs, after all.
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g Virginia and Vanessa Stephen playing cricket c. 1892 The Monk’s House Photograph Albums of Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf, Gift of Frederick R. Koch. © Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.
g 5
Sh a r i ng a Room of On e ’ s Ow n Vi rg i n ia Wool f a nd Va ne s s a B el l i n Su s s e x I want . . . to breathe in more light & air; to see more grey hollows & gold cornfields & the first ploughed land shining white, with the gulls flickering. No: I don’t want anyone to come here & interrupt. I am immensely busy. Virginia Woolf, 5 September 19261
This is much the nicest place in England, there is no doubt. Vanessa Bell to Duncan Grant, 3 August 19212
In 1910, after Virginia Stephen suffered a nervous breakdown, her doctors suggested she find a weekender in the countryside near London. That Christmas, she explored Sussex while staying with her brother Adrian in the market town of Lewes. ‘This country is so amazingly beautiful that I frequently have to stop and say “Good God!”,’ she told Vanessa; ‘. . . promise me to come here, the Sunday after you get back, and to say whether anything in Europe
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beats it’. It seemed ‘another side of life’ was revealed, making life in London seem as narrow as ‘a strip of pavement’. Virginia read and wrote ‘furiously’, making her head feel like ‘a gently bubbling kettle—an ideal state’.3 The following year, immersed in writing her first novel, The Voyage Out, Virginia invited Leonard Woolf to visit her. She’d rented a cottage in the village of Firle. Though she warned Leonard that it was ‘a hideous suburban villa—I have to prepare people for the shock’,4 the house unified longings and memories. She named it Little Talland House, after the family holiday home near St Ives in Cornwall, where the Stephens clan spent their summers from 1882, the year Virginia was born, to 1894. Hermione Lee comments that Talland House became in Virginia’s imagination ‘more than just a large square building near the sea in Cornwall. It is where she sites, for the whole of her life, her idea of happiness . . . Happiness is always measured for her against the memory of being a child in that house.’5 Freud remarked, ‘the dwellinghouse [is] a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease’.6 In ‘A Sketch of the Past’, written at Vanessa’s request, Virginia tells ‘the most important memory of all my memories’. If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake in bed in the nursery in St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the
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wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.7
Water, air, light and space were St Ives’ gifts, celebrated by Virginia in To the Lighthouse. Virginia idealised St Ives, believing ‘nothing that we had as children was quite so important to us, as our summer in Cornwall’. She recalled the change from London as ‘a great change’, from darkness to light, enclosure to space, limitation to freedom. St Ives was so ‘highly sensual’ that writing the essay over forty years later still made Virginia feel ‘warm; as if everything were ripe; humming; sunny’.8 Why choose Sussex? Why not return to Cornwall? Like Freud’s Eden, the forest near Freiberg, St Ives was associated with loss and, in Virginia’s case, with mourning. In 1895, Julia Stephen, Virginia’s mother, died. ‘She was central,’ recalled Virginia. ‘Talland House was full of her.’9 Leslie, her father, declared he never wanted to see the place again. The perfect summers were followed by years of sadness, where Vanessa and Virginia, and their brothers Thoby and Adrian, were immured in their gloomy London home with their inconsolable father. Virginia was thirteen and her grief triggered the first in a lifelong series of breakdowns. The house of childhood happiness was associated with an absent, beloved, maternal presence. Ten years after Leslie had died, the siblings revisited St Ives. They stood outside Talland House in the evening. ‘The lights were not our lights; the voices were the voices of strangers. We hung there like ghosts in the shade of the hedge, & at the sounds of footsteps we turned away.’10 It seemed the radiant past could not be regained, the gate to the magical realm was shut.
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There was another, more practical reason for not returning to Cornwall: it was an all-day journey, from one side of England to another, so ‘Our country was canalised into two or two months and a half’.11 The journey from London to Sussex, even in 1910, was not arduous and Firle was easily reached by train and carriage. Virginia had no intention of repeating the loss of St Ives; her new Arcady was selected precisely because it was attainable and could play its designated role in her life: proximate, constant and nourishing. For Virginia, there was much to rebuild, make whole and re-enter—a site Gaston Bachelard evocatively describes as a ‘protected intimacy’, a dwelling-place that co-penetrates with and retains the treasures of former days.12 For Virginia, life was material—it was a bowl, a receptacle, a very female image and a maternal one, of holding and supporting life. The bowl could be filled, presumably without ever overflowing, a shining space both finite and infinite. One of the most significant aspects of Virginia’s re-creation of her ‘protected intimacy’ was choice—the choice that had been snatched away in childhood when she was not free to return to Cornwall, when she was denied the agency to take control of her own space, one that coexisted with nature. It mirrors Georgia O’Keeffe’s pilgrimage to New Mexico, Hemingway’s and Pollock’s decisions to live beyond the metropolis at Key West and Springs, and Picasso’s return to the sea on the Côte d’Azur. What unites them is the freedom to choose the natural environment in which they would live for the rest of their lives, and all journeyed to find it. Leonard Woolf, who was on leave from the civil service in Ceylon, was smitten with Virginia. Out strolling that weekend in 1911, Leonard and Virginia came upon Asheham, a pretty, wellproportioned Regency house nestled in a hollow in the Downs.
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Virginia’s response was wholehearted and immediate: she contacted Vanessa, and the following month the sisters took out a five-year lease. It is prescient that Virginia and Leonard, halfway to falling in love, had found, in a landscape both enjoyed, the house that would welcome them as a married couple one year later. Leonard recalled that Asheham was ‘a lovely house and the rooms within it were lovely . . . Its front was flat, plain, serene, yellow washed, with large french windows opening onto a small terrace.’ Facing west across the green fields of the Ouse valley, the house had ‘a strong character, [a] personality of its own—romantic, gentle, melancholy, lovely.’13 To Leonard, Virginia embodied the landscape. When he thought of her, he thought of ‘hills, standing very clear but distant against a clear blue sky’. The sun is within her, ‘in her hair, in the red and gold of her skin, in the bow of her lips and in the glow of her mind’. And it is most present in her voice, ‘which seems to bring things from the centre of rocks, deep streams that have lain long in primordial places within the earth’. Leonard also wrote poems about Virginia ‘as a clean, ethereal creature, a spirit at one with the wind and the wide sky over the Downs’.14 It was a fitting tribute. Virginia was exhilarated by the clear, abstract forms of the Downs’ landscape, with its soft, curving rises, its hollows and folds, its vast skies, rolling mists and vistas that revealed the sea. ‘How I adore the emptiness, bareness, air & colour of this!’ She felt ‘extremely happy walking on the downs . . . I like to have space to spread my mind out in.’ It quickened her visual sense. She noted how ‘in the evening, or on colourless days, the proportions of the landscape change suddenly’. It meant ‘detail was smoothed out’ creating ‘an extremely beautiful effect’. She
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observed watery blue sunsets and clouds ‘showing gold over the downs’ or ‘white in a leaden sky’ with flowing hair like ‘the very fine hair of an old man’.15 Virginia’s enthusiasm for the area drew her friends there, making it the Bloomsbury country residence. As Jane Dunn notes, ‘Virginia was an inspired house-hunter and Vanessa the inspired home-creator.’16 Sussex was the sisters’ shared environ, influencing the rhythm, shape and content of their work, and their close and often troubled intimacy; the homes they designed were as important as the landscape that surrounded them. Traditionally a woman’s realm, the interior was reconfigured by the sisters, as modernists and feminists. They charged it with imagination and desire, transforming it into a place of radical experimentation and illumination. Aligning the domestic (what was private, ordinary, repetitive and shared) with modernism (what was formal, considered, fractured and bold) was the sisters’ ambitious project. Vanessa and Virginia’s need for one another was profound. Though enmeshed with their Bloomsbury friends, both were ‘surprisingly isolated from other modernist women writers and painters, particularly those who experimented with lifestyle’.17 Their seclusion in Sussex, particularly during the First and Second world wars, intensified their dependence on one another and their environment. It meant Asheham was a shared house from the first, with Vanessa involved in the practical duties of helping Leonard lay the carpets. In August 1912, Leonard and Virginia spent their wedding night there. Though Vanessa quickly stamped her taste on it, Virginia and Leonard liked to think of Asheham as theirs. The sisters found it hard to establish boundaries. Their emotional economy was based on the priorities of childhood, the expectation
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that each would be available to the other as closely and completely as when they were girls. Marriage provided uncomfortable shifts where each struggled to recognise her sister as an autonomous sexual being, a woman in love and in a union with a man. After Vanessa married Clive Bell in 1907, Virginia flirted so outrageously with her brother-in-law—behaviour which Clive foolishly encouraged— that Vanessa was wounded and the marriage undermined. After Virginia married Leonard, Vanessa, who was strongly in favour of the match, found it ‘bewildering and upsetting’ to think of Virginia as part of a couple. ‘I shan’t see more than I can help of them,’ Vanessa declared, ‘as after all they don’t want me now.’18 During the Woolfs’ honeymoon in Italy, Vanessa told Virginia that she was ‘very busy inside the house’. She had bought reddishorange curtain material, bordered with mauve, for the sitting room—the same colours she’d used to decorate Virginia’s cottage at Firle. ‘We have been putting up violet-orange curtains as fast as we could,’ she told Clive Bell. ‘They are rather sketchy in consequence but full of emotion.’19 Though Vanessa longed to get on with her painting, between making curtains, having meals with the children and writing letters, there was little time. She employed a gardener (with whom she was none too pleased) and had flowerbeds dug, so that even during the cold months the little walled garden bloomed with crocuses, daffodils, tulips, violets and snowdrops. Everyone pitched in, including the artist and critic Roger Fry, who cut down a holly bush and a fir tree to improve the view. Vanessa’s skill at creating a relaxed yet stimulating environment meant there was a steady procession of guests. Roger Fry wrote, ‘I imagine all your gestures and how you’ll be saying things and how all around you people will dare to be themselves and talk of
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anything and everything and no idea of shame or fear will come to them because you’re there and they know you’ll understand.’20 As Christopher Reed points out, Vanessa was creating a ‘Post Impressionist domestic environment’ at Asheham, using the new aesthetics to define a new kind of home life.21 Her innovative use of colour was inspired by Roger Fry’s 1910 landmark exhibition ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ at London’s Grafton Galleries. Virginia observed in her biography of Fry that it was difficult to recall ‘what violent emotions those pictures excited’.22 Fry had selected works by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso, and coined the term Post-Impressionist to define them. The public was shocked by the new art’s radically simplified forms and vivid colours. Personality, landscape and perspective were subjected to a schematised design, a vibrant unity. For Vanessa, the effect was liberating. Fry, at the centre of the furore, was hailed as the leader of the modern movement in England. Art and erotics mingled as Vanessa and Fry began an affair. She told him it was ‘one of the most exciting times of my life, for apart from the new excitement about painting, finding for the first time someone whose opinion one cared for, who sympathised with and encouraged one, you know I really was in love with you’.23 Cezanne and Matisse, brilliant exponents of structure and colour, were especially important for Vanessa. In paintings done at Asheham, she explored a new language of form, producing landscapes as well as studies of the house and its visitors. Her own appearance changed while in the country, too, as she abandoned her sedate London attire for loose skirts and colourful headscarves. Asheham House (1912, private collection) is seen from a distance, the green Downs and tall trees surrounding the little fairytale
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building like an embrace. Vanessa uses paint lightly but the stippled Impressionist brushstrokes are generous and confident. In Landscape with Haystack, Asheham (1912, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts), she tackles one of Monet’s favourite subjects and modernism’s important motifs. Under a grey sky, the big, blocky shape of the haystack has more weight and density than the house, an effect gained not only by placing it in the foreground but by outlining it in black, a decorative device she learned from Gauguin. Vanessa’s portraits often eschew personality, making her sitters seem enigmatic and remote. Virginia Woolf (c. 1911–12, National Portrait Gallery, London), probably painted at Asheham, is her most rigorously formal and exuberantly coloured work from that time. Though she was unafraid to use bright colours when decorating the house, her canvases are subdued in hue. Virginia is enfolded by the orange armchair as the house is enfolded by the Downs in Asheham House. Preoccupied with her needlework, Virginia’s head is lowered. Sewing was the craft of her depression, as her doctors advised her to take up soothing, undemanding occupations. Vanessa emphasises her sister’s remove by abstracting her features. It was a precept of modernism, honoured by Vanessa, that formal pictorial qualities dominate and elements such as subject and character are extraneous and irrelevant. Despite Vanessa’s aim to expunge personal references, it is tempting to observe how the armchair envelops her sister in a protective caress. During that period, shortly after Virginia married and finished her first novel, The Voyage Out, her hold on sanity was fragile. In Virginia’s second novel, Night and Day, dedicated to Vanessa, she based the protagonist, the aloof, inscrutable Katharine Hilbery,
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on her sister. ‘Decision and composure stamped her, a combination of qualities that produced a very marked character.’ Tall and beautiful, Katharine has a ‘spirit given to contemplation and selfcontrol’. She is maternal, organised and ironic, with a capacity for impressive silences and the ‘tolerant but anxious good humour which is the special attribute of elder sisters in large families’.24 In her portrait of Katharine, Virginia tries to understand her sister: her powers of restraint, her sense of repose. While Virginia, questioning and needy, seeks to excavate Vanessa’s character with a multitude of detail, Vanessa, in Virginia Woolf, abstracts Virginia’s features, undermining portraiture as a method of disclosure and suggesting that the identity, even of those we love best, is elusive and mysterious. Vanessa attracted men who believed in her talents. Clive Bell was drawn into the modernist endeavour as a critic, while Fry was modernism’s most fervent champion in England. Both were ebullient and articulate, almost overwhelmingly so, though Fry was the stronger character. Driven and visionary, Fry was an artist and designer as well as a critic while Bell, a bon vivant, followed the lead of his friends. Vanessa admired both men’s social and intellectual skills. Her own education had been patchy and, despite her literary circle, she was not a great reader. Vanessa’s lifelong partnership with Duncan Grant defies definition. Darkly handsome, amusing and self-contained, Grant preferred men. He lived with Adrian, the younger brother of Vanessa and Virginia, though the affair ended with Adrian’s marriage. Other members of the Bloomsbury circle enchanted by Duncan included John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. As his daughter Angelica recalled, ‘on the surface he seemed singularly
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candid and uncomplicated, with an unselfconscious charm that had an almost hypnotic effect on those who knew him’.25 Eventually, Vanessa chose Grant—the intuitive artist with his childlike sense of humour, his spontaneity and unpredictability—over Bell and Fry, despite the cost to herself. Travelling through Italy with the men in her life, Vanessa wrote to Virginia: Roger is up with the lark, does many sketches, sees all the sights, and he and Clive are indefatigable in their attributions and historical discoveries. I can’t say I listen to much, and after Padua I struck at sightseeing and now refuse to see more than one thing a day. I find that Duncan sympathises with me and if he and I had the conduct of the party in our hands we should settle somewhere for a month and spend most of our time loafing.26
Vanessa admired Duncan’s paintings—she loathed Roger’s—and bought The Lemon Gatherers (1910, Tate Britain, London), an early work that earned him plaudits. When Fry praised Duncan for his ‘genius’, Vanessa agreed, saying it was ‘an extraordinary delight’ to be with someone ‘so alive and creative’.27 Perhaps it made up for the jealousy and humilation. That first summer at Asheham, Vanessa was falling in love with Duncan, much to Fry’s despair. Duncan came for the weekend but stayed for a fortnight, painting side by side with Vanessa. It was an arrangement that suited Vanessa, who was self-deprecating about her own work. She firmly believed that Duncan’s talent was superior to hers and that his inspiration, company and criticism
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were essential to her artistic growth. In The Studio: Duncan Grant and Henri Doucet at Asheham (1912, private collection), the three artists seem to be painting one another: Doucet, a visiting French painter, looks directly at Vanessa, while Duncan is absorbed by his work. Painting Duncan, Vanessa portrays a source of her creativity. She depicts him sitting forward in the armchair, alert and engaged. Doucet is a mere shadow at the side, allowing Duncan to take centre stage, the light catching his face and hand, making him the point of radiance amid the room’s sombre tones. A photograph of Vanessa and Duncan taken at Asheham in 1912 gives a glimpse of their relationship. On the terrace outside the house, Vanessa arranges a vase of flowers. Perhaps she is setting up a still life for her and Duncan to paint. The vase provides a link between Vanessa’s solid, beautiful, maternal form and Duncan, who appears a slighter, less substantial figure. Smiling, Vanessa holds the vase with a firm grip while Duncan hovers, sharing in the moment, but at an angle that makes his presence both oblique and restive. The happy summers at Asheham were shortlived. Traumatic events, coinciding with the First World War, engulfed the sisters, leading Leonard to describe those years as ‘the most horrible period’ of his life.28 With the outbreak of the war, Duncan was in a quandary. Like most members of the Bloomsbury group, he was opposed to the war. Maynard Keynes, who continued to work for the Treasury during the war years, was a notable exception. Conscientous objectors were legally bound to find work of national importance that would exempt them from military service. There was a further complication because Duncan had fallen in love with David ‘Bunny’ Garnett,
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a budding writer several years his junior. To avoid conscription, the two men rented a remote farm near Wissett, in Suffolk, and worked the land. Vanessa followed them there. But the terms of their exemption as conscientous objectors meant they had to be employed as farmhands—at Wissett, they were self-employed—so the hunt was on to find another place where the men could find jobs and where Vanessa, with her two sons in tow, could provide a home for all of them. But in those belligerently patriotic times, conscientous objectors were regarded as pariahs, and most were reluctant to employ them. Virginia and Leonard kept a lookout and, in May 1916, Leonard discovered Charleston. Virginia told her sister it was ‘a most delightful house . . . It has a charming garden, with a pond, and fruit trees and vegetables, all now rather run wild, but you could make it lovely. The house is very nice with large rooms, and one room with big windows fit for a studio.’ It was four miles from Asheham, so ‘you wouldn’t be badgered by us’.29 Virginia was desperate to have her sister nearby. After a collapse in July 1913, she spent two weeks in a nursing home. On her return to London, her condition further deteriorated and, in September, she attempted suicide by taking an overdose of Veronal. At year’s end, Virginia took up residence in Asheham. She rarely went to London after this, so Asheham became the house of her madness. She spent 1914 recuperating, but early in 1915 she had another breakdown. The Voyage Out was published in March, while Virginia was in a nursing home, and it was not until the end of the year that she recovered. One of her few activities, aside from writing notes to friends, was taking short walks on the Downs. ‘It is so lovely that one walk gives me something to see for hours.’30
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The same month that Leonard found Charleston, he was exempted from military service—he suffered from trembling hands as well as malaria. Virginia’s doctors also believed that without him she would have another breakdown. Virginia needed her sister, too. ‘I hope you wont [sic] settle at Wissett,’ Virginia wrote to her. ‘I miss your company very sadly.’ A visit to Vanessa’s ménage in Suffolk had inspired Night and Day. ‘I am very much interested in your life, which I think of writing another novel about. Its fatal staying with you—you start so many new ideas.’31 It took Vanessa until October—including two visits to inspect Charleston and to arrange employment for Duncan and Bunny—to settle there. If Wissett was remote, so is Charleston. Even today, it is a solitary place with no other habitation nearby, while the harsh winters on the Downs mean Charleston is only open to the public from April to November. It remains, as it was then, a working farm. The move was quite an operation. As Garnett recalled, ‘Charleston had to be made habitable; the children, servants and ducks had to be moved from Wissett, to say nothing of the easels, scores of canvases, boxes of paints, packing cases of books and a sack of globe artichoke suckers.’32 Conditions were primitive. The sisters’ country abodes ‘would be condemned in Britain nowadays as unfit for human habitation’, observes Victoria Glendinning.33 The water supply consisted of one cold water tap in the kitchen that often froze during the first brutal winter. There was no electricity, telephone or central heating. A shortage of furniture meant Duncan and Bunny had to sleep on the floor. The two men worked long hours and were exhausted from their labours and from the restricted wartime diet. When the bedrooms were allocated, Bunny and Duncan slept
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together, with Vanessa in a room of her own. But Vanessa put a gloss on the hardships, telling Roger Fry that Charleston was ‘absolutely perfect’, and encouraging him to visit.34 Slowly the house assumed its individual character as ‘one after another the rooms were decorated and altered almost out of recognition’.35 A few years later, returning to Charleston after a break, Vanessa wrote to Duncan that she was astonished ‘to find how much energy we spent on this place, how many tables and chairs and doors we painted and how many colour schemes we invented. Considering what a struggle it was to exist here at all, I can’t think how we had so much surplus energy.’36 Vanessa and Duncan’s nestbuilding—decorating the house like a ‘normal’ married couple—can be read as a metaphor for sexual energy, repressed (in Vanessa’s case) and displaced (in Duncan’s). To dissipate it, they engaged in pleasurable, engrossing, cooperative work. The house and the things in it stand for their ideal relationship; these could be fully shared as they did not share, or shared only rarely, one another’s bed, one another’s embrace. Virginia was equally astonished—not only at the activity evident at Charleston, but at Vanessa herself. ‘Nessa seems to have slipped civilization off her back,’ Virginia observed, ‘and splashes about entirely nude, without shame, and enormous spirit.’ She presided ‘over the most astonishing ménage; Belgian hares, governesses, children, gardeners, hens, ducks, and painting all the time, till every inch of the house is a different colour’. It is not difficult to detect the note of envy in Virginia’s voice. Even while she was encouraging Vanessa to lease Charleston, she felt anxious and competitive. ‘I see you’re going to say that Charleston is better than Asheham—It cuts me to the heart.’37
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Part of Virginia’s jealousy had to do with Vanessa’s pregnancy; Angelica was born on Christmas Day, 1918. At no time, it seems, did Virginia reflect on Vanessa’s bizarre situation: she was pregnant to a man who was in love with another man. As Duncan frankly stated, ‘I suppose the only thing lacking in my feelings to [Vanessa] is passion.’38 Was Virginia’s attitude due to her own unusual marriage? Though she and Leonard were devoted to one other, her distaste for sex meant theirs was a celibate union. The sisters slept alone. If Vanessa wanted to keep Duncan at her side, it meant keeping Bunny there, too, leading to inevitable tensions. Not long before she got pregnant, she told Maynard Keynes, ‘There have been such storms . . . I don’t think one can go on indefinitely with such constant recurring crises . . . Bunny is too dependent on [Duncan] to give him up whatever he does . . . I believe Bunny and I suffer more than he does, on the whole!’39 One reason for the storms was that Bunny continued to have affairs with women. Duncan’s Interior (1918, Ulster Museum, Belfast) presents Charleston at its most harmonious: Vanessa paints in one corner of the dining room while Bunny writes at the table.40 Though the room looks snug, with a winged armchair near the fireplace and patterned curtains and carpet, the overall effect is sombre, with brown the predominant tone. It is not a scene of bohemian revelry but of lives conducted earnestly in straitened circumstances. In 1918, the dining room was also the living room as well as a schoolroom. Quentin Bell remembered being tutored there, first by Vanessa, then by the governesses she employed. He also recalled, in March 1918, the sound of distant gunfire from across the English Channel; the German offensive on the Western Front was so deafening that it made the windows rattle in their frames.41 Virginia, too, heard
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the guns. ‘All walks on the Downs this summer are accompanied by this sinister sound . . . which is sometimes as faint as the ghost of an echo, and sometimes rises almost from the next fold of grey land.’42 Duncan painted his two lovers at their desired vocations. The other work—the backbreaking farm labour he shared with Bunny, and Vanessa’s efforts to deal with two active boys (in 1918, Julian was ten years old and Quentin eight) as well as organising domestic routines with the servants and maintaining the garden and grounds—is excluded. In Duncan’s ideal realm, there is order and calm, the opportunity to make art in an environment designed for that purpose. Perhaps such moments, where the three worked productively and peacefully together, kept the ménage à trois intact. As in the photograph taken at Asheham, Vanessa is the solid and commanding figure. She occupies more space in the painting and is more thoroughly anchored in the composition. Bunny is placed at the edge, the position he finally occupied in the relationship as Vanessa made the greater claim on Duncan’s affections. Did Duncan feel trapped? Interior’s low ceiling creates a claustrophobic, tunnel-like space and the view through the open window on the far wall is blocked by another wall, offering only a sliver of blue sky. There is no escape as the gaze is led inexorably back within. Upstairs, Duncan and Vanessa decorated each other’s bedrooms. To Vanessa’s bedhead Duncan attached a roughly painted wooden mask, inspired by Picasso’s interest in tribal art, depicting Morpheus, the god of sleep and prophetic dreams. On the back of the bedhead, he painted her initials. Vanessa’s plans for Duncan’s room were precise and elegant. On the doors, she painted vases of flowers and marbled circles, telling Roger Fry in her usual self-deprecating
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manner, ‘I’m not doing anything startling.’43 In her arrangement of circles and flowers, Vanessa placed two contesting forms of modernism—abstraction and figuration—next to one another. It is telling that the flowers sit atop the circles: Vanessa, after exploring abstraction during the war years, reverted to figuration. She also decorated the room’s mantle and hearth, and a wardrobe, with circles painted in warm shades of orange and yellow. There is probably no more fecund and feminine symbol than the circle: it implies infinity, completion, continuity, unity, mobility, the earth itself. The circle as a ring symbolises marriage, the eternal binding to another. In terms of body imagery, it represents the breast; in cosmic imagery it is the full moon, the symbol of the triple goddess, maiden, mother and crone, as well as the sun, source of light, life and energy. For Virginia, life is ‘a bowl that one fills and fills and fills’, a circular receptacle open and waiting, while Vanessa’s circle, though dynamic, is closed—a metaphor for the way the sisters organised their worlds. Interestingly, at the climax of Night and Day, when Katharine finally recognises that Ralph Denham loves her and wants to marry her, Virginia has Katharine reflect: ‘it seemed to her that the immense riddle was answered; the problem had been solved; she held in her hands for one brief moment the globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round, whole, and entire from the confusion of chaos’.44 Illumination is tangible, precious and powerful: it is the circle and Virginia gives it to Katharine/Vanessa to hold. Richard Shone remarks that Vanessa would ‘go to great lengths in establishing a familiar and protected territory around her, staking out the ground with determination’.45 Vanessa’s element was, in every respect, earth—what was fertile, strong, calm, solid,
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still, rich, deep, maternal and nourishing. No wonder the circle was her personal symbol, one that she often used in decorations at Charleston. Unconsciously, she festooned it like a magical charm around the bedroom of her beloved, the place where she longed to be and was only occasionally welcome. When Bunny was away, Duncan sometimes slept with Vanessa, noting, ‘I copulated on Saturday with her with great satisfaction to myself physically. It is a convenient way the females have of letting off one’s spunk—and comfortable. Also the pleasure it gives is reassuring.’46 When the war ended, Garnett left Charleston for good, though he remained friendly with Duncan. Vanessa and Duncan, no longer tied to Charleston, took rooms in London and holidayed in France, though they regularly returned to Charleston. Despite the apparent stability, Vanessa could never be sure of Duncan, who continued to pursue his amours, and she agonised that he might leave her. As she bleakly told Virginia, ‘After all there is nothing binding in our relationship. It is quite different from yours.’47 Yet the creative partnership between Vanessa and Duncan functioned seamlessly. Was that the reason Virginia refused to see the relationship’s failings? Painters, she announced to Roger Fry, exhale ‘calm and well being . . . Certainly this is true of Bell and Grant: I never saw two people humming with heat and happiness like sunflowers on a hot day more than those two.’48 Charleston’s decorations, even today, look modern. The predominance of pastel tones—pink, blue, cream and yellow—and the recurring motifs of flowers, circles and delicate patterns, together with the casual bravura of Duncan and Vanessa’s brushstrokes create a fresh, lively and decidedly feminine atmosphere. It is as if summer always inhabits the rooms—a mood Vanessa perhaps culled
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from her memories of Talland House. Duncan’s homosexuality, his ‘femininity’, governs his response to modernism, one that he shared with Vanessa. Their modernist aesthetic was not stark, cool or minimalist, certainly not when decorating their home. Welcoming and highly individual, a flowing effect of colour and pattern is presented that is never busy or crowded but clearly advertises their elective affinities in a visual scheme both joyful and celebratory. Home, their home, was a place to be happy. Charleston is a chefd’oeuvre signed jointly by Duncan and Vanessa. Charleston’s decorations were part of a larger project. Bell and Grant were co-directors of the Omega Workshops. Roger Fry’s brainchild, founded in 1913, was a design centre whose ambitious charter was to revolutionise English design along the lines of PostImpressionism. Fry also hoped the workshops would support a struggling younger generation of artists. Planning Omega, Vanessa told Fry, ‘I do think we shall have to be careful, especially in England where it seems one can never get away from all this fatal prettiness. Can’t we paint stuff etc., which won’t be gay and pretty?’49 Vanessa, Duncan and Fry created fabrics, wallpapers, rugs, carpets, pottery and furniture that were dynamic in design and provocative in colour. Unfortunately, sales were not brisk and, by 1917, Vanessa suggested that the workshops should be closed down. While Vanessa was busy with Omega and Charleston, Virginia was distressed to discover she would lose Asheham: the owner wanted the use of the house. To commemorate Asheham, Virginia wrote ‘The Haunted House’, a short story in which two ghosts, a husband and wife who were apart at the time of their deaths, are reunited. Asheham was supposed to be haunted and Virginia knew local legends about
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‘ghostly riders and unhappy ladies forever seeking their lost treasure’. A romantic and tender recreation of place, it is less a conventional tale than a series of exquisite images that coalesce as the narrator awakes, both literally and metaphorically, to the house’s secret, its ‘buried treasure’.50 The window panes ‘reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass’ and the only noise is ‘the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of [the] threshing machine sounding from the farm’.51 The ghostly couple recall their happiness. ‘“Here we slept”, she says. And he adds, “Kisses without number”.’ The couple gaze affectionately at those now living in the house, presumably Leonard and Virginia. ‘Look . . . Sound asleep. Love upon their lips.’ The house itself is alive. ‘“Safe! safe! safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly.’ Love is the house’s ‘buried treasure’—‘the light in the heart’.52 The house celebrates the durability of marriage, the ghost couple’s, as well as that of Leonard and Virginia, and its function is to protect that love. ‘The Haunted House’ is an ode to the place where Virginia began her married life, where she worked on her early novels and where she endured dangerous transitions between madness and sanity. Asheham was her safe place. In July 1919, Virginia and Leonard bought Monk’s House in the village of Rodmell, not far from Charleston. Virginia was thrilled. ‘This will be our address for ever and ever.’53 She was right: Monk’s House was home for the rest of their lives. It is ‘an unpretending house, long & low’. Despite its privations—there was no electricity or mains water and the earth closet was outside—Virginia yielded to a ‘profound pleasure at the size & shape & fertility & wildness of the garden’ with its ‘infinity of fruitbearing trees’. It also had well-kept rows of peas, artichokes and potatoes, and raspberry
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bushes with ‘pale little pyramids of fruit’. Virginia knew Leonard would become ‘a fanatical lover of that garden’.54 According to local legend, the eight-room weatherboard, brick and flint house had been a fifteenth-century priory, hence its name, but Leonard discovered it was actually built in 1707.55 As Hermione Lee observes, ‘Monk’s House is haunted by Virginia Woolf’s writing. Because she turned it so vividly and lovingly into words, her readers have the illusion they can cross the broken bridge into the past.’56 Perhaps they can. Monk’s House is not only charmingly atmospheric but seems to radiate happiness. Genius loci? Given that it was the site of despair, madness and suicide, it comes as a surprise, and a salutary one, to register the house’s immediate and enveloping impression of good cheer. Monk’s House carries the impression, pervasive and joyful, of a union of true minds, of a lovingly protective attachment. The ‘light in the heart’ burns bright. Now owned by the National Trust and open to the public, Monk’s House is at the end of the village next to the twelfthcentury St Peter’s Church and its graveyard. Virginia had no qualms about living in a village, telling a friend, ‘It seems to me that all the virtues and all the humanities can only flourish in a country village. Don’t you think human beings improve very much spaced out with fields between them? And then nature—no, I shall never say how much I adore and respect nature.’57 At that time no one in Rodmell had a car and the only means of transport into Lewes were ‘legs, or bicycle, or pony and trap’.58 Virginia decorated the house à la Charleston, arranging dark blue Omega plates on a green dresser and hanging paintings by Vanessa and Duncan on the walls. Many of the carpets, screens, armchairs and cushions were designed at Charleston. In styling
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Monk’s House, Virginia followed her sister’s lead, though perhaps a little unwillingly. ‘[W]ho am I to talk about matters of taste?’ she wrote tartly to Vanessa.59 When Vanessa and Duncan stayed at Rodmell, Virginia was worried they would regard it as inferior to Charleston and mock her ‘ridiculous’ decorations.60 If the house is a body, a metaphor for strength and protection, for ‘the warm substance of intimacy’, then Virginia was ashamed of hers—at least under her sister’s gaze.61 Vanessa’s body, ripe and proliferate, was the desired form, a template, like Charleston; an ideal that Virginia, childless and ‘mad’, could only try to emulate. Even then, it was likely that she would be compared to her sister, and found lacking. Vanessa had the remarkable ability to flourish amid the pressures of home and family, of love and duty, that often derail the woman artist. Vanessa, the domestic goddess, the imperturbable manager, Bloomsbury’s steady centre, filled Virginia with envy. Yet it was she who, though anxious and unstable, achieved what Vanessa never did—a rock-solid marriage built on constancy and fidelity. Objects in the rooms create a portrait of the Woolfs. Beneath a window in the living room sat the desk where Leonard wrote and dealt with a massive correspondence. But it is tiny, the desk of a modest man and a highly organised individual. Virginia had the living-room walls painted a delicate sea-green. Because the house is set into the side of a slope, making the ground floor slightly lower than the garden, and because there is so much green foliage around the house, the room has an enchanted, floating, underwater feeling, underscored by Leonard’s aquarium. Here the couple dined and entertained, read and worked, listened to the radio or chatted by the fire. Vanessa painted the table, marking her sister’s chair vw together with the symbol of a book.
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The old Bloomsbury crowd came to visit as well as newer friends, including T.S. Eliot, Mark Gertler, Vita Sackville-West and E.M. Forster—but it seemed the carefree atmosphere at Charleston was more congenial than the work regimen and perceived austerities at Rodmell. Clive Bell commented that ‘there is no bath at Monks [sic] House, no wine, and not very nice food’, while E.M. Forster complained, ‘I was irritated at being left so much “to myself” . . . Here are Ws, who read, Leonard The Observer, and Virginia The Sunday Times, and then retired to literary studies to write till lunch.’62 Neither was Vanessa impressed, telling Clive she considered Monk’s House ‘a queer poky jumbled cottage’.63 It seemed sisterly rivalry cut both ways. At Charleston, Vanessa was transforming the garden from ‘a sea of mud and potatoes’ to a thriving vegetable patch that produced food not only for her household but, during the First World War, for Virginia’s, too. Later, Roger Fry helped to redesign it, and by the 1920s it was starting to take shape as a painter’s garden, a riot of colours, shapes and scents. Duncan also pitched in. Vanessa liked strong colours, both in her painting and her dress, favouring rich purples and vermilions. One year she planned the garden around a scheme of reds, planting zinnias, dahlias, scabious and red hollyhocks. ‘It’s so divine here now,’ Vanessa wrote to Fry, ‘that one can’t bear leaving . . . The garden is full of dahlias and red admirals [butterflies] and one can sit out all day if one likes.’64 In the summer of 1925, after years of shivering in a makeshift studio in the garden, an old army hut known as Les Misérables, Vanessa moved into a large, bright studio attached to the house. She told Fry, who helped her design it, the studio had changed her life. ‘It is a perfect place to work in, as besides having a very good and
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even light it is curiously quiet and removed from all the noises of the house and garden . . . [O]ne feels for the first time here more or less independent of the weather.’65 Vanessa’s studio symbolises the calm zone of creativity that she made in a life crammed with turbulent relationships, different domiciles and a host of responsibilities, not the least of which was Virginia’s wellbeing. At Monk’s House, Virginia was exultant, having started To the Lighthouse. She had a superstitious wish to begin her new novel the first day there and, though she ‘made a quick & flourishing attack . . . 22 pages straight off in less than a fortnight’, she was stricken with illness.66 It happened at the birthday party for Quentin, Vanessa’s younger son. Quentin recalled, ‘Virginia was on form and brilliantly amusing. There was laughter and applause and then, suddenly, she seemed to be changing her mind, rising, making as if to move from her place. The two people who knew her best, Vanessa and Leonard, were up on their feet, racing for the door and arriving just in time to catch her as she collapsed. She was green as a duck’s egg.’67 Back at Monk’s House, Virginia was forced to rest, lying about ‘in that odd, amphibious life of a headache’, the result of her ‘queer, difficult, nervous system’.68 That summer, as Vanessa concentrated on new paintings and ‘very seldom [left] the studio except to grapple with weeds in the garden’, Virginia was confined to bed ‘in the little room looking into the garden, the sun beaming steady, the vine leaves transparent green’, frustrated that she was unable to continue writing, ‘the great solace, & scourge’. She was plagued by darker anxieties. ‘And death—as I always feel—hurrying near. 43: how many more books?’69 ‘And there was Nessa,’ Virginia ruminated, ‘humming & booming & flourishing over the hill.’ Virginia’s gifts seemed ‘so moderate in
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comparison’, for which she blamed herself: ‘a little more control on my part, & [Leonard and I] might have had a boy of 12, a girl of 10: This always rakes [sic] me wretched in the early hours.’70 It is no wonder Virginia collapsed at Quentin’s birthday party, surrounded by the proofs of Vanessa’s ‘flourishing’. Despite her green thumb, the interior was Vanessa’s world. When Duncan set off for the fields to paint en plein air, she stayed in the studio. ‘I cannot bear to be hurried or uncomfortable,’ she explained to Fry.71 After the studio was built in 1925, and a long lease negotiated for Charleston, Vanessa concentrated on her home, continuing to decorate it flamboyantly as well as to memorialise it in works like The Open Door (1926, Bolton Museum and Art Gallery, UK). The Open Door presents Vanessa’s perfect world: the creature comforts of the interior are combined with a delicious view of the profuse, sun-drenched garden. That year, Virginia was impressed by Vanessa’s paintings in a group show. She regarded a ‘divinely lovely landscape’ of Charleston as ‘your masterpiece’. It was a work of ‘flashing brilliance, of sunlight crystallised, of diamond durability’. Vanessa, with her ‘pure artistic vision and brilliance of imagination’, was ‘a mistress of the brush’. But, Virginia noted, ‘I think the problems of design on a large scale slightly baffle you . . . now and again, you falter, or somehow flatten.’ 72 It was an accurate assessment as, during the 1920s, Vanessa’s work began to lose vitality. It seems the interior did not continue to offer sufficient scope or challenge. Within are the dangers that have always plagued women: restriction, isolation, self-loss and the potential narcissism of motherhood—vision grown inward. For Virginia, home and garden represented only part of her pleasure in Sussex. After she finished writing for the day, she went
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walking or cycling across the Downs, no matter what the weather. Such outings were a necessary part of her creative rhythm. Confined to bed with one of her awful periodic headaches, she mused: (W)hat I wouldn’t give to be coming through Firle woods, dusty & hot, with my nose turned home, every muscle tired, & the brain laid up in sweet lavender, so sane & cool, & ripe for the morrows [sic] task. How I should notice everything—the phrase for it coming the moment after & fitting like a glove; & then on the dusty road, as I ground my pedals, so my story would begin telling itself.73
David Garnett observed, ‘Vanessa lived in a closed room; when Virginia came over . . . she brought the wind off the Downs into the house with her.’74 While Garnett’s comment is tainted by his rivalry with Vanessa, Virginia did experience a rapturous, sensual delight in the natural world—and she wished to share it. One summer evening, she gazed at the distant hills near Asheham, ‘a sight too beautiful for one pair of eyes. Instinctively I want someone to catch my overflow of pleasure.’75 She was also a knowledgeable watcher of birds, butterflies and other creatures, and enjoyed going on mushroom hunts with Leonard. Yet Virginia’s fiction does not include lengthy descriptions either of landscape in general or Sussex in particular. Her characters, with their intense inner lives, their fragmentary conversations, their monologues and epiphanies, are usually located, and connect with one another, within the rooms of a house or in the swirl of the metropolis. Modernism’s concern with fractured or abstracted form is consonant with Virginia’s construction of her novels, and with her
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perceptions of modern life and personality. In her essay ‘Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car’, Virginia suggests that the beauty of nature is so overwhelming that it cannot be adequately contained by prose. ‘I cannot hold this—I cannot express this—I am overcome by it—I am mastered.’76 Was it only in memory, in reflection, that the landscape’s emotive and visceral impressions could be realised, compressed, ‘mastered’? ‘A Sketch of the Past’ was written at Monk’s House during the summer and autumn of 1939.77 In the essay, Virginia recollects St Ives with lucid and palpable pleasure—her lost Eden. She pauses while writing to note that St Ives gave her the same ‘pure delight’ which was before her eyes ‘at this very moment’ in Sussex. ‘The lemon-coloured leaves on the elm tree; the apples in the orchard; the murmur and rustle of the leaves . . . While I write this, the light glows; an apple becomes a vivid green; I respond all through me; but how? Then a little owl [chatters] under my window. Again I respond.’78 What directly confronts Virginia—the leaves, an apple, the owl’s voice—confuses her, makes her ‘fumble’. She wonders if her response means ‘anything real’, whether she is making up or telling the truth as she yields to ‘the breath of these voices’. It prompts her to cut short her speculations and ‘return to the surface’, to writing about St Ives. Interestingly, ‘the surface’ is the past while the present, with its myriad compelling images, offers a depth Virginia chooses to avoid. This passage reveals the schism she registered when writing about the past and the present, between what she recalls—and can thus control—and what is immediate and makes her fumble. To be regained, the past had to be exactly that, particularly the natural world with its beautiful urgencies, its call on her senses and attention,
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a realm that needed to be located in memory, detached from the diffuse, overwhelming, unameliorated present. ‘The present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you feel nothing else,’ she observed.79
g The outbreak of the second world war brought the sisters to Sussex permanently. London was too dangerous: Leonard and Virginia’s home in Mecklenburgh Square was bombed, as were Duncan and Vanessa’s studio-apartments. In 1939, Virginia was fifty-seven and Vanessa sixty years old. Virginia’s reputation as a novelist and essayist had soared with the publication of To the Lighthouse, The Waves, A Room of One’s Own and The Years, and she was regarded as one of England’s leading writers. The Hogarth Press, the publishing house she and Leonard founded, had established itself as an innovative company that not only published Virginia’s books but T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as well as Katherine Mansfield, E.M. Forster, Robert Graves, Christopher Isherwood, Gertrude Stein and the entire works of Freud in English translation. Vanessa designed the covers for her sister’s books, bold and fluent images often incorporating flowers. Vanessa, too, had her triumphs: several solo exhibitions sold well and she received respectful notices. She completed highly regarded design commissions for the ballet as well as for interiors done in concert with Duncan. But it was Duncan who was seen as the pre-eminent artist of the couple. Vanessa played second fiddle. But Vanessa’s achievement was greater. Her masterpiece was Charleston: lifestyle, love affairs, paintings, decor and garden add
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up to an authentic and lasting achievement, a fittingly private one, an equation largely unrecognised by the hierarchies of art history. She had indeed made art from life. As Bridget Eliott and Jo-Ann Wallace suggest, Bell created ‘a new fluid working space’ where she could explore her ‘intense interest in the private, the personal and the mundane’ together with ‘her preference for a quietly secluded country life over a more flamboyantly professional career’. But because Bell’s life ran counter to trends established by more ‘publicly recognised male modernists’, it contributed to ‘waves of self doubt’ on Bell’s part.80 In a melancholy mood, Vanessa pondered that she had dissipated her talents with the diverse range of projects she had undertaken, telling Virginia, ‘I have split myself among too many stools.’81 But Virginia would hear none of it: she remained Vanessa’s staunch admirer. For herself, Virginia predicted that ‘a slow silent increase of fame’ would be her due, indicating the self-belief at the core of her creativity, the confidence that, despite fluctuations in health and energy, her worth and originality would be acknowledged.82 Vanessa lacked a similarly resilient ego. There were personal tragedies. Vanessa’s older son, Julian, had been killed in 1937 while working as an ambulance driver in the Spanish civil war. After hearing the news, the family took Vanessa to Charleston, where her convalescence was helped by sitting in the garden. In her shock and grief, she turned to Virginia, who completely devoted herself to her sister. On one of the few days that Virginia could not come to Charleston, she sent her sister a note. Quentin found his mother quietly crying over it in the garden. ‘Another love letter from Virginia,’ she smiled faintly.83 That same year, Vanessa finally told Angelica that she was Duncan’s daughter—she had
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grown up believing that Clive was her father—and the situation led to tensions, especially between Angelica and her mother. Then Angelica fell in love with Bunny Garnett, twenty-six years her senior, and, much to the dismay of Vanessa and Duncan, married him. Duncan continued to have affairs and Vanessa continued to accommodate them. Meanwhile, the Woolfs’ publishing successes meant that reno vations and refurbishments were undertaken at Monk’s House, making it more comfortable. Electricity was connected in 1931 and mains water three years later. But, as both Virginia and Leonard were naturally frugal, the place was never luxurious. John Lehmann, manager of the Hogarth Press, recalled: I loved the untidy, warm, informal atmosphere of the house, with books and magazines littered about the room, logs piled up by the fireplaces, painted furniture and low tables of tiles designed by the Bloomsbury artists, and writing done in sunny, flower-filled, messy studios. A smell of wood smoke and ripe apples lingered about . . .84
Virginia wrote in a little weatherboard study in the garden while her bedroom, which faces it, was a specially designed brick addition to the house. Leonard slept upstairs. It meant that Virginia was as close as possible to the countryside she cherished. Her bedroom had sweeping views of the water meadows, the garden and its lush lawn. At night, if she could not sleep, she pulled open the curtains and watched the stars wheel in the sky. The studio where she wrote was at the bottom of the garden under the chestnut tree and against the churchyard wall, but during winter the former toolshed was
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freezing, and Virginia retreated to her bedroom to write. On the tiled fireplace, Vanessa had painted the Godrevy Lighthouse, a shared emblem of childhood and happiness. Vanessa, too, had a new work space. Her attic studio was smaller than the one she’d shared with Duncan downstairs, but its tall windows offered spectacular views of the garden and the Downs. The sisters continued to work intently. In 1940, Virginia published a biography of Roger Fry, who had died in 1934. After reading the manuscript, Vanessa wrote to her, ‘Since Julian died I haven’t been able to think of Roger—now you have brought him back to me. Although I cannot help crying, I can’t thank you enough.’85 Meanwhile, Virginia was also writing Between the Acts, her last novel, which she finished in November. She felt ‘a little triumphant about the book. I think its an interesting attempt in a new method. I think its more quintessential than the others . . . I’ve enjoyed writing almost every page.’86 Between the Acts is set in ‘the heart of the country’, taking place on a single summer’s day in the garden of a grand manor where the local people perform their annual pageant, scenes from the history of England.87 There is no plot, only the day’s progress and the scenes from the pageant, interwoven with conversations and reflections by the characters—in particular, Isa and Giles Oliver, an unhappily married couple. Nature is a radiant companion to the action as Virginia compresses it into metaphors that illuminate her human characters. A man, leaning ‘silent, sardonic’ against a door, is like ‘a withered willow’; a talkative woman suddenly becomes ‘solemn as an owl’. Birds are everywhere—‘chuckling over the substance and succulence of the day’ or ‘attacking the dawn like so many choir boys an iced cake’.
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A line of trees is ‘an open air cathedral’, where darting swallows seemed to dance, ‘not only to music but to the unheard rhythm of their wild hearts’.88 Nature is paradise lost, a transcendent realm of beauty and goodness that Virginia’s alienated characters, who brood over their disappointments and misunderstandings, are unable to reach. Even when the characters are granted flashes of insight and sympathy, they are often unable to express them, underscoring their tragic separateness from one another. Unlike the joyfully industrious birds who revel in their sense of community, the humans are doomed to separateness. If Vanessa’s element was earth, then Virginia’s was air—she was cerebral, quick-witted, flirtatious, gossipy, sharp-tongued, arch and mischievous. Leonard observed that Virginia swooped like a bird between reality and romance, ‘which join inextricably to join her’.89 At the end of Between the Acts, Isa and Giles Oliver face each other. ‘Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared; also love.’90 The threat of invasion and the extensive bombings were making Virginia increasingly anxious. Sussex, on the flight path of German bombers on their way to London, was targeted. On several occasions, the planes flew directly over Monk’s House and bombs shook the windows of her study. Suicide was planned in case of a Nazi invasion. Virginia’s younger brother Adrian Stephen, a doctor and a psychoanalyst, had given the Woolfs enough morphine to avoid being taken prisoner. During the winter, as Virginia’s spirits drooped, she took refuge in nature. ‘I worshipped the beauty of the country . . . How England consoles and warms one.’91 In February 1941, she finished revising Between the Acts but decided it was a worthless book. She wrote to John Lehmann
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telling him not to publish it as it stood because ‘its [sic] too silly and trivial’.92 As Leonard knew, when Virginia completed a book she was most vulnerable to depression. As the darkness in her mind deepened, Virginia wrote to Vanessa in terror. I feel that I have gone too far this time to come back again. I am certain that I am going mad again. It is just as it was the first time, I am always hearing voices . . . I can hardly think clearly any more. If I could I would tell you what you and the children have meant to me. I think you know. I have fought against it, but I cant [sic] any longer.93
On 28 March, Louie Mayer, who cooked and cleaned for the Woolfs for many years, saw Virginia go to her study. After writing notes for Vanessa and Leonard, Virginia put on her coat, took her walking stick and hurried out the gate. It’s not far—through the gate, past the churchyard and across the water meadows to the river. It was the path Virginia took to visit Vanessa at Charleston, the beginning of a nine-kilometre trek across the Downs, with its smooth hills and vistas of the sea. But instead of crossing the bridge at Southease, she stopped. The river, tidal and swollen with early spring rains, was flowing fast. Virginia put a stone in her pocket and clambered down the bank. She could swim—she’d learned during the summers at St Ives—and it must have been with great determination that she held her breath, and herself, beneath the water. In her final act, Virginia chose nature to relieve her sufferings. Images of water, of drowning, recur in her novels. Rachel Vinrace, the doomed heroine of The Voyage Out, falls, in her delirium,
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into a ‘deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head’.94 In Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Smith says, ‘Now we will kill ourselves,’ as he and his wife stand by the Thames.95 Smith, unhinged by the horrors of the First World War, is descending into insanity. Water offers the prospect of cessation and oblivion to those who are already ill and who seek respite: Rachel Vinrace succumbs to a fever and dies; Smith commits suicide. For all its regenerative powers, nature did not prove to be Virginia’s saviour but it did offer solace, a way out. In 1961, Vanessa died at Charleston after a short illness. It had become completely her world, one that she rarely left, and where she was often visited by her children and grandchildren. The grief she suffered after the deaths of Julian and Virginia made her something of a recluse. She continued to paint in her attic studio. Self Portrait (c.1958, The Charleston Trust) is her best late work. Vanessa, nearly eighty, gazes unflinchingly at the viewer and at herself. Beneath her painter’s sunhat, her strong face is still beautiful, despite her glasses and the marks of time. Distinctive, too, is her brand of elegance: she is wrapped in a green shawl with a vermilion neckerchief. The angle of her head, inclined forward so the lower part of her face catches the light, means attention is focused on mouth and chin. Her lips are slightly parted as if she were about to ask a question. It makes her expression both interrogative and submissive, active and passive, two contrasting elements of her personality. Vanessa constructs the painting in terms of interlocking circles and semicircles—her hat, shoulders and the chair in which she sits all echo the same shape. The circle was her favourite form, her design trademark, her very feminine signature. Transversing the circles is the straight column of her neck and face, a central
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axis holding everything together, the fixed centre of movement, Vanessa’s designated role in life. Self Portrait provides a counterpoint to the final, triumphant paragraph of To the Lighthouse. There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in attics, she thought . . . But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. . . . [S]he looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.96
Duncan lived at Charleston until his death at ninety-three in 1978. He is buried next to Vanessa in the churchyard at Firle. Because Duncan stayed on, it meant that the house, shabby though it grew, remained intact. In 1986, after extensive restoration, Charleston opened to the public. Leonard continued to live at Monk’s House after Virginia’s death but he was not alone: he had the companionship of Trekkie Parsons, a painter and book illustrator. As Leonard’s heir, she donated the house to Sussex University who, in turn, gave it to the National Trust. Unlike the other house museums in this book, Monk’s House is occupied. The National Trust advertises for, and then interviews, potential occupants. Jonathan and Catherine Zoob currently lease the property under a ten-year renewable tenancy. ‘So many visitors comment on the resident cats, the odd sound or the smell of baking from . . . the kitchen . . . [and the] signs that the garden is tended by
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people who really love it—the signs of life in the house.’ The Zoobs’ responsibilities include the maintenance and planting of the large garden. Jonathan Zoob notes, ‘On a lovely autumn morning I might stroll out into the Orchard (much as Leonard and Virginia must have done) and pick a few shiny apples to place in the wooden bowl on the dining table, and so the exhibition is constantly enriched in a way that might not happen in an unoccupied museum.’ As Monk’s House is open twice a week for seven months of the year, the Zoobs employ a conservation cleaner to prepare it for the open days. But having the opportunity ‘to enjoy two acres of the most beautiful land in the country is worth the eternal dusting and administrative headaches of finding four volunteers for every opening!’.97 The distance between Charleston and Monk’s House offers a path, visible and emotional, between two sensibilities and two lives, a geography of the heart emblematised by two places in one district, a shared region of trust, joy, failure and tragedy, and, most memorably, of constant creative exploration.
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g From left: Joe Russell and Ernest Hemingway, 1932. Havana Harbour, Cuba. EH 1354 P. Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston.
g 6
Se a Be i ng E r ne st Hem i ng way i n Ke y We st Outside it was a lovely, cool, sub-tropical winter day and the palm branches were sawing in the light north wind . . . Through the window you could see the sea looking hard and new and blue in the winter light. Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not 1
When Hemingway arrived in Key West in 1928, accompanied by his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer, he’d found a home. He was twentynine. Key West marked the most productive period of Hemingway’s career: works completed there include A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not and some of his finest short stories, including ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ and ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’.2 For Whom the Bell Tolls, started in Key West, was finished in Cuba, where he settled in 1939 with Martha Gellhorn, Mrs Hemingway III. The germination of Hemingway’s ‘mythic self’ is unalterably linked to Key West. It was where ‘the man [became] the institution
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known as “Papa”’, where he created an extravagant, rambunctious, controversial persona as a sportsman and man of action.3 Of course, Hemingway had been immersing himself in nature since childhood, but it was in Key West that he created a life and an identity from it. It was where the sea became his beloved, entering his writing and shaping his days as if the azure waters of the Gulf Stream had flowed inexorably into his soul.
g Why did Hemingway, after nearly a decade in Paris at the heart of the expatriate avant-garde, choose such a remote spot? His circle had included the finest writers of his time: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Key West was, literally, about as far from Paris as he could get. The tiny island, southernmost in the chain of keys that fan out from Florida into the Gulf of Mexico, is two and a half kilometres wide and seven kilometres long. It is closer to Havana than Miami and, in those days, there was no road linking it with the mainland, only a ferry. A small, struggling town, Key West relied on cigars and the sea for its income, and its fortunes further declined during the Depression. Its population was an exotic mix of Americans, Cubans, Spanish and Bahamanians, shopkeepers, cigar-factory workers, sailors and fishermen, carpenters, bootleggers, gamblers, revellers and prostitutes. At night, the town’s leisurely rhythm changed as the gambling joints, brothels and speakeasies lit up Duval Street and rumba music blared. Prohibition was regarded as something of a joke by locals, a decision made in Washington which had little to do with them. Liquor was easy to smuggle from Havana under
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cover of darkness. There were no cultural cliques, à la Paris, no literary scene at all. There is no better way to imbibe Key West’s mores than to tour the Ernest Hemingway Museum and Home on Whitehead Street with its guides—a group of charming, irreverent and eccentric locals—and then to wander down Duval Street to drink (quite a lot, as all seem to) at Sloppy Joe’s. Indeed, the weather—Key West is a refuge for holidaymakers during the harsh North American winter—together with its laissez-faire attitude towards booze in particular and life in general—are chief reasons for its ongoing popularity. You go to Key West to let your hair down; Hemingway would no doubt approve. Its appearance is contradictory. Tropical domestic architecture is usually simple, open and low, especially in a hurricane belt like the keys. But the elegant Conch (or native-born Caucasian) style, which dominates the island, is typified by tall, narrow, white weatherboard houses with elaborate latticework, giving the place a distinctive, romantic appearance. Though Key West has become a bustling tourist resort, crammed with upmarket restaurants and galleries—as well as hosting the annual Ernest Hemingway lookalike contest—it manages to retain its air of raffish charm, its scent of lawlessness, its slow, sensuous pace, a langour determined by the relentless humidity. Nature’s embrace is immediate, moist and visceral. A few blocks from the galleries and restaurants, the sidewalks disappear, chickens freely roam the streets, the houses need a coat of paint and the locals are laidback. Once Hemingway decided to settle there, Pauline had little choice in the matter. After all, she’d sworn allegiance to Hemingway’s desires. Wasn’t that how she had won him from Hadley, his first
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wife, after a long and tortuous campaign that saw her befriending Hadley and holidaying with the couple? In ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, set on safari in East Africa, Helen says to her husband Harry, who is dying from a gangrenous leg wound, ‘“I wish we’d never come . . . You always said you loved Paris. We could have stayed in Paris or gone anywhere. I’d have gone anywhere. I said I’d go anywhere you wanted.”’ Harry replies, ‘“Your bloody money.”’ Helen continues, ‘“That’s not fair . . . It was always yours as much as mine. I left everything and I went wherever you wanted to go and I’ve done what you wanted to do. But I wish we’d never come here.”’4 Pauline’s family money had, in a sense, brought them to Key West. Her generous uncle, Gustavus Pfeiffer, had purchased the newlyweds a snazzy Model A Ford. Pauline was seven-months pregnant and the Hemingways’ plan was to pick up the car in Key West and drive to Arkansas to stay with Pauline’s parents. Hemingway had heard about Key West from John Dos Passos, who had been ‘talking [Key West] up to my friends ever since I first saw the place in the course of a walking hitchhiking trek down the Florida peninsula’. Dos Passos would never forget ‘the dreamlike crossing’ from the mainland.5 The Hemingways arrived on 7 April, only to find the car’s delivery had been delayed. Hemingway explored the town and, instantly enchanted, made his decision. That evening, he cabled his publisher Maxwell Perkins: he’d decided to stay in Key West for a time and he was immersed in his writing.6 The couple checked into a small apartment in the centre of town. Hemingway made two important discoveries. First, he could fish to his heart’s content in the island’s rich waters, and second,
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progress on A Farewell to Arms began to move at a rapid rate. The two activities were linked. A fortnight later, Hemingway wrote to Maxwell Perkins, ‘[T]he new book . . . has been going finely . . . I would like to stay right here until it is done as I have been going so very well here and it is such a fine healthy life and the fishing keeps my head from worrying in the afternoons when I don’t work . . . This is a splendid place.’ He was also amused that the locals did not believe he was a writer. ‘They think I represent Big Northern Bootleggers or Dope Peddlers.’7 Hemingway, tall and broad-shouldered, with dark eyes and a radiant smile, was as handsome as a movie star but his fisherman’s garb was scruffy and practical: a stained sweater, worn tennis shoes and pants hitched up with a length of rope. As one horrified local lady declared, ‘He always looked like he’d just pulled his pants on and planned to pull them off again any second.’8 Hemingway’s interest in fishing won him a new circle of friends. He was not a loner; he needed his ‘Mob’, a band of stoic, goodhumoured, hard-drinking men, plus wives or girlfriends who put in an appearance if they were prepared to rough it. The Mob’s role was twofold: to accompany Hemingway on his adventures and to defer to him completely. Hemingway was a warm and generous fellow, the wisecracking, tall-tale-telling life of the party, but he was also the boss, a fiercely competitive man who could not bear to lose. Hemingway was outrageously attractive. Men adored him, women fought over him, even cats and dogs were drawn to him. It seemed no creature could withstand his charm. But Hemingway’s desperate need to be first, to win at all costs, meant that, within him, despite the facade of bonhomie, was a bitter, fastidious and vengeful accountant of every real or imagined slight. As Malcolm
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Pines notes, ‘love of self, egoism, pride [and] competitiveness’ means ‘the urge to mastery will predominate . . . It is others who are to be despised, not the sacred vessel of the self.’9 The first member of the Key West Mob was George Brooks, a lawyer, whom Hemingway met while fishing from a pier. Hemingway told Brooks he was recuperating after a ‘bloody awful’ winter in Paris, and that he was writing a book.10 He asked Brooks if he knew someone with a boat with whom he could share fishing costs. Impressed by Hemingway, Brooks referred him to Charles Thompson, Key West’s golden boy, whose family’s holdings included a fishing fleet and a cigar factory as well as the chief hardware and marine supply business on the island. After an afternoon spent fishing with the sunny-tempered Thompson, followed by a splendid meal at his home with Thompson’s wife Lorine and Pauline, the two men bonded like brothers. Happily for Pauline, she and Lorine also became good friends. Hemingway’s other buddies included Captain Eddie ‘Bra’ Saunders, an expert sailor who taught Hemingway deep-sea fishing; Joe Russell, a charterboat captain and bootlegger who ran a speakeasy off Duval Street, later known as Sloppy Joe’s; and JB Sullivan, an Irishman who owned a machine shop and repaired boats. His new friends had no interest in literature. ‘They haven’t even heard of Scott [Fitzgerald],’ Hemingway crowed.11 These men inspired Hemingway’s new work and way of life. He would never again live in a big city and, until 1958 when he unwillingly left the region, the Gulf Stream was his cherished companion, a realm of quest, play and inspiration, ‘the last wild country’.12 The group was swelled by other members of the Mob whom Hemingway cajoled to visit—Dos Passos from New York, William
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Smith, a childhood friend from Michigan, and the artists Henry Strater and Waldo Peirce. As Dos Passos reflected, Hemingway ‘had an evangelistic streak that made him work to convert his friends to whatever mania he was encouraging at the time’.13 Hemingway told his friends he had discovered ‘The St Tropez of the Poor’.14 It was ‘the best place I’ve ever been any time anywhere, flowers, tamarind trees, guava trees, coconut palms . . . Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks.’15 Alcohol, easily acquired and plentiful, was another attraction. Just after Ernest and Pauline arrived, they had three guests: Ernest’s father, Dr Clarence Edmonds ‘Ed’ Hemingway, his mother Grace and Ed’s brother Willoughby. After inspecting Ed’s property investments in Florida, they were vacationing in Havana. (Will was taking a break from his work as a medical missionary in the Chinese province of Shanxi.) When Hemingway discovered they were in the area, he invited them to visit. It was quite a reunion; Hemingway had not seen his parents for five years and it was the first time they’d met Pauline. Their marriage was a scandal. Pauline was Catholic, so not only did Hemingway have to convert but, as the Catholic Church did not permit divorce, his marriage to Hadley was annulled. When Hemingway’s parents taxed him with rumours of an adulterous affair, he strenuously denied it. But he was so ashamed of his conduct that he did not reveal his circumstances to them until he was divorced from Hadley and married to Pauline, and even then he fudged the truth. Tellingly, Hemingway had not informed his parents he was coming home.16 When he met the trio on the Key West dock, Hemingway was shocked by his father’s appearance: the onset of diabetes and attacks of angina, as well as financial worries, had aged and weakened the
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big, burly man. Ed had also been disheartened to learn his Florida properties were a bad investment. It was Ed who’d aroused Hemingway’s passion for nature. Summers were spent in northern Michigan at Bear Lake (later renamed Walloon Lake) where Ed trained his son to survive in the wild, and to be a first-class hunter, fisherman and marksman, just as he was. Loving nature and needing to kill its creatures was a lust that Ed, manically energetic and nervous, passed on to his son. The training started early. As Grace proudly noted, ‘Ernest Miller at 2 years 11 months went fishing with two men—his father and Mr Glotfelty. He caught the biggest fish of the crowd. He knows when he gets a bite and lands them all himself. He shoots well with his gun and loads and cocks it himself; walks a mile and a half easily.’17 The journey to Bear Lake, made virtually every summer from Ernest’s first until his eighteenth year, was as arduous and complicated as the one taken by Virginia Woolf’s family across England to Cornwall. It involved four separate train and boat trips from their home at Oak Park, near Chicago, to the holiday house on the lake’s shores. Perhaps it is why ‘for Hemingway, ever after, journeys became ritual affairs. They were the same careful preparations that his father had established for the family summers.’18 A photograph taken in Key West captures the relationship between father and son. Standing in front of a Ford roadster, an emblem of modernity and prosperity, Hemingway offers the camera a roguish, dimpled grin while Ed, standing to one side, his head inclined deferentially, gazes not at the camera but at his son with a mixture of pride, awe and bemusement. Ernest’s outfit is smart but casual. An open-necked shirt with rolled-up sleeves,
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showing his manly forearms, is worn under a patterned vest with tweed trousers and soft shoes. In the tropics, Ed must have felt slightly uncomfortable in his three-piece suit and old-fashioned winged collar. Tall, dark and handsome, Ernest seems the master of the situation. But his hands, protectively clasped over his genital area, may symbolise a need to shield himself. Perhaps his father experienced something similar; he ‘protects’ himself with his cap. Ernest loathed his mother, the ebullient, determined, straighttalking Grace. Why? An excellent singer, Grace gave lessons that supplemented the family’s income and, in 1905, she singlehandedly designed their Oak Park home. Though Ernest admired his father’s mastery over nature, he could see that, within the marriage, Grace wielded the power. Ed, who adored his wife, was a henpecked husband. Kenneth Lynn offers another reason for Ernest’s dislike. Until he was two, Grace dressed Ernest as a girl, insisting that he and his sister Marcelline, who was older than he by eighteen months, were identical twins. This may account for his resentment, especially as photographs of him dressed in frilly white frocks and flowery bonnets, and wearing long curls, were displayed by Grace in family albums.19 Grace didn’t allow Ernest to have a proper boy’s haircut until he was seven. Hemingway’s overstated machismo is grounded in its obverse—a profound insecurity about his status as a man. Despite the tensions, Hemingway played the good host and squired his family around the island before they started home to Illinois.
g Hemingway wasn’t exaggerating when he told Brooks it had been an awful winter in Paris. For a man who prized physical strength,
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prowess and dexterity, Hemingway was disastrously accident prone. Just before Christmas, his and Hadley’s son John had poked his finger into his father’s right eye, damaging the pupil, and causing Hemingway pain and near-blindness for several weeks. His vision was already impaired in the other eye from a previous accident. Then, one night in March, Hemingway, probably the worse for drink, managed to pull a skylight down on his head. In the dark, he had mistaken the skylight’s rope, for the toilet chain. The blood was staunched with ‘thirty thicknesses of toilet paper . . . and a tourniquet of kitchen towel and a stick of kindling wood’.20 In the early hours of the morning, Hemingway was rushed to the American Hospital at Neuilly where the wound was stitched. He had a visible scar for the rest of his life. ‘I never knew an athletic vigorous man who spent so much time in bed as Ernest did,’ Dos Passos observed.21 Jeffrey Meyers wonders whether Hemingway’s string of accidents at that time was ‘therapeutic self-punishment’ for his feelings of guilt about Hadley.22 There were other reasons for quitting Paris. The camaraderie of the expatriate community was depleted, and Hemingway was partly responsible. The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, made Hemingway’s name on both sides of the Atlantic. The tale of dissolute and disillusioned youth, adrift in postwar Europe, is told in spare, muscular prose that has a haunting, elegiac undertow. It became the text for a generation. But Hemingway’s detractors were as vociferous as his admirers. In a cruelly insightful review that dealt with The Sun Also Rises and the short-story collection Men Without Women, Virginia Woolf compiled a list of Hemingway’s strengths and weaknesses:
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Mr Hemingway, then, is courageous; he is candid; he is highly skilled; he plants words precisely where he wishes; he has moments of bare and nervous beauty; he is modern in manner but not in vision; he is self-consciously virile; his talent has contracted rather than expanded; compared with his novel his stories are a little dry and sterile.23
In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway had savaged several friends. The writer Harold Loeb was not only cast as the unhappy, humiliated Robert Cohn, he was also the target of Hemingway’s anti-Semitic jibes. Lady Duff Twysden became the gorgeous, tormented, philan dering Lady Brett Ashley, arguably the only fully realised female character in Hemingway’s fiction. Set in Pamplona in 1925 during the bullfight festival of San Fermín, The Sun Also Rises fictionalises the steamy sexual politics that erupted when Hemingway attended the festival with a group that included Loeb and Twysden. Loeb was desperately in love with Twysden, who was also, briefly, the object of Hemingway’s desire, while she flirted with a young matador. After reading the book, Twysden famously declared that she ‘never had slept with the bloody bull fighter’.24 Gertrude Stein’s comment, ‘You are all a lost generation’, provides one of the novel’s epigraphs. Hemingway had also fallen foul of Stein, his mentor, who took her revenge in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, where she claimed that she had formed him as a writer. In retrospect, she was ‘a little proud and a little ashamed of the work of [her] mind’. Stein represents Hemingway as fawning, ambitious and manipulative but coyly adds, ‘I have a weakness for Hemingway.’25
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The split between Hadley and Hemingway had also divided the expatriate community. Many believed Hadley had been treated abominably and wondered if the prospect of Pauline’s money had been an enticement. Certainly Hemingway’s standard of living immediately improved. Pauline’s Uncle Gus, who bought the Ford roadster, paid the rent on a handsome apartment on rue Férou, near the Luxembourg Gardens. Though Hemingway and Hadley had lived in picturesque neighbourhoods, like Montparnasse and near Place Contrescarpe, their living conditions were dismal. Pauline was keen to have her baby in America. She also wanted her family to meet her husband. And like Pauline, Hemingway was homesick. Other friends who succumbed to the lure of home included Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, as well as Dos Passos. Preparing to leave Paris, Hemingway declared, ‘I should have gone to America two years ago when I planned. I was through with Europe and needed to go to America.’26 But the affair with Pauline had delayed him. During the couple’s honeymoon at Le Grau-du-Roi, a small port in the Camargue, Hemingway revelled in the rhythm of his days: writing in the morning, swimming and fishing in the afternoon, and enjoying local cuisine at night—the same pattern he adopted in Florida.27 In Key West, Hemingway ‘de-modernised’ himself, quitting the global, urban environment of Paris for a specific community, a traditional, ‘pre-modern’ culture where knowledge was gained from neighbours and kin, and through direct engagement with the landscape, and where the professional sphere of peers and colleagues was marginalised.28 It was how he’d grown up, relying on his father to teach him important practical skills and help him make the transition to manhood, emphasising the value of a life
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lived naturally, beyond the metropolis. Key West created a life style for Hemingway, recreating the one he’d known as a child. It meant what was local had authentic and intrinsic value, shaping his days, the kind of home he chose, the food he ate, the clothes he wore. These values were synonymous with Key West’s attributes: the sea, fishing, male camaraderie, the seasons. In Key West, after his writing was done, Hemingway had lunch with Pauline, then took off for the sea with his friends. It was too hot to work after midday, when the town closed down for a siesta, but out on the water it was deliciously balmy. In the evening, when the cool tradewinds blew, the Mob assembled in cheap cafes to dine on local delicacies, food that Hemingway relished—green turtle steak, black beans, yellow rice, raw conch meat salad laced with onions, and Cuban bread, washed down with Spanish wine. However, while the Mob went on to amuse themselves at the town’s speakeasies or gambling houses, Hemingway farewelled his companions at a respectable hour and returned to the apartment. Hemingway’s writing day began early, usually around dawn. Hemingway’s genius was in his ability to immerse himself in a culture. There were places he loved and longed to return to, such as Paris, Spain and East Africa, but his curiosity kept him on the move. Travelling was another art form, one that he pursued and perfected over his entire adult life. Hemingway’s skill with languages, his hunger for new vistas and authentic stories, for accuracy and details, together with his frank, friendly manner, meant that as soon as he engaged with a new place, its doors opened to him. He ‘saturated himself to bursting point’.29 After establishing such a perfect regimen in Key West, Hemingway was loath to leave it for Pauline’s parents’ home in Arkansas, which
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he described as ‘a christ offal place’. He planned to go hunting in Michigan but was ‘delayed by impending childbirth probably to take place at Kansas City or some such great obstetrical center’.30 Patrick was born by caesarean section in Kansas City in June. Fatherhood was not a prospect Hemingway welcomed. ‘For your own good, being a father is only a part-time job, remember,’ he advised Waldo Peirce.31 Hemingway wanted a grand, adventurous life, and for his wife to be a companion in that life, a buddy as much as a lover, ready both to rough it in the wild and, with grace and sophistication, adapt to city life and literary circles. ‘Right from the beginning,’ Dos Passos remarked, ‘Hem was hard on his women.’32 While Hemingway’s ideal existence was a gypsy journey of continuous discovery, he also required a well-managed home where he could retire to write in peace and quiet. Children did not fit easily into those plans. Pauline, as a practising Catholic, refused to use contraception, causing tensions with her husband. Nor did Pauline comfortably accept the role of a mother. Her two sons—Gregory was born in 1931—were weaned as soon as possible and had a nanny to take care of them. As a child, Gregory was more attached to the nanny than his mother. As Pauline later explained to Gregory, ‘I just don’t have much of what’s called a maternal instinct, I guess.’33 When Hemingway decided to travel, Pauline went with him. In 1933, when they were away from Key West for nine months, they left their children behind. Madelaine, Hemingway’s younger sister, cattily remarked, ‘What Pauline did, when she was not planning meals with the Negro maid Olive, I really don’t know.’34 A stylish woman with a background in journalism and fashion, Pauline had a sharp, bright intelligence and a worshipful admiration of Hemingway’s writing. She was a
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perceptive audience for his work, and his productivity can also be credited to her. Pauline ‘did everything to keep Ernest at work, to make conditions favourable for him to work’.35 She typed his manuscripts and offered critiques, and he relied on her knowledge of grammar. Small, thin and lively, it was Pauline’s personality that was notable rather than her looks.
g In November, the Hemingways returned to Key West and rented a furnished house in South Street, though Pauline had hoped they would return to Paris where the rue Férou apartment awaited them. Before Hemingway could settle into the steady schedule needed to redraft A Farewell to Arms, he had one more duty to perform. John, known as Bumby, would arrive in New York from Paris to spend Christmas with his father. Hadley had fallen in love with the journalist Paul Mowrer. Showing a remarkable generosity of spirit, she had forgiven Pauline and Hemingway and maintained an affectionate communication with both. On his way back to Key West with Bumby, Hemingway received a telegram: his father had committed suicide that morning; he had shot himself in the head. Ernest needed to go at once to Oak Park. He made the extraordinary decision to leave Bumby in a porter’s care to continue the journey to Key West. Bumby, at five, had just crossed the Atlantic to be reunited with his father and, raised in Paris, spoke virtually no English. Though Hemingway doubtless believed he was acting in the child’s best interests—to send him on to Pauline rather than take him to stay with griefstricken relatives, people he did not know—it seems at the precise
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moment Hemingway found his father had abandoned him, he did the same to Bumby. Once at Oak Park, Hemingway, as the oldest male in the family, took full responsibility for all the arrangements, including financially supporting his mother and several unmarried siblings. Hemingway had four sisters—Marcelline, Ursula, Carol and Madelaine—as well as his younger brother Leicester, who was thirteen. It was Leicester who’d found Ed. Ernest told him, ‘At the funeral, I want no crying. You understand, kid? There will be some others who weep, and let them. But not in our family.’36 It was an order, impossible to obey, to deny grief. Hemingway never quite knew how to deal with his father’s death, largely because he needed to apportion blame. One brutal accusation was that Ed’s action was provoked by Grace, who ‘had to rule everything, have it all her own way’.37 Dr Hemingway’s depression, which had led to his death, was generated by his economic woes, which he’d tried to conceal from the family, as well as increasingly poor health. Ed’s temperament was unstable. He was always in a state of frantic activity and twice he’d needed to take ‘rest cures’, the polite term for a nervous breakdown. Back in Key West, Hemingway discussed the matter with Madelaine, who was there to type up the manuscript of A Farewell to Arms. She was unnerved when Hemingway told her, ‘“I’ll probably go the same way.” He was half-jesting, half-serious.’38 Suicide runs through the Hemingway family like a terrible virus. Hemingway killed himself in 1961. Five years later, Ursula, his younger sister and favourite sibling, who’d been diagnosed with cancer and was suffering from depression, took an overdose of drugs. In 1982, Leicester, on learning that his legs might be amputated due to diabetes, shot himself. In 1996, the model and
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actress Margaux Hemingway, Ernest’s granddaughter, took an overdose after years of depression and drug problems. Another tragic case was Gregory, Hemingway’s youngest son, who, in 1976, wrote a painfully perceptive memoir of his father. Gregory, who married four times and had six children, was a doctor who lost his medical licence due to alcoholism. He was also a transvestite who, after undergoing a sex-change operation, called himself Gloria. He died in 2001, in the women’s section of a Miami jail, after being arrested in the street, naked and incoherent. Manic depression was Ed Hemingway’s awful legacy.
g The Sun Also Rises was written during a painful and turbulent period, the breakdown of Hemingway’s marriage to Hadley. A Farewell to Arms covered another stressful time: leaving Paris, settling in Key West, meeting Pauline’s family, having a new baby, then dealing with his father’s suicide and his family’s distress. A Farewell to Arms was a challenge for Hemingway both as a novelist striving to write a better, more successful second book, and because it drew directly on his wartime experiences: being wounded, being in love and losing that love. A Farewell to Arms is a modernist romance, where maturity is depicted as a brutal rite of passage whose rewards are ambiguous. Sensuality and love’s awakening are mixed with pain, blood, fear and death, leaving the ‘hero’ numbed and bereft. Frederic Henry, the protagonist, is an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in northern Italy during the First World War (as was Hemingway) whose poor eyesight meant he could not enlist for active service. In July 1918, Hemingway was delivering
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morale‑boosting supplies of chocolate and tobacco to frontline troops in their trenches at Fossalta di Piave, near Treviso, when he was injured during an Austrian attack. Several Italian soldiers near him were killed. Convalescing at the American Red Cross hospital in Milan, Hemingway fell in love with a nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic begins a passionate affair with Catherine Barkley, based on von Kurowsky, though the real affair was not as torrid.39 In the novel, Hemingway vividly interweaves his experiences and philosophy of war with a searing imaginary account of the disastrous Italian retreat from Caporetto in October 1917 that resulted in 300,000 casualties. In the first part of the novel, set in late summer, the natural world is described stringently, and functions as a background to the novel’s action. When the retreat at Caporetto takes place, it is autumn and, along with the driving rain, ‘everywhere there was standing water and mud’. So much water flows through the second half of the novel that it assumes a powerful, symbolic function. Water not only locates and dramatises events but acts as a healing and regenerative force. It is Frederic Henry’s saviour. About to face execution at the hands of the carabinieri, who suspect he is a German spy, Frederic ‘ran for the river, my head down’.40 Gunfire strafes the bank but, once in the water, he is safe. Miraculously, he finds a piece of timber floating by that carries him to shore further downstream. He then makes his way to Milan to find Catherine, and the two set off for Stresa, on the shores of Lake Maggiore. Following a tip-off that Frederic will be arrested, he and Catherine sail across the lake to Switzerland on a dangerous night voyage. Just as it seems the lovers have found a haven, Catherine dies, following complications after the birth of their son, who is
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stillborn. Catherine is destroyed by the uncontrollable rush of liquid from her own body: the outgoing tide of her blood as she suffers a series of massive haemorrhages. Hemingway, who was devastated when Agnes broke off their relationship, perhaps took a measure of revenge by giving her fictional double a gruesome demise. In the aquatic imagery of A Farewell to Arms, Key West’s waters take their role in Hemingway’s fiction for the first time, providing a constellation of symbols linking birth with death, safety with danger, love with loss. Traditionally, water is associated with the feminine, the emotions, dreams and the unconscious. In some pagan mythologies, the element of water signifies the direction west, the time of sunset and, seasonally, the autumn equinox. Hemingway felt connected to seasonal change. He believed the ‘inner urgencies’ of the autumn equinox gave him so much creative ‘juice’ that it was almost ‘as bad as a disease’. It was a time when a man felt the old year was dying and was compelled to complete his work.41 In Hemingway’s relationship to water, in particular, and nature in general (including other human beings, especially his intimates), he positioned himself in the role of the hunter. Hemingway was motivated by aggression, an exuberant and furious need to vanquish. His attitude to life was fundamentally adversarial, quite murderous in its extreme, and he used anger as a source of energy, of imagination. As Gaston Bachelard writes, such a man is ‘constantly dynamised by a will-to-attack’ and, inevitably, ‘brutalizes the real’.42 The Gulf Stream served a dualistic function, offering Hemingway the prospect of both meditation and sudden, terrifying violence. Once you are out of sight of land and of the other boats you are more alone than you can ever be hunting and the sea is the
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same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats. In a season fishing you will see it oily flat as the becalmed galleons saw it while they drifted westward; white-capped with a fresh breeze as they saw it running with the trades; and in high, rolling blue hills, the tops blowing off them like snow as they were punished by it, so that sometimes you will see three great hills of water with your fish jumping from the top of the farthest one and if you tried to make a turn to go with him without picking your chance, one of those breaking crests would roar down in on you with a thousand tons of water.43
Aesthetic pleasure—the passive appreciation of nature—had to be matched with the cunning and strength to outwit it. Hemingway wanted a fight and the sea gave it to him. ‘To govern the sea is a superhuman dream. It is both an inspired and a childlike will.’ For Hemingway ‘in the realm of will, there [was] no distinction to be made between things and men’.44 Being in nature, the longed-for place, meant hunting nature. Killing was Ernest’s initiation, that of a warrior, as administered by his father, after which he can access the stories of his tribe which are the myths of his culture. Hemingway, the avid angler, had made fishing a subject in his work since 1920. As a journalist for the Toronto Star Weekly, he wrote a series of articles about the sport.45 In the short story ‘Big Two-Hearted River’, written in 1924, Nick Adams’ fishing trip becomes a solitary, healing ritual while Jake Barnes’s fishing expedition to Burguete with Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises provides an invigorating interlude in nature before Pamplona’s emotional turmoil. ‘You’re an expatriate,’ Bill tells Jake. ‘You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious . . . You spend all your time
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talking, not working . . . You hang around cafes.’46 In Bill’s words are an echo of some of the reasons behind Hemingway’s return to America and his decision to make a home in Key West. Given the intense emotional spectrum of A Farewell to Arms, as well as the various pressures Hemingway experienced during its completion, it is easy to see how fishing became an ideal activity for him. It was a release after writing, an adventure in the company of men from whose skills he could learn, combining action with contemplation and endurance with reward. It also honoured his father’s memory. As it was for Karen Blixen, hunting was a potent means of recalling and pleasing the father. For Ernest, it recaptured the happy times, the summers at Bear Lake. Key West itself served that function, as Hemingway decided to settle there after his father’s death. It was a way of staying in touch with what was positive and enduring about Ed, the good things he had bequeathed, rather than his tragic, ugly end. Fishing also offered a hedonistic immersion in nature, the sheer joy of being out on the water in mild tropical weather. Fishing for trout in a stream is a pleasant pastime, but hauling a one-metre long, two-hundred-kilogram marlin onto a boat with the strength of his own body was a challenge Hemingway found both dramatic and satisfying. The big fish were ‘strange and wild things of unbelievable speed and power and a beauty, in the water and leaping, that is indescribable, which you would never see if you did not fish for them, and to which you are suddenly harnessed so that you feel their speed, their force and their savage power as intimately as if you were riding a bucking horse.’47 For both Hemingway and Blixen, hunting carried an erotic charge.
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Hemingway encouraged his Key West friends to take him on longer expeditions out into the Gulf, to the Marquesas Keys and, beyond that, to the Dry Tortugas. Captain Eddie Saunders taught Hemingway how to catch sailfish, among the fastest fish in the sea. At sunset, they anchored in the Marquesas’ shallow waters or at the abandoned Fort Jefferson on Tortugas. Hemingway dived for conch, to make the raw conch meat salad he liked, while Saunders caught and prepared red snapper and yellowtail for the evening meal. There was treasure to be found. ‘Last Sunday . . . [we] were out salvaging liquor from a boat that went on the reef coming from the Bahamas—got 14 bottles of Chateau Margaux among other things. Boat had about $60,000 worth of liquor on her but everybody else was salvaging too.’48 And there were adventures to be had. Hemingway and the Mob were once stranded at Tortugas for seventeen days during a storm. They went out fishing during lulls, and progressively ran out of ice, then beer, canned food, coffee and liquor. Dry Tortugas is aptly named: there is no fresh water on the island and men have perished there. But Hemingway declared a fish diet was good for the brain and that he had never eaten or drunk better in his life. When they returned to Key West, the other mens’ wives were ‘worried sick’—but not Pauline. It was a damned good trait in a woman, Hemingway said proudly, for a woman to love you and not worry about you.49 When the manuscript of A Farewell to Arms was completed, Hemingway was adamant that Maxwell Perkins should come from New York to collect it, a visit that called for a week-long fishing trip. ‘Don’t let anyone bluff you out of coming down,’ Hemingway advised him.50 Rather nervous at the prospect, Perkins tried to persuade the equally unadventurous Scott Fitzgerald to accompany him. ‘I
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would feel much safer with you too. Without you I may leave a leg with a shark, or do worse.’51 Hemingway took Perkins out fishing all day, every day. In the evenings, Perkins read the manuscript and declared it magnificent. Departing Key West, Perkins told Charles Thompson he’d had ‘a grand adventure’, adding, ‘This town certainly is good for Ernest.’ Thompson replied, ‘I hope he thinks so. I don’t know what we’d do around here without him.’52 Hemingway’s role as a man who initiated other men into adventurous and daring masculine pursuits in nature—the gift bequeathed to him by his father—became Hemingway’s selfappointed task in Key West. He became a father figure—Papa—the nickname that he began to insist others use, though the men who addressed him as Papa were often older than he.53 Instead of converting his friends to ‘whatever mania he was encouraging at the time’, Hemingway now took on a larger project: to define his masculinity in terms of the natural world. Though he’d flirted with this for decades, nature had really only been the site of forays and holidays, time out. In Key West, however, it was an integral part of daily life, and offered him a canvas on which to paint a larger version of himself. Perhaps it is no surprise that Hemingway’s work of mourning, following Ed’s death, was to lead other men across dangerous waters and bring them safely home. While Pauline sometimes accompanied Hemingway on his fishing excursions, mostly she stayed put. It is hard to escape the conclusion that, as soon as Hemingway reached Key West, he abandoned Pauline for the sea. Her comment to Lorine Thompson as they stood on the Key West dock waiting for their husbands to return, that she had ‘never before seen Ernest so content’, may well have been said through gritted teeth.54 Pauline had just won
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him from Hadley and yet, almost immediately, he had withdrawn from her. Did the guilt of leaving Hadley sour his marriage? Did Pauline’s refusal to use contraception alienate him? Or had the passionate affair cooled in wedlock? Hemingway despised his mother and mourned his first marriage: the feminine as water, as ocean, signified a territory of vast loss and desire, and Hemingway sought to appease that loss, quell that desire—impossible tasks. ‘To govern the sea is a superman dream.’55 Pauline seems to have been caught between the losses as, literally, an island in the stream. For Hemingway, the sea was more compelling than his wife and, in Key West, it was his mistress. Hemingway’s tenderness for the water is expressed by Santiago, the protagonist of The Old Man and the Sea. He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they were always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought money, spoke of her as el mar which is masculine. They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even as an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.56
The sea was Hemingway’s ideal feminine companion—seductive, fecund, combative and unpredictable, the Good as well as the Bad
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Mother, the anima, the powerful, unresolved, unconscious feminine. ‘La mar’, pronounced ‘ma’, is a child’s word for mother. Hemingway was able to respond to the feminine as mythic and metaphoric more readily than he could answer the needs of women in his life. Profoundly connected to it, he desired its challenges, depended on its energies. Being on the water also soothed certain anxieties. Hemingway had suffered from insomnia since childhood and his pattern of rising at dawn to write was governed as much by necessity as desire. He told Scott Fitzgerald, ‘If I get exercise and go out in the boat sleep like a log right through the night or if I wake on the boat can go right back to sleep,’ lulled like a baby in a cradle by its mother.57 He confided to the Russian critic Ivan Kashkin that: ‘A life of action is much easier to me than writing . . . In action I do not worry any more . . . you have no responsibility,’ whereas writing was ‘a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything I have ever done’.58 In the exterior world of male action, the realm of the father, Hemingway felt absolved from responsibility—of wife? children?— making it less onerous than the interior world of writing, a solo space of ‘perpetual challenge’. Hemingway’s conflict was the modernist male artist’s dilemma writ large—how to be a ‘man’ in the eyes of society while pursuing such high-minded goals as avant-garde subject matter and forms of expression as well as critical success and financial reward. The strain to realise such objectives was enormous.
g In April 1929, the Hemingways returned to Europe, establishing the pattern that governed Ernest’s Florida sojourn: six months of
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the year in Key West, and six months travelling in Europe, Africa and other parts of America. Key West is unbearably hot and sultry during the summer months, and Hemingway found it hard to work there. June to November is also the hurricane season. The Hemingways established themselves in the rue Férou apartment while Ernest completed editing A Farewell to Arms, then they set off for the south of France, Spain and Germany. By December, Hemingway had had enough, telling Perkins, ‘I want to get to Key West and away from it all.’ A Farewell to Arms had been published in September to excellent reviews and sales. But Hemingway had ‘never been as damn sick of anything as mention of this book’. Though he had received ‘swell letters about it . . . a fan letter only makes you embarrassed and uneasy and vaguely sick. It’s hard enough to write—and writing prose is a full time job and all the best of it is done in your subconscious and when that is full of business, reviews, opinions etc you don’t get a damn thing.’59 Once back at Key West, however, Hemingway noted with satisfaction he had caught three tarpon, a ‘North Easter was blowing like the devil’ and he was working hard.60 The Depression decimated Key West’s fragile economy. The navy vacated their shipyard, leaving behind only a token force, the cigar factories closed down, the fishing industry was crippled and the sea-freight business was all but defunct. Most people were on welfare. In 1934, Key West officially went broke when the town council declared itself bankrupt and issued a state of emergency. It was a shrewd move as the government, under the auspices of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), took over Key West, organising the volunteer labour force required to make Key West eligible for $1 million of federal funding.
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Just as the town was emerging from one crisis, nature provided another. In 1935, the worst hurricane that has ever hit the keys ripped through, killing more than four hundred people, including two hundred ex-First World War soldiers who were living in camps while building the highway. Hemingway, who toured the scenes of death and destruction the day after, was appalled by what he saw. He was also furious that the ex-soldiers had not been given enough warning about the hurricane. ‘The veterans in those camps were practically murdered,’ he declared.61 The hurricane also destroyed the train line at a time when Key West was trying to boost its fortunes by promoting itself as a holiday destination. In Hemingway’s posthumously published novel Islands in the Stream, the protagonist Thomas Hudson reflects, ‘He knew too what it was to live through a hurricane with the other people of the island and the bond that the hurricane made between all people who had been through it.’62 Cushioned by the success of A Farewell to Arms and Pfeiffer family wealth, Hemingway was materially untouched by such calamities. Fishing was one way to help the locals, either in Key West or on trips to Havana. With a huge catch of marlin and sailfish, Hemingway had fed ‘the whole water front . . . We’ve given them all away—cut ’em up and hand ’em out when we come in.’63 Self-sufficiency was Hemingway’s preferred economy. His sense of himself as an outsider was defined by Key West, leading him to believe, ‘A writer is an outlyer like a Gipsy.’64 Key West’s appeal not only included its distance from literary enclaves and the comforts of civilisation but its maverick characters, the tough, laconic, free-spirited Conchs who were inspiring Hemingway’s life and work. Like many of them, Hemingway
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was wary of federal aid and government intervention that could abrogate individual autonomy. Though Hemingway seemed the boss of his Mob, working-class friends like Joe Russell and Eddie Saunders, who earned their living—legally or illegally—by their wits, influenced how Hemingway perceived, and constructed, his ideal image of masculinity. And it was due to them that Hemingway decided to put down roots. In April 1931, Uncle Gus, who continued to fund Hemingway’s plans and dreams, bought Ernest and Pauline a magnificent house at 907 Whitehead Street. Admittedly, it was such a wreck that when Pauline first investigated it, she dubbed it ‘the haunted house’. But she saw its potential. The two-storey home with its wide, iron verandahs and arched, floor-to-ceiling windows was spacious, lightfilled and airy. Its style was subtlely European and it had extensive grounds. Built in 1851 by Asa Tift, a marine engineer who had managed a successful salvage operation in the area, it was made from white coral stones quarried on the property and from wood sourced in Georgia. Unlike the weatherboard Conch houses, it was built to last. One of its chief attractions—a two-storey carriage house at the rear—became Hemingway’s study. Uncle Gus signed the deeds over to Ernest and Pauline, making it the first home Hemingway had owned. But Pauline had reservations. The night the deal was done, Ernest celebrated boisterously with Charles Thompson at Sloppy Joe’s while Pauline spent a more sober evening with Lorine ‘in a mood somewhere between gloom and apprehension’.65 Pauline was pregnant and she had to wait until after Gregory’s birth, in November 1931, to start work on the house. Like Patrick’s, the birth was by caesarian section in a Kansas City hospital, and it left Pauline considerably weakened; she supervised the renovations
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from her bed. Not strong enough to climb the stairs, she slept in the chaos of the makeshift living room while Hemingway was upstairs in the master bedroom. An army of out-of-work men attended to the painting and plastering, to the rotted window frames and rainwarped doors. All the activity jangled Hemingway’s nerves. ‘We’ve been here a week,’ he complained to Maxwell Perkins, with ‘. . . plumbers, carpenters, nurse sick and a citizen in the front room typing all day on this manuscript.’ But ‘this is really going to be a hell of a fine house’.66 Grace had designed the family home at Oak Park and Pauline was assigned the job of ‘making’ the Hemingway home at Key West. Hemingway’s restlessness made his attitude to home contradictory. On the one hand, he espoused the wanderer’s refrain. ‘[R]emember,’ he told one of the Mob in 1931, ‘home for guys like us is a place that should be left in order to come back to.’ Such sentiments must have demoralised Pauline, especially as they were expressed in a letter Hemingway was dictating to her. (In another accident, a car smash that occurred late in 1931, Hemingway had broken his right arm.) But home meant more to Hemingway than he let on. His sophisticated visual sense, expressed in his admiration and friendship with artists such as Juan Gris, Joan Miró, André Masson and Pablo Picasso, meant he appreciated his new home’s finer points. It was ‘a grand house’ that looked like ‘a pretty good Utrillo, somewhere between that and Miró’s farm’.67 In 1925, Hemingway had bought Joan Miró’s The Farm (1921–22, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC) as a birthday present for Hadley. A highly detailed landscape painted in glowing blues and umbers, it was an important transitional work for Miró as he embraced Surrealism. Though Hadley claimed possession of The
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Farm when their marriage ended, Hemingway asked for it back on loan, and hung it in the living room at Whitehead Street. French modernist painting was a taste Hemingway and Pauline shared. In 1931, to celebrate their new establishment, they also purchased Juan Gris’s The Guitar Player (1926, location unknown) and The Bullfighter (1913, location unknown). The latter, a Cubist painting, was reproduced as the frontispiece for Death in the Afternoon. They also acquired works by Masson, Georges Braque and Paul Klee.68 The Farm, a nostalgic recollection of Miró’s parents’ property at Montroig, depicts a farmhouse and a barn, together with a marvellously detailed inventory of farm workers, animals, trees and fields. Pulsating with life, the painting celebrates the earth. Hemingway wrote that The Farm ‘has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there’.69 By describing his first home as a combination of Utrillo (who immortalised Paris) and Miró (who painted Spain), he refers to the places close to his heart and active in his imagination, sites of longing he wished to reconstruct, in prose and in reality, and that were represented by Key West. The renovation of Hemingway’s study was a priority and the results were excellent. Attached by a catwalk to the master bedroom, the study was near the house without being part of it.70 Neither too large nor too small, it was an eminently practical writer’s room painted in cool tones of blue and white. Doors and slatted wooden blinds let in light and air. Glistening, earth-coloured Cuban tiles covered the floor. Hemingway set himself up on a cigarmaker’s wood-frame chair at a round table, with his portable Royal typewriter, amid books, papers and works in progress. Bookcases reached from floor to ceiling. As Pauline commented, the room
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looked like ‘a lightly organised waste paper can’.71 Hemingway thrived. He reflected, ‘We have been (and are) damned happy here.’72 A balance of energies was in place: the solitude of writing with the camaraderie of hunting, the orderly pleasures of home with the lure of the wild. Pauline shipped her furniture from Paris and decorated the house in an elegantly eclectic fashion. She had some exquisite pieces, including an ornate, hand-blown Venetian glass chandelier that hung in the dining room, as well as several seventeenth-century Spanish items—benches, a desk and a massive gate from a mission that served as the Hemingways’ bedhead—all crafted in rich, dark Circassian walnut. The living room, hung with French modernist paintings together with realist works by Waldo Peirce and local artist Eugene Otto, opened onto the garden where drinks were taken after dinner. The Hemingways, among the wealthiest people on the island, had a staff of five. Their evening meal, usually attended by guests, was a grand affair—local produce was served with French wines from the Hemingways’ well-stocked cellar. Hemingway was justifiably proud of his home—‘very fine the way Pauline has fixed it up’—and the flourishing garden with its wide lawns, coconut palms and its fig, lime and alligator pear trees. A bestiary of pets was also growing—racoons, a possum, ‘eighteen goldfish and three peacocks’—plus the cats.73 Hemingway’s cats, or rather their descendants, are renowned, a drawcard to the museum equal to Hemingway’s reputation. The cats’ curiosity value lies in a genetic mutation: they are polydactyl, with six toes on their front paws and five on the rear. Handsome, healthy, well-groomed and relaxed, the sixty or so felines lounge in the house and grounds, accepting the tourists’ admiration as their due. It is a reminder
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that while Hemingway was obsessed with killing animals, he was also sentimentally attached to them, and sensitive to their grace and vitality. His new book, Death in the Afternoon, was a treatise on bull fighting and it was dedicated to Pauline. Hemingway conceived of it as a tribute, a defence and an explanation of an aspect of Spanish culture widely regarded as barbaric. Like Picasso, Hemingway was an avid fan and, like Picasso, he struggled to articulate his fondness for the sport. Between the two of them, and due to their celebrity status, they managed to popularise bullfighting internationally. Death in the Afternoon also provided Hemingway with an arena to indulge in another sport: attacking fellow writers, including William Faulkner and Aldous Huxley. The book was treated with a degree of incomprehension by American critics.74 Who was it designed to impress? The literary world or Hemingway’s new audience, the Key West Mob? Hemingway’s evolving macho persona meant that he yoked his talent as a superb modernist stylist to his need to address, engage and impress his new friends. It proved an uneasy bargain. In ‘After the Storm’, Hemingway refers to the Key West world directly for the first time. The story was written during 1932, a year when he spent ‘105 days in the gulf stream’.75 Maxwell Perkins had asked Hemingway why he wasn’t writing about Key West, such a ‘very rich and colorful scene’. Hemingway replied that first he had to absorb a sense of it and to understand ‘what part everything did play in the scheme of things’.76 He needed to absorb the stories his new friends told him and what they revealed about them as men, as images of masculinity and as representative of place.
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‘After the Storm’ reworks Captain Eddie Saunders’ tale about his discovery of the Spanish liner Valbanera that sank near Havana in 1919, killing all on board. During an early trip into the Gulf Stream, Saunders had regaled Hemingway with the grim tale. Saunders was a pivotal figure for Hemingway: the older man was an experienced sailor and charter-boat captain who generously introduced him to the Gulf Stream, its tides and currents, moods and dangers, together with the art of deep-water fishing. After Ed’s death, he became a father figure to Ernest. A grizzled, weather-beaten, selfreliant Conch, Saunders epitomised the new man that Hemingway valorised; one who was, literally and mythically, exposed to the fortunes of the elements and who survived by experience, luck and a lonely courage. But the heroism Saunders exemplified was ambiguous at best; it seems cruel fate shaped a man’s life, deadening his moral sense. After a drunken brawl, where the unnamed protagonist of ‘After the Storm’ believes he has murdered a man, he flees in his boat. By chance, he finds a sunken liner, ‘just lying there all under water as big as the whole world’. In a desperate bid to salvage it, he grabs a wrench and dives, only to make a grisly discovery. Through a port hole, he sees a drowned woman ‘with her hair floating all out . . . I could see the rings on one of her hands. She was right up close to the port hole and I hit the glass twice and I didn’t even crack it. When I came up I thought I wouldn’t make it to the top before I’d have to breathe.’77 After several fruitless and exhausting attempts, the man admits defeat. On his return to land, he learns that the fellow with whom he’d had the fight is alive, and, after friends rally to his defence, he is placed on a bond. But good luck is soured by bad. A storm
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prevents the protagonist and his friends from returning to salvage the liner. He finds ‘the Greeks had blown her open and cleaned her out . . . She carried gold and they got it all.’ At the story’s end, he ruminates on the ghastly fate of passengers and crew but his detachment excludes compassion. ‘Must have been something when they struck [the sand banks] in that rain and wind . . . There must have been some scenes inside all right because you know she settled fast.’ While the intervention of the man’s friends offers a glimpse of camaraderie, his final remark—‘even the birds got more out of her than I did’—symbolises a continuing and irrevocable sense of loss.78 Hemingway admired his Key West friends but he did not sentimentalise them. In ‘After the Storm’ the sea offers much— escape and the possibility of riches—but the latter proves to be an illusion. Water represents desire, frustration and longing, what is always out of reach. In late 1933, a long-awaited safari to Kenya and Tanzania prompted Hemingway to write Green Hills of Africa, an account of his journey with Charles Thompson and Pauline. Their guide was the legendary white hunter Philip Percival, who ran his safari business jointly with Bror Blixen. Hemingway and Bror got on famously, and Bror later visited Hemingway in the Bahamas. After the safari, to Pauline’s dismay, Hemingway decked the house with trophies—mounted heads of antelope, impala, kudu, oryx and rhinoceros. The skins of a leopard and a lion were made into rugs while the head of a gazelle, a large, beautiful, intelligent-looking creature, watched over Hemingway as he wrote. While tasteless and risible to a modern audience, Hemingway’s mementoes were his household gods, embodiments of past exploits, emblems of cherished conquests and journeys, and a valediction to the animals he vanquished.
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Increasingly, Hemingway was drawn to the spectacle of death as the key to understanding the human condition and, in particular, as a metaphor for male illumination and transformation. Critical response to Green Hills of Africa was discouraging. Early in 1936, deeply depressed by the reaction to his latest book, Hemingway wrote ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ and ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’. Both are set on safari in Africa, and both are about strained marriages and culminate with the death of the male protagonist. He also wrote an evocative article for Esquire, ‘On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter’. Then he set about turning two short stories about a smuggler called Harry Morgan into ‘that thing the pricks all love—a novel’.79 To Have and Have Not is the only full-length novel Hemingway set in America and the only one he published during the 1930s. Like The Sun Also Rises, To Have and Have Not summarises and farewells an epoch of Hemingway’s life and, like that book, it includes unkind portraits of those Hemingway once held dear. The ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ of the title are members of a floating population who inhabit the Gulf Stream region; some are victims of the Depression’s social turmoil, others are involved with revolutionary activities in Cuba, while the middle-class set, ostensibly the ‘haves’, lead shallow, selfish, unhappy lives. The protagonist, Harry Morgan, a charterboat captain, was partly based on that other influential Conch, Joe Russell. The central theme was ‘the decline of the individual—The Man Harry’.80 In April 1932, Joe had invited Hemingway to savour another source of Gulf Stream largesse: marlin. Hunting the giant fish in Russell’s boat the Anita took Hemingway regularly to Cuba. ‘The gulf stream runs almost black and comes right in to the shore.
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The marlin swordfish go by, swimming up the stream like cars on a highway.’81 On their first marlin-fishing trip, Hemingway and Russell planned to stay a fortnight but were away for two months. It seems Joe Russell’s wife was as accommodating about his absences as Pauline. Hemingway derived Harry’s name from the famous buccaneer Henry Morgan, active in the Caribbean during the late seventeenth century. During England’s decades-long war with Spain, the navy commissioned Morgan to attack Spanish vessels and colonies, tasks he acquitted with gusto. He was ruthless, brave and cunning, a formidable adversary and leader who followed the challenges of a seafaring life with a political career on land.82 Though the buccaneers of the Spanish Main have captivated the public imagination as romantic figures, they were mercenaries, bloodthirsty opportunists whose ambitions were gold and pillage. Such contradictions inspired Hemingway’s newest, and darkest, central character. Hemingway clearly admired Joe Russell—a shrewd businessman, bootlegger and smuggler, an expert sailor and fisherman, a husband and father, and a cheerfully ironic fellow. Russell’s various bars created, as Pauline did, a satisfying ‘home’ for Hemingway. In Key West, it’s hard to decide with whom Hemingway spent more time: his wife or Joe Russell. During Prohibition, Russell had managed speakeasies but, with its demise, he opened Sloppy Joe’s on Duval Street (Hemingway came up with the name), a barn-like place which remains virtually unchanged to this day. Despite the Depression, it was popular and Hemingway invested as co-owner. Hemingway’s daily ritual involved writing from early morning until about 2 pm. Afterwards, he would have a nap or a swim, and then around three make his way to Sloppy’s, often padding barefoot
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down Duval Street. As biographer James McLendon notes, it was not one of the town’s illustrious establishments. Pena’s Garden of Roses, Baby’s Place and the Cuban Club on the waterfront were smarter and attracted a more refined clientele. Sloppy’s was a rowdy fishermen’s bar with sawdust on the floor and overhead fans, ‘open twenty-four hours a day with bands and fist fights and a lot of loud talk’.83 Hemingway was in his element. Gin was ten cents a shot, whiskey was fifteen cents and beer cost a nickel for a tall glass. On a busy day during the winter season, Russell made an average of $1500. Hemingway downed several scotch and sodas before setting off for Whitehead Street, and dinner with Pauline. He did not take the bicycle but walked down the street. The moon was up now and the trees were dark against it, and he passed the frame houses with their narrow yards, and light coming from the shuttered windows; the unpaved alleys, with their double rows of houses; Conch town, where all was starched, well-shuttered, virtue, failure, grits and boiled grunts, under-nourishment, prejudice, righteousness, interbreeding and the comforts of religion; the open-doored, lighted Cuban bolito houses, shacks whose only romance was their names; The Red House, Chicha’s; the pressed stone church; its steeples sharp ugly triangles against the moonlight; the big grounds and the long, black-domed bulk of the convent, handsome in the moonlight; a filling station and a sandwich place, bright-lighted beside a vacant lot where a miniature golf course had been taken out; past the brightly lit main street with the three drug stores, the music store, the five Jew stores, three pool rooms, two barbershops, five beer joints, three ice cream parlours, the
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five poor and the one good restaurant, two magazine and paper places, four second-hand joints (one of which made keys), a photographer’s, an office building with four dentists’ offices upstairs, the big dime store, a hotel on the corner with taxis opposite; and across, behind the hotel, to the street that led to jungle town, the big unpainted frame house with lights and the girls in the doorway, the mechanical piano going, and a sailor sitting in the street; and then on back, past the back of the brick courthouse with its clock luminous at half-past ten, past the whitewashed jail building shining in the moonlight, to the embowered entrance of the Lilac Time where motor cars filled the alley.84
In To Have and Have Not, Joe is also cast as Freddy, whose bar is the connecting point for many of the book’s characters and much of its action. Freddy’s ‘legs ached all the time’ from standing behind the bar but, as one of the book’s few easygoing characters, he can afford to congratulate himself, musing ‘he was doing a good business, as good as anyone in the town and with less overhead’.85 How does a man survive? was the question posed by Ed’s death. In Joe, Hemingway sought an answer. Modesty, simplicity, knowing one’s limits and putting down roots—certainly not traits of Hemingway’s—were qualities he admired in Joe. Eddie Saunders is also in the book, as the kindly, honourable Captain Willie Adams, who tries to help Harry. Jeffrey Meyers suggests that Harry Morgan is a self-portrait of Hemingway. (In ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, Hemingway had given the name Harry to the dying hunter.) If so, it is extremely unflattering: Harry is brutal, desperate and doomed. Admiration
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for him must be qualified by the uglier aspects of his character. Albert, Harry’s deckhand on the disastrous voyage to Cuba, reflects that since Harry was a boy ‘he never had no pity for nobody. But he never had no pity for himself either.’ Harry was ‘a bully and he was bad spoken but I liked him all right’.86 Women are drawn to Harry’s charisma, the aura of a reckless warrior. ‘“Oh, he had a beautiful face,”’ comments a tourist in Freddy’s Bar, a woman whom Harry insults when she flirts with him. ‘“Like a Tartar or something . . . He looked kind of like Jenghiz Khan in the face. Gee, he was big.”’ Marie, Harry’s wife, a former prostitute, presents a compassionate image of him. Harry is a good lover—‘[t]here ain’t no other men like that’—who arouses her tenderness, who looks like ‘a kid’ when he is asleep and whose beloved face can move her to tears.87 Their marriage offers a refuge of intimacy and unqualified support, a true union. Though Harry has lost an arm, and his boat, in one bungled venture, it does not discourage him from pursuing further illegal activities. Harry is introduced to a group of Cuban revolutionaries who intend to rob the Key West bank and who need transport back to Havana. The deal is masterminded by Robert ‘Bee-lips’ Simmons, a lawyer based on George Brooks, the state attorney, first member of the Key West mob and a drinking buddy of Hemingway’s. Bee-lips was Brooks’s nickname. Brooks had earned Hemingway’s ire when he made him the target of practical jokes. At Sloppy Joe’s, Brooks convinced a homosexual that Hemingway shared his preference; when Hemingway arrived, the man embraced him, and Hemingway punched him to the floor. He then turned to Brooks, saying, ‘I know you’re behind this you conniving son-of-a-bitch, I know it.’88 The tale gives substance to the distaste with which Bee-lips’ character is
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drawn. Bee-lips is ‘so crooked himself that he’s always more pleased if people aren’t telling the truth’.89 Harry’s desperation is exacerbated by the Depression. When Albert, worried about the risks of the Cuban trip, explains he doesn’t want to ‘get in any real trouble’, Harry counters, ‘What worse trouble you going to get in than you’re in now? . . . What the hell worse trouble is there than starving?’ Albert is earning a pittance digging sewers for the Key West council, labour Harry disdains. ‘“I ain’t going to dig sewers for the government for less money than will feed [my kids]. I can’t dig now anyway. I don’t know who made the laws but I know there ain’t no law that you got to go hungry.”’ Albert observes, ‘“You talk like a radical,”’ to which Harry replies, ‘“I ain’t no radical . . . I’m sore. I been sore a long time.”’90 Harry is Hemingway’s mouthpiece for his resentment at govern ment intervention in Key West during the Depression. Similar views were held by many Conchs. By removing individual autonomy, Hemingway believed that state aid emasculated a man’s dignity, forcing him into a collective enterprise and making him powerless to define himself as a renegade outsider. But Harry’s dissatisfaction predates the Depression—‘I been sore a long time’. Harry illustrates ‘the decline of the individual’, the type of man represented by Hemingway’s Key West friends. But what type was that? Harry is not only a tragic figure but a misguided one. Unlike his wily namesake he can neither fight nor negotiate his way out of difficulties. Joe Russell had been too smart to allow such disasters to overtake him. It was why Hemingway needed to split Joe into two characters: Freddy, who survives, who is balanced, sanguine and canny, and Harry, who fails, who is governed by bitterness and fear.
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After the bank robbery, the Cubans rush aboard the boat Harry has hired for the crossing. Roberto, the leader, shoots Albert. Realising Roberto plans to kill him, too, Harry decides to murder the group but, in the gunfire, is fatally wounded himself. Dying, Harry makes his last confession. ‘“A man . . . One man alone ain’t got. No man alone now . . . No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody chance.”’ He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken all of his life to learn it.’91 The ambiguity of Harry’s statement is the measure of Hemingway’s own doubts regarding class and/or male solidarity. It seems ‘no matter’ what, a man like Harry is doomed. In 1944, when To Have and Have Not was made into a film directed by Howard Hawks, the plot was changed so drastically it bore no relation to the original. A wartime audience needed a hero, not a disaffected loser. Set in Martinique, Harry ‘Steve’ Morgan is played by Humphrey Bogart. A rough diamond who is fundamentally idealistic, Bogart is persuaded to help the French resistance. The film is memorable for the chemistry between Bogart and Lauren Bacall in her first movie role. To Bogart, Bacall says her famous line, ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.’ Hemingway loathed the film, as he did most of the movies made from his works. Hemingway’s simmering anger at the rate of development in Key West was also aired in To Have and Have Not. It was becoming ‘a beauty spot for tourists’ where the poor would be ‘starved out’, their homes demolished and replaced with resort-style apartments.92 Key West was changing. The arrival of a literary figure like Hemingway, along with his bohemian pals, indicates how piquant the island proved to middle-class taste.
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In To Have and Have Not, Hemingway reserves the most ire for the leisured set, the intellectuals and wealthy characters who appear in the latter section of the book. Written between late 1936 and early 1937, and then extensively reworked, this section gave Hemingway enormous trouble, not the least of which was his concern about being sued for libel. Dos Passos, who had fallen foul of Hemingway, is cast as Richard Gordon, a left-wing novelist who is having an affair with the glamorous, seductive Helène Bradley. Richard’s wife, Helen, is disgusted with her husband’s behaviour, and decides to leave him for another man. In ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, Helen is the name given to Harry’s wealthy, unhappy wife, and in To Have and Have Not Helen stands for Pauline. But the similarity of the names ‘Helen’ and ‘Helène’ means that women are, fundamentally, the same. It takes only an accent to turn a good woman into a bitch. In an extraordinary outburst—and the most moving and convincing speech in the book—Helen lists what she sees as Richard’s failings: she is a Catholic and wanted to have children but he has forced her to have abortions; he espouses radical causes but changes his politics ‘to suit the fashion’; her working-class father was ‘a man’ and her new lover, Professor John McWalsey, is ‘a man’ but Richard definitely is not. He’s not even good in bed. Hemingway includes himself in Helen’s litany of complaints. She tells her husband, ‘“I’ve tried to be a good wife, but you’re as selfish and conceited as a barnyard rooster. Always crowing, “‘Look what I’ve done. Look how I’ve made you happy. Now run along and cackle.”’93 Though it is undocumented whether Pauline had an abortion, Helen’s diatribe suggests she did. Hemingway had every reason to feel guilty. He was having an affair with Jane Mason, an ethereally lovely and wildly unstable woman
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who lived in Cuba with her long-suffering husband, Grant, and their two adopted sons. It was one of the reasons that Hemingway was spending time in Havana. In To Have and Have Not, Jane became ‘the rich bitch’, ‘the famous beautiful’ Helène Bradley, who ‘collected writers as well as their books’.94 Jane Mason’s passion for drinking, fishing, shooting and risk-taking was nearly equal to Hemingway’s but, while Hemingway was attracted to strong, sexy, smart women, he required his female partner to provide ballast for him, not the other way around. Hemingway was not, by nature, a philanderer, but his retreat from Pauline, and his affair with Jane Mason seemed to indicate he was on the prowl for a new partner. One afternoon in December 1936, that woman strolled into Sloppy Joe’s. Martha Gellhorn, a twenty-eight-year-old writer and journalist, wore high heels and a black cotton sundress that set off her shoulder-length blonde hair and slender figure. She was intelligent, articulate, ambitious and a big fan of Ernest Hemingway’s. She was in town on holidays with her mother and younger brother. As legend has it, Martha and Hemingway struck up an acquaintance and did not budge from the bar that afternoon, knocking back ‘Papa Dobles’, mixed by Skinner, the massive, quietly authoritative African-American bartender. Papa Dobles, named for Hemingway, comprised Bacardi rum, fresh lime and grapefruit juice, capped off with maraschino liqueur and whipped up in a rusty electric blender. To Skinner, Martha and Hemingway looked like ‘beauty and the beast’. When Pauline sent Charles Thompson to drag Hemingway home for dinner, Charles explained that Ernest was ‘talking to a beautiful blonde in a black dress’.95 Pauline was used to her husband being lionised. Hemingway was a celebrity and it was common knowledge he went to Sloppy’s
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each afternoon. He was dubbed Key West’s ‘leading citizen’ by the chamber of commerce, and 907 Whitehead Street was listed in a guide to local tourist attractions. He regularly found wellwishers waiting for him outside his home to snap his photograph. Depending on his mood, he would chat to them or ignore them. Pauline had a high stone wall built around the property to keep out prying eyes. Martha Gellhorn’s family left Key West but she stayed on, hanging out with the Mob and working on a new book in her hotel room. She and Hemingway saw a lot of each other. Lorine Thompson observed, ‘There was no question about it; you could see [Martha] was making a play for him.’96 Hemingway’s guilt over Jane Mason now included Martha. In a karmic twist, Martha used the same strategy as Pauline when she had prised Hemingway from Hadley: she insinuated herself into their home as a friend. Martha was at Whitehead Street so often, she told Pauline, that she was a fixture there, ‘like a kudu head’.97 (A kudu is an east African antelope, and Hemingway had several trophies.) Pauline kept her counsel, even though the pair were indiscreet. As Miriam Williams, the cook, recalled, ‘There would be parties and Mr Ernest and Miss Martha would be outside and kissing and carrying on and I’d say to Miss Ada [Stern, the boys’ nanny], “look at that would you.” The way some people act.’98 Hemingway asked Martha to share Pauline’s treasured task: she read the unrevised manuscript of To Have and Have Not. While its dialogue made her ‘weak with envy and wonder’, she wanted to avoid parodying Hemingway’s style, however superior it was to all the others ‘I’ve been trying on lately’.99 As Martha told her good friend, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hemingway was ‘an odd bird, very
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lovable and full of fire and a marvelous story teller . . . [I] have just read the mss of his new book and been very smart about it.’100 Martha was sympathetic to the plight of the Depression’s victims. The Trouble I’ve Seen, a quartet of short stories, is drawn from her wide experience as a relief-investigator for FERA, and charts, in a series of finely realised portraits, the Depression’s dreadful effects. Published in September, the book had received excellent reviews and Gellhorn was hailed as the literary discovery of the year. On 2 January 1937, Hemingway announced to Maxwell Perkins that he’d finished his new book—but he meant the first draft. He was not happy with it, admitting that he needed ‘more time to leave it alone to get a proper perspective on it . . . to get that detached eye I need for rewriting’.101 There was an issue more pressing than the completion of a novel: the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. It forged another bond between him and Martha because both were devoted to the Republican cause. Hemingway told Maxwell Perkins, ‘I’ve got to go to Spain.’102 He foresaw that Franco’s fascist rebellion, supported by Hitler and Mussolini, was the dress rehearsal for a wider conflict that would engulf Europe. Hemingway had been approached to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance. He encouraged Martha to get similar credentials and share the adventure with him. On 10 January, after Martha left Key West to start back for her home in St Louis, she and Hemingway rendezvoused in Miami. He was on his way to New York to finalise his travel arrangements. Soon, Martha was also making plans to go to Spain. It was another reason Ernest refused to let Pauline accompany him. To Mary, Pauline’s mother, with whom he had a close, affectionate relationship, he tried to justify his decision. ‘I hate to go away but you can’t preserve
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your happiness by trying to take care of it or putting it away in mothballs and for a long time me and my conscience both have known I had to go to Spain.’ Once there, he would ‘have to work fairly hard’ and, ‘in any event’, he wouldn’t put Pauline in danger by allowing her to go.103 In eerie detail, the 1936–37 episode of Martha, To Have and Have Not and Key West reprises Pauline, The Sun Also Rises and Paris. One decade later, Hemingway was planning to leave his wife and his home for a new lover and a new home, and to publish a book that would identify and hurt so many close to him that he would have no recourse but to quit the place he lived. That winter in Key West, Matthew Josephson, a writer whom Hemingway had known in Paris, became a new drinking buddy. Hemingway told Josephson that ‘he . . . had a nice house and boat in Key West, though they belonged to Pauline, [Hemingway] said. “I could stay on here forever, but it’s a soft life. Nothing’s really happening to me here and I’ve got to get out.”’104 In April, Hemingway was in Madrid, staying at the Hotel Florida, where he was joined by Martha, who’d managed to gain credentials from Collier’s, a weekly magazine. The city had been under seige from General Franco’s Nationalist forces since October. Hemingway wrote that ‘as you lie in bed, you hear the firing from the frontline seventeen blocks away’.105 Hemingway was also collaborating with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens to produce a documentary, The Spanish Earth, that promoted the Republican cause. Under such dramatic circumstances, Ernest’s romance with Martha bloomed. Martha proved herself to be brave, resilient and good-humoured, as well as a scrupulous and compassionate war correspondent.
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In June, Hemingway was back in Key West making major revisions to his book. He was so worried about the veracity of the portraits of Jane Mason, Dos Passos and others that he asked Arnold Gingrich, his publisher at Esquire, and Maurice Speiser, his lawyer, to comb the text for possible libel. On their advice, he deleted clear references to Dos Passos, removed from Helène Bradley’s character Jane Mason’s more obvious traits and deleted literary gossip about Scott Fitzgerald and Hart Crane. But he was not confident the novel could stand alone. He suggested to Perkins ‘a living omnibus’, comprising the Harry Morgan stories, together with various prose pieces, including ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ and ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’, plus his essay, ‘Who Murdered the Vets?’ and a smattering of dispatches from Spain.106 He also wanted to excise the sections about the leisured set. The title he’d come up with—To Have and Have Not—was designed not for the novel but the omnibus. Perkins was unenthusiastic. In Hemingway’s correspondence with Perkins, he rarely expressed self-doubt nor did he canvas his publisher’s opinion about work in progress. As Perkins well knew, Hemingway reacted to criticism like a wounded bull, and to keep his famous author happy, Perkins had to placate him. But Hemingway’s reservations about the book at such a late stage, and the peculiar idea to present the Harry Morgan section bolstered by a selection of recent writing, indicate how aware he was of its shortcomings. Even Pauline voiced her doubts, telling Ernest that, though the writing was wonderful and the substance perfect, ‘the form’ needed thought. She advised him to ‘let the book rest’.107 But Hemingway forged ahead. He was in Spain, with Martha, when To Have and Have Not was published in October. While it
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earned him the cover of Time and hit the bestseller lists, reviews were mixed. Alfred Kazin though it was significant that Hemingway chose Key West to represent America. For like the Paris of 1925, Key West is at once an outpost of culture and its symbol . . . It is by Key West that Hemingway went home, and it is Key West, apparently, that remains America in cross-section to him: the noisy, shabby, deeply moving rancor and tumult of all those human wrecks, the fisherman and the Cuban revolutionaries, the veterans and the alcoholics, the gilt-edged snobs and the hungry natives, the great white stretch of beach promising everything and leading nowhere.108
Malcolm Cowley, an admirer of Hemingway’s, felt the book’s weakness was ‘a simple matter of plot structure . . . The book falls apart at the beginning and the end’.109 While the critics concurred it was among the ‘least successful’ of Hemingway’s works, all agreed it presaged a new beginning: Harry’s demise was the death of a certain kind of Hemingway hero and the writer was ‘saying farewell’ to a ‘type of man and mode of expression’ he had created.110 The most sympathetic characters in To Have and Have Not are women—Helen Gordon and Marie Morgan—who have a moral sense and a human dimension denied to the men. In Key West, Hemingway had developed, and valorised, a masculine identity based on prowess in the natural world, an ideal brotherhood that involved action, strength, sport and booze, and that was dependent on the company of men like Joe Russell, Eddie Saunders and JB Sullivan. But when Hemingway tried to write about that masculinity,
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to enshrine it and forge characters from it, he failed. It seems Ernest did not understand his Key West friends. Harry Morgan is not quite myth and not quite man; he is caught between Hemingway’s desired masculinity and its limitations. Hemingway could confidently create sensitive middle-class ‘failures’ like Frederic Henry or Nick Adams, but with a working-class hero like Harry he was at a loss. What made Harry tick? He represents Hemingway’s shadow self, the killer, the pirate, the pitiless, unforgiving hunter. But what reader can identify with such a man? Hemingway finished Harry off, giving him a final, garbled moment of redemption. There is another character central to Hemingway’s Key West experience that is not fully realised—the Gulf Stream. While much of the action takes place on its waters, it emerges not as a symbolic force but as a passive background. Hemingway is unable to characterise it in fiction, to bring its powerful unconscious elements to his conscious, writerly mind. ‘Saying farewell’ was Hemingway’s painful project during the next two years, as he embarked on an agonised, drawn-out leave-taking of Pauline, his home and his friends. He had arrived at Key West as a young man and he had grown to maturity there, achieving not only literary and commercial success but celebrity status. His mentors now occupied different roles in his life. Joe Russell was a businessman, unable to drop whatever he was doing and go fishing for weeks on end, while Eddie Saunders and JB Sullivan were ageing. Hemingway was captain of his own boat, the Pilar, and in charge of his own fishing expeditions. Charles and Lorine Thompson, distressed by Hemingway’s infidelity, were loyal to Pauline and distanced themselves from him. Hemingway had also fallen out with many members of his Mob, both in Key West and elsewhere.
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As Arnold Gingrich was told in Key West, ‘We’ll welcome you any day now to a large and I’m afraid not very exclusive society—the ex-friends of Hemingway.’111 Goodness knows how George Brooks took his caricature as Bee-lips but at least he did not sue. To Have and Have Not, with its grim cavalcade of ‘human wrecks’, did not endear Hemingway to the locals. They felt betrayed. It seemed as far as Hemingway was concerned, being a Conch meant being a loser. Hemingway was spending more time in Cuba, staying at Havana’s Ambos Mundos Hotel. In 1939, when Martha Gellhorn found a property, Finca Vigía (Lookout Farm) at San Francisco de Paula, about twenty minutes from the city, Hemingway moved in and their relationship became public. It was the same pattern started by Grace at Oak Park and that continued with Pauline at Key West: it was the woman’s role to choose and design the Hemingway home. Once it was designed and completed, certainly in the cases of Pauline and Martha, Hemingway left either it or them. Today Finca Vigía is the Ernest Hemingway Museum, holding first editions of Hemingway’s books, hunting trophies and furniture from Hemingway’s time there. Following his divorce from Pauline, Hemingway and Martha married in 1940. Pauline, who did not remarry, stayed on at White head Street until her death in 1951. After Hemingway’s marriage to Martha ended acrimoniously in 1945, he continued to live at Finca Vigía with his fourth wife, journalist Mary Welsh. Why remain in Cuba? ‘The biggest reason you live [there] is the great, deep, blue river, three quarters of a mile to a mile deep and sixty to eighty miles across . . . that has, when the river is right, the finest fishing I have ever known.’112 Hemingway’s love letter to the Gulf Stream, The Old Man and the Sea, was published in 1952 and it earned him the Nobel Prize. In
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Pollock House, The Springs. Photograph © Janine Burke.
Pollock’s studio. Photograph © Janine Burke.
Jackson Pollock, Birth, c.1941. Oil on canvas, 116.8 × 55 cm. Tate Gallery, London. © Tate, London, 2009.
Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist (Number 1), 1950. Oil, enamel and aluminium on canvas, 221 × 300 cm. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1976.37. Photograph: Richard Carafelli. © National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock lying in the grass, 1950. Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate.
Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, c.1911–12. Oil on board, 40 × 34 cm. NPG 5933. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
Duncan Grant, Interior, c.1918. Oil on canvas, 163 × 174.8 cm. Ulster Museum, Belfast. Courtesy the Trustees of National Museums, Northern Ireland. © Duncan Grant, 1918/DACS. Licensed by VISCOPY, Sydney, 2009.
Vanessa Bell, Self Portrait, c.1958. Oil on canvas, 48 × 39 cm. The Charleston Trust. © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett.
Virginia Woolf’s garden study. Photograph © Janine Burke.
Sussex Downs with Rodmell in the distance. Photograph © Janine Burke.
Charleston and garden. Photograph © Janine Burke.
Ernest Hemingway’s home, Key West. Photograph © Janine Burke.
Sloppy Joe’s, Key West. Photograph © Janine Burke.
Clarence Hemingway (left) and Ernest, Key West, 1928. EH 8163P Box 9 Folder 4, Key West Years 1928–38. Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston.
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between, Hemingway had written his Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was a massive commercial success, and Across the River and into the Trees, an account of an affair between an ageing soldier and a young Italian countess that was widely derided. While The Old Man and the Sea is not set in Key West, it explains the reason Hemingway settled there: the Gulf Stream. Written in a rush at the beginning of 1951, the novella recoups the losses, both critical and artistic, of To Have and Have Not. An enchanting and lyrical fairy tale, The Old Man and the Sea has two intertwined characters, Santiago—based on both Hemingway’s Cuban captain and friend, Carlos Gutierrez, and Eddie Saunders—and the Gulf Stream. Together, man and nature comprise a mythic couple. The Old Man and the Sea achieves a detachment To Have and Have Not lacks, making it an authentic hero journey instead of propaganda for male angst or a forum for airing personal grievances. Surprisingly for Hemingway, who had presented existence as a spectacle of brutality and violent death, The Old Man and the Sea is tender and sentimental, especially in its treatment of animals. Islands in the Stream, written almost simultaneously, achieves a similarly moving degree of intimacy between the human and animal realms in the passages that explore the relationship between Thomas Hudson and his cat Boise. Indeed, Hemingway originally conceived of Islands in the Stream and The Old Man and the Sea as one book, with the latter forming the final section. The Old Man and the Sea was originally titled ‘The Sea in Being’. Hemingway regarded it as ‘an epilogue to all my writing and what I have learned, or tried to learn, while writing and trying to live’.113 At fifty-three, Hemingway, The Old Man of the Sea, was a kinder, sympathetic and more solicitous being than Hemingway-as-Harry-Morgan.
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The story had been forming in Hemingway’s mind since 1936 when he referred to it in his essay ‘On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter’. Gutierrez had told him of an old fisherman, alone in a skiff, who had hooked a great marlin that pulled the skiff far out to sea. After several days, the old man managed to harpoon the marlin and lash it to his boat. But the fish was attacked by sharks, who devoured it. The old man was weeping when he was found, ‘half crazy from his loss, and the sharks were still circling the boat’.114 In Hemingway’s tale, Santiago’s run of bad luck means he has lost Manolino, his young deckhand, whose father has insisted he work with other boats. Alone, Santiago sets off into the Stream. Fishing becomes an exercise in trawling the unconscious, the depths of memory and loss, as well as providing a symbol of life’s journey. It is also an exercise in suffering and endurance, making some reviewers cringe at ‘the suggestion of Christian martyrdom’.115 Out on the Stream, what consoles Santiago is not recollections of his dead wife or his longing for Manolino’s assistance—that which is human—but nature itself. Santiago contemplates the power and personality of the marlin. ‘Then he began to pity the great fish that he had hooked. He is wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is, he thought. Never have I had such a strong fish nor one who acted so strangely . . . “Fish,” he said. “I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.” Let us hope, he thought.’116 The marlin can be interpreted as Santiago’s alter ego whose unbridled, thrusting, youthful, male strength derives from the sea’s energy, from the depths below the surface, and which is potent and mysterious. In another reverie, Santiago describes lions at play on a beach in Africa at dusk. Nature is Arcadia, no longer the predator’s theatre of
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danger and death but the pantheist’s place of worship, where lions are as charming and docile as cats, and where fish and birds are brothers. By positioning The Old Man and the Sea in a numinous natural world, Hemingway’s idealised masculinity becomes heroic and believable, tragic, touching and transcendent, rather than a series of masks and postures. Death, Hemingway’s favourite fictional climax, does not provide the ending to The Old Man and the Sea. Santiago survives and returns home where he is cared for by Manolino. Alcohol is another motif notably absent in The Old Man and the Sea. Until then, Hemingway’s fiction was awash with grog. It seemed to function in his writing as it did in his daily life: drinking was a method of marking time, either alone or with others. He not only inhabited the liquid realm, he also consumed it. At Finca Vigía, Hemingway’s first Bloody Mary was served at precisely 11 am. There was wine with lunch, more drinks with dinner, and so on into the night. Hemingway encouraged those around him, including his young sons, to overindulge.117 But in The Old Man and the Sea, the element of water is honoured as a life force, restorative and beautiful, a lover and a saviour, a worthy opponent, a transfigurative metaphor that is not debased as mind-numbing quantities of booze. In 1959, Hemingway unwillingly left the Gulf Stream to take up residence in Ketchum, Idaho where he’d regularly gone hunting. Fidel Castro’s revolution, which Hemingway supported, had banished the US-backed government of Fulgencio Batista, and most Americans left the island as businesses were nationalised. Hemingway’s new home, a stark concrete bunker, stood on a hillside overlooking Wood River. On the Stream ‘the changes of each season show in the sea as they do on the land. There is no monotony as long as the current
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is alive and moving, and each day you never know what you will meet with.’ But at Ketchum, ‘living on a hill in the country, you fish the days you pick.’118 Hemingway’s departure from the Gulf Stream marked a dreadful decline: he was ill with liver and kidney problems, diabetes, hypertension, skin disease and deteriorating eyesight. As well, he was bedevilled by insomnia (as ever), as well by depression and paranoia. Two plane crashes in Uganda in 1954, the second resulting in severe head injuries, only added to his woes. Psychiatric care at the Mayo Clinic, that included electroconvulsive treatment, did not help. In July 1961, Hemingway committed suicide, like his father, with a gun. Mary Welsh had argued strenuously with the doctors to keep Ernest at the clinic, fearing that he would try to kill himself. An earlier attempt had seen him reincarcerated. But he was released, and though Mary locked the gun cupboard, she did not hide the key. Hemingway used a double-barrelled twelve-gauge shotgun, a messier prospect than his father’s handgun. He rested the barrels against his forehead, just over his eyes, and pulled the trigger. Mary told the press it was an accident. Hemingway was sixty-one but in photographs he looks much older, white-haired, dazed and frail. The Old Man and the Sea, the last work published in Hemingway’s lifetime, had proved an epilogue to all his writing and, fittingly, it was an ode to the Gulf Stream where, like the exploration of his psyche as a writer, ‘each day you never know what you will meet with’.
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g Monet at work at the lily pond, assisted by Blanche Hoschedé-Monet. July 1915. © Collection Philippe Piguet, Paris.
g 7
L a N ym ph é a Mone t , Bla nc he Hosc hedé a nd Giver ny Everything here was illuminated by him. Blanche Hoschedé1
In April 1914, Monet suddenly announced he was ‘feeling marvellous and obsessed with the desire to paint . . . I even intend to undertake some large things’.2 What made Monet’s comment remarkable was that, after a series of personal calamities, France’s most renowned painter had sunk into a depression and ceased to work. In 1911, Alice, his second wife and companion of thirty years, had died. The following year, Monet was diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes. Then the health of his son Jean, who had syphilis, deteriorated horribly. At the family home at Giverny, Jean was nursed by Blanche Hoschedé, his wife and Monet’s stepdaughter, until his death in February 1914.3 Blanche and Monet were united in grief. Monet’s new paintings, the waterlily cycle known as the Grand Décorations, proved to be his greatest achievement. He did not
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have to plan them alone. Blanche had been painting alongside Monet since she was a teenager. Monet had trained and encouraged her and, at forty-nine, she was an accomplished artist. Without Blanche’s assistance, Monet could neither have undertaken the Grand Décorations nor been able to complete them. For Monet and Blanche, Giverny—the focus of Monet’s late work—was a shared site. Blanche, by inhabiting it, illuminated it for him—as he did for her.
g In 1856, when Monet was sixteen and on the cusp of becoming an artist, his mother died. Louise-Justine was a vibrant, sophisticated and graceful woman who had created a ‘grand salon’ at the family home in Normandy’s port city of Le Havre. A connoisseur of the arts, she was a trained singer, played the piano and staged amateur theatricals for the town’s upper classes. Not only did she fill the house with art, guests and music, she also ‘drew with talent’.4 Louise-Justine was the first to encourage Monet: as a teenager she hired casts for him to draw and praised the results. Monet’s passion for the effects of light on water can be traced to his formative years near the sea. Water as the feminine, as the sustaining focus in his art, began there; water was Monet’s ‘most revered’ element, the flowing liquid of creativity, of life itself. Aside from light, as Paul Hayes Tucker notes, it was Monet’s ‘most consistent artistic companion’. He would later be known as Normandy’s ‘great visual poet’.5 With Louise-Justine’s death, Monet lost not only his mother but his home. Adolphe, his dour and respectable father, sent the boy
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to live with his aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, an amateur painter who, at first, doted on him and provided him with funds. But once Monet identified himself with the avant-garde, in both art and lifestyle, his father lost sympathy and his aunt withdrew her support. Monet was secretive about his childhood, insisting he’d grown up amongst philistines. He was a teenager when LouiseJustine died but, in recollection, he said he was twelve, indicating a sense of loss so profound he felt as helpless as a child.6 Monet moved to Paris, where he embraced la vie bohemienne. Camille Doncieux was his model, as well as his lover, posing for early successes, including Camille (Woman in the green dress) (1866, Kunsthalle, Bremen) and Women in the Garden (1866–67, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), images that celebrate femininity, fashion and a bold new painting style. But his father and aunt disapproved of Camille and did their best to break up the union, first severing Monet’s allowance, then agreeing to assist him if he abandoned Camille when she became pregnant. He pretended to obey, but secretly supplied Camille with cash, though he dithered for years about marrying her. Did he regard her as socially inferior? In 1876, Monet met the love of his life, Alice Hoschedé. He was artist-in-residence at Château de Rottembourg, Ernest and Alice Hoschedé’s splendid mansion at Montgeron, where they lived with their six children (Blanche, then eleven, recalled the ‘grand artiste’ with his long hair).7 Monet completed four huge canvases to decorate the dining room. Ernest Hoschedé, debonair and profligate, was an enterprising collector committed to modern art, snapping up Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872, Musée Marmottan, Paris), the work that gave the Impressionist movement its name. The Hoschedé wealth was
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founded in the textile trade but Ernest had no head for business. Though cracks had begun to appear in his empire, Ernest was determined to keep up appearances and continued to entertain lavishly.8 Monet, who indulged his sybaritic tastes even when money was tight, relished the Hoschedés’ luxurious lifestyle. Artists and writers were prized guests and travelled down from Paris in a private train. When the Hochedés were declared bankrupt, Monet took pity on them, inviting them to join his household in the Normandy village of Vétheuil. The situation placed Monet under enormous pressure. With the Hoschedé clan, as well as his own sons, Jean and Michel, he had a dozen mouths to feed. The situation was made even more dire because of Camille’s health: she had been diagnosed with cancer, probably of the uterus or the cervix. Alice tenderly nursed Camille through the final stages of her illness, as well as caring for the children and running the home. ‘The poor woman suffered much,’ recalled Alice, ‘a long and terrible agony and, until the last moment, she was conscious. It was heartbreaking to watch the sad farewells she made to her children.’9 Monet painted his own heartbreaking farewell. Camille on Her Deathbed (1879, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) is a ghostly image Monet felt compelled to make, telling a friend years later, ‘I caught myself, my eyes fixed on her tragic forehead, in the act of mechanically looking for the sequence of tones, seeking to make my own gradations of colour which death had just settled upon the immobile face.’10 Death swirls like a snowstorm of blue and grey strokes engulfing and dissolving Camille. Monet’s ménage was not his only concern. He was having problems finding a market for his landscape paintings, which were regarded as unfinished, and whatever money he made went
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to staunch massive debts. Begging his patron Georges de Bellio for assistance while Camille was dying, Monet received a response that characterised the public unwillingness to accept the new style. I must say—with all the frankness you know me to possess— that it is truly impossible for you to dream of making money from canvases which are so incomplete. You are, my dear friend, trapped in a terrible circle from which I do not see how you can escape. To make money one must have paintings and to make paintings one must have money . . . 11
During the harsh winter of 1879–80, Monet went out painting when he could, recording the snow-covered landscape and the river blanketed with ice, while at home he concentrated on studies of dead game birds, bleak images of death and nature’s remorseless cycle. Why did Monet, in straitened circumstances and with Camille in failing health, take the Hoschedés into his home? It seems an affair between Monet and Alice had begun at Château de Rottembourg. Monet’s wish to have Alice with him may have also been prompted by the possibility that her two-year-old son, Jean-Pierre, was his child. Jean-Pierre was born in August 1877, nine months after Monet left the château. Alice, a society hostess with a fondness for costume balls and haute couture, was fired with an enthusiasm for art similar to her husband’s. Sensitive and highly strung, she often needed Monet to rally her flagging spirits. Alice was not a beauty like Camille. Photographs from the 1880s show a stout, plain woman who looks uncomfortable in the tightly corseted fashions of the day. Like Monet, she loved the countryside and it is probably Alice who
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gazes into The Pool at Montgeron (1876, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg), one of the works Monet completed for the château’s dining room. After Camille’s death, Ernest insisted Alice join him in Paris and was annoyed when she refused. What was the point of going to Paris, Alice countered, when there was barely enough money to survive at Vétheuil? She would not respond to Ernest’s reproaches of Monet. After all, it was Monet who was supporting them and the fellow was working hard.12 The matter was further complicated by the fact Ernest was Monet’s agent in Paris, trying to sell his paintings. It was a delicate situation for all concerned, especially Alice, living under the same roof as a man who was not her husband. Gossip was inevitable, and the journal Le Gaulois printed a malicious article about Monet living at Vétheuil with his ‘charming wife’ Alice.13 In 1882, the household was still in turmoil. After moving to Poissy, a village closer to Paris, cash remained short. Nor was Alice entirely convinced she should stay with Monet. Ernest had no intention of relinquishing his family and kept demanding that Alice return to him. Alice equivocated, telling her husband that she would join him in Paris, then assuring Monet she would not leave him. Bedevilling the situation was Monet’s work pattern, which had caused problems for Camille, too. He needed weeks, sometimes months, to record his petites sensations and, once enthralled by the possibilities a place offered, he could not tear himself away. For example, in February 1882, Monet travelled to Dieppe on the Normandy coast but, finding no subjects that inspired him, he left for Pourville. He stayed there until mid-April—other than a
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quick trip to Paris for an exhibition at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery with his Impressionist colleagues. Monet was able to rent a holiday house, Villa Juliette, at Pourville where the family joined him in June. It proved a happy sojourn. Monet was euphoric, painting steadily and completing more than fifty studies of the coastline. Blanche recalled that his brood was delighted when he took them boating. ‘Monet who adored the water was always in a boat.’14
g It was at Pourville that Blanche Hoschedé, now sixteen, first began painting en plein air. In precisely realised studies, she concentrated on Villa Juliette, situated in the centre of town, a large, half-timbered house typical of Normandy. Blanche’s first artworks depict her home, the emotional and artistic centre of her life.15 Blanche was Alice’s second daughter. She was fourteen when the great rupture took place that saw the abrupt and ignominious end of her privileged existence. At Montgeron, she had lived in a small palace where she was attended by servants, tutored by a governess, dressed in expensive clothes and ferried about by carriage. Suddenly, Blanche found herself crammed into a rented house with the Monets, with creditors banging on the front door. At the same time, her father’s role was being usurped by Monet. Her new father was shrewd and resilient but, equally, driven and unpredictable, given to fits of temper and despair, especially when frustrated by the progress of his painting. Monet was the boss and the household was organised to suit his needs. Blanche described him as ‘fierce and very animated’ though he could also be ‘kindness
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itself’. He loved children, teasing them and playing games like hideand-seek, but once at work, he became ‘very silent’ and brooked no disturbance.16 Blanche formed a remarkable bond with Monet. Encouraged by his example, she devoted herself to art. Monet took Blanche’s ambitions seriously, inviting her to accompany him on outdoor painting expeditions, as well as advising her about the practical matters of technique and advancing her career. Monet and Blanche became companion-artists, the talented young woman working alongside the brilliant craftsman and visionary. Blanche was Monet’s ‘most assiduous assistant’. After a hearty breakfast, the two would load their gear into a wheelbarrow and ‘make their way through the dewy countryside’ to watch the sunrise or have themselves driven by horse-drawn cart to some ‘remote spot’. Monet disliked the idea of giving painting lessons but he was always ready with advice. As Claire Joyes notes, their easels were ‘never very far apart’.17 Portrait of Blanche Hoschedé (c.1880, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen) was completed around the time the Hoschedés moved in with Monet. It is an unusual painting for several reasons. Portraiture does not have a central place in Monet’s oeuvre, though occasionally he did studies of family members, friends or unusual characters he came across. His method, pioneered with Camille, was to place the figure in a landscape so that the person, usually a woman, evokes a relationship between form and space, between different kinds of surfaces, textures and colours, between the human and the natural worlds, providing an anecdotal touch to scenes that otherwise might seem empty or uninflected. Camille assumes such a role in several of Monet’s outstanding studies in the genre—Camille Reading (1872, Walters Gallery, Baltimore) and Woman with a Parasol—Madame
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Monet and her Son (1875, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC). The face, with its transcription of personality and its static features, interested Monet less than the fugitive effects of light. Portraits contemporary with Blanche Hoschedé, like Portrait of Jeanne Serveau (c.1880, private collection) or Portrait of Andre Lauvray (c.1880, private collection) are failures, sentimental studies probably cranked out by Monet for some quick cash. Blanche is different. Her warm, sensual face, large dark eyes, full lips and soft curves are worthy of the girls who give such élan to Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880, Phillips Collection, Washington). Blanche is the only work where Monet portrays a woman as earthy—though Blanche, of course, was still an adolescent. His paintings of Camille, however tender, show her as a sophisticated parisienne whether she inhabits landscape, garden or interior. When Monet includes Alice or her younger daughter Suzanne in his paintings, they fulfill the same role. In The Pool at Montgeron or Study of a Figure Out of Doors (1886, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), Alice and Suzanne are seen from a distance. Wearing elegant white clothes, they provide the focus against foliage and water (in Alice’s case) or sky and grass (in Suzanne’s). Blanche is in close-up. There is nothing to see but her. Though she does not look directly at Monet, her expression and her body language, underscored by the gentle tilt of her head, denote trust and receptivity. Her lips are slightly parted. Pink, the traditional colour for girls, dominates the painting—Blanche’s dress with its large bow, her rosy skin and lips, and the crimson hat she wears. Monet pays homage to a girl on the cusp of womanhood, at once ripe and innocent—a rather disturbing image by a man of a girl in his care. Monet occupied powerful, compelling roles in Blanche’s
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life—he was a celebrated artist, he was her teacher, the family breadwinner and her father’s rival for her mother’s affections. He did not become her stepfather until 1892 when, following Ernest Hoschedé’s death, he and Alice married. Blanche worshipped Monet and the two spent a great deal of time together—out of doors, away from home, alone. Monet’s private life was characterised by bold moves, scandalous liaisons and subterfuge. Camille was kept secret from his family for years. After Alice became Monet’s lover, she shared his home with her husband and his wife—circumstances which forced all of them to conceal and dissemble. While none of that means Monet seduced Blanche, it indicates that where a desired female was concerned, Monet’s ardour could make him tenacious, stealthy and strategic. Propriety, in life or in art, meant little to him. ‘Even in my earliest years,’ Monet declared at sixty, ‘no one was able to make me submit to rules.’18 His tempestuous, saturnine personality was undeterred by dramas and arguments. Indeed, it could be said that Monet drew energy from conflict. Whatever Monet’s relations with Blanche, it was shaped by an attraction that Portrait of Blanche Hoschedé registers. Similarly, Blanche’s feelings of admiration and gratitude to Monet determined her relations with him. Until now, Blanche’s significance—both in relation to Impressionism and to the women artists of the Impressionist movement—has been overlooked. It is surprising, especially given the massive popularity of Impressionism and Monet—its representative artist—that a painter as determined and talented as Blanche, who was involved with Impressionism’s core activities, has been ignored while Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalés and Marie Bracquemond have been canonised as official members of the movement. Nor has the
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importance of Blanche’s relationship with Monet—as his student, artist-companion, studio assistant and agent provocateur of his late work—been recognised. Studying art was not unusual for middle-class girls in the nineteenth century. Of course, the desired outcome was not a career but attributes that would enhance the home of either the girl’s father or her husband, like singing or needlework—les arts des femmes. Unlike the other women Impressionists, Blanche did not choose to paint the domestic interior where women are depicted caring for children, sewing, reading or reposing in fashionable gowns. However cleverly or subversively artists such as Mary Cassatt or Berthe Morisot framed images of femininity, their subjects call attention to womens’ circumscribed lives. Blanche ignores such boundaries and positions herself outside—in the fields, on the riverbank or at the beach. She is clearly uninspired by her female contemporaries, even those she loved like her mother and sisters. Her gaze is fixed beyond the home, beyond the destiny of most women’s lives. For metropolitan women artists, domesticity was their prescribed domain; they were not at liberty to wander the boulevards unchaperoned, choose men outside the family as their subjects or congregate in cafes, unless they were prepared to leave polite society behind. In the country, and close to home, Blanche had the freedom, and the permission of Alice and Monet, to paint the landscape to her heart’s content. In April 1883, Monet, Alice and the children moved for the last time. In the village of Giverny, on the Epte, a tributary of the Seine, Monet had found a property on ninety-six acres, leased with the financial assistance of Durand-Ruel. The house, a long, low, pink building with roughcast walls, was surrounded by orchards and a
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walled garden. Beyond were meadows with poplars and willows, and poppy fields stretching towards the low, distant hills. Ernest Hoschedé waited miserably for his family’s return, and Monet knew he had to establish a permanent abode if he wished to keep Alice with him. The couple also needed the seclusion of country life to avoid the prying eyes of Paris. The boys were settled in boarding school at nearby Vernon, and Alice, at last, had decided to stay with Monet. Not only did Giverny provide Monet with the domestic stability he craved but an endeavour that determined his work and life: the garden. Giverny was Monet’s safe place, chosen by him to keep his family intact, and under his aegis, and to create an environment that would sustain his art. Giverny was a garden-salon, nourished by water, where the talents of Blanche and Monet flourished; like the salon Louise-Justine had created at Le Havre, the stimulating, artistic household Monet had once known, and yearned to reclaim, that was energised by female presence. In Blanche, Monet found a younger self, a budding artist who needed patronage; and in Alice a cultured, maternal figure who could admirably organise his home. Monet, the confirmed atheist, was playing God and he was about to design Eden. As Virginia Spate notes, ‘Monet’s art was centered on his own family’. He painted ‘a domesticated, feminised, bourgeois nature in which there were traces of his own childhood, which was of course irretrievably lost, but which he sought to restore, transformed into a higher sensuous wholeness . . . The family, then, played a crucial role in creating modern landscape painting.’ Nature embodied the feminine for Monet as desire: it represented longing and the methods of appeasing longing. Nature can be read as Monet’s anima, the
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archetype who represents a man’s unconscious feminine aspect, ‘who’, Jung described, ‘sums up everything that a man can never get the better of and never finishes coping with’.19 At Giverny, Monet created major paintings that bridged the achievements of Impressionism with a twentieth-century drive for large-scale, painterly abstraction. Monet’s radical visual language was sourced and developed from his garden—one of the most beautiful and influential of the twentieth century. The two enterprises were entwined: Monet planned the garden to provide an abundant variety of subjects, while his acute, pictorial sensitivity made the garden’s design a triumph of form and colour. Georges Clemenceau described it as Monet’s ‘open air studio’.20 Monet was an adventurous artist and an equally imaginative landscape architect, adept at combining dramatic compositions and vivid hues to gain lush, romantic effects. Underlying his paintings and his garden is an impeccable sense of harmony. It was this balance, derived from nature, schooled and maintained by Monet’s architectural eye, that allowed him to take enormous risks with the pictorial structure of his late works, a structure that seems as nebulous and diaphonous as the morning mist but is firmly grounded in a refined awareness of form and colour. The Monets were devoted to the Normandy countryside. From the 1860s, Monet recorded its atmosphere with fresh, lucid, rapid brushstrokes, eliciting from its coasts and meadows shimmering surfaces of fractured light. The Seine’s gentle valleys and winding tributaries were a particular favourite and Monet always lived as close to the river as possible. As Proust noted, ‘Monet’s pictures show us the enchanted essence of Argenteuil, of Vétheuil, of Epte,
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of Giverny.’21 For Blanche, too, Normandy provided her sustaining inspiration as an artist. Both Monet and Alice encouraged Blanche. Away on a painting trip, Monet wrote Blanche a cheerful letter, observing how, on her own, she made more effort; he was eager to see her new work. When Blanche decided to exhibit at the 1888 Paris Salon, Monet and Alice discussed her chances. Monet was unsure how to advise Blanche because he had not seen the recent paintings. ‘If she doesn’t fear refusal and if she is keen on what she is doing,’ Monet counselled, ‘then she should [submit work] straightaway.’22 He reminded Alice that entries for the Salon closed in mid-March but he fretted that rejection might dishearten Blanche. Monet knew the feeling: he’d been rejected by the Salon several times early in his career. He wanted Blanche to ‘seriously involve herself in painting in a total way’.23 Monet wrote to Blanche, I don’t know what germinates under your pretty little forehead and deep in your heart but I really hope it will be fulfilled. It seems that you work wonders. It shames me that I’m not there to guide you and help you make decision for the [Salon]! I would like to come back and see you all again but alas at the moment that is not possible. I kiss you strongly on your kind cheeks. Your old friend.24
Blanche was not accepted by the Salon. Monet’s images of Blanche as an artist are not only respectful and admiring but rare—in Monet’s oeuvre and in the history of art. In the Woods at Giverny: Blanche Hoschedé at her easel and
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Suzanne Hoschedé reading (1887, Los Angeles County Musuem of Art) shows the artist at work, palette in one hand as she paints with the other. Straight-backed, she works with concentration and determination. Suzanne sits nearby, lounging against a tree. Monet often depicted the women engaged in leisurely pursuits—reading, strolling, boating, fishing. But none are at work as Blanche is, as Monet was. For Blanche and Monet, the landscape is not the site for an outing but the opportunity to rapidly transcribe its shapes, colours and moods. It is a professional arena where they test themselves as artists. In the Woods also offers contrasting models of femininity. The figure of Suzanne is depicted as Monet’s typically placid female subject. Her skirt, with its flecks of white, pink, yellow and blue, seems liquid, melting into her surroundings, identifying her with qualities of acquiescence and pliability. Blanche is an upright, resolute figure, intently focused on her work. By painting her in profile, Monet shows to advantage her alert gaze beneath her perky red-brimmed bonnet, her full bosom, emphasised by her costume’s nipped waist, and her upraised arm as brush touches canvas at the vivid moment of creation. Blanche’s energetic stance is echoed by the sharp, left-leaning angle of the easel and the trees behind her. She is distinct from her environment, its commentator and interrogator, and Monet esteems her for it. As photographs from the mid-1880s show, Suzanne, tall, feline and slender, was the family beauty. Marthe, Blanche and Germaine inherited their mother’s solid build and heavy features. Yet In the Woods distinguishes Blanche as noteworthy while Suzanne’s body is rendered as loose and formless. It is almost as if Monet is comparing them: pretty, passive Suzanne with enterprising, active
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Blanche. To be a woman artist, in Monet’s eyes, was to lose no feminine charm. (Renoir, Monet’s close friend, thought differently. ‘The woman artist is merely ridiculous,’ he scoffed, like all professional women who were ‘monsters and nothing but five-legged calves.’25) In the Woods defines Blanche’s personality, physique and professionalism as alluring. She has grown from the docile girl in Portrait of Blanche Hoschedé to an artist absorbed in her work. In the Woods records the transition. In Blanche Hoschedé painting (c. 1887, private collection), she looks directly at Monet. In the background, Suzanne watches an artist at his easel, perhaps John Singer Sargent or Theodore Butler. Suzanne married Butler in 1892. It seems Monet and Blanche are painting one another. Virginia Spate observes how Blanche’s gaze entwines with his, ‘undermining her role as the passive object of his painting and allowing her the status of an observing painter’.26 Blanche wears a bright red jacket with a wide pink collar and a large hat decked with red flowers. Suzanne also wears a red jacket. Did Blanche dress in this extravagant costume for a plein air painting trip, or did Monet imaginatively clothe her in red, the colour of passion, not only to create a vibrant contrast with the green grass, but to symbolically denote his feelings? As in In the Woods, Blanche stands out from her surroundings. As in Portrait, her face is the viewer’s focus. Once again, Suzanne and Blanche are ‘compared’; Suzanne is the passive muse while Blanche provides the inspiration for Monet’s painting and the agency for her own. Her glance is affectionate and a smile hovers on her lips. These portraits of Blanche were favourites of Monet’s. In 1890, when he arranged a selection of key works in his newly built studiosalon, Blanche Hoschedé took a central position below Luncheon
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on the Grass (1865, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) while In the Woods at Giverny was still on display in 1920. The Impressionist circle is known for its women artists who formed friendships with the male painters—most notably Berthe Morisot with Manet and Mary Cassatt with Edgar Degas. The circle’s liberal attitudes meant the women exhibited alongside the men, and were welcome visitors to their salons and studios—though not, of course, to their seedier, libertine hangouts. Though Manet and Degas often sketched and painted Morisot and Cassatt, they did not depict them as artists. Manet’s Portrait of Eva Gonzalés (1870, National Gallery, London) is a rare exception. Did they consider it inappropriate, preferring to represent them within the rigidly hierarchical conventions governing middle-class women? In the Woods and Blanche Hoschedé painting present fresh and perceptive images, showing the woman artist hard at work, sharing her creative territory with a man, on equal terms. It is an image unameliorated by convention. If Monet had erotic feelings for Blanche, perhaps that abnormality, that ‘monstrousness’, allowed him to create unorthodox images of her. The young Impressionist was producing her best paintings. Blanche followed Monet’s lead. When he began the Grainstacks series in 1890, she painted several too. The habit of painting alongside Monet meant Blanche shared his ideas. Monet worked on about twenty-four paintings of the grainstacks from the summer of 1890 through the winter, including perhaps three months of work in the studio, before exhibiting fifteen at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in May 1891. It was a breakthrough for Monet, an innovative idea where he concentrated on a single motif to record changes in light and season, one that met with unprecedented success.
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Blanche’s Grainstack, Giverny (1890, private collection) celebrates the autumn sunrise.27 The subtle tonal range together with the brushstrokes’ artful flurries contrive a deliciously vibrant effect. Dawn’s pink haze engulfs form so sun and sky, fields and grainstack, near and far, are enveloped in the same liquid, mobile, fantastic atmosphere. The landscape seems to be at once bursting into radiant life and dissolving before our eyes. The highpoint of Blanche’s career, Grainstack, Giverny shows her debt to Monet as well her own formidable skill. Due to the small number of Blanche’s remaining works, and because she rarely dated them, her oeuvre is difficult to assess. Paintings from the 1890s, in particular, are few. It is one of the reasons her reputation has languished.28 The following spring, Monet began the Poplar series, depicting the sylph-like trees that grace the banks of the Epte. Monet worked on the series in his little studio-boat, bobbing on the river’s tranquil, sun-dappled waters. As John Singer Sargent illustrates in his oil sketch, Monet in his Bateau Atelier (c. 1887, private collection), Blanche often worked beside him. Along the River Epte (c. 1891, R.H. Love Galleries, Chicago) shows Blanche’s confident, delicate touch. The poplars’ slender forms are set against the pale evening sky, their trunks mauve in the fading light, forming a harmony with the deep greens and blues of the river and its bank. Behind the poplars swirls a circle of smaller trees, intersecting with the poplars’ verticality and creating a strong decorative rhythm. On a visit to Giverny in 1893, Julie Manet, Berthe Morisot’s daughter, recalled, ‘Mlle Blanche showed us some of her paintings, which are of a lovely colour, two of them trees reflected in the Epte [that] are very like M. Monet’s painting.’29 Blanche did some of her finest work sitting next to Monet and
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Monet wanted to have Blanche by his side. When she sold work to an American collector, Monet was anxious it would make her more independent and she would decide to ‘work away from him’. As Theodore Robinson noted, ‘They both like to work together.’30 Indeed, when Blanche took a fancy to John Leslie Breck, a young American artist, Monet was furious. The American discovery of Giverny began around 1887, when a group of young painters—including Breck, Willard Metcalf, Theodore Butler and Theodore Robinson—arrived to paint the landscape. After settling in, they paid their respects to Monet, and gradually made the acquaintance of the whole family. Monet told Breck, ‘I won’t give you lessons but we’ll wander about the fields and woods and paint together.’31 Blanche accompanied them. A photograph taken in the Giverny garden around 1888 shows the Monet clan with their new friends. Blanche, the tomboy, smiles broadly, hand on her hip. Her lively expression and casual stance contrast with the sedate poses of Alice, Germaine and Suzanne. Monet, his son Michel and John Breck stand nearby. Monet looks a little wary. At first, Monet welcomed the young Americans. His effect on Breck’s work was bracing. From a competent but timid study like Garden at Giverny (In Monet’s Garden) (c. 1887, Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago), Breck graduated to Yellow Fleurs-de-Lis (1888, Terra Foundation for American Art) with its juicy brushstrokes, bright colours and arresting, close-up composition. When Breck exhibited these works back home in Boston, the reaction was shock and dismay—but the message was clear: Impressionism, ‘the latest word from Paris’, had arrived.32
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But Monet was growing anxious. In June 1888, he was cursing the ‘damned Americans’ who were painting in the fields where he wanted to work.33 During Monet’s long absences on painting trips, he regarded with suspicion the social events, like ice-skating parties, which the Americans organised and his family attended. Though the details are not known, at the end of the summer of 1891, a crisis erupted over Blanche and Breck’s relationship, and, in November, Monet demanded Breck leave Giverny.34 Not only had Blanche just produced some of her best paintings, Breck had completed an extraordinary homage to Monet. His series of fifteen paintings of grainstacks, Studies of an Autumn Day, adopts Monet’s use of multiple canvases to record the subject in changing light. The series has an elegiac quality as it also records Breck’s farewell to Giverny. What did Monet have against Breck? Did he fear Breck would whisk Blanche off to America? Was he worried Blanche’s career might be compromised? Blanche knew what she owed Monet professionally: she had become an artist under his gaze. Monet was parsimonious with praise for fellow artists but he regarded Blanche’s work highly, and told her so. Blanche was destined never to leave the family circle. Six years after Breck’s departure, she married Jean, her stepbrother, Monet’s older son. But Monet had reservations about that match, too. Though advising Blanche he was ‘not against her’, nor was he enthusiastic. He confided to Alice that he wondered if Jean was truly committed to the marriage.35 At thirty-two, Blanche’s opportunities to find a husband were limited. Though it may not have been a love match with Jean,
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Blanche had a childhood pal who would not obstruct her career. Of course, it bound her even more intimately to Monet. In June 1897, Blanche and Jean married and moved to nearby Rouen. Each weekend they returned to Giverny and stayed in a specially designed apartment above Monet’s studio. Blanche continued to paint and advance her career, exhibiting with the prestigious Salon des Indépendants in Paris and with the local Salon de la Société des Artistes Rouennais. She became Madame Monet and began to sign some of her paintings ‘Blanche Hoschedé-Monet’. The Salon des Indépendants was founded in 1884 by Odilon Redon, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. Organised in reaction to the strictures of the official Salon, its credo was ‘no jury or awards’. In the generation after Impressionism, the salon’s founders sought to establish an ongoing forum for vanguard painting. The experiment succeeded handsomely, and by 1905 Henri Rousseau and Pierre Bonnard as well as Henri Matisse and the Fauves had exhibited there. Based at Giverny, Blanche was not part of Parisian cultural life; it seems Monet continued to dominate Blanche’s artistic world. Jean’s life was less fulfilling. A shy, retiring fellow, he had studied science in Switzerland and later worked for Monet’s brother, Léon, a chemist, but his career did not flourish. After disagreements with Léon, he started a trout farm at Beaumont-le-Roger. Like his brothers, Jean had problems finding his niche. As Virginia Spate observes, of the four sons of the Monet-Hoschedé families, ‘only Jean-Pierre seems to have been able to lead a normal life; those of the others were perhaps stunted by the dominance of the patriarch Monet’.36
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When Monet created Giverny’s lily pond in 1893, he had great ambitions for it. He acquired more land, planning to treble the pond’s size and re-route the Ru, a tributary of the Epte, to feed its stagnant waters. Local farmers were nervous that Monet would pollute their water supply with foreign plants. The crazy artist was observed with disquiet by his neighbours as he stormed around Giverny, giving orders in his sharp clear voice. Negotiations with the council and relevant bureaucracies threw Monet into a frenzy of frustration but he got his way. Monet usually did. Once the pond was extended, he had an even larger canvas on which to experiment. A true gardener, Monet was always hatching bigger and better plans. He was also in the position to make his dreams come true. After years of penury and hardship, Monet was earning fabulous sums for his art. He employed a team of six gardeners, and directed all that was done in the garden, constantly provoking arguments with Florimond, the head gardener. Wherever Monet went, he collected seeds and plants, bartering with other gardeners, as well as studying local and international catalogues and ordering from them. He controlled everything down to the last detail. Food had to be of the highest quality, too. For the table, Monet personally selected the vegetables from the kitchen garden and chose which ones went into the weekly stockpot, indispensable for the preparation of soups and broths.37 Such tasks usually belonged to the woman of the house but Monet claimed them as his. As Blanche well knew, he was ‘fanatical about nature’.38 In an imaginary dialogue with Monet, critic Roger Marx summarised the artist’s attitude to both painting and gardening. ‘I have no other desire than to merge myself more intimately with nature.’39
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Once the lily pond was established, the garden, with its spectacular displays of peonies and geraniums, its rose-covered arches and gravel paths lined with irises and nasturtiums, was no longer the subject for Monet’s art. That role was now assigned exclusively to the pond at which Monet gazed with ‘passion and the constant curiosity of love’.40 Monet orchestrated the effects. He grew both tropical and hardy varieties of waterlilies planting them in tubs and harmoniously blending the colours before placing them in the pond. Tropical waterlilies have deep blue and purple shades and long blooming seasons but both varieties are warm-weather plants. During the winter, the tubers were removed from the pond and rested in tubs in the greenhouse. The maintenance of the pond was a costly and time-consuming operation and Monet employed a special gardener to take care of it. Early in the morning, before Monet began painting, the gardener rowed a little boat about the pond, cleaning the surface of algae or grasses, grooming plants of spent flowers and leaves, and rinsing the floating flowers. Monet insisted the water be as clean as a mirror and that the spreading waterlilies be trimmed in a circular pattern.41 It was nature manicured for the painter’s eye. In 1909, Monet’s Les Nymphéas: Series de paysages d’eau was exhibited at Durand-Ruel’s to critical and public acclaim. Monet had found the subject he would paint for the rest of his life and his audience was enthralled. But a series of tragic events derailed him. In 1910, Alice was diagnosed with leukaemia. Meanwhile, Monet was suffering headaches which affected his eyesight. Though he avoided an operation for cataracts by treating his eyes with various ointments, his sight remained a problem. From the time that Alice became ill, Monet had difficulty working. When she died, Monet’s
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ability to paint faltered. The relentless worker, the consummate artist, stalled. He felt ‘annihilated’, ‘lost, finished’, telling Rodin, ‘I ought to be able to conquer my grief but I cannot.’42 To further compound Monet’s anguish, Jean’s condition was worsening. In 1912, he suffered a cerebral seizure, a sure sign that syphilis was attacking his brain. In his final months, he was tended at the family home, but as his health deteriorated, he became increasingly agitated. His bedroom was near Monet’s studio and the artist could hear his son screaming and raving. Following Jean’s death, Blanche settled at Giverny. It was then that Monet began to paint again—appositely in April, with the arrival of spring. In Greek myth, it is when Persephone returns, the maiden abducted by Hades whose absence creates winter and whose return rejuvenates the earth, a fitting symbol for Blanche’s inspiring role. Monet’s friends Gustave Geffroy and Georges Clemenceau, who had been worried by his crippling depression, were delighted. Geffroy told Blanche he was ‘very happy with your decision to stay with Monet, happy for him and happy for you. Your mutual misfortune makes your reunion stronger and more intimate.’ Clemenceau showered Blanche with praise, calling her Monet’s ‘angel’.43 Soon Monet announced joyously that he was ‘feeling marvellous and obsessed with the desire to paint’. More than that, he had an exciting new project: ‘large things’ based on studies only recently rediscovered. ‘Clemenceau saw them and was amazed,’ Monet crowed.44 There has been much speculation about Monet’s sudden return to painting, his burst of vitality, his renewed ambition. Was he responding to the agitated atmosphere that preceded the declaration of war in August 1914? Did failing sight spur him on? Was it Clemenceau’s encouragement?
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Or was Blanche responsible for Monet’s renaissance? After several bleak and lonely years, he had at his side his faithful assistant, a fellow artist he admired, the nurturing feminine force that had been absent from his life. With Blanche’s return, Monet once again had a confidante who not only offered the support he craved but the added benefit of an artist’s sensibility. When Monet fell in love with Alice, he had to have her with him, no matter the complications. He had meddled in Blanche’s life to keep her close. Despite Monet’s combative independence, it seems that, at seventy-four, he could not survive as an artist without Blanche’s energising presence. As Gustave Geffroy writes, ‘Monet found the courage to survive and the strength to work because of the presence of his devoted daughter, who kept the house intact and who encouraged him to take up his paints, receiving his friends as her mother did in the past.’45 Monet had a ‘wife’, another Madame Monet. In photographs that show Monet, Blanche and Clemenceau strolling to the lily pond, Blanche is near Monet. Accompanying them is Princess Matsukata, who sent Monet tree-peonies and the bulbs of lilies unavailable in France and who was a collector of his work.46 Blanche is fifty-six and Monet eighty-one. Blanche wears a long lacy gown and, though white-haired and portly, looks robust. Her expression is lively and amused, a glimpse of the tomboy she once was. But Blanche has aged to resemble her mother so closely it seems Alice stands beside Monet. With his white beard and cigarette clamped between his teeth, Monet exudes an air of raffish charm and incorrigibility. He wears a handsomely cut tweed suit—Monet insisted on the best English tailoring—and a deerstalker cap. Even his illustrious guests cannot eclipse the force of his personality. Blanche is his attendant, the angel who maintains Monet’s world. It was a difficult
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and often thankless task, of which Monet was occasionally aware. ‘How kind she is and how maddening I must be to everyone,’ he once confessed.47 Monet and Blanche were consumed by their new painting project. From the start, Monet conceived of it in the most ambitious terms. ‘I’m pursuing my idea of a Grand Décoration. It’s a huge thing that I’ve undertaken, above all, at my age.’48 The idea of mural-scale paintings had been on Monet’s mind for years, probably dating back to Montgeron, where, in the rotunda-shaped dining room, he had composed four huge canvases.49 A photograph taken in July 1915 shows Blanche and Monet side by side at the lily pond. Beneath the white canvas umbrella, Monet paints while Blanche watches. She is waiting for him to complete as much of the study as possible before supplying him with a new canvas. Monet had to change canvases constantly because, as the light changed, so did the effect he was trying to capture. By 1915, Monet had also recognised that the size of the new paintings— often two metres by three metres—had outgrown the second studio. Construction began on a third, larger building, despite the difficulties of finding labourers during the First World War. It made Blanche’s commitment—and her physical strength—even more important; the outbreak of war had depleted Monet’s staff, including the gardeners, who were conscripted. The war also meant Blanche and Monet were marooned at Giverny, anxiously awaiting news of Michel Monet and Jean-Pierre Hoschedé who were both in the army. The scale of the Grand Décorations meant water was presented in a sublime manner. The lily pond is not merely part of the composition, encompassed by trees or marked by the bank, it is
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depicted as an infinity, a totality without boundaries. Monet created an environment, a submerged world of sumptuous colour and shifting form. Space and perspective are unpredictable, fluctuating. Surface shimmers into depth as waterlilies seem to emerge from the reflections of trees and clouds, engulfing the eye in a mutable realm. It is as though, to replenish himself, Monet plunged into the very source of creativity. Water provides a dynamic and fundamental metaphor. As Gaston Bachelard writes, ‘for the imagination, everything that flows is water; everything that flows participates in water’s nature’.50 Mircea Eliade explains how water symbolises ‘“spring and origin”, the reservoir of all possibilities of existence’, preceding every form and supporting every creation. ‘Contact with water always brings a regeneration—on the one hand because dissolution is followed by a new birth, on the other because immersion fertilises and multiplies the potential of life.’51 In classical mythology, every river, lake, spring or marsh harboured nymphs, divine, benevolent beings who cured the sick and delivered oracles. In French, waterlily is la nymphéa. Freshwater nymphs were naiades, regarded as the protectors of girls who guided their safe passage into adulthood, and who were worshipped as the goddess-protectors of the community’s water supply. Evoking the Grand Décorations’s pervasive hue, Clemenceau christened Blanche ‘the blue angel’.52 The waterlily has its own rich history of mystical symbolism. As the lotus, it has been revered by Egyptian, Indian, Tibetan and Chinese cultures. Because the flower grows from mud and sinks beneath the surface at night to rise and bloom with the dawn, it is an image of resurrection, as well as a powerful tool
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for meditation. For thousands of years, the lotus has represented spiritual enlightenment. Monet’s pond is both literally and metaphorically the site for reflection, the place where he renewed himself after the deaths of his wife and his son, a place he created and that, in turn, helped to renew him. It was also a refuge of peace and healing, not only for Monet’s personal losses but during the carnage of the First World War. Further back, in memory, it perhaps reflected the love Monet felt for his mother, whom he’d also lost. Monet was not alone there. At his side was Blanche, who evoked in him fresh strengths and resolve. It was a place of rejuvenation for her, too. Blanche and Monet reflected and illuminated each other. Monet had always been a source of inspiration for Blanche; now she returned the favour by assisting him as his muse, the embodiment of genius loci, spirit of place. As Monet said, ‘it would be better to be all alone [in nature] and yet there are so many things one cannot fathom by oneself’.53 Clemenceau’s account of Blanche’s involvement is specific. ‘She worked on his canvases. She did the grounds [of his paintings] for him.’54 Aside from Blanche, no one was closer to the progress of the Grand Décorations than Clemenceau. In 1918, Monet wrote to Clemenceau, who was both premier of France and minister of war. Monet wished to celebrate the Allied victory by donating two recent paintings to the nation and suggested the Musée des Arts Décoratifs as the recipient. But Clemenceau and Gustave Geffroy had a better idea: a specially designed public gallery in the centre of Paris that would house Monet’s decorative panels as a monument to peace. Monet was thrilled by the prospect. Clemenceau suggested that the Orangerie in the Tuileries Gardens would make an excellent site: it
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was close to the Louvre as well as to the Seine, the river that Monet had painted all his life, and it needed only to be renovated. It was a perfect suggestion for Monet the gardener. The Orangerie, with its glass ceiling, was built in 1617 and, during the winter months, housed citrus trees in tubs belonging to the Palais du Louvre. But the process was slow and stressful. Monet argued with everyone, including Clemenceau and the two architects. Blanche was the negotiator and peacemaker, managing to stay quietly but firmly in control even when Clemenceau lost patience with Monet’s mercurial demands and threatened to cancel the whole business. Overseeing the project made Clemenceau a regular visitor to Giverny. As Blanche notes, Clemenceau arrived every fortnight to discuss progress and view the work, having a meal and staying as long as he could. He and Monet ‘had such long, friendly discussions that it was a great joy for me to organise these gatherings of old friends who loved each other so much’. When Monet felt daunted by the task, Clemenceau encouraged him ‘to paint the impossible’.55 Jean-Pierre Hoschedé writes that his sister ‘completely renounced’ her own painting in order to devote herself to Monet but Clemenceau offers another opinion: she was Monet’s assistant, actively involved in the preparation of works under his guidance.56 How Monet physically completed the Grand Décorations has always been a puzzle. Not only is the scale huge, so is the number of paintings in the series. By 1920, Monet reckoned that he had painted between forty and fifty panels. Most were 2 × 4.25 metres long. He also painted at least sixty large studies—up to two metres square—related to the Décorations and did a number of easel paintings.57 Monet was an old man, beset by infirmities including bad eyesight and arthritis. His love of fine food had given him an enormous
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girth. Gone were the days when Monet set off for the Normandy coast to paint in all weathers or tramped the fields searching for subjects. By 1914, a stroll to the pond was the extent of his exercise. How, for example, did Monet paint the lower sections of the works, a few inches from the floor? Though the gardeners were summoned to heave the enormous canvases around the studio, that was often Blanche’s job, too. As one guest observed, Blanche would ‘tackle the weighty easels’ and arrange them for visitors to the studio.58 Clemenceau’s revelation about Blanche’s role appeared in his ‘autobiography’, published in 1929, the year he died. Titled Clemenceau Painted by Himself, it was compiled from notes made by his friend and former secretary Jean Martet, and it took the form of a dialogue between the two men. In Blanche’s short memoir of Monet’s life, intended for her family and not for publication, she is unequivocal on the topic. ‘Contrary to what has been said and what has been written, I didn’t make a brushstroke on [Monet’s] canvases. It would have been a sacrilege.’59 It’s a rare moment of revelation in Blanche’s self-effacing tribute. She also wrote to Martet, taking him to task. Though Martet gallantly told Blanche he would remove the offending passage from future editions, his opinion was unchanged. It was well known that ‘the discreet but fervent collaboration of one or a number of their students’ was involved in major projects by great artists.60 Perhaps one reason Clemenceau’s claim has not been explored is because Martet was as good as his word. In the English edition of the book, published the following year, Clemenceau’s statement reads only, ‘She helped him prepare his canvases.’61 Preparing a canvas for oil painting is a straightforward task any studio assistant could acquit. First the canvas is stretched and framed, before it is sized—or sealed—to protect the surface, then a
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ground is applied, usually of gesso, which provides a uniform colour, level and absorbency. After about an hour, when the surface has dried, sandpaper is used to lightly smooth it, before another layer of gesso is added to prime the canvas for the application of paint. Monet’s method of painting was complex and unusual. As conservators at New York’s Museum of Modern Art point out, this method was ‘anything but spontaneous: the multilayered paint surfaces are laboriously constructed and give, in places, almost an effect of low-relief sculpture’. It is also evident from the Water Lilies in MoMA’s collection that a number of panels were worked on over long periods, perhaps years. Their colour and texture has been developed through many additional layers of paint, and Monet used a variety of types and combinations of brushstrokes, including a dry-brush technique. Eugena Ordonez, who has done extensive research on MoMA’s Water Lilies, has counted up to fifteen layers of paint before reaching the ‘ground’ or base coat.62 With such a long period to paint and rework the surfaces, the possibility that Blanche assisted Monet is even greater because the Impressionist style of rapid, spontaneous brushstrokes was abandoned in the Water Lilies in favour of a much slower process. Given the sheer scale of the surfaces to be covered in the Grand Décorations, it is logical to consider that Monet had an assistant, and who better than Blanche? Someone must have helped Monet with the massive layering of the dense grounds on the paintings. After Monet had completed the great freehand loops of the waterlilies, an assistant could have then laid in areas of colour for the reflections—the open water reflecting clear sky or the shadowed water reflecting clouds or trees. Monet was responsible for the gestural brushwork—Blanche was not capable of such original and sophisticated strokes. But,
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as Grainstack, Giverny indicates, she certainly had the ability to beautifully interpret and emulate the master’s style. If Blanche had participated in the Grand Décorations, why keep it a secret? Perhaps she considered it could damage Monet’s stature as well as the authenticity, and therefore the market value, of his work. She may have felt it was imperative to protect Monet and her family’s honour. To the close-knit Monet-Hoschedé clan, family meant everything. Did Blanche wish to keep her involvement a secret, within a web of family secrets, which could not be publicly aired? In fact, Monet’s reputation and his prices slumped immediately after his death. Impressionism was suddenly old-fashioned. Picasso, Matisse and the Surrealists formed the vanguard. Even Clemenceau had to admit that scarcely anyone bothered to visit the Orangerie. It was not until 1955, when the Museum of Modern Art bought one of the Water Lilies that artists, critics and historians began to rediscover the late Monet. Subsequently, Monet was hailed not only as an important Impressionist but as a visionary twentieth-century painter. In her memoir, Blanche briefly but movingly describes Monet’s death in 1926. ‘On the 5th of December, at midday, he left us forever. It was the soul of the house who left . . . Everything here was illuminated by him.’63 Poor Blanche. Monet left her penniless. As Clemenceau states, ‘He left everything to his son, Michel . . . [H]e died without doing anything for his daughter-in-law . . . She was admirable in every way. She took care of him, pampered him. She watched over him as if he had been her child . . . she took care of his investments.’64 Monet had not made a will, so Michel inherited the estate. Clemenceau insisted that Michel adequately provide for
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Blanche so she could remain at Giverny and maintain the house and grounds. Blanche did not attend the official opening at the Orangerie in May 1927. Perhaps it was too distressing. She also declined Clemenceau’s offers to travel to Paris and to view the Orangerie with him. But at some point she must have visited the two lovely oval rooms with their dreamy, underwater light to see the panorama of paintings she knew so well, profound, emotional and delicate works, in whose creation she had played her part. The Grand Décorations is undoubtedly Monet’s supreme achieve ment where vision and technique combine to make an exultant and original statement about the possibilities of painting. The panels assert Monet’s feelings for the natural world, his reverence and awe, his desire to possess, his recognition that possession is impossible. ‘The lake, the pond, the still water very naturally awaken [a] cosmic imagination through the beauty of the reflected world.’ Nature is represented as mutable and eternal, humble and sublime, offering a deep and solemn experience and a series of tantalising, flickering moments. Brushstrokes are complex and layered, in some passages free, wild and almost abandoned, yet the effect is never careless or casual but passionately considered and convincing. The colours of sky and water, clouds and flowers are fantastic: pink and mauve, yellow and orange, purple and green. ‘[C]olours born by reflections belong to an idealised universe.’65 Heroic scale is achieved with tender painterly touches. It seems an immense achievement for one man. Blanche remained at Giverny, its quietly assured manager, maintaining the house, the garden and Monet’s artistic legacy. After Monet’s death, many of his friends—artists such as Signac,
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Bonnard and Vuillard as well as critics, curators and collectors— visited the property. Blanche was on hand to greet them, to discuss Monet’s works, and to give a guided tour of the garden. Her career blossomed. The year after Monet’s death, she held her first solo show at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris, a bastion of Impressionism which also showed Cezanne, Seurat, Gauguin, Matisse and Renoir. She resumed exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants and with the Société des Artistes Rouennais. There were also painting trips to Italy, Provence, the Auvergne and Brittany. During the Second World War, when Germany occupied the north and west of France, Blanche unwillingly left Giverny and moved to Aix-en-Provence. Though she was terrified that Monet’s works and the house would be damaged by British air raids, the works were unharmed and damage to the house was minimal. Back at Giverny after the war, Blanche continued to paint en plein air but Jean-Pierre Hoschedé observed that she rarely painted the lily pond which had become for her ‘a sanctuary of memories, a sacred place’.66 In December 1947, while wintering in Nice with her family, Blanche died, aged eighty-two. Over the years, the property gradually fell into disrepair. It was thanks to the advocacy of Robert Gordon, working with Suzanne’s grandson Jean-Marie Toulgouat and his wife Claire Joyes, that the Académie des Beaux-Arts undertook a long and costly restoration in strict accord with Monet’s complex designs before opening the gardens to the public in May 1980. Today, Monet’s home and garden is, after Versailles, France’s most visited site. Despite the crowds, the lily pond remains a place of peace and enchantment, the wide, still eye reflecting the artistic partnership of Monet and Blanche.
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g Greg Weight, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, 1994. © Greg Weight.
g 8
M y t h a n d R e a li t y E m i ly K a me K ng wa r re ye’s Utopia [H]er entire body of work is about one story, her story, her Dreaming, embodied in her Country named Alhalkere. It was [there] that the essence of her being resided, it was her Dreaming that was the source of the creative power . . . her genius loci. Margo Neale1
I keep on painting the place that belongs to me. Emily Kame Kngwarreye 2
Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s story is extraordinary because it is true. Emily, as she signed her paintings and as she was known, was a tribal elder of the Anmatyerre language group. Her traditional lands are in the Central Desert, an area known as Utopia, two hundred and fifty kilometres northeast of Alice Springs. She was born around 1910 at Alhalkere, her father’s country, a narrow triangle of land that abuts Utopia. The precise date is unknown as Aboriginal births
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were not recorded until the 1960s. Much of her life is a mystery, though it is inextricably tied to the occupation of Aboriginal land by European colonisers. In 1976, Aboriginal land rights were made law in the Northern Territory. Three years later, Emily’s people gained the freehold title of Utopia and the land was truly theirs once more. They’d not been forced off, giving them ‘a far more continuous connection’ with their land than many other Aboriginal groups.3 At the same time, Emily began making bold, brilliantly coloured batik prints. In 1988, when she started painting, she won immediate critical acclaim and, over the next eight years, produced over three thousand artworks, a feat worthy of Picasso. ‘Her studio was her bush camp.’4 For Emily, creativity most certainly is a place. The flowering of her artistry is historically linked to retrieving, in legal terms, the original source of her inspiration and identity. Possessing her territory and knowing it was safely back in Aboriginal hands gave her the freedom and the confidence, after she had access to Western art materials, to tell her country’s story splendidly. Emily painted her canvases on the earth, a literal and symbolic act of ‘re-covering’ it. What had been taken was returned, what she had lost was regained, and the enchanted childhood realm, Alhalkere, was again accessible. The journey she’d made over her lifetime was as complete as a circle—the circle, or dots, that signify her Dreaming in its detail and its wholeness. In 1997, the year after Emily died, she was chosen as an Australian representative at the Venice Biennale, the most prestigious, global contemporary art survey.5 Her huge, lush, abstract paintings have been compared to those of Monet and Pollock, yet Emily knew nothing of Western art, had not attended art school and was
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illiterate in the English language. As enigmatic as either Monet and Pollock, she rarely discussed her painting, except to say that she painted ‘whole lot, that’s whole lot, Awelye (my Dreaming)’.6 Like Monet, her work profoundly worshipped nature and, like Pollock, it was influenced by the ceremonial ritual of dance. Like Georgia O’Keeffe, she was a desert-dweller whose soul was most comfortable in vast, dry spaces. But, unlike them, she was the land’s traditional caretaker and myth-keeper. In a sense, Emily created herself as an artist, though her perception, most likely, was that the land created her.
g To tell this story, it’s necessary to write in the first person. That way my views and impressions, however incomplete or superficial, can be ascribed to me alone. In August 2006, to research this chapter, I visited Utopia. Aboriginal land is a highly contested zone, involving rights both legal and mystical, as well as a history of betrayal, misunderstanding, greed, respect, violence, honour and loss. Aboriginal land is saturated with meaning, and any discussion is framed by impassioned moral and political views, and by indigenous and European law. Equally, the debate about Aboriginal land is sited in contradictory and intersecting webs of language: what constitutes ‘ownership’, ‘country’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘home’? I was fortunate to travel to Utopia with Tim Jennings, director of Mbantua Art Gallery and Cultural Museum, Alice Springs. Mbantua means ‘this place’ in Arrente; Alice Springs is on Arrente land. Jennings is a big, energetic, talkative fellow, a former policeman
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who became fascinated with Aboriginal art and, in 1987, opened a gallery. A great admirer of Emily’s, Jennings paid the record price of $1.04 million for Kngwarreye’s Earth’s Creation at auction in 2007. Susan McCulloch, an expert in the field and my good friend, asked Jennings if I could accompany him on one of his regular trips to the Central Desert where he purchases art directly from Aboriginal people. Emily’s country is not a tourist destination. There is only one way in and that is by road, even if you catch a plane for part of the journey. There are no towns, one shop and no service stations. Sometimes there are no roads either. With Jennings, I visited four remote communities, places where Emily spent much of her life and where her relatives continue to live: Mulga Bore (Akaya), Rocket Range (Arnkawenyerr), Soakage Bore (Atnarare) and Arlparra. Aside from Mulga Bore, the communities are in the area known as Utopia, a former cattle station of nearly two thousand square kilometres, once the property of the Kunoth brothers. While Alhalkere is most specifically Emily’s country, there are no communities based there. She lived, travelled and painted throughout Utopia and regarded all of it as her land. As Robyn Davidson writes, ‘in Aboriginal society a boundary or border is not a fixed line of division so much as a fuzzy set of relationships—interchange of rights and duties, like pathways—across shared territory’.7 Sonny and Trott Kunoth, the young Germans who settled there in 1927, were so delighted with the abundance of rabbits they could catch by hand, they named it after Thomas More’s imaginary island paradise. Ironically, Utopia, the byword for an ideal community, means no [ou] place [topos] in Greek.8 Even more ironically, rabbits, an introduced species and an environmental disaster, had grown to
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plague numbers by the 1920s, consuming the plants gathered and eaten by Aboriginal people and causing the extinction of many native animals. The rabbits also degraded the land where pastoralists, like the Kunoths, intended to graze cattle. When Utopia was returned to its traditional owners, cattle grazing ceased, and the land began to revegetate. Because it is illegal to visit the communities without a permit, Jennings obtained one for me from the local land council. It is worth noting permits are rarely denied, and most are issued without charge. Alcohol is forbidden in the communities, an ordinance decreed by the people themselves, and the restrictions are designed to stop the flow of grog. After seeing Aboriginal people weaving drunkenly through the streets of Alice Springs or boozing from morning till night in the dry bed of the Todd River, it seems a wise plan. Ours was a one-day trip: we set off from Alice Springs in the pre-dawn darkness in Jennings’ blissfully air-conditioned four-wheel drive, and returned fifteen hours later. I left knowing one Australia and returned, in a state of utter bewilderment, having encountered another. For me, Utopia provided a series of schismatic visions, of a tribal people who choose to live in the harshest circumstances and who produce subtle and sophisticated art for a non-Aboriginal audience, who appear to have scant regard for the environment yet who have trenchantly fought ‘whitefella’ law for decades to reclaim their land, who often look unhealthy and listless yet are the land’s proud, spiritual custodians, and whose aesthetic sense, from their crude, makeshift lifestyle, seems opposed to beauty, order and harmony, yet whose artworks offer compelling examples of exactly that. What surprised me is how this pivotal feature, this pressing reality, this decisive context is not
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often emphasised by the historians, critics and curators who have documented Emily’s work and life, save for mentioning the ‘raw conditions’ of camp life.9 Heading up the unsealed Sandover Highway provides a leisurely introduction to the Central Desert. The earth is a deep, burning, sensual red like the flesh of a great, soft, warm body that stretches out in magnificent display towards the infinity of the horizon. I want to get out of the car and touch the earth, plunge my hands into it. The sky is electric blue, massive and cloudless like in New Mexico; it’s the same pristine atmosphere, the same feeling that, on such an ancient earth, the sky’s relentless clarity offers perpetual and magical renewal. The eye is constantly drawn upward, away from the ground and into the air. The boundary between earth and sky, between red and blue, is dramatic on the land’s flat plane, and visual contrasts are piercingly immediate. There’s no perspective, no object on which to fix the gaze and assign three-dimensionality; there’s only distance that shimmers and quivers and vanishes. The land is like a reckless and flamboyant gesture. Lavish, potent and open, it dares you to paint it, and survive it. Expecting ‘desert’, I’m surprised at the amount of vegetation: the country is scattered with spinifex and low, scrubby trees but, during winter at least, the colours are muted: the grasses are dull green and the trees, eking out a meagre existence from the soil, are subdued in tone. Water governs the country, as it does at Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch, which flourishes only because of an underground water supply. The waterholes, as historian Dick Kimber notes, ‘hold the essence of the land in them’.10 The communities gather around the soakages, turned into artesian bores during the era of the cattle stations to prevent animals contaminating them.
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Claude Monet, Portrait of Blanche Hoschedé, c.1880. Oil on canvas, 46 × 38 cm. Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts. Legs Blanche Hoschedé à l’Etat, 1948. Dépôt de l’Etat, 1952. © Musées de la Ville de Rouen.
Claude Monet, In the Woods at Giverny: Blanche Hoschedé at Her Easel with Suzanne Hoschedé Reading, 1887. Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 98 cm. Museum No M.46.3.4. Mr and Mrs George Gard De Sylva Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photograph © 2009 Museum Associates/LACMA.
Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, Along the River Epte, c.1890. Oil on canvas, 60 × 71 cm. Courtesy R.H. Love Galleries, Chicago. Private collection.
The waterlily pond, Giverny. Photograph © Janine Burke.
The waterlily pond, Giverny. Photograph © Janine Burke.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Kam[e], 1991. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 137.8 × 303.1 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992. © Emily Kame Kngwarreye, 1991. Licensed by VISCOPY, Sydney, 2009.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Alhalkere, 1996. Acrylic on canvas, 120 × 106 cm. The Ebes Collection, Melbourne. © Emily Kame Kngwarreye, 1996. Licensed by VISCOPY, Sydney, 2009.
Penny Tweedie, Emily Kame Kngwarreye being painted up for Awelye, 1982. © Penny Tweedie.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Emu Woman, 1988–89. Janet Holmes à Court Collection, Western Australia. © Emily Kame Kngwarreye, 1988–9. Licensed by VISCOPY, Sydney, 2009.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s grave. Central Desert, Northern Territory. Photograph © Janine Burke.
Myth and R ea lity
A few hours after leaving Alice, we drive off the highway towards Mulga Bore. I’m expectant, excited. Like many white urban Australians I’ve had little contact with indigenous people. My first memory of seeing an Aboriginal woman was in Jedda, the 1955 film directed by Charles and Elsa Chauvel. I was three, and the violent abduction of Jedda (Ngarla Kunoth) by Marbuck (Robert Tudawali) and its tragic conclusion, obviously made an impact. While Jedda, by today’s standards, is melodramatic, risible and racist, it was the first Australian movie to feature Aboriginal people in leading roles. The Aboriginal people I know are of Aboriginal-European descent; members of the art world, they are either curators or artists. My overwhelming sense of guilt usually disables frank discussion, leaving me either speechless or behaving in a manner that seems, to me at least, both patronising and obsequious. Quite literally, I don’t know what to say. Driving into Mulga Bore is like arriving in a documentary about ‘Aboriginal poverty’ and ‘Third World squalor’, the awful, popular narrative, the negative imagery with which the media mostly represents indigenous Australia. Before visiting Emily’s country, I’d considered such reports extravagant, embellished or prejudiced. Now I see they’re accurate in part. One of the chief consolations of Aboriginal art’s massive international success is to provide a good news story in the mire of bad. Mulga Bore is a settlement of several houses, some tin, some concrete, some surrounded by wire fencing, and all at a distance from one another. How do people bear the heat in a tin house? The walls of the concrete houses are stained a dusty ochre. Rubbish is scattered everywhere—cans, plastic shopping bags, empty milk
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and soft-drink bottles. Wrecked car bodies form rusting metal sculptures. There are also piles of discarded clothes, a bizarre sight in the desert, as if the people wearing them simply took them off and walked away. In the distance, I can see a basketball court where children are playing. Next to it is the school house that caters for around forty-five pupils. As I slide out of the car, a brindled dog with the smart, friendly eyes of a dingo cruises up, sniffing the stranger’s scent. Instinctively, I hold out my hand to stroke it. ‘Don’t touch the dogs,’ Tim commands. I peer at the dog, and the others clustering around the car. They’re underfed and filthy, their skins are pocked with sores, and they scratch constantly. The bitches have long, withered, swinging teats. I have my camera in my hand but I don’t know what to photograph. I stare at the ground and take a picture. We’re parked outside the house of Lindsay Bird Mpetyane. From inside comes wailing, a high, shrill keening that spirals into the still air and hovers like smoke. Lindsay, impressive and self-contained, is the community’s elder, a former stockman and a well-known artist. He’s related to Emily, and Tim has told me I can interview him. At around sixty, Lindsay cuts a dapper, youthful figure wearing a cowboy-style hat, white striped shirt and black jeans. In a soft, rhythmic voice, he explains that ‘sorry business’, or communal ritual mourning, is taking place. Yesterday, a man from the community went into Alice Springs where he was shot and killed. Later, we hear from other people that the man wasn’t shot: he fell asleep in the middle of the road, dead drunk, and was run over—an all-toofrequent event, apparently. Lindsay was the only man from Utopia making batiks in the 1980s, around the same time Emily did. When Tim encourages
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me to begin the interview, I don’t know which of us is more shy. I am the white lady with the notebook and the camera, the clumsy intruder. As I reach for my biro, I notice how pale my skin looks, freckled and fragile, under the desert sun. Though Emily married twice, she had no children of her own, so she was appointed Lindsay’s chief carer, his ‘mother’.11 Lindsay tells me, ‘[She] grown me up. Look after [her] son. Not when big, when little. Good person.’ Emily was ‘always painting . . . everywhere she paints’.12 I’ve heard Emily was a real character, with a wicked sense of humour and a penchant for wacky hats. What was she like? Long pause. ‘Shout me,’ he says reflectively. Then Lindsay steers the talk to the ‘good prices’ that he and Emily have earned for their paintings. When Lindsay makes the point he didn’t ask Emily for money, he’s referring to the obligation that Aboriginal people are under to distribute whatever they have among family and community. As Emily’s fame escalated, together with her prices, she was under pressure not only from a hungry art market but from her needy relatives and her community—which meant she was supporting around eighty people. It was such a burden that she told curator Anne Marie Brody she wanted to give up painting: it ‘caused her too much worry’.13 As Lindsay and I talk, other members of the community slowly arrive, carrying paintings they’ve produced since Tim’s last visit. The women wear loose T-shirts and long skirts, some of the older men are in overcoats and beanies. It’s chilly and most people wear shoes. The children arrive from the school, curious to find out what’s happening. Graceful and quick, they skim the ground like swallows. With huge dark eyes, honey-coloured skin and tawny hair, their
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beauty and joie de vivre is dazzling to behold. As Tim introduces me, everyone smiles courteously, distantly. I’m the art historian who’s writing about Emily. I wonder how that strikes them. After all, Emily is the most renowned Aboriginal artist, and she’s from their neck of the woods. But their reticence and self-possession make probing impossible. There’s also the language barrier. Most people speak only a smattering of English. Conversations with newcomers, as I learn from interviewing Lindsay, can be excruciating. Then it’s down to business and I have my job, too. Because of the numerous fakes on the market, agents and dealers photograph the artists with their work as proof for the buyer. Lindsay has produced an impressive pile of small, elegant dot paintings. As he holds up each one, I’m meant to photograph him and the painting. I find out later from Tim I’ve completely botched it: the photographs are either of Linday’s face, or the painting, but not both. Tim will have to do them all over again. It comes as no surprise; I feel like I can’t see straight. Then it’s on to Soakage Bore where Emily often stayed, performing her Dreaming ceremonies and hunting for bush tucker, practising the skills of observing and working with her environment. Situated on land belonging to Emily’s mother’s family, the Alhalpere clan, it was a lively camp in Emily’s day. Robyn Davidson writes ‘scholars are still trying to describe the “Dreaming” in such a way as to make it accessible to non-Aboriginal understanding’. Davidson describes it as ‘a spiritual realm which saturates the visible world with meaning . . . a matrix of being . . . a parallel universe . . . a network of stories of mythological heroes’.14 At the time of creation, great ancestral beings moved across the land. As they fought and hunted, made love and gave birth, they
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transformed themselves from animal to human to animal once more, a feature common to many mythologies. Their journeys and actions are inscribed on the landscape, concentrated in sacred sites such as rock formations, rivers, trees and waterholes. To Aboriginal people, ‘the whole land is full of signs . . . used and read . . . as clearly as if it were bristling with notice-boards’.15 ‘Dreaming’ can also be translated, less romantically, as Law, because the mythic beings gave specific moral and social structures to their people. Law applies to the production of paintings whose ‘procedural and technical aspects . . . are not incidental’ but the result of rules that are ‘regulatory, binding and disciplinary’.16 Each individual inherits the Law and, through ceremony, re-enacts it. It was because Emily boldly reinterpreted the visual precepts she’d been taught that she became a highly regarded artist. Her paintings speak a language anyone can understand. In 2008, Canberra’s National Museum hosted a retrospective that also attracted record crowds in Tokyo. Walking through the galleries, I observed the reverence, pleasure and awe with which visitors, probably few of whom knew Emily’s country or her Dreaming, contemplated her paintings. Like Native Americans, Aboriginal people enter, through ritual, ‘mythical and sacred time . . . the time of origin, the time that “floweth not” because it does not participate in profane temporal duration, because it is composed of an eternal present, which is indefinitely recoverable’.17 That time imbues Emily’s art. We’re approaching Soakage Bore and there seem to be dozens of blue and white flowers dotted across the land. Then I realise they’re not flowers, they’re discarded plastic shopping bags floating across the countryside. In the 1970s, when Emily’s people began moving away from the cattle station homesteads, Soakage Bore
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was the first camp or ‘outstation’ established. Soakage Bore is greener, the trees larger and more shady than at Mulga Bore. The community is smaller, too: half a dozen houses grouped together. One is an impeccably tidy suburban block with a fence, curtains at the windows and colourful toys arranged neatly on the verandah. It stands in stark contrast to the other houses, which have been trashed, remaining as eerie, blasted concrete shells. The violence done to the houses lingers like the echo of a cry, and conjures a ghost melody, a cacophony of crashing and breaking, shouts and laughter, in the windless desert. What happened here? We park in the shade next to one of the houses. It’s midday, and the heat is rising. Inside, a white woman, a health worker, speaks quietly to an elderly Aboriginal lady who sits on a grubby mattress on the floor. There’s no furniture in the room, no glass in the window frames, no doors. The walls have been defaced. It smells foul. A group of women drift towards us with gentle, welcoming smiles. The dogs arrive, too. So do hordes of little sticky bush flies. A young man emerges from the well-kept house and walks purposefully towards us. He’s strongly built and fit, wearing a dark blue shirt and jeans. He looks at me mistrustfully. Who the fuck is she? I read in his eyes. Tim doesn’t miss a beat and, once again, makes gallant introductions all round. The young man’s expression doesn’t flicker. He’s clearly not impressed. I feel too guilty to take pictures. Exactly what am I photographing?
g Emily was an unusual woman in Aboriginal society, characterised by independence from an early age. She remained single a long
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time. ‘You don’t catch me,’ she used to say.18 In traditional society, girls are ‘promised’ in marriage to older men at birth, and they are duty bound to their family and their Law to fulfil the arrangement. Fathers usually negotiate betrothals, signalling that the authority to make important decisions lies with the men. Once a girl marries, she moves from her birth country to her husband’s. ‘Catch’ is probably a fair description because girls who refused to comply, who tried to run away, might be caught and beaten by their bridegroom. In Emily’s era, it was unlikely the family would intervene. Kinship ties are immensely important, rather as they were to European aristocracy, where the child of a royal family was betrothed at birth, forging territorial, trade and diplomatic alliances. For Emily’s people, community means identity, family means life; there is no ‘alone’. Eventually Emily’s promised husband, an uncle who already had a wife, came to collect her. She left Utopia and began her tough working years on the big cattle stations at Bushy Park, Mount Riddock and Woodgreen. That was probably during the Second World War. It was obviously a wrench and, decades later, Emily reminisced about a plentiful ‘golden age’ in her youth. Anne Marie Brody believes Emily’s paintings celebrate those ‘olden times’.19 At Alhalkere, Emily was raised in a camp in a dry creek bed with a waterhole between sandhills. Her first sight of a white man, when she was around fourteen, was a brutal revelation of black/white relations on the frontier, the clash of two Laws. As Emily told Brody, she was near her camp with another girl, digging for yams, when she saw a man on horseback ‘sneaking up’. She’d never seen a horse before. Tied to this horse was a second, carrying an Aboriginal man in chains. When Emily told this story, she ‘put her hands up to her neck, showing that he also wore an iron collar’.
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The whitefella was probably a policeman, following the dry creek bed, looking for water. The girls thought he was a devil-spirit ‘come to kill them’, and bolted.20 Researcher Victoria King writes that Alhalkere is a Dreamtime green parrot who gave its name to a massive rock formation through which the sky can be viewed, a sacred site where men and women perform custodial ceremonies. At that place, two Dreamtime parrots rested, looking at the waterhole. Anna Petyarre Price says, ‘They’re still there, rock figures at Alhalker. They watch the waterhole, the soak at Alhalker.’ The name literally means ‘a hole made through the septum of the nose’. Emily embodied that place: her nose was ritually pierced to imitate and link her to the rock. The ceremony was done ‘when [Emily] was really really young. She had to be a special woman . . . They put the kangaroo bone through . . . and it had to stay there . . . And that is what they do to Emily because she was boss of that place, that country.’21 Though Emily was not ‘trained’ as an artist in the Western sense, she was trained for decades in the minute observation of nature, in her Dreaming stories and in the complex visual representations, the ‘patterns’, that encode and explain that mythology. ‘Kame’, her given name, is the seed of the pencil yam. It seems like the perfect name for an artist, it provides an image of latent, natural fecundity. Emily adopted her Western name later. As she told linguist Jenny Green, ‘I paint my plant, the one I am named after, those seeds I am named after . . . The pencil yam grows in our country—it belongs to us—the atnwelarr yam. They are found growing in the creek banks. That’s what I painted. I keep on painting the place that belongs to me.’22
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As the guardian of the pencil yam seed, Emily, by performing rituals associated with it, was maintaining the renewal of a key food source and the balance of nature, a sacred cycle managed by her people for centuries. To Aboriginal people, the land is a child, nurtured by ceremony. The pencil yam, a trailing herb or creeper that sometimes covers large areas, has bright green leaves, yellow flowers and slender, finger-length ‘yams’ or roots. Juicy and starchy, yams are a nutritious food source and rich in fibre. They can be eaten raw or, more frequently, baked in hot sand and ashes.23 The Western Desert art movement, which created the audience and the market for contemporary Aboriginal art, began in the early 1970s at Papunya, about three hundred kilometres southwest of Soakage Bore as the crow flies. Papunya was the last of the Aboriginal reserves established by the federal government where tribal peoples, predominantly of the Luritja/Pintupi language groups, were forced to live after removal from their traditional lands. A young art teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, encouraged senior men in the community to paint their Dreamings with acrylic on canvas. It meant Aboriginal people began making permanent artefacts from traditional designs with Western materials. The originality and beauty of those works not only made the heritage of the Papunya artists accessible to a non-indigenous audience, it signalled the revitalisation of Aboriginal visual culture. But, initially at least, the Aboriginal art movement was an exclusively male affair.24 In Utopia, thanks to Emily’s talent and innovation, women dominate the Central Desert art movement. Other significant artists include Gloria Temare Petyarre, Ada Bird Petyarre, Minnie Pwerle, Barbara Weir and Kathleen Petyarre. Women researchers and curators have also been drawn to document Central Desert art in
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general, and Emily in particular: the most prominent include Margo Neale, Jenny Green, Judith Ryan, Anne Marie Brody, Gabrielle Pizzi and Susan McCulloch. While the patterns in men’s artworks derive from their ceremonies involving sand paintings, women’s designs ‘come directly from the body in a female-only Dreaming’ called Awelye. As Jennifer Biddle writes, ‘a major part of this ceremony involves the intricate painting of women’s upper breasts, chests and arms with ochre if the ceremony is public, the thighs and stomach of the women if less or for healing purposes’. The painting is accompanied by singing Dreaming songs and usually lasts longer than the dance that follows. It means, for women, the Dreaming is an intimate, sensual, ‘profoundly embodied . . . experience’.25 Emily’s first painting, Emu Woman (1988–89, Holmes à Court Collection, Heytesbury, Western Australia), shows the intricate dotand-line patterns in brown, black, yellow and white that decorate the body in these ceremonies. Despite the painting’s abstraction, the form of a woman’s body is clearly discernible. Who is Emu Woman? Kathleen Petyarre tells of a sex-changing, shape-shifting Emu Ancestor who walked through the country looking for his people, first as a male, then as a female.26 Ankerre, emu, is a totemic figure; Emily belongs to Ankerre, it belongs to her and both belong indissolubly to the land. In tribal communities the world over, hunted animals are revered, like the bear to the North American Pauite. Emus congregate at waterholes, making Emily’s camp at Alhalkere near a soakage an excellent place to hunt prey. But it would have been a challenge. The flightless birds often grow two metres high and can run like the wind. A vicious kick from their powerful legs can disable a predator. The females, who are larger than the males, treat motherhood casually; after laying a clutch of eggs,
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they wander off and pay no more attention to their offspring. The males dutifully incubate the eggs and, after hatching, care for them until they mature. Emu meat is hearty and delicious, replete with vitamins and minerals. Baked in hot ashes, it would have been a banquet for Emily’s family. While the men hunted the emu with spears, the women followed its tracks with digging sticks, searching for plants that could be used for food and medicine. Aboriginal society is highly segregated and few tasks are shared by men and women. Men were responsible for hunting large game while women, accompanied by the children, sourced smaller game and plants. As Catherine Berndt observed, because these were more prolific and easily obtainable, ‘women contributed the bulk of the ordinary food supply’.27 Emily remembers, We killed different sorts of lizards, such as geckos and bluetongues, and ate them in our cubby houses [shelters] . . . My mother used to dig up bush potatoes [yams], and gather grubs from different sorts of Acacia bushes to eat. That’s what we used to live on. My mother would keep on digging and digging the bush potatoes, while us young ones made each other cry over the food; just over a little bit of food. Then we’d all go back to camp to cook the food . . . We didn’t have any tents—we lived in shelters made of grass. When it was raining, the grass was roughly thrown together for shelter. That was in the olden time, a long time ago.28
Emily grew up naked. Christian missionaries and the staff on the cattle stations instructed Aboriginal people in ‘civilised’ notions
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of propriety. Though Emily’s people were not forced off Utopia, after the arrival of the Kunoth brothers they lost access to sections of their traditional land, the easy passage and right of way they’d previously enjoyed between one place and another. The cattle needed vegetation and water, putting tribal groups in competition with them. The soakages were turned into artesian bores to service the needs of the newcomers. Dependent on the area’s scarce water supply, and unable to reliably access it, Emily and her family, like many in the Central Desert, based themselves on the cattle stations, in her case near the Utopia Station homestead. So she was probably a teenager when she began wearing clothes. Before that Emily danced and hunted and slept naked beneath the sky, a tough and tangible bond with the earth. The Central Desert, and everything in it, is spectacularly physical: the land, the heavens, the colours, the climate and the people. Women’s ceremonies are notable for their sensuality and emphasis on the breast which, thankfully, no amount of whitefella indoctrination about feminine modesty has changed. A photograph from 1982 shows Emily being ‘painted up’ for Awelye at Utopia Station. Surrounded by other women, Emily’s shoulders, breasts and upper arms are being decorated with designs in ochre. Prior to that, Emily’s skin was cleansed with a moisturiser made of leaves, flowers and bark, then she was massaged, and anointed with oil by the expert hands of other women. No wonder Utopia women perform Awelye ‘to make ourselves happy’.29 Soothing and pampering, it’s the ancient version of a day spa. Sexuality is celebrated in Aboriginal society. Anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt observe ‘one is continually aware of the frank importance the Aborigines attach to the sexual aspect . . .
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Sexual behaviour, they feel, is not a topic which must be deliberately veiled or virtually ignored in a community. The physical relations between men and women are spoken of freely and with little or no embarrassment . . . for sex is considered a necessary and a natural factor in human life.’30 Pleasure in the body, in a sisterhood of touch, is also part of Awelye. In Emily’s girlhood, emu fat was used on the skin, but as emus are scarce these days, the modern equivalent is baby oil or cooking oil. In the photo, a plastic bottle filled with oil leans against the large flat stone where the red ochre is ground. Emily, who is singing, looks diminutive but her thickly veined hands and forearms are massive for a woman. Her face, with prominent nose and full lips, is majestically lined. Seniority, which plays a large part in determining women’s power, increases with age. As a senior woman, known as a ‘boss’, Emily often led the Awelye ceremonies and carried the ceremonial pole known as kweter to where it was ‘planted’ in the ground. She also supervised the grinding of ochres and the application of paints. Emily was ‘a great singer—her powerful voice began the verse, on a high note and an inhalation of breath, and descended beyond the melodic range of her co-singers’.31 Awelye celebrates the potency of senior women—their knowledge and their bodies. In contemporary society, the firm breasts of a young woman are objects of desire, symbolising youth and ripening sexuality, the potential for procreation and nurture. For Anymaterre people, the pendulous breasts of an older woman are magical, tactile surfaces on which the Dreaming is inscribed, not sights of shame or embarrassment. Women’s sexual energy is made flesh in Awelye, registering their fundamental connection with the health and wellbeing of the land, and their bonds with one another. Awelye
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is the performance of the archetypal feminine. Awelye also played its part in the successful 1979 land claim; the Utopia women were reluctant to give verbal testimony to the Land Commissioner, Mr Justice Toohey, in the ‘male dominated quasi-court setting’, so they ‘painted up’, then danced and sang their Dreaming to prove their continuous connection with the land.32
g Tim and I don’t stay long at Soakage Bore; there’s no art to collect. We’re heading for Arlparra and, along the road, we see that others are heading there, too. It’s where ‘sorry business’ for the man who died is concentrated. Tim explains we’re lucky our journey is taking place today. By tomorrow, everyone will be involved and, like mourning rites in many cultures, it excludes participating in other activities. Rituals that follow a death sometimes continue ‘spasmodically for months or years’. Death is the way a man or a woman ‘becomes really sacred, in a way not possible to the living even in the most sacred of ceremonies’.33 The dead person’s name becomes taboo, all their possessions may be ritually destroyed, and the house in which they live is abandoned. Are the vandalised homes at Soakage Bore the houses of the dead? Tim pulls up and hails a family, artists whom he’d hoped to meet at another community, a couple who are heading for Arlparra with their three children. While Tim chats to the adults, I try communicating with the kids. We stumble with English words but end up exchanging smiles. Suddenly, the children whirl off like the wind into the grasses, and return with their palms outstretched. They’re offering me a handful of small, orange-brown berries.
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I pop some into my mouth: they’re juicy and, curiously, taste like curry. Tim’s jaw drops. ‘Do you realise some of those varieties are poisonous?’ he asks. I feel rather foolish, realising Tim is responsible for me out here. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I say flippantly. But as we get into the car, I wonder how long it takes for poison to hit the system. What comes first? Pain? Nausea? bush tucker kills writer, coroner reports. I implicitly trusted the children: they know which foods are safe, and acted from courtesy and friendliness. It was a gift. The traveller’s motto—trust your instincts—pays off and, by the time we get to Arlparra, all I need is a cold drink. Arlparra is the hub of the district, the neighbourhood drop-in centre. It’s where the Urapuntja Council, Utopia’s governing body, and the community-controlled health service are based. A recent report shows that Utopia, due to its semi-traditional lifestyle, is one of the healthiest areas in the Northern Territory for Aboriginal people.34 We’re heading for the store, the only one in the district, and it’s busy. A mural graces the front wall, a colourful, realistically rendered, dot-painted landscape. Inside, it looks like any well-stocked mixed business, with takeaway food, shelves of groceries, a fridge filled with milk, juice and soft drinks, and some trays of fruit and vegetables. The truck bringing fresh produce comes only once a fortnight. I buy a bucket of chips and a chilled mineral water. At the checkout, the most popular items are soft drinks and vacuumsealed, ready-to-cook kangaroo legs, complete with fur and claws. Tim bumps into another artist he needs to see, and introduces me. I crank up a smile. The heat, the drive, the confrontation with this new Australia, have overwhelmed me and I’m starting to tire. Emily spent most of the last two years of her life, together with her ‘niece’, Lily Sandover Kngwarreye, beneath the big, old, gracious
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eucalypt near the Arlparra store. Today, more than a hundred people are gathered there, and on the basketball courts and the football field, talking quietly in sex-segregated groups, the younger children with the women. It was under the big gum at Arlparra, over three days in mid-August 1996, two weeks before she died, that Emily painted a series of twenty-four small canvases. These flamboyantly handled and lusciously hued works, some in startling fluorescent colours, others in luminous skin tones of umber and cream, mark the zenith of her career, rivalling, in their supreme mastery of the medium, Monet’s late Water Lilies and Pollock’s drip paintings. Like Monet, Emily was a productive, tireless and driven worker. It was a factor determining her success. Fred Torres, an art dealer, is the son of Barbara Weir, a ‘niece’ whom Emily ‘growed up’ like Lindsay Bird Mpetyane. Torres recalled, ‘[Emily] was a super-fast painter. In the early days I was concerned about the quality; I always kept it a secret how quickly she painted as I thought it would bring the price down . . . Later I realised it was not about how fast she paints, but what she produces.’35 In 1996, Emily was old and frail: she had arthritis, moved with difficulty and needed a walking stick. Monet, too, had arthritis in his later years. He died at eighty-six, around the same age as Emily. Unlike Pollock and Georgia O’Keeffe, Monet and Emily did not lose the thread of their art. Their will to live was represented by their ability to mine the energy, when their own was fast diminishing, to produce grander work; an urgency to continue to experience, passionately and fully, the natural world that both worshipped because it had enriched them immeasurably. Monet and Emily’s last paintings are brilliantly orchestrated farewells, works of genius that
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equal the source of their inspiration. Both had support: Monet had the assistance of Blanche, and Emily sometimes had the assistance of family members. Tim and I are off again, this time to Rocket Range. It’s the last community we’ll visit; after that, Tim has a surprise for me, but he won’t say what. Driving through the desert, it’s intriguing to contemplate Emily crossing it—on foot or by camel. (Much later, she travelled by car—the cars that her wealth bought for her community.) After Emily married, she and her husband left Utopia, and found employment on the cattle stations further south. Domestic service was the usual occupation for Aboriginal girls on the stations. Not Emily. She worked outside like a man, refusing to be enclosed—in a house or by the rules that went with it. Emily and her husband led camel teams carrying supplies between Alcoota and a mica mine on Mount Riddock Station, a round trip of a hundred kilometres. In the vicinity of Harts Range, the countryside is much hillier than at Arlparra and, by camel, the journey could take a week. That was probably during the Second World War because, in 1942, there was an international shortage of mica. Several large deposits were located in the Harts Range area, and the government opened mines there. Mica is the generic name for a group of minerals that, by cleaving, separates into thin, tough, transparent sheets. Prized for its heat resistance, mica is used instead of glass as a window in stoves, and to insulate high-voltage cables. Emily was also a labourer at the mine—exhausting, dirty work. She didn’t earn money—Aboriginal women weren’t paid wages—but rations of brown sugar, tea, flour, jam, bullock meat and portions of plug tobacco known as ‘niki’.36
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When Emily’s husband decided to take another wife, she had no intention of being part of a harem, so she ditched him. Probably tired of the strenuous camel team and mining work, she took a job at Woodgreen Station. She recalled tending Bob Green, the station owner, when he was a baby, rocking him to sleep in his pram, but she was mostly outside, looking after a herd of nanny goats. She fled Woodgreen after an ugly incident involving a police officer. After he arrested one of her uncles for killing station horses for food, the officer chained Emily’s uncle and put him in the patrol car bound for Barrow Creek, two hundred kilometres north. He also took a fancy to Emily and abducted her, chaining her up and forcing her into the car. When the car had a flat tyre, the officer released Emily and asked her to help fix it. But, afraid of being raped, Emily took the opportunity to run off into the bush. She walked three days to reach her grandmother’s camp on the Sandover River.37 What is notable about the tale is Emily’s vulnerability: if the white policeman wanted her, he just took her. As historian Marcia Langton comments, ‘I imagine it must have been terrifying to have been an Aboriginal woman on the Northern Territory frontier.’38 Emily married again but this time it was a love match with a younger man who was already ‘promised’ to another woman. He and Emily might have had to deal with opposition from their families as a result. That husband died, and in the 1950s Emily was back at Utopia. Past her child-bearing years, she became ‘aunty’ to Barbara Weir and Lily Sandover Kngwarreye, and ‘mother’ to Lindsay Bird Mpetyane. She also helped to raise Simon Kemarre, Lily’s son. Aboriginal society is no different to others: a woman’s fertility is prestigious, motherhood is regarded as the ultimate achievement of
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her sex and a major contribution to her community. In Aboriginal society, women are the primary carers for children until the boys are ready for initiation, then they join the men. As Ronald and Catherine Berndt observe, marriage ‘enhances the prestige’ of both men and women, and ‘parenthood is expected of them’.39 Emily’s infertility marked her as an outsider. Did it contribute to feelings of grief or separateness? Did it make her character more resilient and defined? ‘Utopia’s modern art movement began in 1977.’40 It was the year the Utopia people sacked the cattle station management consultants they’d hired and decided to run the place themselves. Independence and revitalisation was in the air. After Jenny Green started craft classes and taught the women batik, they took to it with gusto. Batik, a traditional Indonesian craft, is a textile-dyeing process using melted wax and paint, and the effects are elegantly decorative. Emily was an enthusiastic participant who quickly showed promise. Green and Emily became close, Green describing Emily as ‘a woman of strength, humour and enthusiasm’ whom she grew ‘to love and admire’. The two had adventures. There were some ‘hysterical moments’ when Green tried to teach Emily to drive at the Utopia airstrip in an old car with unreliable brakes. As Green grabbed Emily’s foot, firmly planted on the accelerator, Emily, laughing in panic, let go of the wheel and clutched her instructor. Neither the occupants, nor the car, suffered damage. Green often went hunting and foraging with the women. Once she lost her new Akubra hat. ‘Surveying those endless vistas of witchetty bush and mulga, I had no idea where I might find it.’ She explained the problem to Emily, who vanished into the scrub for a moment, and returned holding the hat.41
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By 1988, the Utopia Women’s Batik Group had more than eighty members as well as an international reputation within the craft world. At first, Emily’s bold experiments with the medium, with pictorial structure and the traditional iconography of dots and lines, dismayed the other women, who regarded it as ‘over the top’. Gloria Temare Petyarre admitted ‘everybody laughed about Emily’s work’, though Petyarre points out it was just good-natured banter. ‘We were only joking.’42 Length of Fabric (1981, Holmes à Court Collection, Heytesbury, Western Australia) is one of Emily’s few existing early batiks.43 It’s deliciously rich and authoritative, a sunburst of reds and yellows that offers a diagram of the Dreaming. Emily’s exuberant schema of dots and lines can be read variously, and simultaneously, as a map of the earth and the stars, the underground plants and the animal tracks, the mythic ancestors’ journeys and the hunting paths of her own people, the cosmos and her country. Time and space are compressed into a thoroughly readable image of the universe. The work explains, better than words, the Dreaming’s holistic philosophy as a net that captures and sustains everything, and where everything is alive. What makes the work so powerful is the clarity, conviction and control that Emily so effortlessly brings to bear. Pollock had to borrow and develop his mythos; Emily’s work glows with the assurance that she owns hers. At the end of the decade, Emily produced Emu Dreaming (1988, Holmes à Court Collection), a gorgeous, golden, rippling field of silk, teeming with small animals and plants—bush turkeys, sand goannas and large lizards, as well as the fruits and seeds favoured by emus. It’s an image of plenty, as though the land has sprung to life after the rain, creating a paradise, an abundance of food for animals and humans.
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Late in 1988, Rodney Gooch encouraged the batik group to try canvas and acrylic paints. Gooch was the manager and arts coordinator of the CAAMA Shop, the ‘visual arts’ branch of the Central Australia Aboriginal Media Association. By that time, the reputation and the market for the Papunya artists was a worldwide phenomenon. The women took to the new media with alacrity, and none more so than Emily. Emu Woman, her first painting, was greeted with delight and astonishment by Gooch. ‘But right from the start the brightest spotlight was trained on Emily Kame Kngwarreye and has remained there ever since.’44
g We’ve arrived at Rocket Range Camp, named for the shape of the local water tower. Though Rocket Range is outside the domain of the Urapunta Land Council, it’s still regarded as Utopia. I feel I’ve descended into one of the circles of hell. Dozens of junked, rusting car bodies surround the camp. The ground is strewn with broken glass, empty cans, cardboard boxes, plastic bottles and stained mattresses. We pull up beneath a tree where several elderly women are sitting. With them is a naked child whose mucous-stained face crawls with flies. Near where we park, a makeshift home has been constructed around the remains of a brick chimney: its walls are tree boughs and corrugated iron sheets, draped with clothes and blankets. The government-built houses are empty, stripped. Tim gets on with business, unloading wads of rolled-up canvases and bags crammed with acrylic paints. A young woman approaches, smiling shyly. She’s barefoot and skinny, her stiff, unwashed hair radiates from her head like an aureole. In her hands, she
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carries a small, beautifully rendered abstract painting as tenderly as a baby. I guess I’m slow but it suddenly hits me it was in a place like this Emily produced great art, where she sat cross-legged on the earth, brush in hand, painting with absorption and determination, surrounded by her family, her friends and her dogs. Any one of these old ladies could be Emily. I try to wipe the shock from my face. The little boy catches my eye. He grabs a puppy by the legs, and slams it on the ground as hard as he can. The dog screams in pain. Whack. He does it again, and laughs. The women sitting next to him—his mother? his aunties?—continue to talk among themselves and pay him no attention. He can see I’m furious. He shrieks with laughter. Whack. ‘If he does that again, I’ll kill him,’ I mutter to Tim. I turn away and face a tall, white wooden cross, supported by beams, opposite the camp. There must have been a church here once, built by the Lutheran missionaries. Of course, I despise the missionaries who tried to convince Aboriginal people to conform to their rules. Now I’m not so sure of my opinions, an ideology built in my safe suburban world, surrounded by people who agree with me. I want to snatch the puppy from the boy and explain it’s wrong to hurt animals. I want to clean his face and wash his hands. Give him rules, my rules. Standing alone, the cross resembles the ruin of a previous civilisation. The shimmering web of the Dreaming that Emily illustrates shows no rupture, no crude or ugly passages, no marks of sadness or mourning, no lack. In works like Kame—Summer Awelye I (1991, private collection) and Kam[e] (1991, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), the Dreaming is represented as a perfect luminous entirety, shining with health and optimism, stretching out forever.
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In Kame—Summer Awelye I—302 × 136.8 cm—the country is depicted as a carpet of effulgent, blooming wildflowers, while Kam[e] shows the earth rich and green after rain. The Dreaming seems present because of the immense vitality and belief with which Emily paints it. A key reason for the widespread appeal of Emily’s work is the frank and lucid spirituality it conveys, a rarity in the cool world of contemporary art. Her paintings beat like a heart with conviction. But, equally, they offer no place for a clash of cultures, for our seemingly insoluble, intertwined problems. Emily’s political statement is her Dreaming: transcendence, unity, eternity, an ideal community. Utopia. Nomads have to be opportunists. Desert-dwelling Aboriginal people have been vulnerable to white incursion due to their lifestyle’s fragility, especially their food sources. If, feeling like something sweet, you need first to locate a nest of honey ants, dig down perhaps a metre, then catch the ants and bite off their abdomens to suck out their juices, wouldn’t you, when offered a bag of sugar by a missionary, take it, even if the trade meant listening to a sermon or wearing a skirt? The resilience of Aboriginal people to survive and thrive for thousands of years in such a demanding climate, sustained by their Law, has made them the colonisers’ relentless adversary and, occasionally, the victor. Contemporary Aboriginal art is itself a triumph, proving Aboriginal people are flexible, inquisitive, enterprising, talented and able to adopt new materials and find a fresh expression for their culture. Despite what I perceive as the sheer awfulness of camp life, the opportunity to produce art is abundant: the slow rhythm, the lack of distractions and the remoteness of the communities mean they’re ideal for art-making.
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In 1990, the second year that Emily painted on canvas, she had five solo exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. She was famous and her paintings fetched high prices. Gabrielle Pizzi, one of the first art dealers to perceive and promote Emily’s talent, was amused by the market frenzy that Kngwarreye aroused. In an article titled ‘The Emily Industry’, Pizzi commented, ‘Why not have us running around getting into a lather? . . . They’re really tough in the desert. They’ve had to be, to survive.’45 In Melbourne, Pizzi showcased Emily’s work in a series of rigorously selected solo and group exhibitions. She regarded Kngwarreye as having agency in the situation, and refused to consider her ‘a victim’ of the white gallery system, a charge often levelled at art dealers. At Rocket Range, Tim introduces me to Janelle Stockman Napaltjarri, a young artist who’s the granddaughter of Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, one of the founding members of the Papunya group. She and her husband’s family divide their time between Rocket Range, Papunya and Hermannsburg, an Arrente community, where the first Lutheran mission was founded in 1877. Janelle is bright, bubbly and ambitious. She’s keen to find out from Tim when an encyclopaedia on Australian art, which will feature her work, is going to be published. When he confirms it’s later that year, she’s pleased and excited, like any young artist whose career is taking off. Janelle doesn’t paint a Dreaming, instead focusing on the landscape’s patterns and colours. As the third generation of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement, Napaltjarri wants to paint her own way. Her confidence and exuberance provide a corrective to my feelings about Rocket Range. In Aboriginal Australia, issues exist in glaring, often redemptive, contradiction to one another.
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There’s no telling what will emerge as a saving grace and what will ensue as a tragedy. We’re getting ready to leave Rocket Range. Tim pays the artists for their work by cheque, which they’ll cash at the Arlparra store. He’s rejected a few paintings because he feels the artist has rushed it, and can do better. He’s keen to see the men paint, and exhorts several, bantering with them about how it’s the women who are the artists. We say our goodbyes, then Tim finds a tap near one of the houses and we clean our hands with the soap and towels he’s brought. Though necessary, I find it embarrassing in front of the community. I don’t know where we’re heading next—it’s Tim’s surprise.
g As Emily’s fame grew, her style changed, and her paintings became even more ambitious in scale, radical in form, subtle and varied in hue. It doesn’t take an art critic to realise Emily was painting for the sheer thrill of it. Her lifestyle didn’t change: she continued to live at bush camps at Utopia, sometimes staying at the Alice Springs’ home of Barbara Weir. Gallery director Rebecca Hossack recalls, It was an amazing sight to see Emily paint—the energy flowing out of her seemingly frail figure across the canvas. She worked sitting on the ground, with her canvas held close to her body, while she dabbed on the paint with economic intensity. She worked from the outside inward, turning the canvas gradually, and changing her brushstroke to facilitate the task.46
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It’s also worth nothing that, aside from the few times that Emily viewed her paintings in a gallery, she had no opportunity to see them vertically, only horizontally, as they were on the ground when she completed them. Pollock, after starting a drip painting, would meditate on the unfinished work for hours, even days, before taking the next step. It makes Emily’s ability to handle a huge, abstract, pictorial design all the more astonishing. Not every painting was successful but hundreds are. The aerial perspective of Aboriginal painting is one of its most puzzling and fascinating features. Emily painted her country from a bird’s-eye view—yet there are no mountain ranges in Utopia that can offer such a perspective. When I flew into Alice Springs, it was like flying over a vast abstract painting. On the red earth with its low hills and salt lakes, its bluffs and boulders, it seemed I could see the Dreamtime creatures who’d made the land and who remain there so powerfully. But I was in a plane thousands of metres up where such visions are possible. Aboriginal people paint aerial perspectives automatically and familiarly, though they may never have flown or seen their country from such a height. The Skyworld features in many Dreamings, with celestial realms described as if they were fully experienced, physical places. Aboriginal art’s treatment of space makes it ‘readable’ and accessible in the language of modernist, abstract painting which flattens perspective, modelling and shading to explore the two-dimensionality of the picture plane, and that eschews the object for the symbol. It attracts an audience that is sophisticated in the techniques and the language of modern art. In 1994, Emily broke away from the dot-and-line style to begin a new series based on the body decorations in the Awelye ceremonies.
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Body Markings I–IV (1994, Holmes à Court Collection) comprise four panels, each 152 × 61 cm. Passionately executed and vividly coloured, the works’ pictorial organisation is dramatically structured with a combination of vertical and horizontal lines, the former predominating. Stripes of deep brown are set against stark white, mauve against pink, red against blue, creating fields of energy, of pulsating optical rhythms. Emily translates the lines that decorate the women’s bodies, originally the tracks of the ancestors’ mythic journeys, as the essence of movement, dance, worship, ecstasy. Untitled [Awelye] (1995, Collection Judith and Ron Behan) is a triumph of reduction where Emily limits the colours—to red, black and white—as well as the number of lines, and paints fearlessly. No hesitation, no mistakes. The following year, Emily began another series which she referred to as ‘sacred grasses’, perhaps a Dreaming story where grasses are ‘winnowed by the wind’ to release their seeds. The grass might be mamperrk, also known as armgrass millet, a seasonal plant that women collect and winnow, before baking the mixture as seed cakes in the camp fire.47 The paintings of the ‘sacred grasses’ series are mostly untitled. Enormous works—some 190 × 106 cm—they display wildly fabulous brushstrokes that suggest the wind rippling through the grasses. Her frenzied, luminous calligraphy and highkeyed palette also imitates the actions of fire and water—ravaging flames and soaking rains. As writer Peter Latz notes, ‘most Central Australian grass species appear to thrive on fire’ and Aboriginal people used fire extensively to regenerate plants.48 Fire encourages the growth of mamperrk, whose first seeds appear after the summer rains. Emily tells the story of the sacred grasses as a beautiful tale of regeneration and elemental balance. Nowadays, because Aboriginal
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people eat whitefella food, the grasses are no longer gathered with the same urgency. It means Emily’s paintings are nostalgic tributes to ‘the olden times’ when, as a young woman, she went gathering with her mother and female relatives at Alhalkere, finding and processing the food to sustain her family. The quality and vigour of the series conveys the immense satisfaction and spiritual significance of collecting the grasses.
g Tim veers off the road, then veers off that road, and we’re heading down a bumpy track. I like Tim’s direct manner, and his affection and respect for the artists is obvious. I also have to trust him. People can disappear in the desert, meet with accidents and disasters. They can get lost, and die from lack of water. Meet with murderous maniacs, epitomised in the horror movie Wolf Creek, based on a real and terrifying event, the murder of English tourist, Peter Falconio in 2001. Even an apparently harmless animal can turn nasty. The dingo took my baby. Haunting tales of our haunted outback. When we pull up, I encounter the most extraordinary sight in an extraordinary day. Surrounded by native grasses and graceful ghost gums is a black marble grave with an imposing headstone. There’s nothing else in sight; no houses, no people, no fences, no roads. Only the grave. This secluded place was Emily’s last camp, though she did not die here but in Alice Springs. The headstone reads: Emily. Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Died September 2 1996. A Great Australian Artist. The gravestone is a well-meaning though incongruous tribute, representing the differing expectations, the contradictory results, the unpredictable and often startling intersections of our
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black/white, non/indigenous relations. Cemeteries are sacred sites commemorating those we love and honour with gravestones carved in beautiful, durable, highly polished marble. The grave is a monument to Emily, ‘totemising’ her as her people ‘totemise’ the landscape. It faces in a westerly direction—perhaps towards Alhalkere? All the artists and writers in this book have a house museum: Emily, too, has a shrine. Reflecting on Emily’s last series painted at Arlparra, gallery director Michael Eather wonders, ‘What were Kngwarreye’s intentions with these final, baffling, sublime works? Perhaps she was reacting to the irony of it all—sparse conditions yet an unimaginably rich cultural heritage? Perhaps the reductionism was simply a filtering of her holistic view of her internal and external landscapes? Perhaps a sly joke? A criticism of our white consumer reliance on her providence, the vulgarity of it all? We will never really know.’49 Inevitably, Emily’s silence about ‘the meaning’ of her work invites interpretation, metaphors to navigate such mysterious and profound art. Emily’s oeuvre can be read as a historical document about colonisation and the land rights struggles of indigenous people, as a myth about Dreamtime creatures, a detailed map of the country—complete with information about plants, animals and water supplies, a sensual feminine tracery describing the curves of a woman’s body, a cosmic diagram, an example of modern religious art, the victory of nature and imagination over deprivation and loss, the survival of Aboriginal culture. Finally, her work is a complex and triumphant journey home, to a place she has taught her audience to cherish. My journey is ending, too. Under the night sky, we’re heading back to Alice Springs, and I’m dumb with fatigue. In Utopia, I’ve
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seen another Australian art world. Although I’ve been looking at Aboriginal art since the 1970s, when the Papunya Tula artists began exhibiting, I didn’t understand the context, the conditions under which it was made. The documentation of Aboriginal art largely ignores it, and the painful, ongoing social dilemmas that accompany it, either unconsciously, or out of respect or political correctness. It is difficult to write about the communities without feeling you’re offending someone, or you’re ‘making things worse’. In some modern societies, art can exist separately from its environment. In traditional Aboriginal art, there is no ‘separate’; there is only ‘environment’. For all the artists and writers in this book, the ‘home’ they recreate is, despite its hardships or drawbacks, Arcadia. Emily would doubtless affirm, for all its challenges, that is also true of her country.
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g Bibliogr a ph y
Ge n e r a l Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell, Dallas Institute Publications, Dallas, 1988. ——The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language and the Cosmos, trans. Daniel Russell, Beacon Press, Boston, 1971. ——The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994. ——The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C.M. Ross, Beacon Press, Boston, 1964. ——Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell, The Pegasus Foundation, Dallas, 1983. Jeffrey Berman, Surviving Literary Suicide, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1999. Janine Burke, The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection, Random House, Sydney, 2006. ——The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide, Random House, Sydney, 2004. Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997. Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art, John Murray, London, 1949. Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth, trans. Willard R. Task, Spring Publications, Putnam, Connecticut, 1994.
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Source ——The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Task, Bollingen Foundation, New York, 1954. ——The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Task, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1959. ——Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R. Task, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1972. T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, The Four Quartets, Faber and Faber, London, 1944, vol. V. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, [Hogarth Press, London, 1953–1974], Vintage, London, 2001, vol. III. ——‘A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung and Wahrheit’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, Vintage, London, 2001, vol. XVII. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘In-Between: The Natural in Architecture and Culture’, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001. ——‘Women, Chora, Dwelling’, in Space, Time and Perversion: The Politics of Bodies, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995. Luce Irigaray, ‘Place, Interval: A Reading of Aristotle, Physics IV’, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G.C. Gill, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1993. Carl Jung, Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster, Arc, London, 1980. ——Man and His Symbols, with M-L. von Franz, Joseph L. Hemderson, Jolande Jacobi and Aniela Jaffe, Arkana, London, 1990. ——The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Collected Works, Bollingen Series, Part 1, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Routledge Kegan Hall, London, 1972. ——The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature, Collected Works, Bollingen Series XX, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1966. ——Sharing the World, Continuum, London, 2008. Kay Milton, Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion, Routledge, London, 2002. Frederick Nietzsche, Part Four: ‘Epigrams and Entr’actes, Number 146’, Beyond Good and Evil, A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future in Rolf-Peter Horstman and Judith Norman (eds) trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002.
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Bibliogr aphy Claire Pajaczkowska and Ivan Ward (eds), Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture, Routledge, London, 2008. Catherine M. Roach, Mother/Nature: Popular Culture and Environmental Ethics, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2003. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, HarperCollins, London, 1995.
1 Georgi a O’ K e e ffe Jack Cowart and Juan Hamilton (eds), Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters, selected and annotated by Sarah Greenough, National Gallery of Art,Washington, New York Graphic Society Books, New York, Little, Brown, Boston, 1987. Frederick J. Dockstader, The Kachina and the White Man: The Influences of White Culture on the Hopi Kachina Culture, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, [1954], 1985. Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe, WW Norton, New York, 2004. Charles Eldredge, Georgia O’Keefe, H.N. Abrams in association with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, New York, 1991. Ruth E. Fine and Barbara Buhler Lynes with Elizabeth Glassman and Judith C. Walsh, O’Keeffe on Paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, 2000. Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2003. Clive Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer, intro. Benita Eisler, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1990. Sam Gill, Native American Religious Action: A Performance Approach to Religion, University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 1987. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. and intro. M.T.H. Sadler, Dover, New York, 1977. Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1987. Laurie Lisle, Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe, Washington Square Press, New York, 1980. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, [1937] 1987. ——Lorenzo in Taos, Kraus Reprint, New York, [1932] 1969.
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Source Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, Yale University Press, New Haven/National Gallery of Art, Washington/Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, Abiquiu, 1999, 2 vols. Barbara Buhler Lynes and Ann Paden (eds), Maria Chabot–Georgia O’Keeffe: Correspondence, 1941–1949, University of New Mexico Press, Alburqueque/ Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, 2003. Barbara Buhler Lynes, Lesley Poling-Kempes and Frederick W. Turner, Georgia O’Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place, Princeton University Press, Princeton, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, 2004. Christopher Merrill and Ellen Bradbury (eds), From the Faraway Nearby: Georgia O’Keeffe as Icon, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1992. Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer, Random House, New York, 1973. ——Encounters, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1987. Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, Viking, New York, 1976. Arthur Newton Pack, We Called it Ghost Ranch, Ghost Ranch Conference Centre, Abiquiu, New Mexico, 1979. Sarah Whitaker Peters, Becoming O’Keeffe: The Early Years, Abbeville Press, New York, 2001. Lesley Poling-Kempes, Ghost Ranch, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2005. ——Valley of Shining Stone: The Story of Abiquiu, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1999. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield (eds), The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, vol. IV, June 1921–March 1924, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987. Roxana Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, Bloomsbury, London, 1990. Lois Palken Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1987. ——Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1996. W. Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1995. Keith Sagar (ed.), D.H. Lawrence and New Mexico, Gibbs Smith, Salt Lake City, 1982. Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz, intro by Georgia O’Keeffe, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1978. Calvin Tomkins, ‘The Rose in the Eye Looked Pretty Fine’, New Yorker, 4 March 1974.
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Bibliogr aphy Jean Toomer, Cane, Harper and Row, New York, 1969. Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001. Anne Middleton Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner and O’Keeffe, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996. James Webb, The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G.I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers, Thames and Hudson, London, 1980. Richard Whelan, Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography, Little, Brown, New York, 1995.
2 Pic a s so Anne Baldassari, Picasso: Love and War, Life with Dora Maar, 1935–1945, Flammarion, Paris, 2006. Wilhem Boeck and Jaime Sabartés, Picasso, Thames and Hudson, London, 1955. Brassaï, Picasso & Co, preface Henry Miller, intro. Roland Penrose, Thames and Hudson, London, 1966. Pierre Cabanne, Pablo Picasso: His Life and Times, trans. Harold J. Salemson, William Morrow, New York, 1977. Mary Ann Caws, Dora Maar: With and Without Picasso, Thames and Hudson, London, 2000. Elizabeth Cowling (ed.), Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose, Thames and Hudson, London, 2006. Pierre Daix, Picasso, Thames and Hudson, London, 1965. ——Picasso: Life and Art, trans. Olivia Emmet, HarperCollins, London, 1993. Jules-César Romauld Dor de la Souchère, Picasso in Antibes, photographs by Marian Greenwood, Pantheon Books, New York, 1960. Barbara F. Freed, with Alan Halpern, Artists and their Museums on the Riviera, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1998. Mary Mathews Gedo, Picasso: Art as Autobiography, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980. Françoise Gilot, An Artist’s Journey/Un Voyage Pictorial, intro. and interview Barbara Haskell, foreword Danièle Giraudy, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1987. ——Françoise Gilot: Monograph, 1940–2000, foreword Dina Vierny, texts the artist, biography and analysis of works Mel Yoakum, Acatos, Lausanne, 2000. ——Françoise Gilot, Interface: The Painter and the Mask, trans. Françoise Gilot, California State University, Fresno, 1983.
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Source ——Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art, Doubleday, New York, 1990. Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, Doubleday, New York, [1964] 1989. Danièle Giraudy, Antibes: Guide to the Picasso Museum, trans. Charles Lynn Clark, Paris, 1987. A. Trevor Hodge, Ancient Greek France, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1999. Geneviève Laporte, Sunshine at Midnight: Memories of Picasso and Cocteau, trans. and with annotations by Douglas Cooper, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1975. Marilyn McCully (ed.), Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1998. André Malraux, Picasso’s Mask, trans. and annotated June Guicharnaud with Jacques Guicharnaud, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1976. Fernande Olivier, Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier, trans. Christine Baker and Michael Raeburn, foreword and notes Marilyn McCully, epilogue John Richardson, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 2001. Ovid, The Metamorphosis, trans. and intro. Mary M. Innes, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1955. Helene Parmelin, Picasso Plain: An Intimate Portrait, trans. Humphrey Hare, Secker and Warburg, London, 1963. Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, University of Califormia Press, Berkley; Los Angeles [1958], 1981. Pablo Picasso: The Time with Françoise Gilot, (ed.) Markus Müller, Kerber Verlag, Münster, 2002. Picasso: A Dialogue with Ceramics: Ceramics from the Marina Picasso Collection, Tecoma Art Museum, Tecoma, 1998. Picasso: La Joie de Vivre, 1945–1948, Palazzo Grassi, Venice: Musée Picasso, Antibes, Skira, Milan, 2006. Picasso à Antibes, Photographies de Michel Sima, Commentées par Paul Eluard, Introduction par Jaime Sabartés, René Drouin, Paris, 1948. Georges Ramié, Picasso’s Ceramics, trans. Kenneth Lyons, Secker and Warburg, London, 1975. John Richardson, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Picasso, Provence and Douglas Cooper, Jonathan Cape, London, 1999. John Richardson, with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully, A Life of Picasso, 1881–1906, Random House, New York, 1991, vol. 1.
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Bibliogr aphy William Rubin (ed.), Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1980. Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: An Intimate Portrait, trans. Angel Flores, Prentice-Hall, New York, 1948. Claude Ruiz-Picasso, ‘The Valley of Gold: Picasso as Potter’ in Elizabeth Cowling and John Golding (eds), Picasso: Sculptor/Painter, Tate Gallery, London, 1994. Gertje R. Utley, Picasso: The Communist Years, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000.
3 K a r e n Bli x e n Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1976. Thorkvild Bjornvig, The Pact: My Friendship with Isak Dinesen, trans. Ingvar Schouseboe and William Jay Smith, intro. William Jay Smith, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1983. Karen Blixen, Out of Africa, Jonathan Cape, London, [1937] 1975. Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales, Random House, New York, [1934] 1961. ——Winter’s Tales, Random House, New York, 1942. ——Anecdotes of Destiny, Random House, New York, [1953] 1974. ——Last Tales, Random House, New York, 1957. ——Shadows on the Grass, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, [1960] n.d. ——Ehrengard, Random House, New York, [1963] 1975. ——Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1977. ——Daguerreotypes and Other Essays, Heinemann, London, 1979. Thomas Dinesen, My Sister: Isak Dinesen, trans. Joan Tate, Michael Joseph, London, 1975. Wilhelm Dinesen, Boganis: Letters from the Hunt, A Field Journal, trans. Lise Lange Striar and Myles Striar, Rowan Tree Press, Boston, 1987. Linda Donelson, Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa: The Untold Story, Coulsong List, Iowa City, 1995. Fady Hajal, ‘Family Scapegoating in the Life and Works of Karen Blixen,’ The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry, vol. 18, 1990. Deborah Hayden, Pox: Genius, Madness and the Mysteries of Syphillis, Basic Books, New York, 2003.
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Source Brian Herne, White Hunters: The Golden Age of African Safaris, Henry Holt, New York, 1999. Susan R. Horton, Difficult Women, Artful Lives: Olive Schreiner and Isak Dinesen, In and Out of Africa, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1995. Tove Hussein, Africa’s Song of Karen Blixen, Tove Hussein, Nairobi, 1998. Karen Blixen Museet, The Karen Blixen Museum, Rungstedlund, 2003. Robert Langbaum, The Gayety of Vision, A Study of Isak Dinesen’s Art, Chatto and Windus, London, 1964. Frans Lasson (ed.) Isak Dinesen, Letters from Africa, 1914–1931, for the Rungedstedlund Foundation, trans. Anne Born, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981. ——Life and Destiny of Isak Dinesen, (ed.), Text Clara Svendsen, Random House, New York, 1970. Simon Lewis, White Women Writers and Their African Inventions, University Press of Florida, Gainsville, 2003. Longing for Darkness: Kamante’s Tales from Out of Africa, Collected by Peter Beard, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1975. John M. Mackenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988. Parmenia Migel, Titania: The Biography of Isak Dinesen, Random House, New York, 1967. Min afrikanske Verden (My African Existence), Karen Blixen Museet, Rungstedlund, 2004. Nick Van der Puy, ‘The Extreme Edge of Freedom’, The Native American Press/ The Ojibwe News, 1995. Glenn C. Reynolds, ‘A Native American Water Ethic’, Transactions, vol. 90, 2003. Edward I. Steinhart, Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya, James Currey, 2006. Stories of Hans Christian Andersen, selected and trans. Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank, Granta, London, 2004. Clara Svendsen (ed.), Isak Dinesen: A Memorial, Random House, New York, 1965. Judith Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984. Errol Trzebinski, Silence Will Speak: A Study of the Life of Denys Finch Hatton and His Relationship with Karen Blixen, Heinemann, London, 1977. Bror von Blixen-Finecke, African Hunter, Cassell, London, 1937.
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Bibliogr aphy Richard B. Vowles, ‘Boganis, Father of Osceola: or Wilhelm Dinesen in America, 1872–1874’, Scandanavian Studies, vol. 48, no. 4, Autumn 1976. Anders Westenholz, The Power of Aries: Myth and Reality in Karen Blixen’s Life, trans. Lise Kure-Jensen, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1982. Sara Wheeler, Too Close to the Sun: The Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton, Jonathan Cape, London, 2006.
4 Jack son Pollock Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen Series XIX Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1969. Claude Cernuschi, Jackson Pollock: Meaning and Significance, HarperCollins, New York, 1992. ——Jackson Pollock’s ‘Psychoanalytic’ Drawings, Duke University Press, Durham, 1992. Vine Deloria Jr, God is Red: A Native View of Religion, Fulcrum Publishing, Golden, Colorado, 1973. Corey Dolgon, The End of the Hamptons: Scenes from the Class Struggle in America’s Paradise, New York University Press, New York, 2005. Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991. Harold E. Doweiko, Concepts of Chemical Dependency, Thomson Brooks/Cole, Belmont, 2006. Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, ‘Who was Jackson Pollock’, Art in America, May 1967. Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York, 1996. Elizabeth Frank, Jackson Pollock, Abbeville Press, New York, 1983. B.H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1972. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Beacon Press, Boston, 1972. Helen A. Harrison (ed.), Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock, Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 2000. Curtis M. Hinsley Jr, Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846–1910, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1981.
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Source Jackson Pollock: Love and Death on Long Island. Video-recording. Produced and directed by Teresa Griffiths, Chicago, Home Vision Arts, c. 2000. Pepe Karmel (ed.), Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Jackson Pollock’s Drawings’, Artforum, January 1971. Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1989. Elizabeth Langhorne, ‘The Magus and the Alchemist: John Graham and Jackson Pollock’, American Art, vol. 12, no. 3, Autumn 1998. ——‘Jackson Pollock’s The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle’, Arts Magazine, vol. 53, no. 7, March 1979. James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1965. Originally published as Part 2 of the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1892–1893. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1896. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, Clarkson N. Potter, New York, 1989. Emily Ballew Neff, The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890–1950, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008. Francis Valentine O’Connor, ‘The Genesis of Jackson Pollock: 1912–1943’, Artforum, 5 May 1967. Francis Valentine O’Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1978, 4 vols. Nancy J. Parezo, Navajo Sandpainting: From Religious Act to Commercial Art, University of Arizona Press, Tuscon, 1983. Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991. Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock, G.P. Puttnam’s Sons, New York, 1985. Barbara Rose, Lee Krasner: A Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1983. W. Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1995. John A. Strong, The Montaukett Indians of Eastern Long Island, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 2001.
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Bibliogr aphy Elisabeth Sussman with John G. Hanhardt, City of Ambition: Artists and New York, 1900–1960, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Flammarion, Paris, 1996. Ferris G. Talmage, The Springs, An Eastern Long Island Town, In the Old Days, Starchand Press, Wainscott, 1983. Anne Middleton Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner and O’Keeffe, University of Cailfornia Press, Berkeley, 1996. Gary Witherspoon and Glen Peterson, Dynamic Symmetry and Holistic Asymmetry in Navajo and Western Art and Cosmology, Peter Lang, New York, 1995.
5 V i rgi n i a Woolf a n d Va n e s sa Be ll Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (eds), Diary of Virginia Woolf, Hogarth Press, London, 1975–1980, 5 vols. Quentin Bell and Virginia Nicholson, Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden, Hodder and Stoughton, Sydney, 1997. Mary Ann Caws, Women of Bloomsbury: Virginia, Vanessa and Carrington, Routledge, London, 1990. Vanessa Curtis, The Hidden Houses of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Robert Hale, London, 2005. Jane Dunn, A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, Jonathan Cape, London, 1990. Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace, Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (im)positionings, Routledge, London, 1994. Angelica Garnett, Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood, Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press, London, 1984. David Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest, Chatto & Windus, London, 1955. Diane Filby Gillespie, The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 1988. Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, Simon & Schuster, London, 2006. Mitchell A. Leaska (ed.), A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals of Virginia Woolf, 1897–1909, Hogarth Press, London, 1990. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, Chatto & Windus, London, 1996. Andrew McNeillie (ed.), Essays of Virginia Woolf, Hogarth Press, London, 1987, vol. II. Regina Marler (ed.), Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, Pantheon, New York, 1993. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (eds), Letters of Virginia Woolf, Hogarth Press, London, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
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Source Joan Russell Noble (ed.), Recollections of Virginia Woolf, intro. Michael Holroyd, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975. Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture and Domesticity, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004. S.P. Rosenbaum (ed.), The Bloomsbury Group, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1975. Richard Shone, Bloomsbury Portraits: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Their Circle, Phaidon Press, London, [1976] 1993. ——The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, with essays by James Beechey and Richard Morphet, Tate Gallery, London, 1999. Jeanne Schulkind (ed.) Moments of Being, Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, Hogarth Press, London, 1985. Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1993. ——Duncan Grant: A Biography, Pimlico, London, 1998. George Spater and Ian Parsons, A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Jonathan Cape/Hogarth Press, London, 1977. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-Garde, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1990. Lisa Tickner, ‘The “Left-handed Marriage”: Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’, in Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership, Thames and Hudson, London, 1993. Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911–1918, Hogarth Press, London, 1964. ——Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919–1939, Hogarth Press, London, 1968. Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House and Other Stories, Hogarth Press, London, [1921] 1953. ——Between the Acts, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, [1941] 1969. ——The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, Hogarth Press, London, 1942. ——Jacob’s Room, Hogarth Press, London, [1922] 1971. ——Moments of Being, Jeanne Schulkind (ed.), Hogarth Press, London, 1985. ——Mrs Dalloway, Penguin, Harmondsworth, [1925] 1971. ——Night And Day, Penguin, Harmondsworth, [1919] 1975. ——Roger Fry: A Biography, Blackwell, Oxford, [1940] 1995. ——The Voyage Out, Penguin, Harmondsworth, [1915] 1975. ——To the Lighthouse, Penguin, Harmondsworth, [1927] 1970.
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6 E r n e st H e m i ngway Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, Collins, London, 1969. Carlos Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1981. Denis Brian, The True Gen: An Intimate Portrait of Ernest Hemingway by Those Who Knew Him, Grove Press, New York, 1988. Matthew J. Bruccoli (ed.), with the assistance of Robert W Trogdon, The Only Thing that Counts: The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 1925–1947, Scribner, New York, 1996. Angel Capellán, Hemingway and the Hispanic World, UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, 1977. Virginia Spencer Carr, Dos Passos: A Life, Doubleday, New York, 1984. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1974. ——A Moveable Feast, Jonathan Cape, London, 1964. ——Islands in the Stream, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1970. ——The Garden of Eden, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1986. ——The Old Man and the Sea, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1952. ——The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories, Penguin, Harmondsworth, (c. 1939) 1963. ——The Sun Also Rises: The Hemingway Reader, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1953. ——To Have and Have Not, Penguin, Harmondsworth, [1937] 1955. ——Winner Take Nothing, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1933. Gregory H. Hemingway, Papa: A Personal Memoir, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1976. Leicester Hemingway, My Brother, Ernest Hemingway, Fawcett, New York, 1967. A.E. Hotchner, Hemingway and his World, Vendome Press, New York, 1989. ——Papa Hemingway: The Ecstacy and the Sorrow, William Morrow, New York, 1983. Bernice Kert, The Hemingway Women, WW Norton, New York, 1983. Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1987. James McLendon, Papa: Hemingway in Key West, EA Seeman Publishing, Miami, 1972. James R. Mellow, Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1993. Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography, Harper and Row, New York, 1985.
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Source Jeffrey Meyers (ed.), Hemingway: The Critical Heritage, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1982. Madelaine Hemingway Miller, Ernie: Hemingway’s Sister ‘Sunny’ Remembers, Crown Publishers, New York, 1975. John Dos Passos, The Best of Times: An Informal Memoir, Andre Deutsch, London, 1968. Caroline Moorehead, Martha Gellhorn: A Life, Chatto & Windus, London, 2003. Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s, WW Norton, New York, 1997. ——Hemingway: American Homecoming, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993. Jan Rogozinski, A Brief History of the Caribbean: From the Arawak and the Carib to the Present, Facts on File, New York, 1992. Carl Rollyson, Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn, Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney, 2001. James Thrall Soby, Joan Miro, Ayer Publishing, New York, 1980. Gregory S. Sojka, Ernest Hemingway: The Angler as Artist, Peter Lang, New York, 1985. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Vintage, New York, [1933] 1960. Emily Stipes Watts, Ernest Hemingway and the Arts, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1971. William White (ed.), By-line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1967.
7 Cl au de Mon et a n d Bl a nch e Hosch e dé Kathryn Adler and Tamar Garb, Berthe Morisot, Phaidon, London, 1995. Kathleen Adler, Erica E. Hirshler, H. Barbara Weinberg, Americans in Paris 1860–1900, National Gallery Company, London, 2006. Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, 1865–1947: une artiste de Giverny, exposition/realisée par le Musée municipal AG Poulain, Vernon, 6 avril–3 juin, Musée municipal [Vernon] 1991. Richard Bretell, Monet in Normandy, Rizzoli Productions, New York, 2006. Ruth Butler, Hidden in the Shadows of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cezanne, Monet and Rodin, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008. Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990.
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Bibliogr aphy Georges Clemenceau, Claude Monet: The Water Lilies, trans. George Boas, Doubleday, New York, 1930. Kathryn Corbin, ‘John Leslie Breck, American Impressionist’, Antiques, vol. 134, November 1988. James A. Ganz and Richard Kendall, The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2007. Tamar Garb, Women Impressionists, Phaidon, Oxford, 1986. Gustav Geffroy, Monet: Sa Vie, Son Temps, Son Oeuvre, Editions G. Gres et Cie, Paris, 1922. Clement Greenberg, ‘The Later Monet’, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Beacon Press, Boston, 1972. Mary Hamer, Incest, A New Perspective, Polity, Cambridge, 2002. Anne Higonnet, Berthe Morisot: A Biography, Collins, London, 1990. Jean-Pierre Hoschedé, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet: Peintre Impressionist, Lecerf, Rouen, 1961. ——Claude Monet: Ce Mal Connu, Pierre Cailler Editeur, Geneva, 1960. Claire Joyes, Claude Monet: Life at Giverny, Vendome Press, New York, 1985. ——Monet at Giverny, Mayflower Books, New York, 1975. ——Monet’s Table: The Cooking Journals of Claude Monet, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1989. Lasting impressions: American painters in France, 1865–1915. Foreword by Helene Ahrweiler, preface by Roger Mandle, intro. by D. Scott Atkinson, essay by William H. Gerdts, commentaries by D. Scott Atkinson, Carole L. Shelby, and Jochen Wierich, Terra Foundation for the Arts, Evanston, Illnois, 1992. Melissa McQuinlan, Impressionist Portraits, Phaidon, London, 1986. Julie Manet, Growing up with the Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet, trans., ed. and intro. Rosalind de Boland Roberts and Jane Roberts, Sotheby’s, London, 1987. Jean Martet, M. Clemenceau Peint par Lui-même, A. Michel, Paris, 1929. ——Georges Clemenceau, trans. Milton Waldman, Longmans, Green & Co, London, 1930. Monet et Ses Amis, Musée Marmottan, Paris, 1971. Elizabeth Murray, Monet’s Passion: Ideas, Inspiration and Insights from the Painter’s Garden, Pomegranate Artbooks, San Francisco, n.d. Ingrid Pfeiffer and Max Hollein (eds), Women Impressionists, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Hatje Cantz, 2008.
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Source Griselda Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art, Routledge, London, 2003. Marcel Proust, Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, trans., intro and notes, John Sturrock, Penguin, London, 1988. Sue Roe, The Private Lives of the Impressionists, Chatto & Windus, London, 2006. Marie-Caroline Sainsaulieu and Jacques De Mons, Eva Gonzalés, 1849–1883: Etude Critique et Catalogue Raisonné, La Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris, 1990. Virginia Spate, The Colour of Time: Claude Monet, Thames and Hudson, London, 1992. Charles Stuckey, Claude Monet, 1840–1926, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 1995. ——‘American Courtships with Giverny’, in Joe Houston, Dominique Vasseur and M. Melissa Wolfe (eds), In Monet’s Garden: Artists and the Lure of Giverny, Columbus Museum of Art/Musée Marmottan/Scala Publishers, Columbus, Ohio, 2007. Paul Hayes Tucker, Claude Monet: Life and Art, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995. ——Monet in the 20th Century, with George T.M. Shackleford and Maryann Stevens, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998. Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et Catalogue Raisonné, La Bibliothèque des arts, Paris [1974]–c. 1991. 5 vols. ——‘Monet’s Giverny’ in Stephen Shore (ed.), The Gardens at Giverny: A View of Monet’s World, Aperture, New York, 1983.
8 E m ily K a m e K ngwa r r ey e Geoffrey Bardon and James Bard, Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, Miegunyah Press, Carlton, 2004. Diane Bell, Daughters of the Dreaming, Spinifex Press, North Melbourne, [1979] 2002. ——‘Person and Place: Making Meaning from the Art of Indigenous Women’, Feminist Studies, vol. 28, no. 1 (Spring 2002). Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt, The First Australians, Ure Smith, Sydney, [1952] 1974. ——The Speaking Land: Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1989.
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Bibliogr aphy Jennifer Loureide Biddle, Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2007. Michael Boulter, The Art of Utopia: A New Direction in Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1991. Anne Marie Brody (ed.), Stories: Eleven Aboriginal Artists, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1997. ——Utopia—A Picture Story: 88 Silk Batiks from the Robert Holmes à Court Collection, Heytesbury Pty Ltd, Perth, 1990. Jane Cazdow, ‘The Emily Industry’, Good Weekend Magazine, Age, 5 August 1995. Philip Clarke, Where the Ancestors Walked: Australia as an Aboriginal Landscape, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2003. Robyn Davidson, No Fixed Address: Nomads and the Fate of the Planet, Quarterly Essay, no. 24, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2006. ——Tracks, Granada, London, 1980. First Australians: The Untold Story of Australia, written, directed and produced by Rachel Perkins, SBS TV, 2008. Fay Gale (ed.), Woman’s Role in Aboriginal Society, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1986. Benjamin Genocchio, Dollar Dreaming: Inside the Aboriginal Art World, Hardie Grant, Melbourne, 2008. Jenny Green, ‘The enigma of Emily Kngwarray’, World of Dreamings: Traditional and Modern Art of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2000. ——‘Utopian Women’ in Isobel White, Diane Barwick and Betty Meehan (eds), Fighters and Singers: The Lives of Some Australian Aboriginal Women, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985. ——Anmatyerr Ayey Arnang-akert, Anmatyerr Plant Stories, Women from Laramba (Napperby) Community, compiled by Jenny Green, IAD Press, Alice Springs, 2003. Rebecca Hossack, ‘Obituary: Emily Kngwarreye’, The Independent, 6 September, 1996. Jedda, directed Charles and Elsa Chauvel, video-recording, 1955. Victoria King, ‘Art of Place and Displacement, Embodied Perception and the Haptic Ground’, PhD thesis, College of Fine Arts, School of Art History and Theory, University of New South Wales, 2005. Peter Latz, Bushfires and Bushtucker: Aboriginal Plant Use in Central Australia, IAD Press, Alice Springs, 1995.
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Source Alan McCulloch, Susan McCulloch and Emily McCulloch Childs, McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Aus Art Editions, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2006. Susan McCulloch and Emily McCulloch Childs, McCulloch’s Contemporary Aboriginal Art, McCulloch and McCulloch, Melbourne, 2008. Mythology and Reality: Contemporary Aboriginal Desert Art from the Gabrielle Pizzi Collection, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, 2004. Margo Neale (ed.), Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere, Paintings from Utopia, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1998. ——Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra, 2008.
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g not e s I n t roduc t ion 1 Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997, p. 7. 2 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994, p. 16. 3 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (Hogarth Press, London, 1953–1974), Vintage, London, 2001, vol. III, pp. 312–13; vol. XXII, p. 259. For further discussion of Freud’s relationship with nature see Janine Burke, The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection, Random House, Sydney, 2006, pp. 9–35. 4 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘In-Between: The Natural in Architecture and Culture’, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 96–7. 5 For a discussion on Sunday Reed’s role in the production of the Kelly series see Janine Burke, The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide, Random House, Sydney, 2004, pp. 256–65. 6 T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, The Four Quartets, Faber and Faber, London, 1944, vol. V, p. 59.
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1 Georgi a O’ K e e ffe 1 GOK to Dorothy Brett, April 1930, Jack Cowart and Juan Hamilton (eds), Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters, selected and annotated by Sarah Greenough, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, New York Graphic Society Books, New York, Little, Brown, Boston, 1987, Letter 53, p. 200. 2 Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, Viking, New York, 1976, n.p. 3 Georgia O’Keeffe, produced and directed by Perry Miller Adato, Educational Broadcast Company, 1977, video-cassette. 4 O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, n.p. 5 Quoted in Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe, WW Norton, New York, 2004, p. 19. 6 Roxana Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, Bloomsbury, London, 1990, p. 3. 7 O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, n.p. 8 Quoted in Drohojowska-Philp, Full Bloom, p. 34. 9 Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 22. 10 Claudia O’Keeffe quoted in Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 40. 11 GOK quoted in Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 40. 12 GOK, c. 1968, Clive Giboire, (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1990, p. 323. 13 O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, n.p. 14 O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, n.p. 15 Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, p. 323. 16 O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, n.p. 17 Though familiarly known as 291, its name was The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession and it opened in November 1905. The rooms themselves comprised the former studio of Edward Steichen, Stieglitz’s friend and colleague, who suggested locating the gallery there. While the rooms were small, the word ‘little’ has significant connotations, as Richard Whelan points out. ‘It was an Arts-and-Craftsy catchword implying sophisticated simplicity, informality, camaraderie, and exclusiveness.’ Richard Whelan, Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography, Little, Brown and Company, New York, 1995, p. 213. In December 1908, the gallery moved to rooms next door at 293 Fifth Avenue but Stieglitz retained the name 291. Though he started the gallery as a showcase for contemporary photography, Stieglitz soon began
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to exhibit a brilliant group of young American modernist painters including John Marin, Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove. 18 O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, n.p. 19 GOK to Florence Cooney, quoted in Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 74. 20 Helen Appleton Read, quoted in Drohojowska-Philp, Full Bloom, p. 72. 21 GOK, February 1916, Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, p. 141. 22 O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, n.p. 23 O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, n.p. 24 Sarah Whitaker Peters, Becoming O’Keeffe: The Early Years, Abbeville Press, New York, 2001, p. 83. Peters also notes that Georgia purchased Dow’s Theory and Practice of Teaching Art (1908) rather then the more extensive and costly Composition (1913), originally published in 1899 as Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers (p. 84). 25 October 1915, Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, p. 60 26 W. Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1995, p. 42. 27 ‘disgustingly tame’. Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, October 1915, p. 58 ‘respect’. Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, 25 August, 1915, p. 15. 28 Quoted in Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 109. Dow’s remarks were contained in a reference he was writing for O’Keeffe. 29 GOK, Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, October, 1915. p. 59. 30 GOK, Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, November, 1915, pp. 87, 92, 94. 31 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. and intro. M.T.H. Sadler, Dover, New York, 1977, pp. 55, 19. 32 O’Keeffe also knew reproductions of Kandinsky’s work from Arthur Jerome Eddy’s Cubists and Post-Impressionism, published in 1914. She would become acquainted with Kandinsky’s work first-hand, as Stieglitz had bought The Garden of Love (Improvisation No 27) (1912, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) from the 1913 Armory Show, America’s first major exhibition of modern art that included Ingres, Delacroix, Redon, Degas, Seurat, Cezanne, Matisse and Duchamp. O’Keeffe did not see the Armory Show. At that time she was teaching in Amarillo, Texas. 33 O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, n.p. 34 GOK, November 1915, Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, p. 103. 35 AP to GOK, 1 January 1916, Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, p. 103, pp. 116–17. Perhaps Pollitzer was acting on O’Keeffe’s unconscious command. In October 1915, O’Keeffe had written to Pollitzer, ‘Anita—do you know—I
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believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something—anything I had done— than anyone else I know of—I have always thought that—If I ever make any thing that satisfies me even ever so little—I am going to show it to him to find out if it’s any good—Don’t you often wish you could make something he might like?’, Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, p. 40. 36 GOK, 4 January 1916, Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, p. 117. 37 There are few extant O’Keeffes from the period 1912–1915 as she destroyed many works, making her progress difficult to assess. Barbara Buhler Lynes lists only five works by O’Keeffe prior to the drawings that Pollitzer showed Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe, Catalogue Raisonné, Yale University Press, New Haven, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC and the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, Abiquiu, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 49–50. Untitled (Catherine O’Keeffe) (c. 1912/1914, private collection) is an unremarkable portrait of the artist’s sister. Untitled (Fashion Design) (c. 1912/1914, private collection) is an example of commercial art. There is also Untitled (Horse) and a study for it (1914, the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, Abiquiu). Untitled (Portait of Dorothy True) (1914/15, private collection) is a delicate, Art Nouveau-influenced linoleum print profile that was exhibited in 1915 at the 26th annual exhibition of the New York Watercolour Club. Lynes also points out that, while ‘the sixteen known drawings dating from 1915–June 1916 substantiate O’Keeffe’s assertion of having worked exclusively with charcoal during this period’, there are two abstract works in coloured pastel, Special No. 33 (1915, private collection) and Special No. 32 (1915, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, New York), that were probably made in Virginia in the summer of that year. Barbara Buhler Lynes, ‘Inventions of Different Orders’, Ruth E. Fine and Barbara Buhler Lynes with Elizabeth Glassman and Judith C. Walsh, O’Keeffe on Paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC and Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, 2000, p. 43. 38 GOK to Arthur Macmahon, 3 May 1916, quoted in Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 154. 39 Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer, Random House, New York, 1973, p. 131. O’Keeffe was in a three-person exhibition with Charles Duncan and Rene Lafferty. 40 Norman, Alfred Stieglitz, p. 130. 41 Stieglitz to S. MacDonald Wright, 9 October 1919, quoted in Norman, Alfred Stieglitz, p. 136. 42 Quoted in Whelan, Alfred Stieglitz, p. 376. The critic was Willard Wright. 43 Quoted in Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 137.
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44 GOK, June 1916, Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, p. 159. 45 GOK, July 1916, Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, p. 164. 46 GOK, August 1916, Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, pp. 174–5. 47 GOK, 11 September 1916, Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, pp. 183–4 48 Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell, Dallas Institute Publications, Dallas, 1988, pp. 168–9. 49 GOK, September 1916, Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, p. 201. 50 Henry Tyrrell, Christian Science Monitor, 4 May 1917, quoted in Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 176. 51 Blue Lines had been shown in the 1916 three-person exhibition but, recognising the importance of the work, Stieglitz chose to show it again. 52 Quoted in Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 179. 53 Stieglitz to S. MacDonald Wright, 9 October 1919, quoted in Norman, Alfred Stieglitz, p. 136. 54 As Vivien Green Fryd points out, there are 329 photographs in the series Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait. Forty-five depict O’Keeffe in the nude. Seventyfive per cent of these were produced during the first two years of her relationship with Steiglitz. Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2003, p. 137. 55 Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1978, n.p. 56 Quoted in Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 255. It was the beginning of an enduring personal and professional friendship. McBride became Georgia’s most consistently positive and perceptive critic; Cowart and Hamilton (eds), Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 171. 57 Norman, Alfred Stieglitz, p. 9. 58 Dorothy Norman, Encounters, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1987, p. 56. 59 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1987, p. 32. 60 Lois Palken Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1987, p. xi. 61 Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde, p. 191. 62 DHL to S.S. Koteliansky, 18 September 1922, no. 2597, The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, vol. IV, p. 296.
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Source 63 In September 1922, Lawrence began a novel based on the life of Mabel Dodge Luhan at her request (The Wilful Woman) but abandoned it at Frieda’s insistence. In June 1924, he wrote the novella St Mawr (published 1926) and the short story ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’, both based on aspects of Mabel’s personality and both critical. See D.H. Lawrence, St Mawr and other Stories, Brian Finney (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p. xi; pp. 19–155 (St Mawr) and pp. 197–204, (The Wilful Woman). Lawrence probably worked on St Mawr and ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ simultaneously. See D.H. Lawrence, ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ and other Stories, Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, p. xxvii. About ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’, Dodge Luhan commented, ‘that [was] the story where Lorenzo thought he finished me up’. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, Kraus Reprint, New York, [1932] 1969, pp. 237–8. 64 Quoted in Keith Sagar (ed.), D.H. Lawrence and New Mexico, Gibbs Smith, Salt Lake City, 1982, p. 96. In 1928, Lawrence was living in Italy where he died from tuberculosis in 1930. Frieda, who married Angelo Ravagli, returned to New Mexico where she lived for the rest of her life. 65 GOK to Henry McBride, Cowart and Hamilton (eds), Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 189. 66 Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997, p. 11. 67 Quoted in Sagar (ed.), D.H. Lawrence and New Mexico, p. 96. 68 Lesley Poling-Kempes, Ghost Ranch, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2005, p. 5. 69 Quoted in Charles Eldredge, Georgia O’Keeffe, H.N. Abrams in association with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, New York, 1991, p. 15. 70 According to Deskey, Georgia became ‘enraged, then hysterical, and ran out of the room in tears’. Laurie Lisle, Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe, Washington Square Press, New York, 1980, p. 261. 71 At Doctors Hospital, O’Keeffe was given ‘nerve-calming medicine’. Drohojowska-Philp, Full Bloom, p. 349. 72 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, [Hogarth Press, London, 1962] Vintage, London, 2001, vol. III, pp. 265–6. The condition could include ‘free anxiousness, unrest, expectant anxiety, complete, rudimentary or supplementary anxiety attacks,
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locomotor vertigo, agoraphobia, insomnia [and] increased sensitivity to pain’. Freud believed ‘anxiety neuroses regularly discloses [sic] sexual influences which have in common the factor of reservation or of incomplete sexual satisfaction’. 73 GOK to Rebecca Strand, August 1933, quoted in Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 392; GOK to Paul Strand, quoted in Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 393. 74 AS to Ansel Adams, 20 October 1933, quoted in Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 393. 75 AS to Jean Toomer, 11 December 1934, quoted in Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1987, p. 213. 76 Jean Toomer to AS, 21 December 1933, quoted in Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 392. 77 GOK to Paul Strand, 26 December 1933, Cowart and Hamilton (eds), Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 214. 78 GOK to Jean Toomer, 3 January 1934, Cowart and Hamilton (eds), Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 216. 79 GOK to Jean Toomer, 10 January 1934, Cowart and Hamilton (eds), Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 218; GOK to Jean Toomer, January 1934, quoted in Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, pp. 398, 52; GOK to Jean Toomer, 10 January 1934, Cowart and Hamilton (eds), Georgia O’Keeffe, pp. 218. 80 GOK to Jean Toomer, 7 January 1934, Cowart and Hamilton (eds), Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 216. 81 GOK to Jean Toomer, 14 February 1934, Kerman and Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer, p. 214. 82 GOK to Jean Toomer, 5 March 1934, Cowart and Hamilton (eds), Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 219. 83 O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, n.p. 84 Quoted in Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 19. In March, she returned to Bermuda for two months. She wrote to Toomer, ‘You must know that my coming out here to these toy like islands on the glassy green blue sea is only an evasion.’ She continued to work, ‘I have been drawing some here—very dull drawings’—but did not paint. [GOK to Rebecca Strand, 26 April 1934, Cowart and Hamilton (eds), Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 221.] O’Keeffe completed five extant drawings of Banana Flowers probably drawn directly in Bermuda. The charcoal drawings that illustrate the growth and ripening of a banana
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Source flower are hardly dull. Immaculately rendered, they are fecund, phallic, tumescent images. 85 Quoted in Kerman and Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer, p. 194. 86 Quoted in Kerman and Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer, p. 214. 87 GOK to Jean Toomer, 11 May 1934, quoted in Kerman and Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer, p. 215. 88 Arthur Newton Pack, We Called it Ghost Ranch, Ghost Ranch Conference Centre, Abiquiu, New Mexico, 1979, pp. 22–3. 89 Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, ‘The Rose in the Eye Looked Pretty Fine’, New Yorker, 4 March 1974, p. 40. 90 For the best account of the history of Ghost Ranch, see Poling-Kempes, Ghost Ranch, pp. 10–36. 91 Quoted in Poling-Kempes, Ghost Ranch, p. 123. 92 Luce Irigaray, ‘Place, Interval: A Reading of Aristotle, Physics IV’, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G.C. Gill, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1993, p. 54. I am relying on Casey’s reading in The Fate of Place, pp. 322–30. 93 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Women, Chora, Dwelling’, in Space, Time and Perversion: The Politics of Bodies, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995, p. 123. 94 Luce Irigaray, Sharing the World, Continuum, London, 2008, p. 71. 95 Quoted in Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 334. Eventually, Mabel became jealous because of Georgia’s friendship with Tony, suspecting that they may have had an affair. It was one of the reasons the two women fell out. By the time O’Keeffe found Ghost Ranch, she was no longer in contact with Mabel. 96 In this series, there are two extant drawings both titled Kachina of the Eagle Dance (1934, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe) and one watercolour Untitled (Kachina) (1934, private collection). See also Buhler Lynes, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1, illus., cat. nos. 823, 824 and 825, pp. 512–13. 97 Email to the author from Antonio Chavarria, Curator of Ethnology, State Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, 4 November 2006. 98 GOK to Henry McBride, July 1931, Cowart and Hamilton (eds), Georgia O’Keeffe, pp. 202–3. 99 Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001, p. 58. Aside from the four 1934 Kachinas, O’Keeffe created ten other Kachina works between 1931 and 1945. 100 ‘(S)everal of O’Keeffe’s paintings titled “Ram’s Skull” were actually renditions based on a locally renowned Angora goat’s skull’ that ‘eventually
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notes made its way to O’Keeffe’s well-known bone collection, where it became the subject of several canvasses that referred to it as a ram’s head’. PolingKempes, Ghost Ranch, p. 118. 101 Quoted in Poling-Kempes, Ghost Ranch, p. 132. 102 As O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch property is private and closed to the public, I am relying on Laurie Lisle’s description of the house. Quote by GOK in Lisle, Portrait of an Artist, pp. 312–14. 103 O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, n.p. 104 Pack, We Called it Ghost Ranch, p. 8. 105 Chabot to Alfred Stieglitz, 10 June 1944, Barbara Buhler Lynes and Ann Paden (eds), Maria Chabot–Georgia O’Keeffe: Correspondence, 1941–1949, University of New Mexico Press, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, 2003, p. 78. 106 Lisle, Portrait of an Artist, p. 331. 107 GOK, c. 1968, Giboire (ed.), Lovingly, Georgia, p. 323. 108 Myron Wood and Christine Taylor Patten, O’Keeffe at Abiquiu, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1995, p. 25. Patten, an artist, was also O’Keeffe’s nurse during the 1980s. 109 As letters between Chabot and O’Keeffe indicate, Chabot became possessive of O’Keeffe and jealous of her friendships, especially with Jean Armstrong and Doris Bry. She also resented guests at Rancho de los Burros. It led to outbursts on Chabot’s part, for which she was sincerely apologetic but which, equally, she seemed unable to control. Though O’Keeffe was forgiving, by the time of the Abiquiu property’s completion, she felt alienated from Chabot. While there is no evidence their relationship was other than platonic, on Chabot’s part, there seems a homoerotic element. See Buhler Lynes and Paden (eds), Maria Chabot–Georgia O’Keeffe, especially pp. 160, 162, 474–5, 482–3. 110 GOK to Cady Wells, undated, Cowart and Hamilton (eds), Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 273.
2 Pa blo Pic a s so 1 Pierre Daix, Picasso, Thames and Hudson, London, 1965, pp. 8–9. 2 As Marilyn McCully notes there are several accounts of Picasso’s first visit to Atelier Madoura. See Marilyn McCully, ‘Painter and Sculptor in Clay’ in Marilyn McCully (ed.), Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1998, fn 1, p. 40. There are also differing accounts of
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what Picasso made that day. Georges Ramié states that Picasso made three clay figures—‘a little head of a faun and two bulls modelled by hand’—that the Ramiés had cast in bronze. They have not survived. (Georges Ramié, Picasso’s Ceramics, trans. Kenneth Lyons, Secker and Warburg, London, 1975, p. 12.) But according to Gilot, that afternoon Picasso decorated ‘two or three plates made of red clay that had already been fired . . . with a few drawings of fish, eels and sea urchins’. (Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, Doubleday, New York, [1964] 1989, p. 182.) 3 George Ramié, Picasso’s Ceramics, trans. Kenneth Lyons, Secker and Warburg, London, 1975, p. 154. 4 Quoted in Daix, Picasso, p. 118. Picasso spent the end of the summer of 1919 in Saint-Raphaël, a smart resort at the time, situated between Saint-Tropez and Cannes. In 1920, he spent part of the summer at Saint-Raphaël before renting a villa on a hillside above Juan-les-Pins. In 1923, he joined Gerald and Sara Murphy at the Hotel du Cap at nearby Antibes. The summers of 1924 and 1925 were spent at Juan-les-Pins, and also 1930 and 1936—the latter two summers Picasso was accompanied by his new mistress MarieThérèse Walter. In 1936, he met Dora Maar at Mougins, a town in the hills behind Cannes, and spent the summers of 1937–1939 with her there. 5 Vanessa Bell to Clive Bell, 17 February 1928, quoted in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, Chatto & Windus, London, 1996, p. 550. Vanessa and Duncan knew Picasso and visited him in Paris. Clive remained a lifelong friend of Picasso’s. 6 Quoted in John Richardson, with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully, A Life of Picasso: 1881–1906, Random House, New York, 1991, vol. 1, p. 41. 7 Richardson and McCully, A Life of Picasso, p. 41. 8 Françoise Gilot, Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art, Doubleday, New York, 1990, pp. 290–1. 9 Quoted in Daix, Picasso, p. 16. 10 Richardson and McCully, A Life of Picasso, p. 37. 11 Picasso’s first trip to the Midi after the war took place in August, 1945 when he and Dora Maar stayed at Golfe-Juan. As Roland Penrose notes, Picasso also visited the tiny, inland village of Ménerbes where a house had taken his fancy. Picasso bartered a painting for the property and, as soon as the deeds were signed, he gave the property to Maar as a gift. Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, [1958], 1981, p. 357.
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notes 12 Pierre Cabanne, Pablo Picasso: His Life and Times, trans. Harold J. Salemson, William Morrow, New York, 1977, p. 372. 13 Geneviève Laporte, Sunshine at Midnight: Memories of Picasso and Cocteau, trans. and with annotations by Douglas Cooper, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1975, p. 7. 14 Mary Mathews Gedo, Picasso: Art as Autobiography, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980, p. 255. 15 John Richardson, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Picasso, Provence and Douglas Cooper, Jonathan Cape, London, p. 79. 16 Fernande Olivier, Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier, trans. Christine Baker and Michael Raeburn, Foreword and Notes Marilyn McCully, Epilogue John Richardson, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 2001, p. 177. 17 Françoise Gilot, An Artist’s Journey/Un Voyage Pictorial, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1987, p. 34. 18 Brassaï, Picasso & Co, Thames and Hudson, London, 1966, p. 101. 19 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 266. 20 Gilot, An Artist’s Journey/Un Voyage Pictorial, p. 16. 21 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 142. 22 Brassaï, Picasso & Co, p. 102. 23 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 91. 24 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, pp. 115–18. See Valérie-Anne SircoulombMüller, ‘The Woman-Flower, Metamorphoses of the Metamorphosis’, Pablo Picasso: The Time with Françoise Gilot, Markus Müller (ed.), Kerber Verlag, Münster, 2002, pp. 37–47. 25 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 348. 26 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 133. 27 Massalia (Marseille) was founded around 600 bc as a colony of the Greek Ionian state of Phocaea in Asia Minor, not far from modern Izmir. Antipolis was part of its ‘empire’. Built on the narrow strip of high ground that includes the chateau, the ancient city has been entirely built over, making archaeological excavation difficult. Small finds, however, are relatively abundant, especially pottery shards and inscriptions. See A. Trevor Hodge, Ancient Greek France, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1999, pp. 182–6. 28 Picasso: La Joie de Vivre, 1945–1948, Palazzo Grassi, Venice/Musée Picasso, Antibes/Skira, Milan, 2006, p. 24. 29 Brassaï, Picasso & Co, p. 192.
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30 Picasso: La Joie de Vivre, p. 25. 31 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 133. 32 Brassaï, Picasso & Co, p. 270. 33 Quoted in Picasso: La Joie de Vivre, p. 25. 34 Brassaï, Picasso & Co, p. 194. 35 Quoted in Brassaï, Picasso & Co., p. 164. 36 Quoted in Picasso: La Joie de Vivre, p. 26. 37 Jules-César Romauld Dor de la Souchère, Picasso in Antibes, photographs by Marian Greenwood, Pantheon Books, New York, 1960, p. 56. 38 Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. and intro. Mary M. Innes, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1955, Book XI, pp. 252–3. 39 Erich Franz, ‘Françoise Gilot: Personification of a style’ in Pablo Picasso: The Time with Françoise Gilot, p. 29. 40 Quoted in Brassaï, Picasso & Co, p. 190. 41 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 93. Mourlot was responsible for a resurgence in lithography and his studio, despite its raffish appearance, was regarded as the finest in Paris, attracting Matisse, Chagall, Miró, Braque, Dubuffet and Léger. 42 Quoted in Danièle Giraudy, Antibes, p. 30. 43 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, pp. 199–200. 44 Quoted in Danièle Giraudy, Antibes: Guide to the Picasso Museum, trans. Charles Lynn Chark, Paris, 1987, p. 4. 45 Penrose, Picasso, pp. 362–3. 46 Ramié, Picasso’s Ceramics, p. 17. 47 Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell, The Pegasus Foundation, Dallas, 1983, p. 107. 48 Luce Irigaray, ‘Place, Interval: A Reading of Aristotle, Physics IV’, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G.C. Gill, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1993, pp. 39, 43. 49 Laporte, Sunshine at Midnight, p. 2. 50 Fernande Olivier, Loving Picasso, p. 200. 51 André Malraux, Picasso’s Mask, trans. and annotated June Guicharnaud with Jacques Guicharnaud, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1976, p. 144. 52 Ramié, Picasso’s Ceramics, p. 17. 53 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 315. 54 Cabanne, Pablo Picasso, pp. 398–9. 55 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 31.
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notes 56 Richardson, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, p. 79; Gilot and Lake, p. 217. In March 2006, the house was on the market with Carlton International realtors. It has subsequently been removed from the website, presumably sold. 57 Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, trans. Olivia Emmet, HarperCollins, London, 1993, p. 299. 58 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 123. 59 Quoted in Cabanne, Pablo Picasso, p. 399. 60 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 219. 61 Richardson, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, p. 79. 62 Cabanne, Pablo Picasso, p. 415. 63 Fernande Olivier, Loving Picasso, p. 254. 64 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 188. 65 Gertje R. Utley, Picasso: The Communist Years, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000, p. 153. 66 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 335. 67 Laporte, Sunshine at Midnight, pp. 62, 81. 68 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 366.
3 K a r e n Bli x e n 1 Karen Blixen, Out of Africa, Jonathan Cape, London, [1937] 1975, p. 355. 2 Edmée de Rochefoucauld, ‘Karen Blixen’ in Clara Svendsen (ed.), Isak Dinesen: A Memorial, Random House, New York, 1965, p. 83. 3 Bror von Blixen-Finecke, African Hunter, Cassell, London, 1937, p. 17. Initially, the plan was to farm cattle and Bror bought seven hundred acres for that purpose, but ‘gold meant coffee’, as he wrote, and he quickly sold the first property to buy the larger one near Nairobi. On the farm, six hundred acres were allocated for coffee and two hundred for corn. The Blixens also had several thousand acres of grasslands. (‘Here the long grass ran and fled like sea-waves before the strong wind, and the little Kikuyu herdboys herded their fathers’ cows.’ Blixen, Out of Africa, p. 11.) During droughts, herds of zebra and eland came onto the the grass plains to feed. 4 Blixen, Out of Africa, pp. 4, 7. 5 Blixen, Out of Africa, p. 8. 6 In 1907, ‘The Hermits’ (‘Eneboerne’) was published in Tilskueren and ‘The Ploughman’ (‘Pløjeren’) in Gad’s Danske Magasin. In 1909, ‘The de Cats Family’ was also published in Tilskueren. All appeared under the pseudonym Osceola and were reprinted in Clara Svendsen (ed.), Osceola, Gyldendal,
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Copenhagen, 1962. ‘The de Cats Family’ was reprinted in English in Isak Dinesen, Carnival, Entertainments and Posthumous Tales, University of Chicago Press, Chicago: London, 1977. 7 Parmenia Migel, Titania: The biography of Isak Dinesen, Random House, New York, 1967, p. 14; Isak Dinesen, ‘The Dreaming Child’, Winter’s Tales, Random House, New York, 1942, p. 178. 8 Migel, Titania, p. 9. 9 Judith Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984, p. 44. 10 Quoted in Richard B. Vowles, ‘Boganis, Father of Osceola: or Wilhelm Dinesen in America, 1872–1874’, in Scandanavian Studies, vol. 48. no. 4, Autumn, 1976, p. 377. 11 Fady Hajal, ‘Family Scapegoating in the Life and Works of Karen Blixen’ in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry, vol. 18, 1990, p. 635. 12 23 June 1923, Frans Lasson (ed.) Isak Dinesen, Letters from Africa, 1914– 1931, for the Rungedstedlund Foundation, trans. Anne Born, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981, p. 159. 13 Isak Dinesen, Shadows on the Grass, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, n.d. [1960], p. 58. 14 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 14 July [1914], p. 13. 15 Edward I. Steinhart, Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya, James Currey, Oxford, 2006, pp. 93, 100. 16 Dinesen, Shadows on the Grass, p. 59. 17 Blixen, Out of Africa, p. 16. 18 Blixen, Out of Africa, p. 292. 19 Letters from Africa, 6 June [1914], p. 12. 20 Dinesen, Shadows on the Grass, p. 53. 21 Quoted in Thurman, Isak Dinesen, p. 435. Hemingway became good friends with Bror and his third wife, Eva Dixon, and they visited him at Bimini in the Bahamas. 22 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 28 May 1915, p. 31. 23 Salvarsan, the arsenic-based medication with which she was treated, was extremely toxic and dangerous. Deborah Hayden points out that many of Karen’s symptoms puzzled her doctors and either defied diagnosis or were diagnosed as other illnesses but could have been related to syphilis: Spanish flu, sunstroke, poisoning, malaria, amoebic dysentery, gallstones, tropical fevers, inflammation of the spine and ulcers. Deborah Hayden, Pox: Genius, Madness
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and the Mysteries of Syphilis, Basic Books, New York, 2003, pp. 230–7. For a detailed discussion of Blixen’s condition see Linda Donelson, Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa: The Untold Story, Coulsong List, Iowa City, 1995, p. 347–56. 24 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 5 September [1926], p. 281. 25 Quoted in Thurman, Isak Dinesen, p. 171. The poem, ‘Ex Africa’, was published in 1925 in the Danish magazine Tilskueren. 26 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 24 November [1921], pp. 118–19. 27 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 24 March 1917, pp. 42–43. Mbogani was bought for Karen and Bror by Karen Coffee Company when Åke Sjögren, its previous owner, went broke. 28 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 13 September 1917, p. 54. 29 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 19 April 1917, p. 44. 30 Due to various restrictions, the film was unable to be shot at Mbogani so a replica of the verandah was created at Ngong Dairies, a similar house nearby. A group of Danish expatriates, led by Tove Hussein, a former aid worker who had settled in Nairobi, was already lobbying the government to establish Mbogani as a museum. It opened in 1986, assisted by the film’s international success. (Tove Hussein. Interview. Nairobi. 28 April 2006.) Some items sourced or made for Out of Africa, such as Meryl Streep’s riding boots and some of Robert Redford’s and Karl Maria Brandauer’s clothes, were donated by the film company to the museum. 31 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 1 April 1914, pp. 4–5. 32 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 9 September 1927, p. 314. 33 Susan R. Horton, Difficult Women, Artful Lives: Olive Schreiner and Isak Dinesen, In and Out of Africa, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1995, p. 195. 34 Dinesen, Shadows on the Grass, p. 3. 35 Blixen, Out of Africa, pp. 26, 188, 193, 114. 36 Anders Westernholz, The Power of Aries: Myth and Reality in Karen Blixen’s Life, trans. Lise Kure-Jensen, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1982, p. 18. 37 John M. Mackenzie, The Empire of Nature, Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988, p. 7. Mackenzie notes, ‘as the nineteenth century progressed hunting became a central part of imperial culture . . . An imperial and largely masculine elite attempted to reserve for itself access to hunting, adopted and transformed the concept of the Hunt as a ritual of prestige and domination, and set about the sepa-
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ration of the human and animal worlds to promote ‘preservation’ (later ‘conservation’) as a continuing justification of its monopoly’. p. 22. 38 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 19 November 1927, p. 321. 39 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 15 March 1924, p. 196. 40 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 19 August 1923, p. 169. 41 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 6 May 1928, p. 358. 42 Errol Trzebinski, Silence Will Speak: A study of the life of Denys Finch Hatton and his Relationship with Karen Blixen, Heinemann, London, 1977, p. 133. 43 Blixen, Out of Africa, pp. 242, 388. 44 Blixen, Out of Africa, p. 388. 45 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1976, p. 87. Karen Blixen had several editions of One Thousand and One Nights that are now in the library of the Karen Blixen Museum, Rungstedlund. 46 Blixen, Out of Africa, pp. 294–5. 47 Westenholz, The Power of Aries, p. 18. 48 Blixen, Out of Africa, p. 10. 49 Simon Lewis, White Women Writers and Their African Inventions, University Press of Florida, Gainsville, 2003, p. 119. 50 Donelson, Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa, pp. 288–92. 51 Westenholz, The Power of Aries, p. 33. 52 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 10 April 1931, p. 419. 53 Karen Blixen recalled that she ‘wrote two of my Seven Gothic Tales there’. (Dinesen, Shadows on the Grass, p. 11.) Thomas Dinesen writes that, immediately on her return from Kenya, Karen read him drafts of three stories later published in Seven Gothic Tales. He does not specify which ones. [Svendsen (ed.), Isak Dinesen, p. 10.] Judith Thurman notes that two stories were finished by the time Karen left Africa, probably ‘The Dreamers’ and ‘The Old Chevalier’ both of which appear in Seven Gothic Tales. [Thurman, Isak Dinesen, p. 295.] Early drafts of stories still exist in Blixen’s African notebooks. They are lists of titles, often much recopied, and short prose paragraphs, mainly in Danish, that are ‘almost an index of Isak Dinesen’s mature work . . . The same unfinished tales live on for decades, and she brings them with her from Denmark to Africa and back to Denmark again.’ [Thurman, Isak Dinesen, p. 236.] 54 Blixen, Out of Africa, p. 49. 55 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 13 May 1931, p. 430. 56 Blixen, Out of Africa, p. 347. 57 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 10 April 1931, pp. 418–19.
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notes 58 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 14 September 1930, p. 410. 59 Palle Lauring, A History of Denmark, trans. David Hohnen, Høst & Søn, Copenhagen, 1981, p. 232. 60 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 2 September 1928, p. 378. 61 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 12 October 1930, p. 412. 62 Blixen, Out of Africa, p. 75. 63 Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell, Dallas Institute Publications, Dallas, 1988, p. 21. 64 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 12 October 1930, p. 412. 65 ‘The Wild Swans’, Stories of Hans Christian Andersen, selected and trans. Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank, Granta, London, 2004, pp. 108–10. 66 Blixen, Out of Africa, p. 382. 67 Thomas Dinesen recalls that she wrote a note of apology to the people in whose house she was staying at the time. (Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, p. xx.) Thurman comments that the suicide note, once among Blixen’s papers, has subsequently disappeared. (Thurman, Isak Dinesen, p. 286.) 68 Trzebinski, Silence Will Speak, p. 316. 69 Thomas Dinesen, My Sister, Isak Dinesen, trans. Joan Tate, Michael Joseph, London, 1975, p. 125. 70 Blixen, Out of Africa, p. 4. 71 Isak Dinesen, ‘The Supper at Elsinore’, Seven Gothic Tales, Random House, New York, [1934] 1961, p. 232. 72 Isak Dinesen, ‘Peter and Rosa’, Winter’s Tales, Random House, New York, 1942, pp. 281–2. 73 ‘The Supper at Elsinore’, Seven Gothic Tales, pp. 234–5. ‘Ewald’s study’. When Karen first moved back to Rungstedlund, she worked in her father’s former ground floor office and an attic room, previously Thomas’s study, became her bedroom. Later she moved into her study, into ‘Ewald’s room’. It is unknown in which room at the old inn the poet worked. In the winter, Karen wrote in the west-facing sitting room at the rear of the house, where it was warmer. 74 Thomas Dinesen, quoted in, Svendsen (ed.), Isak Dinesen, p. 2. 75 Isak Dinesen, Daguerreotypes and Other Essays, Heinemann, London, 1979, p. 11. 76 Thurman, Isak Dinesen, p. 39. 77 Dinesen, Shadows on the Grass, p. 113. 78 Isak Dinesen, ‘Sorrow-Acre’, Winter’s Tales, p. 34.
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Source 79 Isak Dinesen, ‘The Bear and the Kiss’, Carnival, p. 284. 80 Isak Dinesen, ‘A Country Tale’, Last Tales, Random House, New York, 1957, p. 191. 81 Dinesen, ‘Sorrow-Acre’, pp. 28, 58. 82 Blixen, Out of Africa, p. 49. 83 Thorkvild Bjornvig, The Pact, My Friendship with Isak Dinesen, trans. Ingvar Schouseboe and William Jay Smith, intro. William Jay Smith, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1983, p. 168. 84 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 13 September, 1928, p. 382. 85 Lasson (ed.), Letters from Africa, 1 April 1926, p. 247. 86 Dinesen, ‘Sorrow-Acre’, Winters Tales, p. 29. 87 Isak Dinesen, ‘Copenhagen Season’, Last Tales, p. 252. 88 Isak Dinesen, ‘Alkmene’, Winter’s Tales, p. 202. 89 Dinesen, ‘The Supper at Elsinore’, pp. 219, 221, 245. 90 Thurman, Isak Dinesen, p. 378. 91 Quoted in Thurman, Isak Dinesen, p. 478. 92 Nancy Wilson Ross quoted in Svendsen (ed.), Isak Dinesen, p. 42. 93 Glenway Westcott, quoted in Thurman, Isak Dinesen, pp. 474–5; Hudson Strode, quoted in Svendsen (ed.) Isak Dinesen, p. 101. 94 Dinesen, Daguerreotypes and Other Essays, pp. 202, 209. 95 Karen’s older sister Elle bought out Thomas’s interest in Rungstedlund, then Elle, Karen and Anders, their younger brother, deeded the property to the non-profit Rungstedlund Foundation. Currently, Tore Dinesen, Thomas’s son, is chair of the foundation. 96 Cecil Beaton, quoted in Svendsen (ed.), Isak Dinesen, p. 194. 97 Dinesen, Daguerreotypes and Other Essays, p. 12.
4 Jack son Pollock 1 Jeffrey Potter, ‘Jackson Pollock: Fragments of Conversations and Statements’, in Helen A. Harrison (ed.), Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock, Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 2000, p. 89. 2 Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, ‘Who was Jackson Pollock?’, Art in America, May 1967, p. 50. 3 For information on Pollock-Krasner Study Center see http://naples.cc.sunysb. edu/CAS/pkhouse.nsf.
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notes 4 Quoted in Jackson Pollock: Love and Death on Long Island, video-recording, produced and directed by Teresa Griffiths, Home Vision Arts, Chicago, 2000. 5 May Rosenberg, quoted in Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, Clarkson N. Potter, New York, 1989, pp. 501, 503. Krasner and Pollock married on 25 October. 6 Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1985, pp. 26, 20; Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 70. 7 Potter, To a Violent Grave, pp. 175, 160. 8 Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 84. 9 Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 84. Naifeh and White Smith gleaned their information about the Bear Dance ceremony from Hele Joaquin, in 1999, headsman of the Janesville Wadatkut. As James Mooney noted in 1896, ‘the great majority of the Pauite are not on reservations’ and many were ‘attached to the ranches of white men’. At that time, Mooney estimated there were 7,000–8,000 Pauite. James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1965, pp. 286–7. Originally published as Part 2 of the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1892–1893, Government Printing Office, Washington DC, 1896. 10 Roxana Robinson, quoted in Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, Bloomsbury, London, 1990, p. 334. 11 Vine Deloria Jr, God is Red: A Native View of Religion, Fulcrum Publishing, Golden, Colorado, 1973, p. 122. See also George E. Tinker, ‘Religion’, Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York, 1996, pp. 537–41. 12 Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 85; Reuben Kadish and Tony Smith, quoted in W. Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1995, p. 169. See also oral history interview with Reuben Kadish, 15 April 1992, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, New York. 13 Marie Pollock, quoted in Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 40; Sigmund Freud, ‘A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung and Wahrheit’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, Vintage, London, 2001, vol. XVII, p. 156; Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 168.
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Source 14 Francis Valentine O’Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1978, vol. 4, p. 209. 15 Interview with Frederick John De St Vrain Schwankovsky, 1 March 1965, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, New York. 16 Interview with Frederick John De St Vrain Schwankovsky. See also Francis Valentine O’Connor, ‘The Genesis of Jackson Pollock: 1912–1943’, Artforum, 5 May 1967, pp. 16–23. 17 Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Value of Individuality (1928), Early Writings, <www. Jiddu-Krishnamurti.net.> See also Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 129. 18 Interview with Manuel J. Tolegian, 12 February 1965, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, New York. 19 Harold E. Doweiko, Concepts of Chemical Dependency, Thomson Brooks/ Cole, Belmont, 2006. As Doweiko notes ‘in spite of the growing awareness that alcohol or drug abuse frequently co-exists with various forms of mental illness, mental health professionals lack the knowledge of what forces initiate or maintain substance abuse in those who have a form of mental illness’, pp. 291–2. In a chart showing the overlap between substance abuse disorders and psychiatric disorders, the lifetime prevalence of substanceuse disorders among those diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder is 84 percent, pp. 291–2. Professor Isaac Schweitzer, Department of Psychiatry, University of Melbourne; Director, Mood Disorders Unit, Melbourne Clinic, notes, ‘There are several possible diagnoses [of Pollock’s condition]: Alcoholism, or otherwise referred to as Substance Use Disorder, is undoubtedly one diagnosis . . . It is also possible that he had a Personality Disorder [which meant he was] narcissistic, dependent, impulsive, explosive, paranoid.’ Email to the author, 26 December 2008. 20 Interview with Manuel J. Tolegian, 12 February 1965, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, New York. 21 Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 33; ‘Jackson Pollock: A Questionnaire’, Arts and Architecture (1944), reprinted in Pepe Karmel (ed.), Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998, p. 15. 22 Quoted in Claude Cernuschi, Jackson Pollock: Meaning and Significance, HarperCollins, New York, 1992, pp. 14–15. 23 Philip Pavia, Edith Symonds and Reggie Wilson, quoted in Potter, To a Violent Grave, pp. 36–7.
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notes 24 Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, pp. 164–5. 25 JP, February 1932, O’Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock, vol. 4, p. 212. 26 ‘Jackson Pollock: A Questionnaire’, p. 15. Thomas Hart Benton presented the Smithsonian with Going West. 27 Barbara Rose, ‘Jackson Pollock at Work: An Interview with Lee Krasner’, in Karmel (ed.), Jackson Pollock, p. 42. 28 For a Jungian interpretation of Moon Woman and Moon Woman Cuts the Circle see Judith Wolfe, ‘Jungian Aspects of Jackson Pollock’s Imagery’, Artforum, November 1972, p. 68 and Elizabeth Langhorne, ‘Jackson Pollock’s The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle’, Arts Magazine, vol. 53, no. 7, March 1979, pp. 128–37. 29 Berton Roueché, ‘Unframed Space’, New Yorker (1950), reprinted in Karmel (ed.), Jackson Pollock, p. 198. 30 JP, February 1932, O’Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock, p. 212. 31 Marie Pollock, quoted in Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 41. 32 Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, pp. 213–15. 33 Manuel Tolegian, quoted in Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 48. 34 Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 47. Reuben Kadish; Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 249. Peter Busa. 35 David Alfaro Siqueiros, quoted in Jackson Pollock: Love and Death on Long Island. 36 Reuben Kadish, quoted in Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde, p. 188. 37 Stephen Polcari points out ‘the same publications were collected by the Surrealists in Paris and are responsible for their first exposure to and absorption of Native American art in their work’. Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 237. 38 Cf. fn. 21 & 26 ‘Jackson Pollock: A Questionnaire’, pp. 15–16. 39 Carl Jung, Man and his Symbols, with M-L. von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Jolande Jacobi and Aniela Jaffe, Arkana, London, 1990, p. 11. 40 Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 336. 41 Carl Jung, ‘Picasso’, The Sprit in Man, Art and Literature, Collected Works, Bollingen Series XX, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1966, p. 136. 42 The drawings have a controversial history. They remained in Henderson’s files until the late 1960s, when Henderson visited the San Francisco Museum of Art and saw Pollock’s Guardians of the Secret (1943). Realising his patient
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had become an internationally celebrated artist, Henderson decided to sell the drawings, offering them first to the Pollock estate, which declined them, and then selling them to Maxwell Galleries, San Francisco. In 1970, an exhibition of the drawings toured American venues, including New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, at which point Lee Krasner sued Henderson for ‘violating the privacy of his patient by revealing private and confidential information’. Henderson testified at the trial and Krasner’s complaint was eventually dismissed. See Claude Cernuschi, Jackson Pollock: ‘Psychoanalytic’ Drawings, Duke University Press, Durham, 1992, pp. 18–20. 43 Henderson quoted in B.H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1972, p. 41. 44 Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works, Bollingen Series, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Routledge Kegan Hall, London, 1959, vol. VIII, pp. 152, 158. 45 See Wooden Mask, Eskimo, (2–5854) in Frederic H. Douglas and Rene D’Harnoncort, Indian Art of the United States, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1941, p. 30. 46 Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Collected Works, Bollingen Series, Part 1, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Routledge Kegan Hall, London, 1972, vol. IX, p. 48. 47 Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, ‘Who Was Jackson Pollock?’, p. 49. 48 Potter, To a Violent Grave, pp. 54, 66. 49 Bruce Glaser, ‘Jackson Pollock: An Interview with Lee Krasner’, Arts Magazine, vol. 41, no. 6 (April 1967), pp. 36–9, reprinted Karmel (ed.), Jackson Pollock, p. 28. Painter Fritz Bultman recalls it differently: ‘One evening when we were building our house in Provincetown, Jackson was trying to get across to Hans Hofmann his concept of the image: that you paint from nature, as Hans was doing, but that if you painted out of yourself you created an image larger than a landscape. Hans disagreed with him in principle, and finally in talking about the origin of the image, Jackson said, “I am nature.”’ Quoted in Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 77. 50 Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 408. 51 Elizabeth Frank, Jackson Pollock, Abbeville Press, New York, 1983, p. 41. 52 Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 333. 53 Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 75. 54 Potter, ‘Jackson Pollock: Fragments of Conversations and Statements’, in Harrison (ed.), Such Desperate Joy, p. 87.
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notes 55 John A. Strong, The Montaukett Indians of Eastern Long Island, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 2001, p. 3. Algonquian should not be confused with Algonquin, the Canadian Indian tribe. I am grateful to Helen A. Harrison, director, Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, for supplying me with information regarding the origin of Springs’ name from The Springs in the Old Days, by Ferris G. Talmage (1970). Email to the author, 11 December 2008. 56 Strong, The Montaukett Indians, p. 139. 57 Lee Krasner, quoted in Jackson Pollock: Love and Death on Long Island. 58 Frank Dayton quoted in Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 88. 59 Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 89. 60 JP to Ed and Wally Strautin, 29 November 1945, O’Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock, vol. 4, p. 236. 61 Richard T. Talmage quoted in Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 93. 62 When Guggenheim initially refused to loan the money, Krasner told her Pollock might leave the gallery. After discussion with collector William Davis, Guggenheim agreed to the loan. Guggenheim, ill at the time, wrote that ‘Lee came every morning to try and persuade me to lend them the money’ and she agreed because ‘it was the only way to get rid of Lee’. Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century, Universe Books, New York, 1979, p. 316. She also visited Springs in February to assess Krasner’s claim that Pollock was more happy and productive there. She agreed to deduct $50 from Pollock’s $300-a-month allowance until the interest free loan was repaid but insisted Pollock give her three paintings, including Pasiphaë (c. 1943, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) as collateral. See also O’Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock, A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 4, p. 234; Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, pp. 513–14. 63 JP, 8 February 1946, Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 514. 64 Berton Roueché, ‘Unframed Space’ in Karmel (ed.), Jackson Pollock, p. 18. 65 JP to Ed and Wally Strautin, 8 December 1946, O’Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock, vol. 4, p. 237. 66 Julian Levi quoted in Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 93. 67 Dr Frank Seixas quoted in Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 141. 68 Ted Dragon quoted in Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 141. 69 du Plessix and Gray, ‘Who Was Jackson Pollock?’, p. 51. 70 Roueché, ‘Unframed Space’, p. 19. 71 Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 516. 72 Alfonso Ossorio quoted in du Plessix and Gray, ‘Who Was Jackson Pollock?’, p. 58.
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73 Lee Krasner quoted in Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 516 74 du Plessix and Gray, ‘Who was Jackson Pollock?’, p. 51. 75 Julian Levi quoted in Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 141. 76 JP to Louis Bunce, 2 June 1946, Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 514. 77 Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 532; du Plessix and Gray, ‘Interview with Lee Krasner’, reprinted Karmel (ed.) Jackson Pollock, Interviews, Articles and Reviews, p. 33. 78 O’Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock, vol. 4, p. 241. Pollock’s statement was originally published in Possibilities I (1947/8), edited by Robert Motherwell and Harold Rosenberg. 79 Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 541. 80 du Plessix and Gray, ‘Who Was Jackson Pollock?’, p. 52. 81 Gary Witherspoon and Glen Peterson, Dynamic Symmetry and Holistic Asymmetry in Navajo and Western Art and Cosmology, Peter Lang, New York, 1995, p. 15. 82 Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Foundation, New York, 1954, pp. 83–4. 83 As Mircea Eliade points out, ‘shamanism in the strict sense is pre-eminently a religious phenomenon of Siberia and Central Asia’. In that area, ‘the shaman remains the dominating figure; for through this whole region in which the ecstatic experience is considered the religious experience par excellence, the shaman, and he alone, is the great master of ecstasy’. But similar ‘magicoreligious phenomena’ has been observed in North America, Indonesia and Oceania. Tribal people from Siberia are believed to have brought these practices with them when they migrated to North America across the Bering Strait to Alaska 20,000–30,000 years ago. Mircea Eliade Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R. Trask, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 1972, pp. 4–5. 84 See Mary Irvin Wright’s illustrations in James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, pp. 189–97. 85 du Plessix and Gray, ‘Who Was Jackson Pollock?’, p. 51. 86 Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Beacon Press, Boston, 1961, p. 217. 87 Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1989, pp. 175–6. 88 B.H. Friedman, quoted in Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, pp. 576–7.
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notes 89 Roger Wilcox claimed that Heller gave Pollock prescriptions for Phenobarbital and Dilantin. [Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 577.] But Dilantin was not approved by the Federal Drug Administration until 1950. Phenobarbital was a widely prescribed barbiturate that was first marketed in 1912 by the drug company Bayer under the name Luminal. Like Amobarbital, it is an anti-convulsive still used in the treatment of epilepsy. During the 1930s and 1940s, barbiturates attained their greatest popularity. The most commonly prescribed were Phenobarbital, sodium amobarbital, sodium secobarbital, sodium pentobarbital and sodium thiopental. Despite their widespread use during the first half of the 20th century, no barbiturate succeeded in eliminating their main drawback—the phenomena of dependence and death by overdose. As Harold Doweiko notes, ‘historically, the United States went through a wave of barbiturate abuse and addiction in the 1950s’ and ‘prior to the introduction of benzodiazepines, the barbiturates accounted for about three-fourths of all drug-related deaths in the United States’. Harold E. Doweiko, Concepts of Chemical Dependency, pp. 107–9. 90 B.H. Friedman, quoted in Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 127. 91 Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 579. 92 Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 539. 93 Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 128. 94 Tony Smith, quoted in du Plessix and Gray, ‘Who Was Jackson Pollock?’, p. 52. 95 Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 627. 96 Potter, To a Violent Grave, pp. 108, 128. 97 Potter, To a Violent Grave, pp. 131–3. 98 Robert M. Coates, ‘The Art Galleries: Extremist’, New Yorker, no. 26 (9 December 1950) pp. 109–11, reprinted Karmel (ed.), Jackson Pollock, p. 72. 99 Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 134 100 Potter, To a Violent Grave, p. 135. 101 JP to Alfonso Ossorio and Ted Dragon, (early 1951), quoted in O’Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock, vol. 4, p. 257. 102 JP to Alfonso Ossorio and Ted Dragon, June 1951, quoted in O’Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock, vol. 4, p. 261. 103 O’Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock, vol. 4, p. 263. 104 Clement Greenberg, ‘Partisan Review Art Chronicle: 1952’, Art and Culture, p. 153.
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Source 105 Tibor de Nagy, quoted in Naifeh and White Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 609. In 1950, Tibor de Nagy, encouraged by Pollock and other artists, opened a gallery in Manhattan. 106 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen Series XIX, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1969, p. 30. The book is in Pollock’s library. 107 Frederic Nietzsche, Part Four: ‘Epigrams and Entr’actes, Number 146’, Beyond Good and Evil: A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future in Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (eds) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p. 69. 108 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (Hogarth Press, London, 1953– 1974), Vintage, London, 2001, vol. 12, p. 301. 109 Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 12.
5 V i rgi n i a Woolf a n d Va n e s sa Be ll 1 Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (eds), Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. III: 1925–1930, Hogarth Press, London, 1980, p. 107. 2 VS to DG, August 3 [1921], Regina Marler (ed.), Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, Pantheon, New York, 1993, p. 252. 3 VS to VB, 8 April 1911, p. 458; VS to Clive Bell [29 December 1910], p. 446; VS to Jacques Raverat, 9 April [1911], p. 459; VS to Clive Bell [March 1911], p. 454 in Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (eds), The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. I, 1888–1912, Hogarth Press, London, 1975. 4 VS to LW, 31 August [1911], Nicholson and Trautmann (eds), Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. I, p. 476. 5 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, Chatto & Windus, London, 1996, p. 22. 6 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (Hogarth Press, London, 1953– 1974), Vintage, London, 2001 (1930 [1929]) Vol XXI, p, 91. 7 Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’ in Jeanne Schulkind (ed.), Moments of Being, Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, Hogarth Press, London, 1985, pp. 64–5.
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notes 8 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, pp. 110, 65, 66. Though VW did not set To the Lighthouse at St Ives but on Skye, it is the acknowledged site of the novel. The title refers to the Godrevy Lighthouse seen from Talland House. 9 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, p. 83. 10 Mitchell A. Leaska (ed.), A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals of Virginia Woolf, 1897–1909, Hogarth Press, London, 1990, p. 282. 11 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, p. 110. 12 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994, p. 3. 13 Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911– 1918, Hogarth Press, London, 1964, pp. 57–8. Asheham was demolished in 1994. 14 LW, quoted in Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf: A Life, Simon & Schuster, London, 2006, p. 135. 15 Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (eds), Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. III, 14 August 1928, p. 192; 5 September 1926, p. 107; 31 July 1926, p. 103; 22 September 1925, p. 43; 31 August 1928, p. 192–3. 16 Jane Dunn, A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, Jonathan Cape, London, 1990, p. 229. 17 Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace, Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (im)positionings, Routledge, London, 1994, p. 63. Katherine Mansfield was the obvious exception for VW. (Though Vita Sackville-West was a close friend of VW’s, she could not be regarded as a modernist.) 18 VB to Clive Bell, quoted in Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, p. 323. 19 VB to VW, 23 August 1912, Marler (ed.), Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 125; VB to Clive Bell, February 1911, quoted in Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture and Domesticity, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004, p. 88. 20 Quoted in Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1993, p. 111. 21 Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms, p. 88. 22 Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography, Blackwell, Oxford, [1940] 1995, p. 122. 23 VB to Roger Fry, 29 November [1918], Marler (ed.), Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 221. 24 Virginia Woolf, Night And Day, Penguin, Harmondsworth, [1919] 1975, pp. 10, 26.
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Source 25 Angelica Garnett, Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood, Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, London, 1984, p. 33. 26 VB to VW, 3 May [1913], Marler (ed.), Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 138. 27 VB to Roger Fry, 29 November [1918], Marler (ed.), Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 221. 28 Woolf, Beginning Again, p. 197. 29 VW to VB, 14 May [1916], Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (eds), Letters of Virginia Woolf, Hogarth Press, London, 1976, vol. II, p. 94. Vanessa and Duncan rented but never bought Charleston. Vanessa leased the property from the Gage family, who owned the surrounding estate and nearby Firle village. The property is now owned by the Charleston Trust. 30 VW to Lady Robert Cecil, [13 September 1915], Nicolson and Trautmann (eds), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, p. 64. 31 VW to VB, [16 July 1916], Sunday [30 July 1916], Nicolson and Trautmann (eds), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, pp. 106, 109. 32 David Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest, Chatto & Windus, London, 1955, p. 125. 33 Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, p. 227. 34 VB to Roger Fry, Monday [16 October 1916], Marler (ed.), Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 200. 35 Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest, p. 175. 36 VB to Duncan Grant, 3 August [1921], Marler (ed.), Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 252. 37 VW to Violet Dickinson, Tuesday [10 April 1917], [8? May, 1919], to Vanessa Bell, [19? October 1916], Nicholson and Trautmann (eds), Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, pp. 147, 355, 123. 38 Quoted in Frances Spalding, Duncan Grant: A Biography, Pimlico, London, 1998, p. 201. 39 VB to Maynard Keynes, 8 February [1918], Marler (ed.), Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 210. 40 In 1923, David Garnett won both the Hawthornden and the Tait-Black prizes for his novel Lady into Fox. In 1955, he published The Flowers of the Forest, the second of his three-volume autobiography, The Golden Echo, that dealt with the period he spent at Wissett and Charleston. He does not mention his affair with Duncan. Interior shows the dining room in 1918— before the walls were covered with grey and yellow stencilled patterns, the
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ceiling painted pale blue and the mantle crowded with plates collected on the artists’ Mediterranean journeys, as it is today. 41 Quentin Bell and Virginia Nicholson, Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden, Hodder and Stoughton, Sydney, 1997, p. 32. 42 ‘Heard on the Downs: The Genesis of a Myth’ [The Times, August 1916], in Andrew McNeillie (ed.), Essays of Virginia Woolf, Hogarth Press, London, 1987, vol. II, p. 40. 43 VB, 22 February 1917, quoted in Bell and Nicholson, Charleston, p. 112. 44 Woolf, Night And Day, pp. 466–7. 45 Richard Shone, Bloomsbury Portraits: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Their Circle, Phaidon Press, London, [1976] 1993, p. 11. 46 Quoted in Spalding, Vanessa Bell, p. 172. 47 4 February 1922, Bell and McNeillie (eds), Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, p. 159. 48 16 September 1925, Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann (eds), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. III, Hogarth Press, London, 1977, p. 209. 49 Sunday [July 21 1912], Marler (ed.), Bell, Vol. III, p. 120. 50 Andrew McNeillie (ed.), Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, p. 40 51 Virginia Woolf, ‘A Haunted House’, in A Haunted House and Other Stories, Hogarth Press, London, [1921] 1953, p. 9. Hermione Lee sugggests that though ‘A Haunted House’ was first published in the short-story collection Monday or Tuesday (1921), it may date from 1916. Lee, Virginia Woolf, fn. 105, p. 809. 52 Woolf, ‘A Haunted House’, pp. 10–11. 53 VW to Katharine Arnold-Forster, 12 August [1919], Nicholson and Trautmann (eds), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, p. 382. Cornwall was still on Virginia’s mind and, sight unseen, the Woolfs rented three tiny, conjoined cottages in Cornwall that had a distinguished literary history: Katherine Mansfield had lived there with John Middleton Murry, and D.H. and Frieda Lawrence had occupied them, too. But Leonard and Virginia never even visited and cancelled the lease. See Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, p. 224. 54 Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (eds), Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. I: 1915–1919, Hogarth Press, London, 1977, pp. 286–7. 55 Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919– 1939, Hogarth Press, London, 1968, p. 12. 56 Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 421. 57 VW to Janet Case, 5 January 1920, Nicholson and Trautmann (eds), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, p. 415.
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Source 58 Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, p. 226. 59 VW to VB, [18 June 1919], Nicholson and Trautmann (eds), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, p. 368. 60 VW to VB, 1 April [1923], Nicholson and Trautmann (eds), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. III, p. 27. 61 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 43. 62 E.M Forster, quoted in Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 433. 63 VB, quoted in Dunn, A Very Close Conspiracy, p. 229. 64 Bell and Nicholson, Charleston, p. 128; VB to Roger Fry, September 1926, quoted in Bell and Nicholson, Charleston, p. 129. As Virginia Nicholson notes, ‘Although Vanessa enjoyed pruning and weeding, and Duncan loved choosing plants, on the whole the hard work was left to the gardener . . . Because Charleston was for much of the time the family’s holiday home, the garden was created to be enjoyed mainly in the summer months.’ Bell and Nicholson, Charleston, p. 134. 65 VB to Roger Fry, 11 September 1925, Marler (ed.), Bell, p. 285. 66 5 September 1925, Bell and McNeillie (eds), Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. III, p. 39. Virginia began To the Lighthouse on 6 August 1925. 67 Quentin Bell’s fifteenth birthday was on 19 August. Bell and Nicholson, Charleston, p. 40. 68 5 September 1925, Bell and McNeillie (eds), Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. III, p. 39. 69 VB to Roger Fry, 11 September 1925, Marler (ed.), Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell. p. 285; Monday 14 September 1925, p. 40. 7 December 1925, p. 51. Bell and McNeillie (eds), Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. III. 70 28 September 1926, Bell and McNeillie (eds), p. 111, Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. III; 5 September 1926, p. 107; 20 May 1926, p. 87. 71 VB To Roger Fry, 11 September 1925, Marler (ed.), Selected Lettes of Vanessa Bell, p. 286. 72 2 June 1926, Nicholson and Trautmann (eds), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. III, pp. 270–1. The exhibition was the first group show of the London Artists’ Association at Leicester Galleries. 73 18 August 1921, Bell and McNeillie (eds), Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, p. 132. 74 Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest, p. 160. 75 12 August 1921, Bell and McNeillie (eds), Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, p. 129. 76 Virginia Woolf, ‘Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car’, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, Hogarth Press, London, 1942, p. 120.
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notes 77 ‘Two days ago—Sunday 16th April 1939 to be precise—Nessa said that if I did not start writing my memoirs I should soon be too old . . . As it happens that I am sick of writing Roger’s life (Roger Fry: A Biography, 1940), perhaps I will spend two or three mornings making a sketch.’ Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ p. 64. 78 Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, p. 133. Jeanne Schulkind notes that VW had crossed out ‘chatters’ in the text and replaced it with another word that is indecipherable. 79 Woolf, Moments of Being, p. 98. 80 Elliott and Wallace, Women Artists and Writers, p. 89. 81 19 August 1929, Bell and McNeillie (eds), Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. III, p. 243. 82 19 August 1929, Bell and McNeillie (eds), Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. III, p. 243. 83 Bell and Nicholson, Charleston, p. 147. 84 John Lehmann, quoted in Joan Russell Noble (ed.), Recollections of Virginia Woolf, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975, p. 52. 85 VB to VW, [13 March 1940], Marler (ed.), Bell, p. 461. 86 23 November 1940, Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. IV, p. 340. The working titles of Between the Acts were The Pageant and Poynzt or Pointz Hall. 87 Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, [1941] 1969, p. 37. 88 Woolf, Between the Acts, pp. 28, 44, 3, 8, 65. 89 LW, quoted in Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, p, 135. 90 Woolf, Between the Acts, p. 219. 91 [24 December 1940], Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. V, p. 346. 92 VW to John Lehmann, [27? March 1941], Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. VI, p. 486. 93 VW to VB, [23? March 1941], Nicholson and Trautmann (eds), Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. VI, p. 485. 94 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, Penguin, Harmondsworth, [1915] 1975, p. 346. 95 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, Penguin, Harmondsworth, [1925] 1971, p. 74. 96 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Penguin, Harmondsworth, [1927] 1970, p. 237. 97 Jonathan and Catherine Zoob, email to the author, 6 October 2008.
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6 E r n e st H e m i ngway 1 Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, [1937], 1955, p. 206. 2 Though the final draft of A Farewell to Arms was completed in Key West, additional work was done in Paris in 1928 when Hemingway rewrote the ending thirty-two times. Hemingway noted in the foreword to the illustrated 1948 edition, ‘This book was written in Paris, Key West, Florida, Piggott, Arkansas, Kansas City, Missouri, Sheridan, Wyoming, and the first draft was finished near Big Horn in Wyoming. It was begun in the winter months of 1928 and the first draft was finished in September of that year. It was rewritten in the fall and winter of 1928 in Key West and the final writing was finished in Paris in the spring of 1928.’ Quoted in Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography, Harper and Row, New York, 1985, pp. 215–16. 3 James McLendon, Papa: Hemingway in Key West, EA Seeman Publishing, Miami, 1972, p. 18. 4 Ernest Hemingway, ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, The Hemingway Reader, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1953, pp. 587–8. 5 John Dos Passos, The Best of Times: An Informal Memoir, Andre Deutsch, London, 1968, p. 198. 6 EH to Maxwell Perkins, 7 April 1929, Princeton University Library, Archives of Charles Scribner’s Sons, Series: Hemingway I, Box 1, Folder 5. The Hemingways’ liner, SS Orita, had departed La Rochelle in France before sailing via Vigo, Spain, to the Canary Islands and then to Havana where they disembarked and caught a steamship to Key West. Hemingway, ever organised, had told Maxwell Perkins that he would be in Florida in April and May, Arkansas in June and Kansas City in June or July. EH to Maxwell Perkins, Paris, 12 February 1928, Carlos Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917– 1961, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1981, p. 272. James McLendon writes that EH and PH were forced to wait for a week for the car’s delivery, and checked into a small apartment in the Trevor & Morris building, above the Ford dealership in Simonton Street. McLendon, Papa, pp. 21–2. 7 EH to Maxwell Perkins, Key West, 21 April 1928, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, pp. 276–7. 8 Leicester Hemingway, My Brother: Ernest Hemingway, Fawcett, New York, 1967, p. 103.
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notes 9 Malcolm Pines, ‘Shame—What Psychoanalysis Does and Does Not Say’, in Claire Pajaczkowska and Ivan Ward (eds), Shame and Sexuality, Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture, Routledge, London, 2008, p. 103. 10 McLendon, Papa, p. 26. 11 EH to Maxwell Perkins, Key West, 21 April 1928, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 277. 12 Ernest Hemingway, ‘On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter’, [Esquire, April 1936] in William White (ed.), By-line: Ernest Hemingway, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1969, p. 237. 13 Dos Passos, The Best of Times, p. 143. 14 McLendon, Papa, p. 34. 15 EH to Guy Hickok [1932], quoted in Meyers, Hemingway, p. 206 16 See EH to Dr C.E. Hemingway, Hendaye, France, 14 September 1927. Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, pp. 257–60. 17 Grace Hemingway, quoted in Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1987, p. 45. 18 James R. Mellow, Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1992, p. 14. 19 Lynn, Hemingway, pp. 38–43. 20 EH to Maxwell Perkins, Paris, 17 March 1928, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 272. 21 Dos Passos, The Best of Times, p. 219. 22 Meyers, Hemingway, p. 203. 23 New York Herald Tribune Books, 9 October 1927, p. 8. Hemingway was furious, telling Maxwell Perkins: The Viriginia Woolf review was damned irritating—She belongs to a group of Bloomsbury people who are all over 40 and have taken on themselves the burden of being modern and all very promising and saviours of letters . . . [T]hey dislike what they consider the intrusion of anybody under 40 into the business . . . I would have enjoyed taking the clothes off Virginia Woolf this noon and permitting her to walk down Avenue de l’Opera letting every one, truth, reality, whatever she liked—pass her close each time.
EH to Maxwell Perkins, Paris, c. 1 November 1927, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, pp. 264–5. 24 EH to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hendaye, c. 15 September 1927, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 262.
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Source 25 Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Vintage, New York, [1933] 1960, pp. 216, 220. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes that ‘the way it ended with Gertrude Stein’ was due to his disgust at her lesbian relationship with Alice B. Toklas. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, Jonathan Cape, London, 1964, pp. 102, 103–4. 26 EH to Maxwell Perkins, Paris, 17 March 1928, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 274. 27 In January 1946, Hemingway began work on The Garden of Eden (1986), whose opening sequences are set in Le Grau-du-Roi where David and Catherine Bourne are honeymooning. Perhaps due to its themes of cross-sexual experimentation, the book was not published during Hemingway’s lifetime. For discussion of problems related to the manuscript and publication of The Garden of Eden see Lynn, Hemingway, pp. 540–4. 28 For ideas on this theme see Kay Milton, Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion, Routledge, London, 2002, pp. 105–9. 29 Dos Passos, The Best of Times, p. 155. 30 EH to Maxwell Perkins, Piggott, Arkansas, 31 May 1928, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 278. 31 EH to Waldo Peirce, Key West, 15 April 1932, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 358. 32 Dos Passos, The Best of Times, p. 143. 33 Gregory H. Hemingway, Papa: A Personal Memoir, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1976, p. 19. 34 Madelaine Hemingway Miller, Ernie: Hemingway’s Sister ‘Sunny’ Remembers, Crown Publishers, New York, 1975, p. 113. 35 Lorine Thompson, quoted in Denis Brian, The True Gen: An Intimate Portrait of Ernest Hemingway by Those Who Knew Him, Grove Press, New York, 1988, p. 78. 36 Hemingway, My Brother, p. 99. 37 Lloyd Arnold, quoted in Jeffrey Berman, Surviving Literary Suicide, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1999, p. 106. 38 Hemingway Miller, Ernie, p. 115. 39 As Bernice Kert notes, ‘No one has suggested it was a fully realized love affair. Even as Agnes was drawn to him, she continued to put limits on their physical closeness. And Ernest, though intensely aroused, was not so sexually advanced that he would seduce her.’ Bernice Kert, The Hemingway Women, WW Norton, New York, 1983, p. 58.
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notes 40 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1962, pp. 185, 225. 41 EH’s comments about the autumn from a letter to Maxwell Perkins, November 1933, quoted in Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, Collins, London, 1969, p. 325. EH also notes, ‘Summer’s a discouraging time to work—You don’t feel death coming on the way it does in the fall when the boys really put pen to paper.’ EH to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hendaye, France, 13 September 1929, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 306. 42 Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell, The Pegasus Foundation, Dallas, 1983, p. 160. 43 ‘On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter’, pp. 237–8. 44 Bachelard, Water and Dreams, pp. 179, 183. 45 See Gregory S. Sojka, Ernest Hemingway: The Angler as Artist, Peter Lang, New York, 1985, pp. 32–8. Hemingway’s early articles about fishing are reprinted in White (ed.), By-line. 46 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises: The Hemingway Reader, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1962, p. 115. 47 ‘On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter’, p. 240. 48 EH to Maxwell Perkins, Key West, 8 January 1929, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 292. 49 Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, p. 257. 50 EH to Maxwell Perkins, Key West, 8 January 1929, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 292. 51 Maxwell Perkins to F. Scott Fitzgerald, quoted in Mellow, Hemingway, p. 377. 52 McLendon, Papa, p. 59. 53 The first extant time EH used the nickname ‘Papa’ was to sign a humorous note to Pauline while on board SS Orita from France to Cuba. EH to Pauline Pfeiffer, c. 28 March 1928, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 275. 54 Quoted in McLendon, Papa, p. 31. 55 Bachelard, Water and Dreams, p. 179. 56 Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1952, pp. 36–7. The Old Man and the Sea was written in Cuba and published in 1952 but had its inception in ‘On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter’ when EH told of ‘an old man fishing alone in a skiff ’ who hooked ‘a great marlin that . . . pulled the skiff far out to sea’. White (ed.), By-line, pp. 239–40.
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Source 57 EH to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Key West, 21 December 1935, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 428. 58 EH to Ivan Kashkin, Key West, 19 August 1935, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 418. Kashkin wrote ‘Ernest Hemingway: The Tragedy of Craftsmanship’, International Literature, May 1935, and EH began a correspondence with Kashkin. As Baker notes, Kashkin was responsible for EH’s reputation in Russia (pp. 420–1). 59 EH to Maxwell Perkins, Paris, 15 December 1929, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, pp. 316–17. 60 EH to Maxwell Perkins, Key West, c. 11 April 1930, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 321. 61 EH to Maxwell Perkins, Key West, 7 September 1935, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, pp. 421–22. EH wrote an impassioned article about the fate of the men. ‘Who Murdered the Vets?’, New Masses, 17 September 1935, pp. 9–10. 62 Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1970, p. 4. 63 EH to John Dos Passos, Havana, 30 May 1932, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 359. 64 EH to Ivan Kashkin, Key West, 19 August 1935, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 419. 65 McLendon, Papa, pp. 60, 76. 66 EH to Maxwell Perkins, Key West, 26 December 1931. Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 346. 67 EH to Waldo Peirce, Key West, 15 April 1932, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 359. 68 EH’s four works by André Masson are in the Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston. Location of other works currently unknown. 69 EH, quoted in James Thrall Soby, Joan Miro, Ayer Publishing, New York, 1980, p. 32. 70 The catwalk blew down during a storm in 1948 and was replaced by a winding iron staircase that leads from the ground floor to the studio but is not attached to the house. 71 McLendon, Papa, p. 81. 72 EH to Janet Flanner, Key West, 8 April 1933, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 387.
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notes 73 EH to Janet Flanner, Key West, 8 April 1933, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 387. 74 Max Eastman’s review ‘Bull in the Afternoon’, New Republic, 7 June 1933, was the harshest American comment. Hemingway’s references to ‘ritual’ and ‘tragedy’ were ‘sentimental poppycock’ of the sort dished out by ‘those Art nannies and pale-eyed professors of poetry whom Hemingway above all men despises’. Meeting Eastman four years later in Maxwell Perkin’s office, Hemingway punched him in the face. See Lynn, Hemingway, pp. 398–401. As Angel Capellán notes, there were several Spanish reviews and articles of Death in the Afternoon, ‘all of them very favourable’. Hemingway and the Hispanic World, UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 1977, p. 135. 75 EH to Janet Flanner, Key West, 8 April 1933, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 388. 76 Maxwell Perkins to EH, 7 January 1937. Matthew J. Bruccoli (ed.), with the assistance of Robert W. Trogdon, The Only Thing that Counts: The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 1925–1947, Scribner, New York, 1996, p. 248. 77 Ernest Hemingway, ‘After the Storm’, Winner Take Nothing, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1933, pp. 6, 7–8. ‘After the Storm’ was first published in Cosmopolitan (May 1932), and then in Hemingway’s short story collection, Winner Take Nothing, in 1933. 78 Hemingway, ‘After the Storm’, p. 13. 79 EH to Maxwell Perkins, Cat Cay, Bahamas, 11 July 1936, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 449. ‘On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter’ was published in Esquire, April 1936; To Have and Have Not is based on two short stories about Harry Morgan’s bootlegging activities: ‘One Trip Across’, published in Cosmopolitan, April 1934 and ‘The Tradesman’s Return’, published in Esquire, February 1936. 80 EH to Maxwell Perkins, Cat Cay, Bahamas, 11 July 1936, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 448. 81 EH to Janet Flanner, Key West, 8 April 1933, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 386. 82 In 1674, having won the favour of Charles II, Morgan was knighted by him and made Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica. As Jan Rogozinski writes, ‘Morgan was now thirty-nine, immensely rich, and the owner of a plantation of 6000 acres. He spent the next fourteen years in drunken idleness. By his death in 1688—ousted from office for incoherence—he was so immensely fat that he no longer could move from his hammock.’ Jan Rogozinski, A
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Source Brief History of the Caribbean, From the Arawak and the Carib to the Present, Facts on File, New York, 1992, p. 96. 83 McLendon, Papa, p. 147. 84 Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, pp. 151–2. 85 Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, p. 109. 86 Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, p. 79. 87 Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, p. 108, p. 92. 88 A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: The Ecstacy and the Sorrow, William Morrow, New York, 1983, p. 160. 89 Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, pp. 153, 82. 90 Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, pp. 78, 77, 78. 91 Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, p. 178. 92 Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, pp. 78–9. 93 Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, p. 144. 94 Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, p. 147. 95 McLendon, Papa, p. 165. 96 Lorine Thompson, quoted in Brian, The True Gen, p. 102. 97 Martha Gellhorn to PH, 14 January 1937, quoted in Caroline Moorehead, Martha Gellhorn: A Life, Chatto & Windus, London, 2003, p. 127. 98 McLendon, Papa, p. 166. 99 Moorehead, Martha Gellhorn, p. 126. 100 Kert, The Hemingway Women, p. 291. 101 EH to Maxwell Perkins, [early February, 1937], Bruccoli (ed.), The Only Thing that Counts, pp. 248–9. 102 EH to Maxwell Perkins, Key West, 15 December 1936, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 455. 103 EH to Mrs Paul Pfeiffer, Key West, 9 February 1937, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, pp. 457–8. 104 Quoted in Mellow, Hemingway, p. 485. 105 ‘A New Kind of War’, [NANA Dispatch, April 14 1937], in White (ed.), By-line. 106 Bruccoli (ed.), The Only Thing that Counts, [early February, c. 10 June 1937], pp. 248–50. 107 Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The 1930s, WW Norton & Co., New York, 1997, p. 272. 108 Alfred Kazin, New York Herald Tribune Books, 17 October 1937 in Jeffrey Meyers (ed.), Hemingway: The Critical Heritage, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1982, p. 230.
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notes 109 Malcolm Cowley, New Republic, [20 October 1937] in Meyers (ed.), Hemingway, p. 234. 110 Philip Rahv, Partisan Review, [December 1937] in Meyers (ed.), Hemingway, p. 242. 111 Arnold Gingrich, quoted in Brian, The True Gen, p. 88. 112 ‘The Great Blue River’, Holiday, July 1949, White (ed.), By-line, p. 404. 113 EH to Wallace Meyer, La Finca Vigía, 4 and 7 March 1952, Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway, p. 757. 114 Hemingway, ‘On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter’, p. 240. 115 Mark Schorer, New Republic, [6 October 1952] in Meyers (ed.), Hemingway, p. 409. 116 The Old Man and the Sea, pp. 46, 52. 117 Hemingway, Papa, pp. 48–9. 118 Ernest Hemingway, ‘A Situation Report’, Look, 4 September 1956 in White (ed.), By-line, p. 472.
7 Cl au de Mon et a n d Bl a nch e Hosch e dé 1 Jean-Pierre Hoschedé, ‘Notes Posthumes de Blanche Hoschedé-Monet’, Claude Monet: Ce Mal Connu, Pierre Cailler Editeur, Geneva, 1960, p. 164. 2 Monet to Gustave Geffroy, 30 April 1914, Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et Catalogue Raisonné, La Bibliothèque des arts, Lausanne, 1985, vol. IV. L. 2116, p. 390. Paul Hayes Tucker suggests that it was probably in mid to late May 1914 that Monet started painting the Grand Décorations. As Tucker points out, Monet was ‘ill in January; Jean died on February 9; and his other son Michel, underwent an operation in March’. Paul Hayes Tucker, ‘The Revolution in the Garden: Monet in the Twentieth Century’, in Paul Hayes Tucker (ed.), Monet in the 20th Century, with George T.M. Shackleford and Maryann Stevens, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998, p. 64. 3 Paul Hayes Tucker notes that, while ‘Jean’s biography is cryptic, like that of the rest of Monet’s children and stepchildren’, Jean was first hospitalised for the illness while in the army in 1890. Claude Monet: Life and Art, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995, p. 201. 4 Comments about Louise-Justine from the journal of Comte Théophile Beguin Billecocq, quoted in James A. Ganz and Richard Kendall, The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2007, pp. 13–14.
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Source 5 Tucker, ‘The Revolution in the Garden: Monet in the Twentieth Century’, p. 41; Richard Bretell, Monet in Normandy, Rizzoli Publications, New York, 2006, p. 15. 6 In 1920, Monet told art dealer René Gimpel his mother had died when he was twelve. Quoted Ganz and Kendall, The Unknown Monet, p. 11. 7 Hoschedé, ‘Notes Posthumes de Blanche Hoschedé-Monet’, p. 158. 8 Alice was independently wealthy and had inherited Château de Rottembourg from her father, Alphonse Raingo. (Wildenstein, Monet, vol. I, p. 81). 9 Alice Hoschedé to her mother-in-law, Madame Hoschedé, 26 August 1879, Wildenstein, Monet, vol. I, p. 98. 10 Georges Clemenceau, Claude Monet: The Water Lilies, trans. George Boas, Doubleday, New York, 1930, p. 20. 11 Quoted in Virginia Spate, The Colour of Time: Claude Monet, Thames and Hudson, London, 1992, p. 137. Georges De Bellio was a wealthy Romanian doctor who collected works by Monet, Manet and Sisley as well as treating them and their families. By the early 1880s, De Bellio had collected around thirty paintings by Monet, mainly of Argenteuil. 12 Alice Hoschedé to Ernest Hoschedé, end November 1879, mid-December 1879, Wildenstein, Monet, vol. I, pp. 100, 105. 13 Quoted in Wildenstein, Monet, vol. I, p. 108. 14 Wildenstein, Monet, vol. II, pp. 5–6. 15 Jean-Pierre Hoschedé comments that two of BHM’s early paintings—a study of the Villa Juliette and a bouquet of four sunflowers in a vase—were in his possession and that they attest to Blanche’s artistic gifts. Jean-Pierre Hoschedé, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet: Peintre Impressionist, Lecerf, Rouen, 1961, p. 11. 16 Hoschedé, ‘Notes Posthumes de Blanche Hoschedé-Monet’, p. 159. 17 Claire Joyes, Claude Monet: Life at Giverny, Vendome Press, New York, 1985, p. 42. 18 CM, quoted in Spate, The Colour of Time, pp. 14–15. 19 Spate, The Colour of Time, pp. 8–9; Carl Jung, Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster, Arc, London, 1988, pp. 144–51. 20 Georges Clemenceau, The Water Lilies, trans. George Boas, Doubleday, New York, 1930, p. 67. 21 Marcel Proust, ‘The Painter: Shadows–Monet’, Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, trans. John Sturrock, Penguin, London, 1988, p. 329. 22 CM to AH, 4 March 1888, quoted in Wildenstein, Monet, vol. III, L. 849, p. 231.
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notes 23 CM to AH, 26 April 1888, quoted in Wildenstein, Monet, vol. III, L. 880, p. 236. 24 CM to Blanche Hoschedé, c. 5 March 1888, Wildenstein, Monet. vol. III, L. 850, p. 231. 25 Quoted in Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p. 215. 26 Spate, The Colour of Time, p. 182. There is no extant portrait of Monet by BHM. 27 Though Hoschedé-Monet’s Grainstack, Giverny is dated 1890 verso, it is likely it was painted in 1891, given its similarity to Monet’s Grainstack, Sun in the Mist, (1891, Minneapolis Insititute of Arts). Wildenstein, Monet vol. III p. 1286. Hoschedé-Monet’s Grainstack, Giverny is h. 19.9 × w. 32 in/h. 50.5 × w. 81.3 cm while Monet’s Grainstack, Sun in the Mist is h. 23 × 45 in/h. 60 × 116.2 cm. I would like to thank Molly Eppard and Sarah Richardson, Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York, for giving me access to this painting and for pointing out that the work has an estate stamp, not a signature, lower left. 28 Fifty-five works are catalogued in Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, 1865–1947: Une Artiste de Giverny: exposition/realisée par le Musée municipal A.G. Poulain, Vernon, 6 avril—3 juin, Musée municipal [Vernon]1991. 29 On the same visit, Monet showed the Morisot family paintings from the Rouen Cathedral series. Julie Manet, Growing Up with the Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet, trans., ed. and intro. Rosalind de Boland Roberts and Jane Roberts, Sotheby’s, London, 1987, pp. 43–4. 30 Theodore Robinson, 3 July 1982, Unpublished Diaries, vol. 1, Frick Art and Reference Library, New York. 31 Quoted in Kathryn Corbin, ‘John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist’, Antiques, November 1988, p. 1145. 32 CM, quoted in Charles F. Stuckey, Claude Monet: 1840–1926, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 1995, p. 217. 33 CM, quoted in Gerdts, ‘American Art and the French Experience’, Claire Joynes, Lasting Impressions: American Painters in France, 1865–1915, Terra Foundation for the Arts, Evanston, Illnois, 1992, p. 49. 34 Claire Joyes, Claude Monet, Life at Giverny, Vendome Press, New ork, 1985, p. 48. 35 To Alice Hoschedé, 16 and 21 February 1897, Wildenstein, Monet, vol. III, L. 1370, p. 294, L. 1313, p. 294. 36 Spate, The Colour of Time, p. 238. 37 Claire Joyes, Claude Monet, Life at Giverny, p. 65.
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Source 38 ‘Notes Posthumes de Blanche Hoschedé-Monet’, p. 162. 39 Quoted in Spate, The Colour of Time, p. 265. 40 Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell, The Pegasus Foundation, Dallas, 1983, p. 115. 41 Elizabeth Murray, Monet’s Passion: Ideas, Inspiration and Insights from the Painter’s Garden, Pomegranate Artbooks, San Francisco, p. 73. 42 Letter to Geffroy, 11 July 1911, Wildenstein, Monet, vol. IV, L. 1971, p. 382; Letter to Geffroy, 7 September 1911, Wildenstein, Monet, vol. IV L. 1977, p. 382; Letter to Rodin, 16 July 1911, Wildenstein, Monet, vol. IV, L. 1972, p. 382. 43 Gustave Geffroy to BHM, [April] 1914, Hoschedé, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, p. 42; Quoted in Hoschedé, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, p. 15. 44 CM to Gustav Geffroy, 30 April 1914, quoted in Wildenstein, Monet, vol. IV, L. 2116, p. 390. 45 Gustav Geffroy, Monet: Sa Vie, Son Temps, Son Oeuvre, Editions G. Gres et Cie, Paris, 1922, p. 332. 46 The photographs are illustrated in Joyes, Monet at Giverny, pp. 100–1. 47 Joyes, Monet at Giverney, p. 39. 48 CM to Raymond Koechlin, 15 January 1915, quoting Wildenstein, Monet, vol. IV, L. 2142. 49 Though Monet began work on the Grand Décorations in 1914, he had explored the same subject twice before. He painted several Water Lilies between 1897 and 1900 (see Wildenstein, Monet, vol. IV, cat. nos 1501–1508). In 1897, Monet discussed the prospect with Le Figaro’s Maurice Guillemot. The journalist visited Giverny in August, rising at dawn and accompanying Monet to the river where he was painting Mornings on the Seine, a series of superb pastelhued waterscapes. Guillemot saw several Water Lily paintings. They were ‘the models for a decoration . . . Imagine a circular room, the dado below the wall moulding entirely filled with a plain of water scattered with these plants, transparent screens sometimes green, sometimes almost mauve. The calm and silent, still waters reflecting the scattered flowers, the colours evanescent, with delicious nuances of a dreamlike delicacy.’ (Quoted in Spate, The Colour of Time, p. 235.) It is a prescient description of the Grand Décorations in the Orangerie, thirty years prior to their installation. Between 1903 and 1909, Monet painted a second, more substantial series, Les Nymphéas: Series de paysages d’eau. Fortyeight were exhibited at Durand-Ruel in May 1909. When Monet wrote to Geffroy announcing the start of the Grand Décorations, ‘[Y]ou will see some
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notes
old trials which I found in a cellar’, he is referring to works from the second series. Wildenstein, Monet, 30 April 1914, vol. IV, L. 2116, p. 390. 50 Bachelard, Water and Dreams, p. 117. 51 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1959, p. 130. 52 Hoschedé, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, p. 10. 53 Letter to Bazille, 15 July [1864], quoted in Wildenstein, Monet, vol. I, L. 8, p. 420. 54 Jean Martet, M. Clemenceau Peint Par Lui-même, A. Michel, Paris, 1929, p. 52–3. 55 Hoschedé, ‘Notes Posthumes de Blanche Hoschedé-Monet’, p. 163. 56 Hoschedé, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, p. 15. 57 Spate, The Colour of Time, p. 271. 58 Agathe Rouart-Valéry quoted in Spate, The Colour of Time, p. 280. 59 Hoschedé, ‘Notes Posthumes de Blanche Hoschedé-Monet’, p. 163. Jean Pierre Hoschedé found the notes after Blanche’s death and published them in Claude Monet: Ce Mal Connu (1960). 60 Martet to BHM, 21 January 1930, Hoschedé, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, p. 85. 61 Martet, M. Clemenceau, p. 217. 62 ‘Monet: Genesis of a Restoration’ (www.moma.org/explore/conservation/ genesis_restoration.html) [accessed 30 January 2009]. 63 Hoschedé, ‘Notes Posthumes de Blanche Hoschedé-Monet’, p. 164. 64 Martet, M. Clemenceau, p. 219–20. 65 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language and the Cosmos, trans. Daniel Russell, Beacon Press, Boston, 1971, p. 198. 66 Hoschedé, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, p. 23.
8 E m ily K a m e K ngwa r r ey e 1 Margo Neale, ‘Marks of Meaning: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye’ in Margo Neale (ed.), Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra, 2008, p. 218. 2 EKK quoted in Jenny Green, ‘The enigma of Emily Kngwarray’, World of Dreamings: Traditional and Modern Art of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2000 (http://nga.gov.au/Dreaming) [accessed 20 January 2009].
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Source 3 Susan McCulloch and Emily McCulloch Childs, McCulloch’s Contemporary Aboriginal Art, McCulloch and McCulloch, Melbourne, 2008, p. 79. 4 Neale, ‘Marks of Meaning’, Utopia, p. 217. 5 The other Australian representatives were Yvonne Koolmartie and Judy Watson. Fluent—Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmartie, Judy Watson— XLVII Esposizione Internationale D’Art, La Biennale Di Venezia, Venice, Italy, 1997. 6 EKK in an interview with Rodney Gooch, Soakage Bore, 1990, trans. Kathleen Petyarre, quoted in Michael Boulter, The Art of Utopia: A New Direction in Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1991, p. 61. 7 Robyn Davidson, No Fixed Address: Nomads and the Fate of the Planet, Quarterly Essay, no. 24, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2006, p. 13. 8 Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, the granddaughter of Troth Kunoth, recalls another story about Utopia’s name. ‘Sonny, he named it Utopia because he got lost one day and [Troth] went looking for him . . . So he asked Sonny, “Where do think you’ve been all day?” And he said, “Where do you think? I’m in Utopia, aren’t I?” Just saying, you know, it wasn’t a heavenly place, it wasn’t nice at all, and apparently they kind of thought, “Well, that’s a good name for the area. Let’s call it Utopia.”’ Interview by Robin Hughes, 10 July 1995, Australian Biography. (www. australianbiography. gov.au/subjects/kunothmonks/ interview_1_htm). 9 Anne Marie Brody, ‘Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Portrait from the Outside’, in Margo Neale (ed.), Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere, Paintings from Utopia, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1998, p. 12. 10 R.G. Kimber, First Australians: The Untold Story of Australia, written, directed and produced by Rachel Perkins, SBS TV, 2008. 11 Lindsay Bird Mpetyane’s mother was Rosie Kngwarreye, the sister of EKK. When she died, EKK became Lindsay Bird Mpetyane’s ‘mother’. EKK was also the chief carer for her ‘nieces’ Barbara Weir and Lily Sandover Kngwarreye, both highly regarded artists. See McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Aus Art Editions, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2006, p. 179. See also Neale (ed.), Utopia, p. 257. 12 Interview with Lindsay Bird Mpetyane, 23 August 2006, Mulga Bore, Northern Territory. 13 Anne Marie Brody, ‘Emily Kame Kngwarreye,’ in Anne Marie Brody (ed.), Stories: Eleven Aboriginal Artists, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1997, pp. 78–9. 14 Davidson, No Fixed Address, pp. 13–14.
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notes 15 Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt, The Speaking Land: Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia, Penguin Books, Ringwood, Victoria, 1989, p. 6. 16 Jennifer Loureide Biddle, Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2007, p. 54 17 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Task, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1959, p. 88. 18 Brody, ‘Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Portrait from the Outside’, p. 14 19 Brody, ‘Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Portrait from the Outside’, p. 12. 20 EKK’s stories are compiled from Brody, ‘Emily Kame Kngwarreye’, in Brody (ed.), Stories: Eleven Aboriginal Artists, p. 76 and Brody, ‘Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Portrait from the Outside’, in Neale (ed.), Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere, Paintings from Utopia, p. 14. As Philip Clarke points out, ‘Aboriginal adults across Australia often use the potential actions of spirit beings in threats to help control children. For instance, in the Western Desert children in particular fear the mamu or “devil”, which is believed to cause illness.’ Emily and the other girl may have believed the policeman was a mamu. Philip Clarke, Where the Ancestors Walked, Australia as an Aboriginal Landscape, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2003, p. 23. 21 Anna Petyarre Price, quoted in Victoria King, ‘Art of Place and Displacement: Embodied Perception and the Haptic Ground’, PhD thesis, School of Art History and Theory, University of New South Wales, pp. 142–4. The translation of the word ‘Alhalkere’ is by Jenny Green, quoted in King, p. 142. 22 Green, ‘The enigma of Emily Kngwarray’, World of Dreamings: Traditional and Modern Art in Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2000 (http://nga.gov.au/Dreaming) [accessed 20 January 2009]. 23 Peter Latz, Bushfires and Bushtucker: Aboriginal Plant Use in Central Australia, IAD Press, Alice Springs, 1995, p. 296. As Latz points out, ‘the above-ground section of the plant usually dies off a month or so after rain, and it is after this time that the yams are frequently collected. Considerable skill is required to locate the underground portions of the plant at this stage, and involves both a knowledge of the specific habitat of the plant and an ability to recognise the remaining dry stems and leaves.’ 24 Bardon writes, ‘I saw no mature-age women artists during my time at Papunya, and no mention was made to me by any of the artists that women could or were allowed to paint.’ Geoffrey Bardon and James Bard, Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, Miegunyah Press, Carlton, 2004, p. 53.
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Source 25 Biddle, Breasts, Bodies, Canvas, pp. 27–9. 26 Quoted in King, ‘Art of Place and Displacement’, p. 145. 27 Catherine H. Berndt, ‘Digging sticks and spears, or, the two-sex model’, in Gale (ed.), Woman’s Role in Aboriginal Society, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1986, p. 82. 28 EKK, quoted in Green, ‘The enigma of Emily Kngwarray’, in World of Dreamings: Traditional and Modern Art in Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2000 (http://nga.gov.au/Dreaming) [accessed 20 January 2009]. 29 Jenny Green, ‘Utopian Women’ in Isobel White, Diane Barwick and Betty Meehan (eds), Fighters and Singers: The Lives of Some Australian Aboriginal Women, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985, p. 57. 30 Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt, The First Australians, Ure Smith, Sydney, [1952] 1974, p. 106. 31 Green, ‘The enigma of Emily Kngwarray’, in World of Dreamings: Traditional and Modern Art in Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2000 (http://nga.gov.au/Dreaming) [accessed 20 January 2009]. 32 Diane Bell, ‘Person and Place: Making Meaning from the Art of Indigenous Women,’ Feminist Studies, vol. 28, no. 1 (Spring, 2002), p. 108. Bell was working as the anthropological consultant to Mr Justice Toohey. Bell notes that the Utopia claim was ‘the first claim heard under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 where relationships traced through women were presented as ones which carried a category of rights which should be recognised as those of “traditional owners” . . . [T]he women were critically important in terms of putting together the genealogies required for the claim.’ 33 Berndt and Berndt, The First Australians, pp. 54, 115–17. 34 ‘The factors associated with the particularly good outcomes here [at Utopia] are likely to include outstation living, with its attendant benefits for physical activity and diet and limited access to alcohol, as well as social factors, including connectedness to culture, family and land, and opportunities for self-determination.’ Kevin G. Rowley, Kerin O’Dea, Robyn McDermott et al., ‘Lower than Expected Morbidity and Mortality for Australian Aboriginal population: 10 Year Follow-up in a Decentralised Community’, Medical Journal of Australia, 2008, 188(5), pp. 283–7. (www.maj.com.au/ public issues/188_05_030308/row10886_fm.html) [accessed 31 January 2009]. 35 Benjamin Genocchio, Dollar Dreaming: Inside the Aboriginal Art World, Hardie Grant, Melbourne, 2008, p. 184. 36 Green, ‘Utopian Women’, p. 56.
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notes
37 Brody, ‘Emily Kame Kngwarreye’, p. 14. 38 Marcia Langton, quoted in First Australians, SBS TV. 39 Berndt and Berndt, The First Australians, p. 54. 40 McCulloch’s Contemporary Aboriginal Art, p. 80. 41 Green, ‘Utopian Women’, pp. 54, 63, 60. 42 Brody (ed.), Stories: Eleven Aboriginal Artists, p. 78. 43 In the middle of 1988, only months before EKK began to paint, she was involved with the Utopia Women’s Batik Group in a project called Utopia: A Picture Story. Inspired by the title, the women bordered their silk fabrics with striped edges to simulate a picture frame. Anne Marie Brody, curator of the Holmes à Court Collection, suggested to Robert and Janet Holmes à Court that they acquire a selection of eighty-eight works, which they did. See Anne Marie Brody, Utopia: A Picture Story: 88 Silk Batiks from the Robert Holmes à Court Collection, Heytesbury Pty Ltd, Perth, 1990. 44 Brody (ed.), Stories: Eleven Aboriginal Artists, p. 77. In 1987, Rodney Gooch became the manager and arts co-ordinator of the CAAMA Shop. The shop was located just outside Alice Springs. In September 1987, the Department of Aboriginal Affairs asked Gooch to co-ordinate and market Utopia art through the CAAMA Shop. Brody, ‘Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Portrait from the Outside’, p.9. 45 Gabrielle Pizzi quoted in Jane Cadzow, ‘The Emily Industry’, Good Weekend Magazine, The Age, 5 August 1995, p. 32. 46 Rebecca Hossack, ‘Obituary: Emily Kngwarreye’, The Independent, 6 September 1996. 47 Neale, ‘Marks of Meaning’, p. 189. 48 Latz, Bushfires and Bushtucker, p. 6. 49 Michael Eather, quoted in McCulloch’s Contemporary Aboriginal Art, p. 82.
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g Ack now l e dge m e n ts
Many people have generously assisted me in my research and on my travels. I would like to thank Marianne Wirenfeldt Asmussen, director, Karen Blixen Museum, Rungstedlund; MacKenzie Bennett, Museum Archives, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Valerie Benoist; Patrick Bertrand, Art-Giverny; Anne Brody, Assistant Curator, Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth; Dr Katherine Bourguignon, Terra Foundation of American Art; Antonio Chavarria, curator of Ethnology, State Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; Chris Coleman, Collections Manager of Anthropology, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles; Molly Eppard, Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York; Frick Art and Reference Library, New York; Jenny Green; Wendy Hitchmough, curator, Charleston; Helen A. Harrison, director, Pollock-Krasner House and Research Center; Heather Hole, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe; Tove Hussein, Nairobi; Tim Jennings, director, Mbantua Art Gallery and Cultural Museum, Alice Springs; Barbara Buhler Lynes, director, Georgia O’Keeffe
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Acknowledgements
Museum, Santa Fe; Dr Patrick McCaughey; Renee Montgomery, Los Angeles Museum of Art; Dr Margo Neale, Senior Research Fellow, Senior Curator and Principal Advisor to the Director on Indigenous Matters, National Museum of Australia, Canberra; John R. Neeson; Susan Oshima, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles; Meg Sherry Rich, Princeton University Library; Sarah Richardson, Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York; Judith Ryan, Senior Curator of Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Victoria; Claudia Da Salvo, Matheson Library, Monash University; Professor Isaac Schweitzer, Department of Psychiatry, University of Melbourne; Professor Virginia Spate, University of Sydney; Sharon Tassicker, director, Holmes à Court Gallery, Perth; Josephine Thangwa, curator, Karen Blixen Museum, Nairobi; Sharyn Rolfsen Udall, Sante Fe, New Mexico; Professor Gary Witherspoon, University of Washington; Dr Mel Yoakum, curator, Françoise Gilot Archives; Jonathan and Catherine Zoob, Monk’s House, Rodmell. I’d also like to thank the welcoming folk at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, who made me feel so at home. Leilei, who was my guide and my driver in Nairobi—thank you! Warmest thanks to Jane Palfreyman, my publisher at Allen & Unwin. Thanks also to my agent Joe Veltre, The Veltre Company, New York. My colleagues at Monash University have provided unfailing enthusiasm and encouragement: Dr Steven Angelides, Dr Sharon Bickle, Associate Professor Maryanne Dever, Dr JaneMaree Maher, Associate Professor Peter Murphy, Professor Clive Probyn and Dr Sally Newman, my enterprising research assistant. I would also like to thank all permissions and copyright holders, including Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (Jackson Pollock), Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe (Georgia
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Source
O’Keeffe), National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (Georgia O’Keeffe), Rungstedlund Foundation (Karen Blixen), The Hemingway Society (Ernest Hemingway), The Random House Group Ltd (Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf) and The Society of Authors (Virginia Woolf). Quote from Ernest Hemingway, To Have and to Have Not, Jonathan Cape, pp. 275–6 reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. Quotes from Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961, edited by Carlos Baker and By-line: Ernest Hemingway edited by William White reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., copyright Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust. Sincere apologies to any of those whose permissions were unable to be obtained despite our best efforts. This book is dedicated to Susan McCulloch, dear friend and intrepid writer, publisher and traveller.
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g I n de x Aboriginal art see also Emily Kame Kngwarreye aerial perspective in, 346 agents, curators, and scholars, 317, 324, 329–30, 339, 341, 344, 345, 349 modern art at Utopia, 339–41 Papunya artists, 329, 344 as triumph over painful context, 343, 350 Western Desert art movement, 329–30 women artists, 329, 339–41 Aboriginal remote communities at Arlparra, 335–6, 349 mourning rituals, 322, 334 at Mulga Bore, 321–4 at Rocket Range, 341–5 at Soakage Bore, 324–6 squalor, 321–2, 341–2 Aboriginal society Awelye female ceremonies, 330, 332–4, 346–7
the ‘Dreaming’, 324–5, 340 gendered roles, 331 and sexuality, 332–3 Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple II (Gilot), 58 ‘After the Storm’ (Hemingway), 254–6 Agard, Jules, 70, 75 Alchemy (Pollock), 170–1 ‘Alkmene’ (Dinesen), 123 Along the River Epte (Hoschedé), 296 America Today (Benton), 146–7 Andersen, Hans Christian, 113–14 Arlparra, 335–6, 349 Art Students League (New York), 7, 142 Asheham House Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell at, 188–92 as Virginia Woolf ’s safe place, 204–5 Asheham House (Bell), 192–3 Atelier Madoura (Vallauris), 50, 70, 75, 79, 81 Autumn Rhythm (Pollock), 173, 176 Awelye female ceremonies, 330, 332–3
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Source Bachelard, Gaston, 19, 72, 188, 305 Barn with Snow (O’Keeffe), 32–3 batik, 339–41 Bell, Clive, 191, 194 Bell, Vanessa acquires a bright studio, 208–9 as artist, 202, 210, 213 daughter’s marriage, 214–15 death, 219 as home-creator, 190–2, 198–9, 201–3, 210 life at Asheham, 187–92 marriage to Clive Bell, 191, 195 ménage à trois at Charleston, 198–03 and Omega Workshops, 204 partnership with Duncan Grant, 194–03 and Roger Fry, 194–5 son’s death, 214 visits Côte d’Azur, 51 works Asheham House, 192–3 Landscape with Haystack, 193 The Open Door, 210 Self Portrait, 219–20 The Studio: Duncan Grant and Henri Doucet at Asheham, 196 Virginia Woolf, 193 Bement, Alon, 10–13 Benson, Thomas Hart, 143–7 Between the Acts (Woolf), 216–18 Birth (Pollock), 152–3 Black Cross (O’Keeffe), 27 Black Place III (O’Keeffe), 43 Blake, Peter, 175 Blanche Hoschedé Painting (Monet), 294–5
Blixen, Karen admiration for Ernest Hemingway, 97 admiration for Hans Christian Andersen, 113–14 on African landscape, 90, 96, 115–16, 117, 122 alias Isak Dinesen, 89, 125 contracts syphilis, 97–8, 110 on Danish landscape, 122–3 death, 129–30 depressions, 92, 98–9, 107, 117 devotion to African people, 102–4, 113 fashions an exotic persona, 89, 106, 126–8 has miscarriage, 106 leaves Africa, 116 letters from Africa, 116 liaison with Denys Finch Hatton, 104–10, 111, 113, 114–15, 121 love of nature, 92–4 and Marilyn Monroe, 127 marriage to Count Bror von BlixenFinecke, 90–1, 94, 96, 98, 110 at Mbogani House, 99–102, 110 passion for hunting, 94–6 relationship with her father, 92–4, 125 relationship with her mother, 118–21 retreats into literature, 112 at Rungstedlund, 89–90, 118, 119–21, 128–30 runs coffee plantation, 90–1, 109–11, 120 snobbery of, 98–9, 123 as storytelling Scheherazade, 108–9
n 420
Index suicide attempt, 116 works, 120 ‘Alkmene’, 123 Out of Africa, 102–3, 108, 127 ‘Peter and Rosa’, 117–18 Seven Gothic Tales, 112, 124, 126–7 Winter’s Tales, 127 Blixen-Finecke, Count Bror von, 90–1, 94, 96, 98, 105–6, 110, 256 Blue Lines (O’Keeffe), 20 Blue Poles (Pollock), 179 Body Markings I–IV (Emily Kame Kngwarreye), 346–7 Brassaï, 56 Breck, John Leslie, 297–8 Brooks, George ‘Bee-lips’, 228, 261 bullfighting, 72–3, 254 Camille (Woman in the green dress) (Monet), 281 Camille on Her Deathbed (Monet), 282 Camille Reading (Monet), 286 Central Desert, 320 Chabot, Maria, 42–6 Chagall, Marc, 76 Charleston (house) decoration of, 197, 199, 200, 201–3, 210 Vanessa Bell at, 198–03, 208 as Vanessa Bell’s masterpiece, 213–14 Charnel House (Picasso), 64–5 Chase, William Merritt, 7–8, 158 Chateau Grimaldi, 60–4, 67–9 circle as feminine symbol, 202
as Vanessa Bell’s favourite form, 202–3, 219–20 Clemenceau, Georges, 302, 306–8 Content, Marjorie, 33–4, 37 Côte d’Azur attraction for artists, 51 and ceramics, 69–71 Picasso’s love of, 50–1, 53, 71, 76–8 Cowley, Malcolm, 270 Cuttoli, Marie and Paul, 68 Dawn with Snow (O’Keeffe), 32–3 de Kooning, Willem, 133, 159, 165 de Lazlo, Violet Staub, 149, 157 de Nagy, Tibor, 179–80 Death in the Afternoon (Hemingway), 254 The Deep (Pollock), 180–1 Dinesen, Isak see Blixen, Karen Dinesen, Thomas, 98, 106, 113, 116, 119, 124, 129 Dinesen, Wilhelm, 90, 92–4 Dinesen-Motzfelt Cabin, 93 Doncieux, Camille and Monet, 281–2 Monet’s portraits of, 281, 282, 286–7 Dor de la Souchère, Jules-César Romauld, 61–2, 66–8 Dos Passos, John, 226, 228–9, 232, 236, 264, 269 Dove, Arthur, 158 Dow, Arthur Wesley, 11–12 the ‘Dreaming’ Awelye ceremonies, 330 description, 324–5, 340 in Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s art, 325, 330, 340, 342–3, 346–8 Durrio, Paco, 70
n 421
Source Earth’s Creation (Emily Kame Kngwarreye), 318 Echo: Number 25 (Pollock), 178 Emily Kame Kngwarreye Aboriginal land and, 316–18 at Arlparra, 335–6 and Awelye ceremonies, 332–3, 346–7 and batik making, 316, 339–40 comparison with Monet, 336–7 the Dreaming in her art, 325, 330, 340, 342–3, 346–9 embodiment of Alhalkere locality, 328 employment on cattle stations, 327, 337 exhibitions, 344 first sight of white man, 327–8 gravestone, 348–9 her names, 328–9 marriages, 326–38, 337 method of painting, 316, 341, 345 as ‘mother’ and ‘aunty’, 323, 338–9 naked in childhood, 331–2 in old age, 336 output and creativity, 316 and Utopia, 315–16, 327–34, 336, 339–40, 343 works Body Markings I–IV, 346–7 Earth’s Creation, 318 Emu Dreaming, 340 Emu Woman, 330–1, 341 interpretations and meanings, 317, 325, 340, 342–3, 349 Kam[e], 342 Kame—Summer Awelye I, 342–3 Length of Fabric, 340
‘sacred grasses’ series, 347–8 spirituality of, 343, 347–8 Untitled [Awelye], 347 Emu Dreaming (Emily Kame Kngwarreye), 340 Emu Woman (Emily Kame Kngwarreye), 330–1, 341 emus, as totemic figures, 330–2 Ernest Hemingway Museum (Cuba), 272 Ewald, Johannes, 118 Eyes in the Heat (Pollock), 164 Farah Aden, 102–4, 112–13, 116 A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway), 239–41, 244–5, 248 The Farm (Miró), 251–2 Finch Hatton, Denys, 104–9, 111, 113, 114–15, 121 ‘The Fire Boy’ (Pollock), 179–80 The Flame (Pollock), 149 Fort, Louis, 59 Freud, Sigmund, x, 28, 213 Fry, Roger, 191–2, 194, 204, 216 Garnett, David ‘Bunny’, 196–9, 200, 203, 215 Gellhorn, Martha, 265–8 Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait—Head (photo, Stieglitz), 21–2 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 47 Ghost Ranch, 34–42, 47 Gilot, Françoise as painter, 55–8, 83–5 and Picasso’s ‘Période Françoise’, 65–7, 86 Picasso’s portraits of, 58–9, 64–5 publishes Life with Picasso, 85–6
n 422
Index relationship with Picasso, 55–9, 65–7, 72, 84–5 works Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple II, 58 The Painters, 84–5 Picasso’s Face (Portrait from Memory), 57 Self Portrait (Figure in the Wind), 57 Girl Skipping Rope (Picasso), 80–1 Giverny discovery by Americans, 297 Monet moves to, 289–90 Monet’s house and garden, 289–91, 300–1, 306, 311–12 Going West (Pollock), 145 Gooch, Rodney, 341 Grainstack, Giverny (Hoschedé), 296 Grainstacks series (Monet), 295 Grand Décorations project (Monet), 304–11, 336 Grant, Duncan, 194–01, 203–4, 220 Green, Jenny, 339 Green Hills of Africa (Hemingway), 256–7 Greenberg, Clement, 169–71, 178 Guggenheim, Peggy, 161, 164 ‘The Haunted House’ (Woolf), 204–5 healing agents Jungian myths, 152 Monet’s pond, 306 Native American dance ceremonies, 168 Native American sand painting, 166–7 nature and landscape, 19, 29, 38
nymphs, 305 shamans, 168 water, 168 Heller, Edwin, 171–2, 174 Hemingway, Clarence Edmonds ‘Ed’ aroused son’s passion for nature, 229–31 depression and suicide, 237–9 Hemingway, Ernest accident prone, 232 admiration for Karen Blixen, 97 affair with Jane Mason, 264–5 African safari, 256–7 art collection, 251–2 on being a writer, 247–8, 249 as celebrity, 266, 270 on ‘decline of the individual’, 257, 262 and Eddie Saunders, 228, 244, 250, 255, 260, 270, 271 establishes a home in Key West, 250–4 fan of bullfighting, 254 and George Brooks, 228, 261 and Gertrude Stein, 233 and the Gulf Stream, 228, 254–5, 257, 271–6 ‘Harry Morgan’ as self-portrait, 257–8, 260–4, 273 and his children, 236–8 his daily routine in Key West, 234–5, 258–9 as hunter, 241–2, 256–7 importance of sea and water for, 241–2, 245–7, 256, 272–6 and Joe Russell, 228, 250, 257–60, 270, 271
n 423
Source Hemingway, Ernest (continued) and John Dos Passos, 226, 228–9, 232, 236, 264, 269 and Key West Mob, 228–9, 271–2 leaves Pauline and Key West, 271 machismo image and masculinity, 223–4, 231, 245, 250, 254, 270–1 marriages, 229, 239, 272 and Mary Welsh, 272 moves to Ketchum, Idaho, 275–6 moves to Key West, 224–7 need to be winner, 227–8, 241–2 nickname ‘Papa’, 224, 245 passion for fishing, 227, 242–4, 249, 257–8, 272 passion for hunting, 96–7 and Pauline Pfeiffer, 225–6, 229, 234, 236–7, 245–6, 264, 266, 272 quits Paris, 232 relationship with his father, 230–1, 237 relationship with his mother, 231 and Spanish Civil War, 267–8 suicide, 238, 276 time in Cuba, 272 works ‘After the Storm’, 254–6 Death in the Afternoon, 254 A Farewell to Arms, 239–41, 244–5, 248 Green Hills of Africa, 256–7 The Old Man and the Sea, 246, 272–6 The Sun Also Rises, 232 To Have and Have Not, 257–64 267, 269–71
Hemingway, Pauline see Pfeiffer, Pauline Henderson, Joseph L., 149, 151 Hofmann, Hans, 155 Hogarth Press, 213 Hoschedé, Alice affair with Monet, 281–4 death, 301 marriage to Monet, 288–90 personality, 283–4 Hoschedé, Blanche as artist, 285, 288–9, 292–7, 299, 312 bond with Monet, 286, 288–9, 292–5, 297, 303–4 death, 312 and Giverny, 302, 311–12 and Jean Monet’s death, 279 and John Leslie Breck, 298 marries Jean Monet, 298–9 Monet’s death and, 310–11 as Monet’s muse and assistant, 306–10 Monet’s portraits of, 286–8, 292–5 works Along the River Epte, 296 Grainstack, Giverny, 296 Hoschedé, Ernest, 281–2, 284 Hoschedé, Jean-Pierre, 283, 299 Hoschedé, Suzanne, 293 hunting Blixen and, 94–6 Hemingway and, 241–3, 256–8 Impression Sunrise (Monet), 281 Impressionist movement, 281 Blanche Hoschedé’s significance, 288–9 impact on American artists, 297 women artists in, 295
n 424
Index In the Woods at Giverny: Blanche Hoschedé at her easel and Suzanne Hoschedé reading (Monet), 292–3, 295 Interior (Grant), 200 Irigaray, Luce, 37, 72 Jack, Norah, 139 Jennings, Tim, 317–18, 345 Josephson, Matthew, 268 Jungian psychotherapy, 149, 151–3, 156–7 Kachina (O’Keeffe), 38–9 kachinas, 38–40 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 59, 63, 83, 85 Kam[e] (Emily Kame Kngwarreye), 342 Kame—Summer Awelye I (Emily Kame Kngwarreye), 342–3 Kandinsky, Wassily, 11, 14, 16 Karen Coffee, 90–1, 109–11, 120 Kazin, Alfred, 270 Kenya, as hunter’s paradise, 94–6 Key West description, 224–5 Hemingway’s depiction, 254, 259–60 hurricane destruction, 249 impact of Depression on, 248 Key West Mob, 228–9, 271–2 The Keys to Antibes (Picasso), 62 Kligman, Ruth, 181 Kngwarreye, Emily Kame see Emily Kame Kngwarreye Krasner, Lee as artist, 152, 154–6
marriage to Jackson Pollock, 133–4, 154–5 Krishnamurti, Jeddu, 141 La Femme-fleur (Picasso), 58–9 La Fournace, 79 La Galloise, 76–7, 85 La Joie de Vivre (Antipolis) (Picasso), 64–6 landscape aerial perspective in Aboriginal art, 346 Blixen and Africa, 45–6, 90, 96 Blixen and Rungstedlund, Denmark, 122–3 Central Desert, 320 Monet and his garden, 291, 300–1 Monet and Normandy, 291, 300–1 New Mexico, 25–7 O’Keeffe and New Mexico, 1–2, 11, 19, 26–7, 38–40, 46–7 Picasso and Côte d’Azur, 50–1 Pollock and Springs, Long Island, 137, 145, 163–4, 166, 175 Virginia Woolf and Sussex Downs, 185–6, 189, 197 Landscape with Haystack (Bell), 193 Lavender Mist (Pollock), 173 Lawrence, D.H., 25–6 The Lemon Gatherers (Grant), 195 Length of Fabric (Emily Kame Kngwarreye), 340 Les Nymphéas: Séries de paysages d’eau (Monet), 301 Letters from the Hunt (W. Dinesen), 93 Life with Picasso (Gilot), 85–6 light, in Monet’s art, 280 Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 24–6
n 425
Source Maar, Dora, 54 Macmahon, Arthur, 17 Mad Moon Woman (Pollock), 146 Male and Female (Pollock), 156 Man with Sheep (Picasso), 81 Manheim, Ralph, 170 Mason, Jane, 264–5 Matisse, Henri, 77 Mbogani House, 99–101 Miró, Joan, 76 modernism Aboriginal art and, 346 Duncan Grant and, 204 O’Keeffe and, 20, 23 Pollock and, 169–70 Roger Fry and, 194 Thomas Benton’s attitude to, 143–4 Vanessa Bell and, 192–3, 202, 204 Monet, Alice see Hoschedé, Alice Monet, Blanche see Hoschedé, Blanche Monet, Claude and Alice Hoschedé, 281–4, 288–90, 301–2 and American artists at Giverny, 297–8 and Blanche Hoschedé, 286–8, 290, 292–5, 297 and Camille Doncieux, 281–2 creates Giverny garden, 291, 300–1 death, 310 depression, 303 family tragedies, 301–2 love of water, 285 mother’s death, 280–1 moves to Giverny, 289–90 and nature, 290–1 Orangerie project, 304–11 public response to his art, 283, 295
takes the Hoschedés into his house, 282–3 work pattern, 284–5 works Blanche Hoschedé painting, 294–5 Camille (Woman in the green dress), 281 Camille on Her Deathbed, 282 Camille Reading, 286 Grainstacks series, 295 Grand Décorations project, 304–11, 336 Impression Sunrise, 281 In the Woods at Giverny: Blanche Hoschedé at her easel and Suzanne Hoschedé reading, 292–3, 295 Les Nymphéas: Séries de paysages d’eau (Monet), 301 The Pool at Montgeron, 287 Poplar series, 296 Portrait of Blanche Hoschedé, 286–7 Study of a Figure Out of Doors, 287 Woman with a Parasol—Madame Monet and her Son, 287–8 Women in the Garden, 281 Monet, Jean dies of syphilis, 279, 302 marriage to Blanche Hoschedé, 298–9 Monk’s House, 205–8, 215, 220–1 Monroe, Marilyn, 127 moon and Jackson Pollock, 145–6, 176 Karen Blixen’s worship of, 122 Moon Woman (Pollock), 146
n 426
Index Moon Woman Cuts the Circle (Pollock), 146 Mpetyane, Lindsay Bird, 322–4 Mulga Bore, 321–4 music, O’Keeffe and, 12 Namuth, Hans, 168–9, 175 Napaltjarri, Janelle Stockman, 344 Native American culture healing dance ceremonies, 168 O’Keeffe’s fascination for, 38–40 place and spatiality in, 138–9 Pollock’s immersion in, 134–5, 137–9, 150 sand painting, 165–6 Wilhelm Blixen and, 92–3 nature see also landscape; sea Blixen’s love of, 92 as culture, x–xi Freud and, x healing role in art, 18–19, 29, 166, 240, 306 impact on Virginia Woolf, 211–13, 216–17 for Monet, 290–1, 300 O’Keeffe and, 1–2, 11, 19, 26–7, 38–40, 46–7 Pollock and, 137 New Mexico landscape, 25–7 O’Keeffe’s love of, 26–7, 38, 40–1, 46–7 Night and Day (Woolf), 193–4, 198, 202 No 2—Special (O’Keeffe), 16 Nolan, Sidney, xiii Norman, Dorothy, 23–4 nymphs, 53, 64–5, 305
O’Keeffe, Frank, 2–3 O’Keeffe, Georgia Abiquiu house, 43–5, 47 and Alfred Stieglitz, 1, 8–9, 15–19, 21–4, 27–8, 46 and Alon Bement, 10–13 and Anita Pollitzer, 13, 15, 46 as art student, 6–8 as art teacher, 11, 19–21 and Arthur Macmahon, 13–14, 17 and Arthur Pack, 35–6, 41 and Arthur Wesley Dow, 11–12 and Asian art, 12 Barn with Snow, 32–3 broken friendships, 45–6 and Carol Bishop Stanley, 35–6 childhood, 2–4 eroticism of her art, 16, 18, 19–20, 22 exhibitions and critics’ responses, 18–20, 27 as freelance illustrator, 9–10 at Ghost Ranch, 34–42, 47 grief at mother’s death, 17–18 illness as rescuer, 6–7, 10, 19–20, 28–9 impact of desert on, 24, 26 influence of landscape and nature on, 1–2, 11, 19, 26–7, 38–40, 46–7 and Jean Toomer, 30–3, 37 Kandinsky’s influence, 11, 14, 16 love of music, 12 and Mabel Dodge Luhan, 24–6 and Maria Chabot, 42–6 and Marjorie Content, 33–4, 37 marriage and marital problems, 31 modern art and, 20, 23
n 427
Source O’Keeffe, Georgia (continued) nervous breakdown, 28–9 quest for the ‘Faraway’, 1, 38 Radio City Music Hall mural, 28 relations with her parents, 2–6, 17–18 reliance on male mentors, 10–13, 22 schooling, 4–5 sensual photographs of, 21–2 use of spiritual symbolism, 27 works Black Cross, 27 Black Place III, 43 Blue Lines, 20 Dawn with Snow, 32–3 Katchina, 38–9 No 2—Special, 16 Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock— Hills, 40 Untitled (Horse), 16 White Place in Shadow, 43 O’Keeffe, Ida (née Totto), 1–7, 9–11, 17 The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway), 246, 272–6 Olga Khokhlova, 54–5, 75–6 Olivier, Fernande, 55 Omega Workshops, 204 One: Number 31 (Pollock), 173 The Open Door (Bell), 210 Out of Africa (Blixen), 102–3, 108, 127 Out of Africa (film), 104 owls, Picasso and, 74 Pack, Arthur, 35–6 The Painters (Gilot), 84–5 Papunya artists, 329, 344 Perkins, Maxwell, 226–7, 244–5, 254
‘Peter and Rosa’ (Dinesen), 117–18 Pfeiffer, Gustavus, 226, 250 Pfeiffer, Pauline, 225–6, 229, 234, 236–7, 250–3, 264, 269, 272 Picasso, Claude, 67 Picasso, Pablo and bullfighting, 72–3 and Chateau Grimaldi, 60–4, 68–9 decision to leave Paris, 77–8 and Dora Maar, 54 early ceramic sculptures, 70 experiments with sculpture, 79–81 and Fernande Olivier, 55 health and hypochondria, 63 and his children, 67 his houses, 60, 76–7, 79, 85 impact of the women in his life, 54–5, 75–6, 83, 85 impact on Vallauris, 81–3 importance of sea and Côte d’Azur for, 50–1, 53, 76–8 influence on Pollock, 151, 153 and Jaqueline Roque, 85 The Keys to Antibes, 62 as lithographer and etcher, 59, 79 and Olga Khokhlova, 54–5, 75–6 ‘Période Françoise’, 65–7, 86 as printmaker, 67 relationship with Françoise Gilot, 55–9, 65–7, 72, 85 as sculptor, 79–80 symbolism used by, 64–5, 71–3 works The Charnel House, 64–5 Girl Skipping Rope, 80–1 La Femme-fleur, 58–9 La Joie de Vivre (Antipolis), 64–6 La Paix, 82
n 428
Index Man with Sheep, 81 as young artist in La Coruña, 52–3 Picasso et Françoise Gilot (Sima), 66–7 Picasso’s Face (Portrait from Memory) (Gilot), 57 Pizzi, Gabrielle, 344 Pollitzer, Anita, 15, 46 Pollock, Charles, 136, 175 Pollock, Jackson affair with Ruth Kligman, 181 alcoholism, 141–2, 147–9, 157, 176–7 appearance and physique, 142, 154, 168–9, 178 art training, 140–1, 143–4 black paintings and figuration, 177 death, 181 ‘drip’ technique, 149–50, 164–71, 173 effect of moon and seasons, 145–6, 176–7 fame and reputation, 171, 172–3, 178 identification with nature, 145–6, 155, 161–3 immersion in Native American culture, 134–5, 137–9, 150–1, 153, 157–8 influence of Schwankovsky, 140–1 influence of Siqueiros, 149–50 influence of Thomas Hart Benson on, 143–7 Jungian influence on, 149, 151–3, 156–7, 180 marriage to Lee Krasner, 133–4, 154–5 mental illness, 141–2, 147–9, 171, 176–7
psychotherapy, 149, 151, 157 relations with brothers, 136 relations with parents, 135–7 response to Picasso, 151, 153 at Springs, Long Island, 133–4, 158–64, 174 works Alchemy, 170–1 Autumn Rhythm, 173, 176 Birth, 152–3 Blue Poles, 179 choice of titles, 170–1 The Deep, 180–1 Echo: Number 25, 178 Eyes in the Heat, 164 ‘The Fire Boy’ (story), 179–80 The Flame, 149 Going West, 145 Mad Moon Woman, 146 Male and Female, 156 Moon Woman, 146 Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, 146 One: Number 31, 173 Portrait and a Dream, 179 Shimmering Substance, 164 Pollock, Leroy, 135–6 Pollock, Stella, 135–6, 139, 141 Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, 134, 181–2 Poplar series (Monet), 296 Portrait and a Dream (Pollock), 179 Portrait of Blanche Hoschedé (Monet), 286–7 pottery as art form, 71–2 Côte d’Azur and, 69–71, 81–3 Picasso’s revitalisation of, 50, 71–5, 78
n 429
Source Provence Picasso’s love of, 72–3, 76–7 Radio City Music Hall, 28 Ramié, Georges and Suzanne, 49–50, 69–70 Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock—Hills (O’Keeffe), 40 Rancho de los Burros, 41–2 Reed, Sunday and John, xiii Rocket Range, 341–5 Roque, Jaqueline, 85 Rungstedlund history and description, 116–18 Karen Blixen and, 89–90, 118, 119–21, 128–30 literary associations, 118 Russell, Joe, 228, 250, 257–8, 260, 270, 271 Salon des Indépendants, 299 sand paintings, 165–7 Saunders, Eddie ‘Bra’, 228, 244, 250, 255, 260, 270, 271 sea importance for Hemingway, 241–2, 245–7, 256, 272–6 importance for Picasso, 51, 53 Self Portrait (Bell), 219–20 Self Portrait (Figure in the Wind) (Gilot), 57 Seven Gothic Tales (Dinesen), 112, 114, 126–7 Shimmering Substance (Pollock), 164 Sima, Michel, 60, 66 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 149–50 ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (Woolf), 186–7 Soakage Bore, 324–6
Springs, Long Island climate and seasons, 159, 163 landscape, 134 and Montaukett Indians, 157–8 Pollock’s house and studio, 160–1, 163–4, 181–2 as Pollock’s refuge, 134, 158–64, 174 Stanley, Carol Bishop, 35–6 Stein, Gertrude, 233 Stieglitz, Alfred affair with Dorothy Newman, 23–4, 28–9 death, 46 exhibits O’Keeffe’s drawings, 15–16 marriage to O’Keeffe, 1, 22–4, 27, 37 as O’Keeffe’s champion, 15–18 opposes Radio City mural project, 28 photographs of O’Keeffe, 21–2 relations with Dorothy Norman, 21–4 Studies of an Autumn Day (Breck), 298 The Studio: Duncan Grant and Henri Doucet at Asheham (Bell), 196 Study of a Figure Out of Doors (Monet), 287 suicide Ernest Hemingway, 238 in Hemingway family, 237–9 Virginia Woolf, 218–19 Sullivan, J.B., 228, 270–1 The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway), 232 Talland House (Cornwall), 186–7 Taos, 25 theosophy, 140–1 Thompson, Charles and Lorine, 228, 271
n 430
Index time, in Aboriginal art, 325 To Have and Have Not (film), 263 To Have and Have Not (Hemingway) Hemingway’s reservations about, 267, 269 publication and reviews, 269–70 themes and characters, 257–8, 260–4, 270–1 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 220 Toomer, Jean, 30–3, 37 Totto, Count George, 2 Totto, Ida see O’Keeffe, Ida The Trouble I’ve Seen (Gellhorn), 267 Tyrrell, Henry, 19 Untitled [Awelye] (Emily Kame Kngwarreye), 347 Untitled (Horse) (O’Keeffe), 16 Utopia Aboriginal communities in, 318–19 Arlparra community, 335–6 author’s reactions to, 319–23, 325–6, 335, 341–2, 349–50 beginnings of modern art movement, 339–41 location, 315 Rocket Range community, 341–5 role of women artists, 329, 339–41 Soakage Bore community, 324–6 white settlement, 318–19 Women’s Batik Group, 339–41 Vallauris, 49–50, 69–70, 81–3 Virginia Woolf (Bell), 193 Walter, Marie-Thérèse, 55 water see also sea as the feminine, 280
in Monet’s art, 280, 285 symbolism of, 305 waterlilies Monet creates garden of, 300–1 Monet’s Grand Décorations project, 304–11 Monet’s Les Nymphéas: Series de paysages d’eau, 300–1 symbolism of, 305–6 Western Desert art movement, 329–30 White Place in Shadow (O’Keeffe), 43 ‘The Wild Swans’ (Andersen), 115 Winter’s Tales (Dinesen), 127 Woman with a Parasol—Madame Monet and her Son (Monet), 287–8 Women in the Garden (Monet), 281 Woolf, Leonard, 188–9, 197–8, 204, 207, 213, 220 Woolf, Virginia delight in the natural world, 211–12 depression and illness, 185, 187, 193, 197, 209, 218 envies sister, 199–00, 207 on Hemingway, 232–3 and Hogarth Press, 213 idealisation of St Ives, 186–7 life at Asheham, 187–92, 197 longing for children, 210 love of Sussex Downs landscape, 185–6, 189, 197, 210–11 marriage to Leonard Woolf, 190, 200 at Monk’s House, 205–7, 209, 215–16 mother’s death, 187 reputation as writer, 213, 214 suicide, 218–19
n 431
Source Woolf, Virginia (continued) visits Côte d’Azur, 51 works Between the Acts, 216–18 biography of Roger Fry, 216
‘A Sketch of the Past’, 186–7 ‘The Haunted House’ (Woolf), 204–5 To the Lighthouse, 220 Night and Day, 193–4, 198, 202
n 432
