The Jealous Muse by Arthur Hoyle

Presenting in its entirety, The Jealous Muse by Arthur Hoyle…

Introduction : The Muse Calls

Art exerts a strong pull on the human spirit. A 2005 survey conducted by the US Census Bureau found that there are approximately two million Americans who declare their occupation as “artist.” They represent 1.4% of the US labor force, and about .7% of the total population. While this may seem like a small number, the surprising fact is that artists are a larger group of workers than members of the legal profession, or medical doctors, or agricultural laborers. And because tens of millions more Americans consume the goods and services that artists produce, they make an important contribution to both the economy and the cultural life of many communities across the country. Because artists entertain and enlighten us, they are highly regarded.

Yet the majority of artists—actors, dancers, musicians, writers, painters, sculptors, photographers—earn from their art an income that places them near or below the poverty level. Although better educated than most other members of the workforce, they earn less and are underemployed. One-third of all artists work only part of the year, actors and dancers being the least employed. Despite these grim statistics, the number of artists as a percentage of the work force has remained constant for over a decade. While a tiny minority of artists earn astronomical sums of money performing, selling fine art to wealthy collectors and museums, or publishing bestselling books, all the while gaining fame and celebrity for their success, the vast majority of artists labor in obscurity, needing secondary employment or support from others to survive, scrounging for grants, never even setting foot on the ladder to success. Why do they do it?

In 2002, Hans Abbing, a Dutch economist who is also an artist, published Why Are Artists Poor?, a book that attempted to answer this question. As an economist, Abbing wondered why the arts market did not follow the laws of supply and demand that govern capitalist markets. If demand from consumers of art was insufficient to match the supply of good and services offered by artists, and thus to provide them with a livable income, why didn’t artists leave the profession for some other line of work, and why did new artists continue to enter such a chancy field? As he put it, “Someone who makes it in the arts is so unusual, that the desire to become an artist is little more than leaping off a cliff with one’s eyes closed.” (Abbing, p. 103) But many take the leap.

Abbing saw two factors—one personal, the other social—that worked to motivate artists to enter their profession and to persist in it despite ongoing struggle and failure. Artists, through their work, authenticate their individuality and thus receive a significant non-monetary reward from a western culture that highly values individuality. Giving inner experience objective form in an artistic medium is intrinsically satisfying—its own reward. This aspect of art, its ability to create the feeling of self-fulfillment, places art in the transcendent realm of the sacred and the magical, a realm that because it cannot be monetized, carries high social status, exceeding even religion as a source of individual aspiration. Abbing considers these attributes of art to be myths. In his view, making art is simply hard work. But that is the view of the economist. Abbing the artist confesses to the allure of these intangible qualities. He concludes that the arts are “an exceptional economy,” operating by its own rules, the rules of the sacred domain in which the philanthropy of collectors—a kind of congregation, if you will—and the self-sacrifice of artists—a priesthood—form a secular religious community that holds society together.

Another approach to answering this question comes from psychology, and probes deeper into the mind and soul of the artist. George Hagman writes, “Aesthetic experience is a fundamental dimension of human experience. It is as important as love, sex, and aggression, and is part of all human experience . . . The mother holding and caring for her child is the first medium of aesthetic experience and creative life.” (Hagman, p. 3) Hagman, like Abbing, sees art as authenticating the artist’s individuality by allowing him or her to create an external representation of some aspect of themselves in a perfectible form that others can see and value. And it is this authenticating property of art that draws people to produce it and consume it. But far more seek the grail of wealth and fame through art than attain it. Those who grasp the cup often pay a heavy price, as the stories that follow will demonstrate.

Chapter One — Anjelica Huston : Child of Fame

The American actress Anjelica Huston descended from a dynastic American entertainment family. Her birthright gave her great social and professional advantages, and with them, great personal deprivations. She was born in the wings of the performing arts stage, but her parents, distracted by fame, often neglected her emotional needs, especially during her childhood. She took the stage and performed well, but struggled to find her own emotional center and psychological equilibrium. She sought this through both her work as a model and an actress, and through trial by fire in challenging relationships with men. When we applaud her success and prominence on the American cultural scene, we must also acknowledge the suffering that marked her path.

Anjelica’s father, John Huston, was a film director—famed for crafting such honored motion pictures as The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, Prizzi’s Honor, and The Dead; notorious for his gambling, drinking, and womanizing, and for his elaborate and sometimes cruel pranks inflicted on friends and fellow celebrities. Anjelica’s mother, Enrica (Ricki) Soma, was a classically trained ballerina who danced for George Balanchine in New York as a teenager. When she was eighteen, her face appeared on the cover of Life magazine in a photograph taken by Philippe Halsman that likened her to the Mona Lisa. Both Anjelica’s parents were iconic Americans, admired by many, envied by some.

John Huston was an extravagant man with large appetites and a restless spirit, shaped by his own tumultuous upbringing. His father was Walter Huston, an itinerant vaudeville and stage actor originally from Canada. His mother Rhea Gore was a nomadic journalist, daughter of a hard-drinking father prone to cycles of financial boom and bust. Walter and Rhea met in 1904 in a hotel lobby during the St. Louis World’s Fair and a week later were married, setting in motion a pattern of impulsive and short lived marriages that wove through John Huston’s life.

Walter and Rhea moved frequently, following the fortunes of Rhea’s father, John Gore. Their son, John Huston, was born in Nevada, Missouri on August 5, 1906. The Hustons then moved to Texas, and when John was three his parents separated, Walter returning to New York to pursue a career in theater, Rhea moving in with her mother Adelia who lived in Dallas. Adelia looked after John while Rhea sought work as a freelance journalist. John was home schooled by his grandmother, and grew up without a sense of strong family bonds. When he was three and a half years old, Adelia dressed him in an Uncle Sam uniform and put him on a vaudeville stage singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

As a youth, John perpetrated destructive pranks and acts of vandalism, early signs of a simmering anger that would erupt periodically over the course of his life. To rein him in, Rhea enrolled him in a military academy in San Diego. He took up boxing, and fought twenty-five amateur bouts, compiling a 23-2 record. In 1924, at the age of eighteen, he went to New York to live with his father and entered the theater world.

In starts and fits, John’s career in show business moved forward and the patterns of his life began to unfold. He was contracted by the Goldwyn Studio to write screenplays, and in 1931 he went to work for Universal writing dialogue. He soon developed a reputation in Hollywood as a rowdy, larger-than life character, unrestrained by conventional standards of behavior.

His career took off after he sold a script to Warner Brothers. His break-through film was The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor, and now considered to be the birth of a new Hollywood genre, film noir. After the success of this film, John worked steadily for the Hollywood studios over a period of nearly fifty years, directing and acting in more than forty films, most of them filmed in locations far from Hollywood.

In 1949, during a party at David Selznick’s home, John was introduced to Ricki Soma, then under contract to Selznick’s production company. John was attending the party with his third wife, the actress Evelyn Keyes.  Ricki reminded him that they had met in 1943 when John was dining at her father’s restaurant in New York and he had promised to take her, then a girl of thirteen, to a ballet. John scandalized Selznick’s guests and infuriated Evelyn by necking openly with Ricki at the party. Soon she was pregnant with John’s first child, Tony. On February 10, 1950 John divorced Evelyn Keyes in La Paz, Mexico. On February 11, 1950 he married Ricki, making her his fourth wife. Tony Huston was born on April 16. A year later, while John was in the Belgian Congo directing The African Queen, Ricki delivered a girl at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. Ricki named the girl Anjelica, after her deceased mother Angelica. When John went to London for post-production of The African Queen, Ricki, who was suffering from post-partum depression, left her two infant children on Long Island with her father and step-mother, and went to England to join her husband. John’s new family was fractured from the outset.

After the war, John was in the forefront of resistance to the harassment and prosecution of Hollywood artists by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Disgusted by the imprisonment of several of his friends and by the studios’ timid response to the Committee’s bullying, he decided to leave Hollywood and live in Ireland, home of his ancestral roots. In 1953 he leased a property in County Kildare, then purchased at auction for ten thousand pounds a run-down Georgian manor called St. Clerans. The manor sat on 110 acres of land, and the property included a smaller stone house and a fourteenth century Norman ruin. For the first ten years of Anjelica’s life, St. Clerans was home to her and Tony and Ricki—and, occasionally, John.

John was continuing his nomadic way of life, directing picture after picture in exotic and far flung locations: Moulin Rouge in Paris, Beat the Devil in Rome, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison on Tobago Island in the Caribbean, Moby Dick in multiple locations on the Atlantic Ocean and the Irish sea. While making Moulin Rouge he began an affair with the actress Suzanne Flon whom he had cast in the film. Many years later, reflecting on his numerous infidelities, John said, “I regret that lack within myself that enables a man to pour all his affections into one individual.” (Huston, An Open Book, p. 85)

Ricki’s project while John wandered the globe and enjoyed dalliances was the restoration of St. Clerans, an undertaking that lasted four years and consumed three million dollars. Ricki had a strong aesthetic sense, was fashion conscious, and worked with a virtually limitless budget, since John had no qualms about being in debt. She made St. Clerans a showplace over which John presided like a feudal lord when he returned during intervals from filming or at Christmas.

The main hall was paved in marble, and the rooms were filled with Chinese porcelain, paintings by Juan Gris and Morris Graves, ceramics dating from the Etruscan period forward, a Japanese fan painting collection, African bronzes and fabrics, antiques from England and France, Mexican tiles in the kitchen and all bathrooms, a thirteen-foot long Georgian dining table with matching chairs, a Louis XV drawing room, Egyptian pieces, and one of Monet’s “Water Lily” paintings. Huston’s bedroom had a big, canopied, four-poster Florentine matrimonial bed, carved with doves and flowers. It also had two Louis XIV chairs, a chest that had originally stored vestments in a French church, and a thirteenth-century Greek icon. All the bedrooms and baths had fireplaces. (Harris, p. 93)

But Ricki, Anjelica, and Tony did not live in the manor house; they lived in the smaller, adjoining stone house—the Little House, formerly the steward’s residence. The manor house at St. Clerans—the Big House—was John’s domain. In her memoir A Story Lately Told, published in 2013, Anjelica revealed that she had never seen her father and mother in the same bedroom. “ My parents were quite formal with each other . . . I don’t remember much touching between them, or many demonstrations of affection.” (p. 55)

Two separate but overlapping lives were led at St. Clerans, one in the Big House that revolved around John, another in the Little House that revolved around Ricki, Tony, and Anjelica. It was as though John’s family was just another part of his collection, kept in its own display case and brought out for visitors to see and touch when he was at home.

The Little House provided the domestic setting where Ricki, assisted by a parade of governesses, raised Tony and Anjelica. Their childhood was, in many ways, an idyllic period, free of many of the restraints and limitations that most children experience as they grow up. They were home schooled by a succession of tutors, culminating with Leslie Waddington, an Englishman who became virtually a member of the family. Tony and Anjelica had the run of the estate, playing hide and seek with the children of the groom Paddy Lynch in the ruins of the Norman castle, and riding their ponies. Ricki had an extensive library and record collection. She read to her children and played the songs of The Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte. As playmates other than the groom’s children were scarce, Anjelica developed an active fantasy life, dressing up as characters from stories she had read and performing for her parents and their guests. Early on she delighted in altering her identity through costume and make-up.

The Big House was dormant most of the year during John’s lengthy absences. He would return occasionally at intervals between films, and always at Christmas. “Then, like a sleeping beauty, awakened, the house would come alive,” Anjelica wrote in her memoir, “glowing from the inside, turf fires burning in every room . . . Dad always brought wonderful presents: kimonos and pearls for Mum, a blue polka-dot Spanish dancing dress for me, a matador’s suit of lights for Tony . . .” (p. 55). There would be fox hunts followed by gay parties featuring notable guests—Eric Sevareid, Peter O’Toole, Marlon Brando, John Steinbeck, who one year dressed up as Santa Claus.

When their father was in residence, Anjelica and Tony would visit his bedroom to take breakfast with him. As he dressed, he quizzed them about their activities. He could be a harsh listener. Once, when Anjelica remarked that she did not care for the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, John challenged her to name three paintings by the artist. Flustered and unable to name even one, Anjelica was subjected to a lecture about the evils of ignorant opinions.

In 1958, when she was seven, Anjelica’s routine at St. Clerans altered. Her parents enrolled her in the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy in the nearby town Loughrea. Tony was also sent away to school. With children no longer under her wing at St. Clerans, Ricki decided to separate formally from John, leave Ireland, where she felt out of her element (she did not enjoy fox hunting), and move to London, one of the great cosmopolitan centers of the world. John hired Betty O’Kelly, a local woman, to manage the estate, and Gladys Hill as his personal assistant. Anjelica remained at St. Clerans until she was ten, then joined her mother in London.

During the 1960s in London Anjelica endured a series of shocks to her psychic equilibrium that would have wounded an adult, let alone a vulnerable adolescent. At the end of the decade, after the final tragedy, she moved to the United States in an attempt to restart her life. But troubles came with her.

Ricki had purchased a house in the Little Venice section of London and while it was undergoing restoration Anjelica lived with her friend Lizzie Spender, daughter of the English poet Stephen Spender. Anjelica’s schooling during this critical period in her life was erratic and, ultimately, incomplete. Ricki enrolled her in the Lycée Francais, a questionable choice since the courses were conducted in French, a language Anjelica did not speak. Presumably, Ricki thought that fluency in French would have cultural advantages for Anjelica and that full immersion was the quickest way to achieve it. But not surprisingly Anjelica immediately felt isolated at the school, fell behind, and had to repeat a year. She begged Ricki to remove her. After two years, Ricki acted when the nursing staff ignored a schoolyard accident that left Anjelica with a broken vertebra that required six months in a plaster cast to heal. She was transferred to St. Mary’s Town and Country School, and subsequently to Holland Park Comprehensive when Anjelica was thirteen. By then, according to her own admission, she was acting out—often truant, smoking, shoplifting, and engaging in petty thievery with her school friend Emily Young. Her parents were giving her reason to be angry.

In 1961, while filming Freud with Montgomery Clift in Munich, John began an affair with Zoe Ismail, an Indian actress whom he had cast in the film. Zoe became pregnant, her condition visible to all the production crew. She withdrew from the film, moved to Rome, and delivered a boy who was named Danny. Anjelica learned of the existence of this illegitimate half-brother not through either of her parents, but from friends at school repeating London gossip about the Hustons.

As though to retaliate, Ricki began an affair with John Julius Norwich, a married English lord with two children. In December 1963 she became pregnant, and the following August a baby girl named Allegra was born. On her birth certificate her father was listed as “unknown.”  John Huston gave her his surname and for many years Allegra believed that he was her father.  But Huston was furious, and banned Ricki from St. Clerans.

Anjelica’s relations with her father became increasingly tense. She and Tony spent summers at St. Clerans, and still went there for Christmas, despite Ricki’s banishment. She also visited John periodically at his film locations, going to Munich and Berlin for Freud, to Rome, where she met Danny and Zoe, for The Bible, and to Milan for the premiere of The Mines of Sulfur, an opera John had directed. There, we catch sight of Anjelica in an early glamour shot, looking shy but friendly in the company of Hollywood royalty, her father and Ava Gardner.

Anjelica wrote that she did not enjoy being in the midst of her father’s productions. “I never much liked going to Dad’s films—his first assistant director, Tommy Shaw, was always shouting at Tony and me to be quiet, and there was nothing going on beyond the set.”  (A Story lately Told, p. 116) Then an incident at St. Clerans during Christmas 1965 made Anjelica afraid of her father.

As was her custom, Anjelica dressed up and performed for her father and his guests on Christmas Eve. She danced provocatively in front of them, and the next morning she was summoned to her father’s bedroom in the Big House. He accused her of dancing in a sexually seductive way—“the bumps” —then struck her twice across the face, back and forth, with his open hand. In tears, Anjelica fled back to the Little House, where Tony, who had been having his own battles with John, comforted her.

The controlling side of John Huston’s nature was in evidence again when Franco Zeffirelli, in pre-production for his film of Romeo and Juliet, invited Anjelica to audition for the part of Juliet. Perhaps he had seen the photographs of her taken for British Vogue by Richard Avedon, a friend of Ricki. John brushed aside Zeffirelli’s offer, informing him that he intended to cast Anjelica as the lead actress in A Walk with Love and Death, a film he was then preparing to shoot in Austria. Anjelica was a reluctant and unhappy performer, self-conscious about her looks and fearful of her father’s direction. The film did not turn out well, and her performance was panned by the critics. Eight years passed before she would perform again for a motion picture camera.

But still photographs of her taken at the location in Austria reveal her affinity for the gaze of the lens. Standing in front of a heavy stone wall surrounded by woods, wearing a simple high-waisted, scoop neck dress, her chest and shoulders exposed, her dark hair falling to her breast, her face serene and beautiful, faintly smiling, Anjelica projects an ideal of innocent young womanhood, desiring and desirable. Alone with the camera, like her mirror, she is at home with herself, self-contained and self-assured.

Despite the complications and disturbances of her domestic life, Anjelica found much to enjoy as a teenager living in London during the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. With her friend Emily Young she went to concerts to hear the music of Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, and The Rolling Stones. Her mother took her to films and the theater. It was a time of cinematic greatness in Europe, with British filmmakers turning out biting social commentaries like Darling, Room at the Top, and The Servant, the French new wave breaking with the work of Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman creating dark investigations of the human soul, Antonioni commenting on the London scene with Blow-Up. On Saturdays Anjelica would join the fashion parade of young women on Kings Road, and on Sunday attend suppers prepared by Ricki for celebrity guests such as Dirk Bogarde, Joseph Losey, Tony Richardson, and Peter O’Toole.

Though her brother was continuing his education at London University, Anjelica more and more seemed destined for the spotlight and the camera. During a party at Tony Richardson’s apartment, he told Anjelica that he was preparing a stage production of Hamlet with Nicol Williamson, and asked if she would like to read for the part of Ophelia. Though the role went to Marianne Faithful, Anjelica joined the production as her understudy and performed on occasions when Faithful was ill.

In January 1969, when Anjelica was seventeen, her world caved in on her. Ricki, who was traveling to Venice with her lover Brian Anderson Thomas, was killed instantly when their car struck a pothole in the road, swerved into oncoming traffic, and was rammed head-on by a van. Ricki, riding in the passenger seat, was thrown through the windshield. Thomas suffered facial lacerations and cracked ribs. The driver of the van lost a leg. John, filming The Kremlin Letter in Rome, returned to London to attend Ricki’s Quaker funeral. Not long after the funeral, Anjelica left England for the United States to tour with Hamlet. Her old tutor Leslie Waddington adopted Allegra. Anjelica was adrift.

After settling in New York, Anjelica took up modeling in earnest. She moved into the 47^th Street apartment of her childhood friend Joan Buck, whose father, a frequent guest at St. Clerans, had once worked with John as a cameraman and producer. Joan was two years older than Anjelica. She had gotten a foothold in the New York fashion world as an assistant to an editor at Glamour. When a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar asked Anjelica to model for a shoot—Anjelica was then in the midst of promoting A Walk with Love and Death—Joan suggested Bob Richardson as the photographer. Their session, carried out on Long Island, turned into a tumultuous four-year relationship that ended Richardson’s second marriage and put Anjelica on an emotional roller coaster.

Richardson had developed a reputation as the bad boy of fashion photography, known for his striking, often disturbing images, and for his erratic, drug fueled behavior. His photographs alluded to many of the dark themes of the 1960s—the urgent sexuality, the emotional isolation, the sordid lives of marginals. His images often presented a dramatic scene whose narrative took precedence over the fashions being displayed. The situations were edgy and provocative, and implied that the men and women wearing the clothes being marketed were extremely cool. His images sold a style of life for which the clothes were essential accessories.

Richardson had a complex and difficult personality. Forty-one years old when Anjelica met him, Richardson had since his mid-twenties experienced periods of mental derangement marked by fear and paranoia that he attempted to alleviate using illegal drugs—heroin, cocaine, speed. Shortly before he met Anjelica, he had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and had tried unsuccessfully to manage the illness using prescription medications. The illness made Richardson prone to dark moods, periods of prolonged silence that might last for days, and outbursts of violent anger.

Richardson enjoyed photographing beautiful women, and often ended his sessions by having sex with them. Steven Meisel, another fashion photographer who was influenced by Richardson, remarked that “the women he [Richardson] photographed were unusual beauties, and often they looked as if they were lost, desolate, or frightened.” (The New Yorker, April 10, 1995, p. 48) Surely this description fits Anjelica Huston in 1969, eighteen years old, bereft of her beloved mother, and untethered from her itinerant, self-absorbed father.

Anjelica moved in with Richardson. They lived for a while at the Chelsea Hotel in downtown Manhattan, an artists’ hub where they might cross paths with Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, or Patti Smith. That summer, Anjelica went to Ireland to be photographed by Avedon for Vogue, then joined Richardson in Paris. They went to Marrakech and traveled around Europe on fashion shoots, living like gypsies. Anjelica became a runway model in London for designers such as Halston and Giorgio de Sant’Angelo. She posed for other well-known fashion photographers, including David Bailey, Helmut Newton, and Ara Gallant. She had a distinctive look—cool, elegant, slightly haughty, unapproachable, perhaps even dangerous, as in a photo of her holding a revolver over her head taken by Gallant. She was neither the girl next door nor a sultry seductress. She embodied style.

By 1971 she and Richardson were back in New York, living in an apartment on Gramercy Park South. Richardson had been pressing Anjelica to have his child, which Anjelica saw as his attempt to put her further under his control. Anjelica was infertile, and her gynecologist recommended exploratory surgery. She refused, determined not to become a mother at age twenty and be tied irrevocably to Richardson. Then, changes in John Huston’s life set in motion a chain of events that terminated her relationship with Richardson and put her life on a new course.

In 1972, while John was preparing to film The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean in Arizona, he was introduced to Celeste Shane at a dinner party in Los Angeles. Celeste (Cici) was thirty-one, recently divorced, beautiful, independently wealthy, a horsewoman who lived in a ranch house in Pacific Palisades. Cici was taken with John Huston, pursued him aggressively, and in August 1972 they were married. Cici had a five-year old son named Collin who suffered from cerebral palsy. A young Mexican woman named Maricela Hernandez lived with Cici and looked after Collin.

Shortly after the marriage, Cici, Collin, and Maricela went with John to St. Clerans. There they met Zoe and Danny, as well as Allegra and her nurse Kathleen Shine, whom John had recently parked there. He had taken custody of Allegra when Leslie Waddington’s wife became resentful of her continued presence in their lives. Cici soon made the fur fly at St. Clerans. She ridiculed her rival Zoe and went to war with Gladys Hill and Betty O’Kelly over their management of the estate. Studying the account ledgers, she found that John’s staff had been taking advantage of his chronic absences, and concluded that the costs of maintaining the estate were unsustainable. John decided to sell St. Clerans, upsetting both Tony and Anjelica. Zoe and Danny returned to Rome. Allegra and Kathleen Shine were deposited with Ricki’s father and stepmother on Long Island

John then moved in with Cici in Pacific Palisades. In March 1973 they invited Anjelica and Richardson to join them on a fishing trip to La Paz in Baja California. It’s hard to imagine a more inappropriate setting for the fashion photographer Bob Richardson than the deck of a smelly, run-down Mexican fishing boat. He showed signs of stress from the moment they arrived, and when Anjelica left their motel room late one afternoon for a ten minute meeting with her father that stretched to an hour, he cracked. As Anjelica entered their room after the meeting, Richardson threw a bottle of tequila at her that struck the wall and shattered into pieces. Terrified, Anjelica fled to the beach where a stranger comforted her. After they returned to Los Angeles, Anjelica picked up her suitcase from the baggage carousel at the airport and said good-bye to Richardson. She refused his handshake. Later, she credited her father’s presence with giving her the strength to break with her abusive lover.

After the break with Richardson, Anjelica remained in Los Angeles, living with her father, Cici, Collin, and Maricela at Cici’s home in Pacific Palisades. In April, Cici was invited to Jack Nicholson’s birthday party at his house on Mulholland Drive, and she brought Anjelica with her. Thus began a tumultuous seventeen-year relationship that, while giving her constant emotional upheaval, transitioned Anjelica from a fashion model to a movie star.

When Anjelica met Nicholson, he was on his rise to the top of Hollywood’s A-list of male leads. His breakout role as sidekick to Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider had caught the attention of the film industry and led to leading parts as well as writing and directing assignments for major studios in films such as Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, Drive, He Said, and A Safe Place, which also featured Orson Welles. At the time he met Anjelica, he had just finished filming The Last Detail, for which he subsequently received an Academy Award Nomination for Best Actor, the first of many to follow. The role that propelled him into the stratosphere, as Randle P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was two years away.

Nicholson had come to Hollywood in 1954, after graduating from high school, to stay with June Nilson, a divorced mother of two, whom Nicholson believed to be his sister. June had come to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a dancer and actress, but had foundered. June was actually Nicholson’s mother, her children his siblings, though he did not learn this until 1974, when he was interviewed by two film students from the University of Southern California who had tracked down the true story of his parentage while researching a thesis on him.

He was born April 22, 1937 at a Roman Catholic hospital in Greenwich Village. Though his birth certificate stated that his mother was Ethel Rhoads and his father John Nicholson, her husband, in fact it was Ethel’s daughter June, a girl of sixteen, who had given birth to Jack. June had eloped with an older man, Don Furcillo-Rose, who married her on October 16, 1936, concealing from her that he was already married and the father of a child. After Jack’s birth, June left her marriage to travel on a vaudeville circuit. She came to rest in Ohio, where she found work in a defense plant, married a test pilot, and had two children by him. When the pilot deserted her for another woman, she moved to Los Angeles.

Jack was raised by his grandmother Ethel and her sometime companion, John Nicholson, a heavy drinker who worked sporadically. They lived in Neptune, New Jersey near the shore. Ethel had another daughter, Lorraine, who was married to George “Shorty” Smith, a blue-collar type who served as father figure to Jack during his youth. Jack grew up in a household that sustained the deception that Ethel Rhoads was his mother and John Nicholson was his father. It was all make-believe, just like a movie.

Jack did well in high school, a popular student too small at 5’ 9 ½” for football and basketball but excelling in drama. He was bright, earned high grades, was elected senior class vice-president, and was offered a scholarship at the University of Delaware. Ethel, a successful hairdresser who had opened a chain of beauty salons, expected Jack to seize this opportunity. But Jack had been an obsessive fan of comics and movies during his boyhood, and once in Hollywood with June he decided to remain. He found work as an office clerk in the animation department at MGM, took his own apartment in Culver City, and played the ponies at Hollywood Park. When MGM closed down its animation unit, Jack pursued work as an actor. He joined Jeff Corey’s acting class and there met Roger Corman, who was leading a new wave of independent filmmaking that started the careers of directors such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Monte Hellman. Nicholson acted in a series of low budget exploitation films for Corman, and also joined the pool of talent orbiting around the independent production team of Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson. Easy Rider began as a biker film called The Loners being developed by Corman. When Corman’s distribution deal fell out, Nicholson brought the script to Rafelson, for whom he had worked as a screenwriter. Rafelson and Schneider obtained financing from Columbia, where Schneider’s father was an executive. The part of George Hanson, the alcoholic southern lawyer who joins the easy riders, went to Nicholson after Dennis Hopper insulted Rip Torn, the previous choice for the role. Such was the blend of persistence, connections, and good fortune that brought Nicholson into the mainstream of American film.

Jack had come to Hollywood a virgin, and was twenty before he had his first romance. His partner was Georgianna Carter, an actress he met in Corey’s class. They were a couple until she asked him to marry. Having tasted sex, Nicholson developed a prodigious appetite for it, becoming one of Hollywood’s legendary womanizers. In 1972 Jack married Sandra Knight, a beautiful actress he encountered on the set of a Corman movie. She introduced him to LSD, and then proposed to him. On September 13, 1963 Sandra delivered a girl they named Jennifer. Tired of Nicholson’s philandering, Sandra separated from him in 1967, and they divorced in 1968. Sandra moved to San Francisco, then to Hawaii, severely limiting Jack’s visitation opportunities.

In 1970, during the filming of Five Easy Pieces, Nicholson had an affair with the actress Susan Anspach. She bore a son named Caleb on September 11, 1970 and later claimed publicly that Nicholson was the father, a claim that Nicholson disputed, although he gave Anspach financial support when her career stalled. When Anjelica met Jack at his birthday party, he was just breaking up with Michelle Phillips, the former singer with the Mamas and the Papas. Michelle and her daughter Chynna by John Phillips had been living with Jack, and she had recently miscarried his child.

As Anjelica stepped across the threshold into Jack Nicholson’s life, she must have felt rumblings of her father’s presence. For like John Huston, Nicholson was a larger than life character, brimming with energy, humor, and mischief, but harboring a smoldering anger that found outlet in excess. Like Huston, Nicholson wrote, directed, and performed in movies, though he had yet to make any films that could match the stature of Huston’s work. Like Huston, Nicholson was somewhat of an outsider to the studio system, making films on his own terms, often on modest budgets, at locations far from Hollywood. Like Huston, he liked to gamble at the racetrack. Like Huston, Nicholson was frequently intoxicated, though he preferred marijuana, cocaine, and LSD over Huston’s martinis. Like Huston, who had a magnetic personality that drew people to him, Nicholson attracted an entourage of loyal friends with whom he made movies and frequently socialized. Allegra, who would spend considerable time at Nicholson’s home in company with Anjelica, wrote in her memoir Love Child, “It reminded me of Dad: another king, another court.”  (Love Child, p. 132) And like Huston, Nicholson had an insatiable need for sexual intimacy with women. Both men had fathered children in and out of wedlock.

Anjelica recalled her first meeting with Nicholson in a poignant account:

He opened the door to his house that early evening in April, with the late sun still golden in the sky. “Good evening, ladies,” he said, beaming, and added in a slow drawl, “I’m Jack, and I’m glad you could make it.”

He motioned for us to enter. The front room was low-ceilinged, candlelit, and filled with strangers. There was Greek food, and music playing. I danced with Jack for hours. And when he invited me to stay the night, I asked Cici what she thought. “Are you kidding?” she said. “Of course.”

In the morning when I woke up and put on my evening dress from the night before, Jack was already downstairs . . . Then Jack appeared and said, “I’m gonna send you home in a taxi, if that’s OK, because I’m going to a ball game.” (Watch Me, pp. 7-8)

In the summer of 1973 Nicholson went to Europe to film The Passenger with Michelangelo Antonioni, and Anjelica went with him. She had no part in the production, and while Nicholson was on various locations in Germany, Spain, and Morocco, she took modeling jobs in London, Paris, and Milan. Unsettling stories of Nicholson’s affairs reached her. In Corsica on a fashion shoot for English Vogue with the model Manolo Blahnik and the designer Grace Coddington, she had an affair with the photographer David Bailey. She saw it as tit for tat. In her memoir Watch Me she wrote, “I wasn’t going to hang around and let Jack treat me badly.” (p.32) But when they returned to Los Angeles from Europe she moved in with Nicholson, and the pattern of betrayal and reprisal, a pattern she had experienced as a child through her parents ongoing infidelities, was repeated over and over.

For the next three years, Anjelica lived with Nicholson as his principal, but not only, love interest. She accompanied him on publicity junkets for his films, attended awards ceremonies with him in Cannes and Los Angeles as his career took off, and went with him to Aspen for the winter ski season. She did no work, either in modeling or in film. Nicholson showered her with gifts of jewelry, furs, and a Mercedes Benz. Anjelica played big sister to Allegra, then living with Cici, John, Collin, and Maricela in Pacific Palisades, taking her on shopping outings and bringing her to the location where Nicholson was filming Chinatown. This film brought Nicholson and John Huston together professionally for the first time as they both performed under the direction of Roman Polanski, Nicholson as the hero, Huston as the villain.

Nineteen seventy-five brought turmoil into the domestic lives of Anjelica and her father. John Huston began an affair with Maricela, and after Cici learned of it from John’s son Tony, Huston moved out of their house into a hotel, taking Maricela with him. This brought misfortune on Allegra, as the couple hired as caregivers to replace Maricela mistreated her. Over the summer, Anjelica went to Montana to be with Nicholson, who was filming The Missouri Breaks there with Marlon Brando. She brought Allegra with her as companion for Nicholson’s daughter Jennifer. Shortly after she arrived, she found love letters from a woman in the bedroom of the house Nicholson was renting. Distraught, she confronted Nicholson, who offered the explanation that the letters were intended not for him, but for his friend Harry Dean Stanton.

In the fall, Anjelica performed a small part in The Last Tycoon, her first film work since A Walk with Love and Death. The film, directed by Elia Kazan, featured performances by Nicholson and Robert De Niro. After the filming, while Nicholson was in New York promoting One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Anjelica began an affair with Ryan O’Neal, the star of Love Story, Paper Moon, and Barry Lyndon, whom she had dated before moving in with Nicholson.

When Nicholson returned from New York, Anjelica told him she was in love with O’Neal. Nicholson was surprised, but took the news calmly. For a while, Anjelica continued to live with Nicholson, but spent her weekends at O’Neal’s beach house in Malibu, often taking Allegra with her as companion to O’Neal’s daughter Tatum. Then she moved in with O’Neal, and lived with him for a year and a half. Allegra stayed with them on weekends, and during a six-month stretch, lived with them full time, over Cici’s objections.

O’Neal was another charismatic man with a dark side and a violent temper. He was a heavy user of drugs, and prone to sudden shifts of mood. He liked to play Frisbee for hours on the beach with his friends. He took Allegra to and from Marymount High School in Westwood and treated her to ice cream. But he was controlling, a philanderer like Nicholson, capable of abusing Anjelica verbally and physically. She broke with him after a violent episode that must have reminded her of Richardson and the tequila bottle. Angered because she had left him momentarily at a party to use the bathroom, O’Neal head butted her in the forehead while waiting for a parking valet to bring his car. Terrified, Anjelica fled back into the party and hid in the bathroom. Nonetheless, she returned to O’Neal’s house later that night. O’Neal complained to her that he had a headache. The next day, while driving with Allegra, Anjelica asked her thirteen-year-old sister what she should do. “Leave him,” Allegra replied. And that is what Anjelica did. She resumed her relationship with Nicholson, but lived apart from him in a small house he bought for her in the Beverly Glen canyon below Mulholland Drive.

Near the end of the period that she was living with O’Neal, Anjelica had an unpleasant encounter with the law. On March 10, 1977 she went to Nicholson’s house to pick up some of her belongings. When she entered the house, she noticed some camera equipment and a jacket she had seen worn by Roman Polanski the night before, when they had gone to the movies together. She called out, and immediately the door to the TV room opened. Polanski and a tall young girl emerged, looking disheveled. Anjelica had intruded on a crime scene—Polanski’s rape of a thirteen-year-old girl he had brought to the house to photograph, then drugged and sodomized. Mumbling excuses, Polanski and the girl left.

The next night, Anjelica was again in the house when Polanski arrived in the company of several plainclothes detectives. Nicholson was in Aspen. Anjelica let them in, and the police searched the house for drugs after seeing rolling paper in an ashtray. They found marijuana in Nicholson’s bedroom and cocaine in Anjelica’s purse. She and Polanski were arrested and taken to the West Los Angeles police station, where they were fingerprinted and booked. A friend of Anjelica raised bail money at two am and she was released. Subsequently, Polanski was indicted on six felony counts, including rape by use of drugs. Charges against Anjelica were dropped when she agreed to testify for the prosecution that she had seen Polanski and the girl at Nicholson’s house. Because Polanski agreed to a plea bargain, Anjelica never testified. The incident shamed her; she had brought scandal to the Huston family. Soon thereafter, Anjelica left O’Neal and moved temporarily into a studio apartment she rented from Cici. Then she resumed her relationship with Nicholson.

Around the time of the Polanski episode, Cici told Allegra that John Julius Norwich, not John Huston, was her father. Norwich was in Los Angeles when Cici broke the news, and the next day he visited Allegra for an hour at Cici’s house. Allegra learned that John Julius was married, and that she had a brother and a sister living in London, a revelation that echoed Nicholson’s discovery of his true parentage. Not long after, Allegra moved back to Beverly Hills to live once again with Cici’s parents. Recalling those days in her memoir Love Child Allegra wrote, “I traveled through life so lightly loaded—not much more than my clothes and my suitcase went with me from house to house, clothes which I grew out of within months—that I was sometimes waylaid by a sense that my own existence wasn’t quite real.” (Love Child, p. 150)

Although Anjelica was living apart from Nicholson, her life was centered on him. She lived in the shadow of his career and was doing nothing to develop herself as an actress. Through her father and Nicholson, she knew many people in the upper reaches of the film industry, but her connection to them was social, not professional. She had worked successfully as a model, but her sophisticated, high fashion look was better suited to the haut couture worlds of London, Paris, and New York than to the laid back sun and surf culture of Southern California.

In the summer of 1978 Nicholson was cast by Stanley Kubrick to play the lead in his horror film The Shining, based on the novel by Stephen King. Nicholson went to London, where most of the film was shot, and Anjelica came with him, bringing Allegra. Filming proceeded at a snail’s pace due to Kubrick’s obsessive perfectionism and a fire that destroyed a major set. Nicholson injured his back jumping the fence to his rented house because he had forgotten his keys. He was laid up on his back for weeks, and could barely walk. During a break in filming, Anjelica took him and Allegra to Ireland to visit St. Clerans, but they were refused entry by the new owners. Allegra visited John Julius in London and met her brother and sister.

Around this time John Huston told Anjelica that at twenty-seven she might be too old to start an acting career. This warning jolted her out of her lethargy, and when Nicholson asked his friend Bob Rafelson to add a part for her to the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice that Rafelson was directing, Anjelica made no objection, although up until then she had been reluctant to ride on Nicholson’s coat tails. Anjelica was given the part of Madge, a hippie type who appears topless in a comic scene with Nicholson, who is wearing the headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh. Though her part was small, she was on the credit crawl with Nicholson and Jessica Lange.

A more profound jolt came to Anjelica in the form of a car accident. When she was back in Los Angeles after filming The Postman Always Rings Twice in Santa Barbara, the car she was driving down Coldwater Canyon Avenue was struck head-on by a speeding drunk driver. Unrestrained by a seat belt, Anjelica was thrown into the windshield. Her nose was broken in four places, her eyes were blackened, and her teeth became loose in her jaw. A friend took her to Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where a plastic surgeon repaired the damage. She liked her nose better after the surgery. The accident was a wake-up call for Anjelica. It must have reminded her of the death of her mother, killed in the prime of her life. “I made up my mind to take greater advantage of my life,” she wrote in Watch Me. “How things come and go. How people come and go . . . I needed to do my own thing, to have something that was mine alone.” (Watch Me, p. 117)

Following this accident, she was cast by Lee Grant in the film version of August Strindberg’s drama Playing with Fire. Carol Kane and Maximilian Schell had the leads. During rehearsals it became apparent to Grant and the other performers that Anjelica had no acting technique. Grant took over her role during one rehearsal to show her how to perform it, humiliating Anjelica. Carol Kane suggested that Anjelica take acting classes, advice that she followed by enrolling as a novice in Peggy Feury’s Loft Studio.

Feury immediately honed in on the character flaw that was holding Anjelica back—her lack of self-confidence. In Watch Me, Anjelica describes the scene in which Feury exposed this flaw:

The first exercise Peggy gave me was to acquire an object from another actor . . . I worked hard throughout the scene. After it was over, Peggy said, “Anjelica, you’re a tall and imposing girl, a big presence. When you ask for something, you don’t need to extend your hand. You have our attention.” It was a great piece of advice. It was the awakening in me to the illusion of confidence. I had not realized it until that moment, but I was pleading for things that I could simply have asked for. (Watch Me, p. 128)

Tony Richardson, with whom she worked on Hamlet, also gave her a nudge. Sitting next to her at a dinner party in Los Angeles, he chided her for doing nothing with her talent. He told her that she needed to start taking parts, no matter how small, to get experience and exposure. She subsequently appeared on the TV series Laverne & Shirley, in Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre, in the short film A Rose for Emily, then in the cult film This Is Spinal Tap. Her breakthrough came when John Foreman, who produced films for her father, cast her in the lightweight summer movie Ice Pirates. Foreman was in the process of setting up Prizzi’s Honor for John Huston to direct. He thought that Anjelica was well suited for the role of Maerose Prizzi, and Huston agreed. Nicholson was cast as Charlie Partanna, a hit man for the Prizzi family and godson of Don Corrado Prizzi, the mafia chief.

The film centers on a love triangle involving Partanna, Maerose, and Irene (Kathleen Turner), a professional killer Charlie falls in love with. Maerose is the Don’s niece. She disgraced the Prizzi family honor when she ran away to Mexico with an outsider after Charlie jilted her. Her mission in life is to win back Charlie even though he has fallen for Irene and married her. Maerose’s strategy is to expose Irene as party to a Las Vegas gambling scam that robbed the Prizzi’s of $720,000.

The plot is driven by the deceit of women, who refuse to live by the code of honor upheld by men. Irene is the embodiment of this feminine deceit, but she is out-maneuvered by her rival Maerose. Irene not only participated in the gambling scam, she is married to the man who orchestrated it, facts that she conceals from Charlie. Maerose goes to Las Vegas, locates a witness who can implicate Irene, then tells the Don. The Don orders Charlie to kill Irene as a test of his loyalty to the family. The scheming Maerose further complicates the situation by falsely telling her father that Charlie recently forced himself on her. Her father hires Irene to kill Charlie. Irene takes the $10,000 down payment, then tells Charlie. This tangled web of lies and betrayals amongst family members, with its obvious parallels to John Huston’s personal life, brought forth from the director a dark and witty comedy that earned the film eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Nicholson), Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress (Anjelica). Only Anjelica won.

Anjelica performed the role of Maerose as a sophisticated, street-smart manipulator bent on revenge and redemption. Wearing striking outfits of black and purple topped with attention grabbing wide brim hats, jewelry clanging on her arms, speaking in a low, drawn out Brooklyn accent, Maerose had an edge. The screen popped with electricity during her scenes. Anjelica was fond of the character. “Maerose is a woman scorned,” she said, “but she has the wisdom to know that the only way to keep something forever is to let it go . . . I learned from Maerose that you have to allow the things you love to be free.” (Grober, p. 764) This acceptance, while obviously not borne out by Maerose’s behavior in the film, reflects Anjelica’s recognition of the limits of her relationship with Nicholson, who was not prepared to make the deep commitment to her that she wanted, though he loved her in his own way.

After her Oscar for Prizzi’s Honor, Anjelica was a Hollywood celebrity in her own right, and she worked steadily as a character actress for a number of prominent directors, including Woody Allen (Crimes and Misdemeanors), Francis Ford Coppola (Gardens of Stone), Paul Mazursky (Enemies: A Love Story), and Stephen Frears (The Grifters, for which she received a Best Actress Nomination from the Motion Picture Academy). She also had a recurring role in the television mini-series Lonesome Dove. She played a wide range of strongly etched, distinctive characters. In Crimes and Misdemeanors she was Dolores Paley, the clinging, needy, mistress of the Martin Landau character, a woman who refuses to accept that their affair is over, that his promises were empty. In The Grifters, she was Lilly Dillon, a hard faced con woman who unintentionally kills her own son in an argument over money. In Lonesome Dove she was Clara Allen, a well-to-do widow on the prairie who offers love and hospitality to restless, homeless wanderers. In all of these parts her character experiences unfulfilled, incomplete relationships with people she loves.

Her most important role in this period was as Gretta Conroy in The Dead, John Huston’s adaptation of the short story by James Joyce about a Christmas dinner hosted in Dublin by two elderly sisters. The film was especially significant for the Huston family, because it brought together professionally John, Angelica, and John’s son Tony, who wrote the screenplay, and because of its Irish setting and subject matter. All of the actors, excepting Anjelica, were Irish. Owing to John Huston’s poor health, the film was shot at a warehouse in Los Angeles rather than in Dublin.

Gretta Conroy is a married woman with children. Her husband Gabriel, an apparently self-assured man confident of his wife’s love, is ill-at-ease throughout the evening, worried about the speech he must give in tribute to the hosts. He delivers the speech graciously, and can finally relax. As he and Gretta are descending the stairs at the end of the evening, they hear the beautiful tenor voice of one of the guests singing a love song. Gretta pauses on the stairs to listen, and a look of great sadness and yearning passes over her face. In their hotel room, as they undress for bed, Gabriel remarks the change in Gretta’s mood. She tells him that the song reminded her of a youthful suitor who died with his love for her unrequited. Gabriel is stunned at this revelation. Gretta throws herself on the bed, sobbing inconsolably. The camera moves outside to film snow falling on the Irish countryside.

In an interview, Anjelica was asked what she drew on for the wordless scene on the stairs when she reacted to the love song, registering both sadness and longing. She said that when she did the scene, she was looking down the stairs at her dying father, who was directing from below. Six months after completing The Dead, on August 28, 1987, John Huston died, his body destroyed by severe emphysema. Three years later, Anjelica ended her relationship with Jack Nicholson after he told her that Rebecca Broussard, a woman he had been seeing, was carrying his child.

In June 1990 Anjelica met Robert Graham, the man who would become her devoted husband and friend. They were introduced by a mutual friend, Earl McGrath, who managed The Rolling Stones and owned an art gallery in Los Angeles. Graham was a prominent Los Angeles sculptor who had exhibited his work in McGrath’s gallery. McGrath had invited both Anjelica and Graham to a dinner party at his home in West Hollywood, and knowing of Anjelica’s break with Nicholson, suggested to Graham that her bring her to the dinner. They had an instant rapport, and the following day Anjelica visited Graham at his studio in Venice, where they became lovers.

Over the next two years, Anjelica and Graham saw each other regularly. She brought him to the 120-acre ranch she owns in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and bought him a horse, which he rode only once. They made a trip to Ireland where Anjelica took Graham to her childhood home St. Clerans, now a boutique hotel owned by Merv Griffin. They stayed overnight at Dromoland Castle near Shannon, and in the morning Graham proposed marriage. On May 23, 1992 they were married at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, followed by a boisterous reception under a tent on property that Graham owned in Venice. They honeymooned in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Graham was born in 1938 in Mexico City, the child of a Mexican-Indian mother and a Scotch-English father. Graham’s father deserted the family when the boy was five and he saw his father only once after that. He was raised by his mother, his aunt, and his grandmother, who were all members of the occult Rosicrucian order. When Graham was twelve, the family moved to San Jose, California, headquarters of the Rosicrucians. Graham studied art at San Jose State University, joined the Air Force and was stationed in Japan, then continued his art studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. He married twice before he met Anjelica, and had an adult son named Steven by his first wife.

Graham had followed a singular path as an artist, working with live models to create highly realistic, representational human figures at a time when the prevailing art movements were either pop or minimalist. His first works were dioramas in which miniature human figures made of wax and painted were placed in plexiglass boxes in a variety of poses and positions. These pieces made the viewer a voyeur of humans occupying a private, insular space.

This early period of Graham’s work spanned the 1960s and included two years in London. In 1970 he returned to Los Angeles where he had established a studio and began working with the human figure on a larger scale, casting it in bronze. His work was being exhibited in major museums and shown internationally in galleries. In 1978 he received his first private commission, from the art collector Frederick Weisman, to produce a piece called Dance Door, which positioned small human figures on the top edge of a large metal door. This piece was installed at the Los Angeles Music Center, and was the first of many sculptures to be placed in public spaces. Perhaps influenced by the Mexican muralists, Graham believed that art should be public, not solely the province of museums, galleries, and collectors. Following Dance Door, Graham created a number of monumental public works, including the Olympic Gateway at the entrance to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a memorial to Joe Louis in Detroit, another to Duke Ellington in Harlem.

When Anjelica met Robert Graham, he was a celebrity in the art world, known and respected by collectors, critics, museum curators, and other artists in America and Europe. He was largely unknown to the general public. His celebrity was of a different order than Anjelica’s, because it centered more on the work he created rather than on his personality, as shaped and promoted by the publicity machinery of Hollywood. Graham was not a mass culture phenomenon, as movie stars are. He was celebrated for his workmanship, and did not crave the public eye, or depend upon it for his livelihood. In fact, he disdained it, debunking the notion of the artist as culture hero that was attached to artists like Picasso. “An artist’s authorship is not important,” he once told an interviewer. “A work takes on its own specific life. The modernist notion of an artist making art for himself is an aberration . . .” (Vanity Fair, September 1992)

Graham’s humility was reflected in his work ethic. He was usually in his studio by eight am and worked until about seven pm, with a break for lunch. He was disciplined in his habits, and moderate in his lifestyle.  His chief vices were a fondness for Cuban cigars and a taste for tequila. With him, Anjelica entered a period of contentment and stability she had not known since the death of her mother. “We have a connection, “ Anjelica told an interviewer. “He gives me comfort and support. It’s a very basic thing, but very difficult to find. It makes it easier to go about the rest of your life and work.” (Vanity Fair, September 1992)

While honeymooning in Oaxaca, the newlyweds stayed at the El Presidente, a luxury hotel that had been converted from a sixteenth century convent. The structure gave them the idea to create an insulated living space on the lot that Graham owned in Venice. The lot was on Windward Avenue, a busy commercial street just off the Venice boardwalk, where homeless transients begged and slept, vendors sold flimsy wares, street performers passed the hat, and tourists strolled. Graham designed a two and three story home they called “ the fortress,” 5,500 square feet walled on four sides around a central courtyard planted with a coral tree and bordered by a black bottom lap pool. The residence echoes on a large scale the plexiglass boxes that housed Graham’s miniature human figures. Anjelica sold her home in Beverly Hills and moved to “the fortress” in acceptance of her husband’s need to live in Venice where he had built his own foundry and established his studio. Since her film work took her everywhere, she could live almost anywhere.

Anjelica worked steadily as a character actress in both film and television. She became the iconic Morticia Addams in The Addams Family and Addams Family Values, appeared as herself in Robert Altman’s The Player, worked again with Woody Allen in Manhattan Murder Mystery, and was a favorite performer for Wes Anderson, who cast her in The Royal Tennenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and The Darjeeling Limited. In 1996, she was given her first directing assignment, Bastard Out of Carolina, a film about child abuse that was shown at Cannes and nominated for an Emmy, despite the fact that Ted Turner, the backer of the film, refused to show it on his network because of its graphic content.

Although Anjelica was in her early forties, she and Graham wanted to have a child. Because of her infertility, they attempted pregnancy through in vitro fertilization and then an implant. The procedure failed several attempts, and Anjelica resigned herself to being childless, directing her nurturing instincts to stray cats and injured birds. Her siblings Tony, Danny, and Allegra all started families. Tony had three children by his wife Margot Chalmondeley before they divorced. Allegra moved from London to Taos, New Mexico to marry Cisco Guevara, a river guide she met while visiting Tony, who had settled there. They had a son named Rafael. Danny married Katie Evans, an English woman, and with her had a daughter named Stella. Anjelica thus had a considerable extended family and maintained close relations with her nieces and nephews.

Early in 2007, after nearly fifteen years of marriage during which both her own and her husband’s careers had flourished, Anjelica became troubled by signs that Graham was not well. He was undergoing treatment for neuropathy, and complained of numbness in his extremities and back pain. He had resisted seeing a doctor, but as the symptoms persisted, he relented, and in August 2008 he returned home from a visit to his son Steven’s doctor with a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis. So began a rapid deterioration of Graham’s health that soon reached crisis proportions. He suffered a heart attack in the middle of the night and was rushed to UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica by paramedics who kept him alive using a defibrillator. That night in the intensive care unit he had a stroke that partially paralyzed him, and impeded his speech and memory. His doctors transferred him to the Ronald Reagan Medical Center at UCLA in Westwood. When his kidneys stopped functioning, a specialist told Anjelica that Graham had Wegener’s granulomatosis, a disease for which no cure or effective treatment had been found. He was put on dialysis, and fed large doses of Cytoxan, a drug used to treat cancer patients.

After seven weeks, Graham’s condition had not improved, and he was released from the hospital. He underwent dialysis for seven hours every other day, and received therapy for the effects of his stroke. In the midst of this crisis, on October 16, came the news that Stella’s mother Katie, divorced from Danny and struggling with drug addiction and depression, had committed suicide in Manhattan Beach by jumping from the roof of her condominium. Stella was four years old, the same age as Allegra at Ricki’s death. Two months later, on December 27, Robert Graham died in the intensive care unit of the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica after Anjelica and Steven agreed to disconnect the respirator that was keeping his unconscious body alive. Anjelica drove around Los Angeles placing flowers at the base of public monuments he had created, and others did the same in Detroit, New York, and Washington, D.C. Back at “the fortress” Anjelica started a garden for her husband’s memory.

Cardinal Roger Mahony held a funeral mass for Graham at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, whose bronze doors Graham had made. Anthony Villaraigosa, the Mayor of Los Angeles, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California, and Schwarzenegger’s wife Maria Shriver attended, along with many of Graham’s friends and fellow artists, and the members of Anjelica’s family, including Tony, Allegra, Danny, Stella, and Zoe. In Watch Me, Anjelica wrote of her loss, “The world as I knew it had ended, but I was surrounded by friends.” (p. 366) Stella, in a reprise of Allegra’s nomadic childhood, went to live with Danny’s mother Zoe in London.

Though, as she put it, “loss became part of my landscape,” Anjelica soldiered on. In March 2011 she was offered the lead in Smash, a TV series about a Broadway musical. As the production was located in New York and Anjelica’s contract required a six year commitment, she decided to sell the Venice house that she and Graham had built, and that had been, in her words, “ a very beautiful shell in which to place my oyster.” (Architectural Digest, April 1996) After a two-year run, Smash was discontinued and Anjelica returned to Los Angeles, where she continues to live and work.

* * *

We Americans live in a celebrity-driven culture. Whether they are highly skilled athletes playing professional sports under multi-million dollar contracts, or movie stars whose glamorous faces are beamed at us from movie screens, televisions, and the covers of glossy supermarket magazines, or popular musicians performing live before delirious fans, or daredevils who astonish us riding monster fifty-foot waves, celebrities perform an almost religious function in our society, embodying our ideals and aspirations and setting the pace for our lifestyles and patterns of consumption.

In the modern capitalist economy, consumption is the engine that powers growth and produces wealth. For the system to continue, consumption must be perpetual, products constantly changing, being “improved.” Our needs and desires must be manipulated through advertising and other forms of propaganda to keep the engine purring. Some degree of dissatisfaction with what we already have must be encouraged if we are constantly to desire renewal through purchases of things. The wheels of fashion, whatever the merchandise, must perpetually turn.

Celebrities play an essential role in maintaining this system. Their fame is attached to products through sponsorship and advertising, turning ordinary objects into talismans with magical properties, like relics of the saints peddled by religious quacks. Their lavish lifestyles, promoted and publicized in the mass media, remind us of the seemingly limitless possibilities for ascension that democratic capitalism offers the individual. The ordinariness of their origins is stressed, implying that each of us is capable of joining their company.

Most celebrities earn their fame through remarkable achievements and long practice. Actors learn their craft and go endlessly to auditions; athletes and musicians practice for hours each day. Their skills and reputation accumulate over years of dogged persistence. Many are called, few are chosen, but the few who reach the limelight hold out their arms to others, beckoning them to follow. Only in the post-modern digital age have social media allowed celebrity to become a title divorced from the merit of any meaningful achievement beyond skillful networking and self-promotion. Celebrity itself is a twentieth-century phenomenon, an industry based on the image making capabilities of media that can transform ordinary people into icons.

Anjelica Huston is a celebrity. She has performed in over seventy motion picture and television films, and numerous photographs of her displaying high fashion have appeared in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Town and Country, and on the cover of Vanity Fair. She has been declared one of the ten most beautiful women in the world, a fatuous if promotionally useful designation that can be neither proven nor disproven. Her residences in California have been the subject of full page spreads in Architectural Digest, giving curious readers a close-up view of her possessions, her wardrobe, her tastes, and tempting them with the sight of possible attainments. A keyword search of her name in a database for mass media periodicals published in English yields over twelve hundred citations, most of which are the output of the film industry’s promotional machinery, providing information about her film roles. Lengthier interviews in publications like The New York Times and Vanity Fair weave well-known facts about her personal life into plugs for her movies, creating a blend of the ordinary and the mythical that becomes her public persona and commodifies her for consumption.

Recently she published a two-part memoir about her upbringing in John Huston’s Irish manor household and her career path as a model and actress. These read like extended versions of her widely disseminated publicity material. We learn about the vagaries of life with her parents, we learn about her love affairs and longer-term relationships, we learn about what she eats and drinks and buys, and where she goes on vacation, and we learn production details from her films. And we learn about her losses, which are numerous and often heartbreaking.

But the question that remains is: where does Anjelica Huston the woman, the human being who is at bottom no different than the rest of us, diverge from Anjelica Huston the public persona, professionally packaged as an entertainer and role model? Is there a divergence, or has her fundamental identity been subsumed in the public image manufactured for her by hair stylists, costume designers, photographers, screenwriters, and publicists?

Beneath the airbrushed surface of Anjelica Huston’s life story one feels an undercurrent of sadness at losses bravely endured. Her childhood, though exceptional for its luxuries and privileges found only in the homes of European nobility, was deeply scarred by the neglect of her brilliant but self-indulgent father, who spent precious little time with her during her most important formative years. The loss of her mother when she was only seventeen effectively made her an orphan, vulnerable to the attentions of fickle older men (Richardson, Nicholson) in positions of cultural power like her father. She confessed in her memoir A Story Lately Told to her childhood insecurities and lack of self-esteem, and to creating alternate identities through costume and play acting in order to amuse her father on his infrequent visits. These childish inventions were prelude to her careers as model and actress, performing fantasies for others through the camera, which is after all only another kind of mirror that allows her to be seen. The importance of being visible to others is stressed in the title of her second memoir volume, Watch Me.

Was the fictional persona she created for public consumption simply a professional mask that she wore in order to make a living, or was it more than that—an alternate identity that has given her refuge from a profound loneliness at her core?

Chapter Two — Edward Weston : The Camera as Muse

In the career of photographer Edward Weston we can trace a connection between an artist’s creative fecundity and his sexual freedom. We can also witness the personal drama of Weston’s conflict between his commitment to his medium—his muse—and his sense of responsibility to others, especially members of his own family. The journals and letters Weston wrote reveal that his periods of highest creative output often coincided with periods of unrestrained promiscuity. They also reveal that he suffered torments of guilt over his neglect of his children and his infidelity to their mother. While living in Mexico with his lover Tina Modotti and his oldest son Chandler during the early nineteen twenties, he tried to justify in a journal entry the choices he had made.

One does not necessarily act for the best, nor even nobly, in destroying personal aspirations for the sake of others. The greatest if less apparent gain, even for those others, must come from the fulfilling of one’s predilection rather than in sentimental sacrifice. Yet I do realize that I face sacrifice, no matter what the decision . . . My eternal question is between my emotional, personal love for them [his children], my selfish love! —and the impersonal consideration, realization, that to do the best for them—unselfishly—I must think of Edward Weston first. (Daybook v.1, Feb 25, 1925 p. 117)

Weston wrestled with this issue throughout his working life and never satisfactorily resolved it. But his first love remained his camera.

The first camera came into Weston’s hands when he was sixteen, living in Chicago. The camera, a Kodak Bullseye that held a roll of twelve 31/3 x 31/3 negatives, was a gift from his father, Edward, a medical doctor. The invention and marketing of the Kodak box camera was the first step in making photography the mass medium that it became in the twentieth century. It made photography available to everyone. It took photography out of the hands of professional portraitists working in studios with bulky equipment and slow glass negatives and brought it into the street, where images of the everyday world could be captured. It enabled consumers to build their own personal photo albums instead of having to rely on store bought stereoscopes and stereo cards that provided standardized images of the world.

Around the time that Weston received his first camera, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz was initiating the movement to establish photography as a medium of fine art. In March 1902 he curated an exhibition of photographs at the National Arts Club in New York that was judged by photographers. Several months later, Stieglitz published the first issue of Camera Work, a journal devoted exclusively to the aesthetics of photography. Three years later, he opened his own gallery, the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, at 291 Fifth Avenue, where his own work and the work of Edward Steichen, among others, were hung. Edward Weston began taking pictures at the birth of the modern era in photography.

The gift of the camera was a transforming event in Weston’s life. He was a frail and shy boy, short of stature at 5’4” and slight. His mother Alice died when he was five, and four years later his father remarried, to a widow with four sons older than Weston. He did not bond with the new family, but became very close to his sister May, nine years older, who had taken on the role of mothering him.

Weston disliked school. He once wrote to his son Brett, “School is a good place to train and mold the minds of those who are to be the slaves of the world.” He often played hooky with his camera as companion, roaming the streets of Chicago looking for subject matter. Many years later, living in Carmel, California, Weston described in his journal his first excitement at being alone in the world with his camera.

Can I ever forget certain days, periods, places? One of the earliest, —the scene in a Chicago apartment, printing from my first negative made with a stand camera purchased with money saved penny by penny, walking ten miles to save ten cents, denying sweets, selling rags and bottles: a second hand camera I had seen in a downtown window, with tripod and filter it cost $11. I can even recall my ecstatic cry as the print developed out—“It’s a peach!” —and how I ran, trembling with excitement, to my father’s library to show this snow-scene made in Washington Park, —a tree, a winding stream, snow-covered banks. I slipped into the stream and rode home on the Cottage Grove cable car with my trouser legs frozen stiff as a board. (Daybook v. 2, p. 122 May 14, 1929)

The camera for young Weston was more than a machine that could magically create imagery, and photography for him was more than a teenager’s hobby. It consumed him, and brought him into a new relationship with reality. “I needed no friends now—I was always alone with my love . . . My whole life changed—because I became interested in something concrete.” (Maddow, p. 58)

In 1903, when Weston was seventeen, May married John Hancock Seaman and the couple moved to Tropico, California, a suburb of Los Angeles that eventually was absorbed by Glendale. Weston dropped out of high school and moved in with his Uncle Theodore and his Aunt Emma. Theodore arranged an entry-level job for Weston at Marshall Field, where he also worked. Weston ran errands for the shipping department, then was promoted to salesman. May had been inviting Weston to visit her in California. In May 1906 he had enough money saved to make the trip. A summer visit was planned, but at the end of the summer Weston decided to stay.

Initially he lived with his sister and her husband in Tropico. John found employment for him as a surveyor for the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad. May introduced him to her best friend Flora Chandler, a relative of the wealthy Los Angeles Chandler family that published the Los Angeles Times, among other ventures. Flora was a schoolteacher seven years older than Weston, an age gap that nearly mirrored the distance between Weston and his sister. They began a courtship that featured chaperoned outings to Camp Rincon, where they slept in tents, cooked outdoors on open fires, picnicked by rushing streams, and rode horseback.

A letter Weston wrote to Flora in October 1907 on railroad stationery exhibits Weston’s sharp visual eye and flair for poetic natural description as he records sense impressions from one of his surveying forays.

Meadow Valley Creek—what a picture this may conjure up of verdant meadows & rolling hills and dancing waters, flecked by sunshine which filters through cool archways of spreading shade trees . . . It is a misnomer. The meadow is a barren, scorching desert naked of all vegetation except stunted growths of sage brush and cacti struggling for existence, and only here and there a cotton-wood with its clean cut limbs and fresh green leaves to rest the eye: the valley is only a narrow cañon with grim forbidding walls and the water swirls against its sides in vain endeavor to find escape. But to those who come to know its value, the creek is like a vein of pure silver running thru the lowest grade muck. (Edward Weston Collection, Getty Center, Album A)

One senses in Weston’s words the allure that spontaneous observations of the natural world held for him. As it had in high school, the camera again pulled Weston away from the dependability and restrictions of a predictable, conventional routine. He quit his job with the railroad to become an itinerant photographer, roving the countryside on horseback and taking photographs of ordinary subjects that he offered for sale in the emerging photo postcard market.

In 1908 Weston returned to Chicago and enrolled in the Illinois College of Photography, where he learned darkroom technique. He completed the nine-month course in six months, but was denied a diploma when he refused to pay the full nine-month tuition. He returned to Tropico and married Flora on January 30, 1909. They built a simple home on land owned by Flora’s parents, and Weston went to work as an assistant in a series of portrait photography studios in Los Angeles.

Flora and Weston started a family. Their first child, named Edward Chandler Weston and called Chandler, was born April 26, 1910. On December 16, 1911 a second son, Theodore Brett Weston, was born. He was called Brett, the maiden name of Weston’s deceased mother.  Over the course of his career Weston took many photographs of his children, recording the evolution of their growth. Flora collected the childhood photos in albums that reveal the depth of Weston’s feelings for his family: a tender photo of Flora holding the naked infant Chandler; Chandler, age one, holding a chocolate rabbit; two year old Chandler reading comics; Chandler at two holding baby brother Brett; Brett seated on Flora’s lap as she looks at him lovingly; the infant Brett holding a teddy bear; Brett, age two, holding a ball. These photos give us images of a conventional, middle class family life that Weston, before long, would chafe against.

In 1911 Weston quit his job at the studio of A. Louis Mojonier, a prominent Los Angeles portrait photographer, and established his own studio in a shack he built on land owned by Flora near their home in Tropico. Using an 11×14 view camera Weston opened his photographic business making formal portraits of men, women, couples, and children. His subjects were conventionally posed against neutral, monotone backgrounds, their faces and character revealed through the skillful use of natural light. Their expressions are open and genuine, suggesting that they felt comfortable revealing themselves to Weston’s penetrating gaze. Their individuality is apparent in their frank, unaffected expressions. They look themselves. Though his studio was off the beaten track in Tropico, Weston quickly built a successful portrait business and began to acquire a national reputation through publication of his photographs in photography periodicals.

In 1913 Weston was introduced to the photographer Margrethe Mather, a woman with whom he became both romantically and aesthetically involved. The intermediary who brought them together was Elmer Ellsworth, a Los Angeles bohemian with connections to both the city’s fledgling movie industry and its radical political element. Ellsworth was an entrepreneur who had operated vaudeville theaters where the anarchist Emma Goldman sometimes spoke. He became a gag writer for silent film comedians, including Charlie Chaplin, and socialized with Chaplin’s friends. Ellsworth and Mather were both members of the Los Angeles Camera Club, and on a club outing to Griffith Park Ellsworth brought Mather to Weston’s studio. A few days later Mather returned to the studio to pose for Weston, and he subsequently asked her to join his studio as his assistant. They soon became lovers, though it is unclear whether their romantic relationship became fully sexual at this time. In 1925 Weston destroyed the Daybook covering this period in his life and in which he would have recorded intimate details of his personal life.

Mather was an unconventional woman with a mysterious past and openness to experimentation in both her life and work. She was born March 4, 1886—the month and year of Weston’s birth—in Salt Lake City. In a version of her early life history that she fabricated, she was orphaned at an early age and adopted by a mathematics professor and his common-law wife Minnie. As a teenager, she worked as a prostitute, servicing local businessmen in Salt Lake. She moved to California when her vocation was about to be exposed, and settled in Los Angeles.

In truth her real name was Emma Caroline Youngren. Her parents were Mormons who had emigrated from Denmark. Emma’s father Gabriel remarried after the death of his wife and fathered six more children.  Emma was raised by her maternal aunt, Rasmine Laurentzen, who worked as a live-in housekeeper for Joseph Cole Mather, a widower employed in the mining industry as a metallurgist. Emma attended high school in Salt Lake but did not graduate. She took Mather’s name when she was eighteen, and two years later, in the same year that Weston came to live with his sister, she left Salt Lake for California. She lived for a time in San Francisco, calling herself Margrethe, the name of her deceased maternal grandmother. By 1912 she was living in Los Angeles, in a rooming house on Bunker Hill, and supporting herself with prostitution.

As Mather and Weston became acquainted in his studio, they must have remarked the similarities in their life journeys: born three weeks apart; deprived at an early age of their mothers; raised in alien households; failed to complete high school; drawn to California as a means of reinventing themselves. Mather, like Weston, had publicly exhibited her photographs. Her photograph titled “Maid of Arcady,’’ depicting a nude woman (possibly Mather herself) standing in a wood with her back to the camera, was shown at the American Salon and reproduced in American Photography. It was considered daring for its time.

Mather proposed to Weston that they establish a camera club devoted to aesthetic photography, to be called the Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles. This represented a west coast version of Stieglitz’s efforts in New York to promote photography as a fine art form commensurate with other fine arts, such as painting, sculpture, and music. Photography at the time was considered by critics to be a craft, not an art, because it relied on a machine rather than the human hand. But as Weston would later point out in a talk that he gave at a college in California, musicians also relied on machines to create works of art. Just as it was the pianist, not the piano, who performed a beautiful sonata, so it was the photographer, not the camera, who created an aesthetically pleasing image.

Pictorialism was the prevailing style for “art” photography. It derived from the visual aesthetic of contemporary painting, especially the work of James Whistler. Pictorial photography was romantic and decorative. It featured idyllic subject matter, rendered in soft focus with muddy tones. As the title “Maid of Arcady” suggests, pictorial photography was allusive, aiming to evoke a mood rather than to give a strict representation.  By the outbreak of World War I, the aesthetics of pictorial photography were being challenged by the modernist aesthetic of clear, sharp, formal photography as practiced by east coast artists such as Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler. This modernist aesthetic had reached New York with the exhibition of work by Picasso, Kandinsky, Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, and many other European artists at the famous Armory Show of 1913. But modernism did not arrive in Los Angeles until the end of the war, and it came through the architecture of Rudolf Schindler and Frank Lloyd Wright. Mather and Weston continued to work in the pictorial mode until the nineteen twenties, although the formal elements of modernism (clean lines, abstractions, geometric shapes) began to appear in their photographs even while the treatment remained “pictorial.”

During the war years, the collaboration between Mather and Weston continued. They exhibited at the same salons, and photographed each other, with Mather sometimes posing nude. Mather’s connection to the movie world through Ellsworth and Chaplin gave her opportunities to photograph celebrities such as Nijinsky and Rudolf Valentino, as well as the writer Max Eastman and his lover Florence Deshon, who became Chaplin’s mistress as well. When Carl Sandburg came to Los Angeles in 1921 on a lecture tour, Mather and Weston photographed him standing on a bridge. Weston by then considered Mather his full partner and they began co-signing their studio work. They had become cultural celebrities in their own right, often mentioned in the entertainment section of the Los Angeles Times.

Mather also brought Weston into the orbit of political radicals such as Emma Goldman, Bill Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World, and the photographer Johan Hagemeyer, a pacifist who lived in San Francisco and worked for a short while as Weston’s studio assistant in exchange for room and board. Though Weston’s sympathies lay with these leftists, he was not and never would be politically active. He kept his focus on photography as an art form and had no interest in using it as a tool of social protest and reform, even during the Depression, when documentary photography became ascendant through the work of Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. The Espionage Act of 1917 put many of Mather’s and Weston’s friends in jeopardy. Emma Goldman and her lover Alexander Berkman were deported to Russia in December 1919, and in 1920 Weston’s friend Hagemeyer left the country to escape harassment by the government.

The personal relationship between Weston and Mather seems to have been fraught with uncertainty and instability, a reflection of Mather’s character. Mather sometimes disappeared mysteriously, offering Weston no explanation. She took other lovers, and may have been in a lesbian relationship with Florence Reynolds, a wealthy woman who became her benefactress, giving her a lifetime lease on Mather’s studio on Bunker Hill. Her friend Florence Deshon said of her, “She never accomplishes anything and has excuse after excuse . . . She is very stubborn.” (Warren, p. 75)

In April 1921, two months after forming his studio partnership with Mather, Weston began an affair with Tina Modotti, an actress working in Hollywood and passing herself as the wife of Roubaix de l’Abrie Richey (Robo), a writer and painter who was making plans to move to Mexico City to open a studio. Weston’s marriage to Flora was broken, but they now had four sons to care for. Lawrence Neil Weston had been born on December 6, 1916, and Cole Weston followed on January 30, 1919. Weston’s studio business was supporting them, but he was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with his work as a portrait photographer and wanted the freedom to pursue his fine art photography. He felt both confined by and obligated to his family.

Robo had been invited by Ricardo Robelo, a Mexican official recently appointed Director of the Department of Fine Arts at the Ministry of Education in Mexico City, to take up a teaching position there. Modotti was to join him as soon as she completed work on two films. Robo suggested to Weston that he join them in Mexico City, and set about arranging an exhibition at the Academia de Bellas Artes that would include work by Weston and Mather. Robo died from smallpox two months after arriving in Mexico City. Modotti had rushed to Mexico to be with him, but was forbidden entry to his hospital room. She completed arrangements for the exhibition that Robo had planned, then went to San Francisco, where her family lived, to attend the funeral of her father.

During the period when Modotti was in San Francisco with her family, Weston visited his sister May and her husband in Middletown, Ohio, where they had moved. While staying with them he made a photograph of the American Rolling Mill Company that marked his transition from pictorialism to modernism.  Weston framed the steel mill close up from below, filling the frame with the strong vertical columns of the smoke stacks crossed by the dark horizontals of thick pipes. The image was in sharp focus; the tones were crisp blacks, whites, and grays. It was pure form, cold and austere, rendering an industrial plant as an object of aesthetic beauty, not an engine of economic progress. Several years later in his Daybook, Weston remarked the change in his approach to photography from pictorialism to modernism: “Once my aim was to interpret a mood, now to present the thing itself.”  (Daybook, v.2 p.79 October 2, 1928) This principle also underlay the poetics of the modernist William Carlos Williams, who had famously declared in his poem Paterson “No ideas but in things.”

Weston’s new vision was reinforced when, with financial help from May and her husband, he continued on to New York, where he met with Stieglitz, Sheeler, and Strand. Stieglitz, like Weston, had a lover-muse who was also an artist—Georgia O’Keeffe. Weston showed some of his prints to Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, who commented on them, singling out the Aramco image for special praise. He also looked at their work, and was especially moved by Stieglitz’s nude studies of O’Keeffe, and her simple, stark painting of a green apple on a black tray, an image that showed him how universal, abstract forms (a circle and a sphere) could be discovered in ordinary objects. After a seven-week stay in New York during which he rekindled an affair with the dancer Jo Kellogg, Weston returned to Glendale to prepare for a trip to Mexico with Modotti. He planned to take his son Chandler with him. He and Flora were now living apart, she in their house, he in his studio.

Weston’s departure for Mexico with Modotti and Chandler was originally scheduled for March 2023, but was delayed numerous times for a variety of reasons that became a cause for joking amongst Weston’s friends. Regardless of the ostensible impediments, the underlying reason may have been Weston’s conflict about leaving his family for his camera and his lover. He wrote a letter to Stieglitz that exposed his dilemma.

To reconcile a certain side of one’s life to another—to accept a situation without at the same time destroying another—to coordinate desires which pull first this way—then that—to know or try to know what is best for those one has brought into the world—and even knowing—to be able to do that “best” without satisfying yourself—looms as an almost hopeless problem—and makes one wonder the “why” of this whole mad life—

I feel myself in a critical period of readjustment—change—and yet through it all in the ever increasing urge to lose myself in work—I may have been overwhelmed at times—faltered—made mistakes—but I have never lost the desire to grasp that intangible something which haunts my ground glass—It almost seems at times I must be cruel—or else give up my own desires—for there are those whom one has loved—still love—and though they stimulate—they also drag—hold back—involve—destroy a certain singleness of purpose—clutter up the background—barricade the foreground—until I wonder if I am a weakling because I stand it or for the same reason very strong! . . . (Warren Artful Lives, p. 290 – Letter to Alfred Stieglitz, July 12, 1923 AS/GO Archive, Yale)

When the day for departure finally did arrive, Weston was seen off at the port by Flora, Brett, Neil, and Cole. Mather was not there. Weston later learned from his friend Ramiel McGehee of the anguish felt by his family at his leaving. Brett was especially despondent. “I felt so sorry for him the day you left—he felt your going more than anyone—there was nothing left for him to cling to—only blind unreasoning woe—he knew something inexplicable was happening and as long as it was unexplainable—why should it happen?” Cole later recalled being “left on the damn dock – – – it was more than I could handle.” (Maddow, p.116) From Mexico, Weston wrote his family trying to justify the rupture and gloss over the nature of his relationship with Modotti.

Let me repeat what I once told you—that it was I who planned the whole trip—upon hearing that she [Modotti] intended coming here to live—I saw my opportunity—just as I did when Robo was alive and was to share his studio—a fine friendship exists between Tina and myself—nothing else. (Maddow, p. 96)

With Flora, Weston attempted to maintain the fiction that his relationship with Modotti was strictly professional. She would serve as his assistant and, with her knowledge of Spanish, facilitate his work in Mexico. In exchange for these services, Weston would teach her photography. But of course Flora was not fooled. Weston was duplicating with Modotti the relationship he had formed with Mather, a pattern that would continue throughout his life.

Modotti was ten years younger than Weston, and at 5’1”, a good physical match for the diminutive photographer. She was born August 16, 1896 in Udine, an ancient commercial town in northeast Italy, near the border with Austria. At the time of her birth, Udine was a center of conflict between the populace and the monarchy. Modotti’s father, Giuseppe, worked as a mechanic and was active in the socialist movement that had also attracted Benito Mussolini. Her mother Assunita was a tailor. The family included seven children.

In August 1905 Giuseppe emigrated to the United States, living first in Pennsylvania with his brother before settling permanently in San Francisco. In stages, he brought the rest of his family to live with him. As a teenager in Udine, Tina was employed as a silk spinner. She also spent considerable time in the photographic studio of her uncle Pietro, who had gained an international reputation for his portraits. In June 1913 she emigrated to the United States, joining her family in San Francisco, which at the time was home to a large Italian population. She worked first as seamstress for a department store, but her sensuous beauty was noticed and before long she was modeling clothes for I. Magnin. She also performed in Italian theatricals.

In 1915 she met Robo, who introduced her to the bohemian world of San Francisco. In 1917, presenting themselves as a married couple, Modotti and Robo moved to Los Angeles, where their home became a gathering place for the city’s bohemian crowd. It was probably at one of their salons that Modotti and Weston met.

As the ship transporting Modotti and Weston to Mexico steamed south from Los Angeles, Weston made an entry in his Daybook that expresses his relief at shedding the burdens and responsibilities of life with Flora.

At last we are Mexico bound, after months of preparation, after such endless delays that the proposed adventure seemed but a conceit of the imagination never actually to materialize. Each postponement became a joke to our friends and a source of mortification to us. But money had to be raised, and with rumors of my departure many last minute sittings came in, each securing our future. Nor was it easy to uproot oneself and part with friends and family—there were farewells that hurt like knife thrusts.

But I adapt myself to change—already Los Angeles seems part of a distant past. The uneventful days—the balmy air has relaxed me—my overstrained nerves are eased. I begin to feel the actuality of this voyage. (Daybook v.1, p. 13 July ?, 1923)

The Mexico that awaited Modotti and Weston was still in the throes of turmoil caused by the years of revolution that began in 1910 with the ouster of the dictator Porfirio Diaz by Francisco Madera. The revolution lasted ten years, and was marked by treachery, assassinations, guerilla warfare led by Pancho Villa in the north and Emilio Zapata in the south, and numerous changes of leadership.

Alvaro Obregón became President of Mexico in 1920 and sought to end the factionalism that had disrupted life in Mexico for a decade. He implemented land reform, increased the education budget, promoted literacy, and encouraged cultural nationalism. His policies gave rise to the mural movement led by Diego Rivera, José Orozco, and David Siqueiros that celebrated Mexican history and championed the goals of the revolution. All of these artists would play important roles in the careers of Modotti and Weston.

Although Obregón had stabilized Mexico, when Modotti and Weston arrived in August 1923 he faced a political and military challenge from his Minister of Finance, Adolfo de la Huerta. Obregón secured his hold on power by negotiating a treaty with the United States that provided reparations for land and property taken under an article of the 1917 constitution. By recognizing US holdings established before 1917, the treaty gained Mexico diplomatic recognition from the United States, thus opening the door to further foreign investment. De la Huerta objected to the treaty and launched a rebellion against Obregón that got underway not long after Modotti and Weston settled into their apartment in Mexico City. Three days before they sailed from Los Angeles, Pancho Villa was assassinated while driving his car down a street in the city of Parral, Chihuahua. Mexico’s turbulent politics were a continuous backdrop for the artistic activities of Modotti and Weston while they lived there together, and affected them in radically different ways.

Modotti, Chandler, and Weston reached Mexico on August 4, when their ship docked at Mazatlan. They went ashore, and Weston recorded his first impressions in his Daybook. “We found life both gay and sad—sharp clashes of contrasting extremes, but always life—vital, intense, black and white, never gray.”  (Daybook, v.1 p. 14 August 4, 1923) They disembarked in Manzanillo, then took the train to Mexico City, arriving there on August 11. Their first residence was in Tacubaya, a forty-minute trolley ride from the center of the city. Weston made one of his first Mexican photographs there, Tina in left profile, sitting on the doorstep of their house, dressed in black, gazing pensively out of the frame. Weston described the simplicity of his room in terms that echo both the austerity of his lifestyle and the pure aesthetic formality of his photographs: “A whitewashed room; the furniture shall be black, the doors have been left as they were, a greenish blue, and then in a blue Puebla vase I’ll keep red geraniums.” (Daybook, v.1 p. 17 August 4, 1923)

After a month they moved to an apartment in Mexico City, having discovered that Tacubaya had no phone service, without which they could not conduct the business of the portrait studio that would be their principal source of support.

Modotti had been to Mexico twice before. In 1920 she performed the role of a Mexican servant in the Hollywood movie Tiger’s Coat that was partially filmed in Mexico. And in 1922 she spent a month there managing the exhibition of Weston’s and Mather’s photographs that Robo had organized before he died. She spoke Spanish and knew some of the important artists and political figures who were reshaping Mexico’s culture under Obregón’s government. She took Weston to view the murals of Diego Rivera, and introduced the two men. Rivera became an enthusiastic supporter of Weston’s work, and Weston in turn photographed Rivera’s wife Lupe in a famous heroic portrait.

They also attended a corrida, whose elegant and brutal ritual fascinated Weston. He brushed aside the suffering of the horses and the bull as unavoidable for the nobler symbolism of the event. “The blood and suffering are but means to an end—like the music—the color—the hot sun—the bellowing bull—that of aesthetic gratification. Yes, I shall go again.”  (Daybook, v.1 p. 29 October 30, 1923) Weston’s certainty of the supremacy of aesthetics over other values was reflected in the priorities of his own life, in which all considerations were subordinate to the demands of his art.

Weston and Modotti had been in Mexico less than a month when his romantic attachment to her began to fray. On September 1 he wrote in his Daybook, “Barefoot, kimono-clad, Tina ran to me through the rain—but something has gone from between us. Curiosity, the excitement of conquest and adventure is missing. ‘Must desire forever defeat its end?’” (Daybook, v. 1 p. 20 September 1, 1920) Weston sought in his relationships with women the same thrill he felt when discovering a beautiful image on his ground glass. Once the image was fixed and printed, he moved on to a new subject, seeking to replicate the joy of first discovery. A steady, predictable, dependable relationship, such as he had with Flora, brought on creative death.

Weston began a light romance with Elisa Guerrero, a pretty young woman, sister of Xavier Guerrero, an artist and political radical whom Modotti had known in Los Angeles and may have romanced. Modotti was open to sexual relations with men, a feature of her character that made Weston jealous. He wrote of her in his Daybook, “There is a certain inevitable sadness in the life of a much-sought-for, beautiful woman, one like Tina especially, who not caring sufficiently for associates among her own sex, craves camaraderie and friendship from men as well as sex love.” (Daybook, v. 1 p.58 March 23, 1924)

Modotti’s connections in Mexico City helped Weston establish his artistic presence there. She arranged an exhibition of his photographs at the Aztec Land Gallery. The exhibit opened on October 30 and drew large crowds, including Rivera and his wife. Weston sold eight prints, six of which were nudes of Mather. Weston was delighted with his reception by the artistic community of the city. “I have never before had such an intense and understanding appreciation – – – Yet viewing my work day after day on the walls has depressed me greatly, for I know how few of them are in any degree satisfying to me, how little of what is within me has been released.” (Daybook, v.1 p.25 October 30, 1923)

Modotti and Weston were supporting themselves with studio work, supplemented by occasional sales of Weston’s prints. Although they lived near the poverty level, they afforded a servant, Elisa, who kept house for them in exchange for room and board and fifteen pesos ($7.50) per month. They were often short of funds and behind in their rent. Weston wrote periodically to Flora requesting money, which she provided from her income as a schoolteacher. Once they borrowed money from Elisa, who had been saving her salary. Yet they led a busy social life, holding weekly open houses at their apartment and spending evenings at the home of Tomas Braniff, a wealthy Mexican who patronized the arts. In May 1924 they moved again, to a cheaper apartment in a less desirable part of the city.

Weston and Modotti were photographing continuously around the city and on excursions into the countryside. Weston found plentiful subject matter, though he shunned the conventionally picturesque. “Life is intense and dramatic, “ he wrote. “I do not need to photograph premeditated postures, and there are sunlit walls of fascinating surface textures, and there are clouds! They alone are sufficient to work with for many months and never tire.” (Daybook, v.1 p. 20 September 1, 1923)

In addition to this ordinary subject matter that surrounded him and that he sought to transform into abstract shapes, Weston made portraits of their Mexican friends: the painters Diego Rivera, Rafael Sala, and Jean Charlot, the general Manuel Hernández Galván who took them on shooting expeditions, D.H. Lawrence, Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo), the theoretician behind Mexico’s mural movement, and his lover Nahui Olin, among others. And he made many photographs of Modotti, capturing both her beauty and her melancholy. He described “Tina With Tear” in his Daybook: “She leaned against the whitewashed wall. I drew close – – -and kissed her. A tear rolled down her cheek—and then I captured forever the moment.” (Daybook, v. 1 p. 46 January 30, 1924) This comment conveys the magic of photography for Weston—its ability to turn a fleeting moment of time into art.

He made a number of nude studies of Modotti, taken on the rooftop of their apartment, where she liked to sunbathe. In the most famous one, clearly erotic, she lies on her back, her arms folded under her rib cage, pushing it up to add sculptural lines flowing from the shape of her breasts. She stretches languidly across the frame, her head in the lower left corner, her legs cropped above the knees in the upper right hand corner. Her head is turned sideways, chin resting on her right shoulder. Her eyes are closed, as though she has removed herself from the scene and surrendered her body to the voyeuristic gaze of the camera. Weston presents her to us as a beautiful object to be ravished by our eyes.

As he photographed in Mexico, Weston’s modernist aesthetic solidified. “The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh – – – The approach to photography is through realism.” (Daybook, v. 1 p.55 March 6, 1924)

Modotti made rapid progress as Weston’s apprentice. Her early photographs of flowers and church interiors show the influence of Weston’s formalist aesthetic, but her images are softer, more sensuous, lighter in tone. She photographed Weston with his camera, and made portraits of their friends Jean Charlot and Carleton Beals that bring out the sensitivity of her subjects. Over time, Modotti’s eye was drawn to human subjects in social settings through which she could convey her empathy for Mexico’s underclass. She made photographs of a woman nursing, of a laborer’s rough hands on the handle of a shovel, of battered feet in worn sandals, of a workers’ parade. She was at pains to justify the social dimension of her photography to the formalist Weston. “I cannot—as you proposed to me ‘solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art’ – – -there should be an even balance of both elements while in my case life is always struggling to predominate and art naturally suffers.” (Lowe, p. 26) This divergence in their views of the function of photography reflected a similar divergence in their views of the useful life. Weston was devoted to the art of his camera; Modotti’s response to the suffering she saw around her in Mexico was radical political activism. This divergence was one of the factors that would ultimately separate them.

By the middle of 1924 Weston was questioning whether he should remain in Mexico. Modotti’s promiscuity—at night lovers came to her room adjoining Weston’s in their apartment—was causing him distress. He was wearying of the struggle for money, and troubled by Mexico’s political instability. But most of all he missed his children. “I am most assuredly not mentally calm. The ghosts of my children haunt, their voices, their very accents ring in my ears. Cole’s merry laugh, Neil’s wistful smile, and blue-eyed Brett’s generous gestures. Some solution must come; I need them, they need me.” (Daybook, v. 1 p.57 March 6, 1924) He planned to return to California in July, but delayed the trip until December. In the interim, he exhibited new work at the Aztec Land Gallery and held a joint show with Modotti at Palacio de Minéria. He and Chandler left by train on December 28. In his absence, Modotti would run the studio, as Mather was doing in Glendale while he remained in Mexico.

After Weston returned to Glendale, he and Flora lived apart, he in their house with the boys, she at her parents’ home, which was empty. The gloom that had driven him to Mexico quickly revived, and he resolved to return there. His incompatibility with Flora, and his antagonism towards the culture of Los Angeles, alienated him. Of Flora he had written in his Daybook, while waiting for a money order from her to arrive, “Yes, Flora, you are generous and you mean so well, and you have written me so beautifully. But when I think of living in the same house with you, or near you, my reactions are definite. It cannot be. Yet—I wish to be near my children—The desire is strong.” (Daybook, v.1 p. 48 February 6, 1924) He had also recorded his contempt for the city where he had built his life and photographic career. “Give me Mexico, revolutions, small-pox, poverty, anything but the plague spot of America—Los Angeles. All sensitive, self-respecting persons should leave there. Abandon the city of uplifters.” (Daybook, v. 1 p. 43 January 1, 1924)

In February Weston went to San Francisco, taking Neil with him. He attempted to support himself with studio portrait sittings, but met with small success. He visited the Modotti family, and photographed Tina’s sister Mercedes nude. He re-established contact with Johan Hagemeyer, then living down the coast in Carmel, and exhibited with him in a show at Gump’s department store that failed to bring sales. Neil, bored, returned to Los Angeles, and in June Weston followed. Before he left, he burned his journals covering the years of his collaboration with Mather, an act he later regretted.

Back in Los Angeles, Weston photographed and conducted affairs with Miriam Lerner and Christel Gang. Lerner was a former girlfriend of Hagemeyer. Weston had met her before leaving for Mexico and began a relationship with her shortly after he and Chandler returned. He met Christel Gang at an exhibition of his work held at the Japanese Club in Los Angeles in August. He maintained relationships with both women for several years, corresponding with Lerner after she moved to Paris. On August 21, deeply dissatisfied with the outcome of his eight-month stay in California, Weston sailed again for Mexico, this time bringing Brett with him. After his arrival in Mexico, Weston summarized in his Daybook the photographic output of his time in California. “The majestic old boats at anchor in an estuary across from San Francisco, Neil who, naked, seems most himself, the full bloom of Miriam’s body, responsive and stimulating, the gripping depths of Johan’s neurasthenia, —the all-over pattern of huddled houses beneath my studio window on Union Street—in these varied approaches I have lately seen life through my camera.” (Daybook, v.1, p. 129 August 21, 1925)

Modotti and the servant girl Elisa met them in Guadalajara, where, at the State Museum, Modotti had arranged a joint show of their work that was glowingly reviewed by the muralist David Siqueiros. In Weston’s absence, Modotti had continued to run their studio, but her focus had shifted to political activity. Her apartment became a meeting place for the city’s artists, intellectuals, and activists, including Xavier Guerrero, who became her lover. Guerrero was a member of the Communist Party. Through him, Modotti became involved with International Red Aid, a leftist version of the Red Cross. She also wrote for El Machete, a workers and peasants newspaper founded by Siqueiros, Rivera, and Guerrero that became the official publication of Mexico’s Communist Party. She continued her photography, but put her camera in the service of social concerns—the plight of workers and the poor, the status of women. She also posed nude for a Rivera mural and may have become his lover, according to her biographer Letizia Argenteri. Argenteri observed of Modotti, “In Tina’s heart and mind there was a vacuum that the Communist Party filled as no man could ever fill. The Party gave her a sense of belonging and a sense of identity.” (Argenteri p. 98)

At Weston’s return to life in Mexico with Modotti, the basis of their relationship had shifted from romance to friendship and professional collaboration. Weston began an affair with a young Indian girl who had come to live with them, Elena, the sister of their housekeeper Elisa. It was during this period that Weston produced his famous photograph of the porcelain toilet that has become one of his most iconic images. He spent months photographing the “excusado” in their apartment, experimenting with different camera angles, lighting conditions, and backgrounds. He fretted that someone in the apartment would need to use the toilet just as the right image appeared on his ground glass. He was searching for pure form in a prosaically utilitarian object.

As do many of Weston’s still lifes—especially his later studies of vegetables—his presentation of the toilet invites comparisons with the human form. The front of the toilet supporting the bowl looks strikingly like a male human torso—upper chest, abdomen, pelvis, upper thighs. The bowl rests on it like a giant sombrero. The toilet gleams white, like marble, against the dark mosaic tile floor. The volumes of the bowl and the stand call to mind the sculptures of Brancusi and Jean Arp. Weston remarked the similarities between the toilet and the human form in his Daybook. “Here was every sensuous curve of the ‘human form divine’ but minus the imperfections.” (Daybook, v. 1 p. 132 October 3, 1925)

Weston found perfection in the human form with a nude study he made of Anita Brenner, an anthropologist investigating Mexican cultural history. He photographed her from behind against a black background, bent over as though in child’s pose. Her body takes on the shape of a pear, pure abstraction. The crease in her buttocks is the only evidence that we are looking at a human figure. Weston was thrilled with the image. “I am seldom so happy as I am with the pear-like nude of A. I turn to it again and again. I could hug the print in sheer joy. It is one of my most perfect photographs.” (Daybook, v. 1 p. 147 January 15, 1926) Weston’s delight in abstracting the human form reveals how far his aesthetic had diverged from the work of Modotti, who was photographing people she encountered on the street, emphasizing their individuality and social context. In Mexico, Weston’s eye sought form; Modotti’s heart found compassion.

Modotti went to San Francisco in December to attend her ailing mother. Shortly after her return in March, Weston was approached by Brenner to accompany her on a tour of Mexico photographing culturally significant decorative arts, many of which were to be found in churches. Weston was tiring of Mexico and planned to leave at the conclusion of the tour. The tour was delayed by postponement of Weston’s payment from the National University, which was sponsoring the project. Weston was contracted to produce four hundred prints. He was also making photographs for a book Brenner was co-authoring with Alfonso Pallares on decorative arts. The book was published in 1929 as Idols Behind Altars.

The Mexico tour was arduous. They were plagued with bad weather, and social unrest interfered with the work. The Cristeros Rebellion had erupted, a reaction against anti-clerical laws in the 1917 constitution that weakened the Catholic Church. The Church responded by refusing to provide religious services, enraging worshippers. Though carrying letters of introduction from the University, Weston, Modotti, and Brenner were often met with suspicion and distrust when they sought to enter churches throughout the country to photograph decorative features.

Weston was becoming increasingly disillusioned with Mexico in the wake of the murder of his friend Galván, shot in a Mexico City tavern. During a stay in Guadalajara, where violence erupted, Weston wrote in his Daybook, “Mexico breaks one’s heart. Mixed with the love I had felt was a growing bitterness, a hatred I tried to resist. I have seen faces, the most sensitive, tender faces the gods could possibly create, and I have seen faces to freeze one’s blood, so cruel, so savage, so capable of any crime.” (Daybook, v. 1 p. 184 June 3, 1926)

At the conclusion of the tour in August, Weston worked doggedly to print all his negatives so he could collect his final payment and leave Mexico. He attended one last corrida on October 25, then left by train with Brett on November 9. Tina saw them off at the station. Weston recorded their parting in his Daybook.

The leaving of Mexico will be remembered for the leaving of Tina. The barrier between us was for the moment broken. Not till we were on the Paseo in a taxi rushing off for the train did I allow myself to see her eyes. But when I did and saw what they had to say, I took her to me—our lips met in an endless kiss, only stopped by a gendarme’s whistle. – – – This time, Mexico, it must be adiós forever. And you, Tina? I feel it must be forever too. (Daybook, v.1 p. 202 November 9, 1926)

Weston never saw Tina again, but they corresponded until her death in 1942.

Weston lived with Flora and the children on his return, and took up work again in his studio. But strains with Flora quickly resurfaced, and he regretted resuming his old way of life. “I should never have returned to my past,” he wrote in his Daybook. “But the boys brought me back here, and here I will stay until I can make some positive, constructive move.” (Daybook, v. 1 p. 3 January 27, 1927) He renewed his affair with Christel Gang and photographed her nude. He also began an affair with Kathleen, “tall and fair with gold-brown hair, hazel eyes, lovely and 21.” Mather came to the studio and yielded to him, though Weston observed that she had been drinking. In February he exhibited photographs at UCLA and was subsequently approached by Bertha Waddell, a dancer who, moved by his images, offered to pose for him. He photographed her nude in various poses, and soon they became lovers. He was also sleeping with Elena, the young Indian girl, who had moved to Los Angeles with Elisa and their mother. Elena worked as a maid for Bertha Waddell. Once, three of Weston’s current lovers came to his studio on the same day, though fortunately at different times. Weston saw them as gifts that fecundated him. “Women are presented to me in abundance so that I may suffer from no inhibitions! I never think of them—nor search them out—for they always appear at the right moment. This is well for my work. How different from those years in Mexico!” (Maddow, p. 157)

Weston continued to refine his aesthetic through pursuit of pure, abstract forms in photographs that he made of the female body, and of ordinary objects such as shells, fruits, and vegetables. Always he looked to the natural world. Of his nudes he remarked, “These simplified forms I search for in the nude body are not easy to find, nor record when I do find them. (Daybook, v. 2 p. 10 March 24, 1927)

During the UCLA exhibit, Weston had met the painter Henrietta Shore, who invited him to her studio. There he discovered her paintings of shells. She loaned him chambered nautiluses, which he took great pains to photograph in very long exposures that would bring out their luminescence. He sent prints of the shell photographs to Modotti along with a letter explaining their significance for him. “It is this very combination of the physical and the spiritual in a shell like the chambered nautilus which makes it such an important abstract of life – – – I knew that I was recording from within, my feeling for life, as I had never had before.” (Maddow, p. 150)

Modotti showed the prints to their painter friends in Mexico. She reported that Orozco said, “This suggests much more ‘The hand of God’ than the hand Rodin made.” (Maddow, p. 150) She noted that one of his compositions had made everyone think of the sexual act. She was referring to an image in which Weston had placed one shell inside the fold of another, so that they appeared coupled, their pearly surfaces looking like human skin. Weston denied any erotic intention, but no one believed him.

He also photographed a cantaloupe and a pumpkin, seeing them as sculpted forms rather than food. “Now I want to see the eternal, basic quintessence each object has and its relation to the great whole,” he wrote. (Daybook, v. 2 p. 46 January 5, 1928) Weston was seeking through his photography a mystical connection to the timeless phenomena of the natural world. But Weston was also a sensualist. “Tonight my pumpkin will achieve its final glorification, in a pumpkin pie. (Daybook, v. 2 p. 46 January 4, 1928) His final act of union with the pumpkin bears comparison with his carnal relationships with many of his models.

Despite his progress with his art, Weston was struggling in his personal life. Relations with Flora remained tense, and he worried that their incompatibility would impair his work. In August, he made a dark entry in his Daybook.

I am deeply concerned about the return of my old bitterness: it will distort or destroy all that is creatively fine within. I thought I could stand her proximity—that I was strong enough, but I am being gradually undermined again. We should be miles apart, for her sake as well, for I know I have the same effect upon her. I would never want to hear of her again, —not even see her handwriting on an envelope: that dreaded handwriting!

But the boys?! (Daybook, v. 2 p. 33 August 6, 1927)

A series of mishaps drove him out. Flora bought a car they could not afford and mortgaged their property to pay for it. When Cole fell from a tree and broke his wrists, Weston became his caregiver, taking him away from his camera and dark room. Brett, sixteen, ran away from home without saying goodbye, then was picked up by police in Modesto for being truant. Flora was injured in a car accident with Chandler driving and was laid up in bed for six weeks. To raise money, Weston sold his father’s archery bow, a collectors’ item. Cole, recovered from his fall, came down with measles. The stress gave Weston swollen glands in his neck. He wrote despairingly in his Daybook, “Oh, if only I had a little shack somewhere in the desert or wilderness, with no possessions.” (Daybook, v. 2 p. 42 January 25, 1928)

To escape his circumstances, Weston made frequent trips to San Francisco, where he stayed with Hagemeyer. He began an affair with a young woman he met at a party, then discovered he was being used to make her boyfriend jealous. In November 1928 he was contracted by the San Francisco Daily News to photograph prominent citizens in the city. With the funds from this project he arranged to move to Carmel, to a studio Hagemeyer had been using during summers. Brett was to come with him. He spent Christmas in Glendale with his children, then settled in Carmel with Brett on January 17, 1929.

When Weston settled in Carmel, a charming village facing a small wind-swept bay on the Pacific coast in Monterey County, the community was an artists’ colony just beginning to attract tourists. Hagemeyer had established a summer portrait studio there to serve its well-to-do visitors and residents. The poet Robinson Jeffers lived there in

a stone house he had built by the sea. The writer Lincoln Steffens and his wife Ella Winter were residents, as was Harry Leon Wilson, a popular contemporary writer whose works are now forgotten. Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Sinclair Lewis had all been part-time residents. Professors from Stanford and UC Berkeley had summer cottages there. The milieu was intellectual and sophisticated. The surrounding countryside, especially Point Lobos, was beautiful and wild, just what Weston had been seeking. He was optimistic about his prospects. “This new life should bring fresh stimulus to my work,” he wrote in his Daybook a few days after arriving with Brett. (Daybook, v. 2 p. 107 January 17, 1929)

Just after settling in, Weston received disturbing news from Mexico about Modotti. In 1927, following a demonstration in Mexico City against the death sentences for Sacco and Vanzetti, Modotti had joined Mexico’s Communist Party and made her camera a tool of the party’s communication program. Her lover Xavier Guerrero had left for Moscow, and in his absence Modotti began a relationship with Julio Antonio Mella, a communist who had been expelled from Cuba for his anti-government activities. They met at El Machete and soon lived together.

Mella was involved in plotting a coup against the Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado. On the evening of January 10, 1929, as Mella and Modotti were walking home from a meeting, an assassin murdered Mella. Tolerance for Mexico’s Communist Party was waning under the government of Plutarco Calles, who had seized power after the assassination of Alvaro Obregón during the Cristeros Rebellion. Modotti was accused of being an accomplice in the murder of Mella, although there was no evidence linking her to the crime. She was acquitted of involvement in Mella’s death, but the ordeal humiliated her and she withdrew from political activity in Mexico City to the countryside on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. There, she photographed native women and village life. But her harassment by the Mexican authorities would continue, and Weston would continue to receive news about her.

Weston wanted a female companion to live with him and serve as his photographic assistant, assuming the roles that Mather and Modotti had formerly played. Miriam Lerner was in Paris, Christel Gang was not suitable, and Kathleen had turned him down. But in April he met Sonya Noskowiak at a party organized by Hagemeyer, for whom she worked as receptionist. She was eager to learn photography from Weston and was willing to live as his companion. She moved in with him and Brett.

With Sonya in Carmel, Weston settled into a relatively tranquil and highly productive period during which he pared down his photographic aesthetic to the barest essentials. He exhibited widely and his reputation in fine art circles—museums and galleries—grew. Family issues continued to complicate his life, and his need for the embrace of fair young women persisted.

Weston often took his camera to nearby Point Lobos, a dramatic landscape jutting out into Carmel Bay, its rugged shoreline scalloped with small rocky coves where kelp beds flourished, seals and otters cavorted. Cypress trees twisted into fantastic shapes by the sea winds rose from the bluffs. The setting was wild and rich in unusual natural forms. Weston made close-ups with his camera—the roots of cypress trees, tendrils of kelp strewn above the tide line, carcasses of dead birds, rocks and sea foam in tide pools. He recorded in his Daybook his excitement at these discoveries.

There it [kelp] lay unchanged, twisted, tangled, interwoven, a chaos of convoluted rhythms, from which I selected a square foot, organized the apparently complex maze, and presented it, a powerful integration. This was done of course with no manual arrangement—the selection was entirely my viewpoint as seen through the camera. I get a greater joy from finding things in nature, already composed, than I do from my finest personal arrangements. (Daybook, v. 2 p. 146 March 30, 1930)

In the studio, in addition to his commercial portrait work, Weston was photographing peppers and other vegetables, turning them into metaphors for the human form through his lighting and camera angles. In his concentration on pure form, Weston was approaching a mystical relationship with his subjects. “Many of my last year’s peppers – – – take one into an inner reality, —the absolute, —with a clear understanding, a mystic revealment. This is the ‘significant presentation’ that I mean, the presentation through one’s intuitive self, seeing ‘through one’s eyes, not with them’: the visionary.” (Daybook, v. 2 p. 180 July 21, 1930)

Weston sent prints of his peppers to Modotti in Mexico. She showed them to their painter friends and reported their reactions. Rivera was especially affected, breaking into a sweat when he saw them and wondering if Weston were ill. Weston was not ill. He was working from a deep conviction in the fundamental unity of all his subjects, a unity that he sought to make apparent to the viewer through his photographs. “Clouds, torsos, shells, peppers, trees, rocks, smoke stacks, are but interdependent, interrelated parts of a whole, which is Life. Life rhythms felt in no matter what, become symbols of the whole . . . To see the Thing Itself is essential – – – This then. To photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock.” (Daybook, v. 2 p. 154 April 24, 1930)

As Weston pursued his unique vision, interest in his work from the art world grew, and exhibitions were mounted in museums and galleries across the country, and reviewed in mainstream media such as The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, as well as in more specialized art journals.

In July 1930 Weston was visited by Orozco and his New York gallery representative Alma Reed. Weston made a penetrating portrait of Orozco during this visit, and Reed, impressed with Weston’s work, offered to represent him. He sent fifty prints to her Delphic Studios for a show that was well received by New York’s artistic community. Though Reed sold several of his prints, Weston continued to rely on his commercial portrait work for income, a limitation that he struggled with. In December he went to San Francisco to see Diego Rivera, who was painting a mural in the San Francisco Stock Exchange. Rivera was then married to Frida Kahlo, and Weston photographed them standing together in front of the mural.

In February 1930 Weston had received further news about Modotti. After the death of Mella, she had continued her communist activities and formed a relationship with an Italian communist, Vittorio Vidali, whom she had met at the Sacco-Vanzetti protest. In January 1930 the government had outlawed the Mexican Communist Party, and on February 5 the new president, Ortiz Rubio, was shot in the face while riding in his car. Modotti was arrested on February 7 and accused of involvement in the attack. She was imprisoned for ten days, then given a choice between giving up her communist activities or being deported. She chose to leave Mexico and sailed for Europe from Veracruz on February 24. She traveled under the name Carmen Ruiz Sanchez. Vidali joined her when the ship docked in Tampico. She went first to Berlin, where she tried unsuccessfully to restart her photographic career, then moved to Moscow to join Vidali, who was married to a Russian woman and the father of a girl. She became a Soviet agent and worked with Vidali on Party assignments.

Weston’s search for the simplicity in his personal life that he was finding in his photographs was complicated by ongoing family obligations. Shortly after he and Brett had settled in Carmel, Brett suffered a badly fractured leg when a horse he was riding fell on him. After a lengthy recuperation, he returned briefly to Glendale, but was again with Sonya and Weston in September. He had also become a fine photographer, working from the same aesthetic as his father.

In August 1929 Weston had received the news from Flora that Chandler, age nineteen, had married his girlfriend Maxine, age seventeen. On March 24, 1930, Weston’s birthday, their child Edward Frank Weston was born. Neil had come to live with his father in January, and in May Brett returned from a visit to Glendale bringing Cole with him. Tempers flared, and Brett left to pursue his own photographic path. In August 1930 Cole left for Glendale and Chandler, Maxine, and baby Edward arrived. Brett returned at the end of September, bringing his girlfriend.

The stresses in Weston’s family life came to a boil in February 1931. Cole became ill with diphtheria, and Weston went to Glendale to help care for him. Flora’s clumsy management of the sick boy upset both Weston and his other sons. “She is a hard worker, a slave, one who would die for the children, extravagantly generous, but with qualities which lead to utter confusion,” he wrote in his Daybook after his return to Carmel. “The order she so much desires, and could have with half the effort, is dissipated through her most disorderly mind. I return with memories of Chan and Flora roaring at each other, of Brett telling her to ‘shut up’, or paying no attention at all while she chattered or screamed on. In another room Cole calling for help, going into spasms, half brought on by fear, and intensified the moment Flora entered.” (Daybook, v. 2 p. 204 February 21, 1931)

In the spring Weston broke off relations with Hagemeyer and moved his studio and home to the center of town. Domestic problems continued. Sonya and Maxine did not get along, and Weston wanted Chandler to move out with his family. They left in October, Chandler going to Santa Maria to open a portrait studio. Neil and Cole continued to live with Weston and Sonya. Weston longed for a more hermetic existence.

More and more I am absorbed in my life’s work. I have set a goal: when the boys are finally started in life, I will retire. This means I will find an isolated spot as far away from the general public as possible, a place where only those who have a great desire can reach me, and there I will work undisturbed, sending my prints to city markets. I can live on the sale of four prints a month. (Daybook, v. 2 p. 227 October 14, 1931)

As he had done throughout his career, Weston took on lovers to fertilize his work—Lydia, then Sybil, then Xenia. He was untroubled by his promiscuity, and retained his fondness for Sonya (“She has given me the most peaceful ‘married’ life I have ever had.”), but his passion for her had died. “I love Sonya, but only with tenderness, the calm affection of a friend,” he wrote in his Daybook as he pondered the demands of managing four relationships simultaneously. “And that is not enough for most women, not even the most emancipated; they are basically conservative no matter how intellectually radical.” (Daybook, v. 2 p. 268 January 18, 1933)

In April 1934 Weston met Charis Wilson, the nineteen year-old daughter of the writer Harry Leon Wilson, at a concert in Carmel. They were introduced by her brother Leon, who had befriended Weston. She asked to view his work, but when she came to his studio a few days later he was away in Los Angeles. Sonya showed her some of his prints and suggested that Charis pose for him. On April 17 Weston wrote to Sonya that he wanted his freedom. Five days later, following a session during which Charis posed nude for Weston and drank wine with him, they became lovers.

The young photographer Willard Van Dyke, who had studied under Weston and later made a documentary film about him that won an Academy Award, had this to say about Weston’s reliance on women:

He liked women as companions, as sexual objects. His numerous affairs are legendary. He found each new sexual adventure vastly stimulating as far as his work was concerned . . . He needed assurance that he was loved and wanted, and that women were attracted and were satisfied by him. He was very self-centered, as many artists are . . . What he needed and wanted took precedence. (Maddow p. 181)

Weston’s fondness for women extended to frequently dressing as one when he attended social gatherings, to the amusement of all the guests.

Initially, Weston and Charis kept their relationship clandestine. Fearing scandal in the small Carmel community and the disapproval of her parents, Charis came to Weston’s studio in the early hours before dawn for trysts and wrote to him using a code. Sonya elected to stay with Weston despite his declaration of independence, accepting that she was not Weston’s only love. He continued to sleep with her as well as with Charis.

Charis came from a somewhat dysfunctional family. Her father was a successful novelist and playwright absorbed in his work, with little time to spare for his children, who were attended by servants. Her mother, Helen, had given birth to Leon when she was seventeen and not ready to take on the responsibilities of parenthood. Charis was born a year later, on May 5, 1914. Both parents were remote and unaffectionate, according to Charis’s memoir Through Another Lens.

Charis, like Weston, had been sickly as a child, confined to bed with a heart murmur. At age eleven she was sent to a boarding school in San Francisco, where she learned of her parents’ divorce from a friend. She was expelled from the school for being a bad influence on the other girls.

In 1929 she was living in Hollywood with her mother and attending Hollywood High School. She was offered a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College, but her father refused to supplement it. Instead, she went to secretarial school. She moved to San Francisco to live with a friend, became pregnant, and underwent an abortion from a doctor who was treating her for appendicitis. At the time she met Weston she was adrift, a lonely young woman in need of love.

Weston’s portrait business shrank under the Depression, and in January 1935 he closed his Carmel studio, moved to Santa Monica, and opened a studio there near the beach with Brett. In August, Charis came to Santa Monica and moved in with Weston and Brett. They were soon joined by Neil and Cole, who slept in the garage. Weston was living with his three sons and a mistress their age. Chandler was then living and working in San Francisco, while his son lived with Maxine in Los Angeles.

Weston worried that he would be unable to support himself through photography. A Vogue assignment to photograph Hollywood celebrities brought a temporary reprieve, and yielded portraits of Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper, James Cagney, and Dolores Del Rio. Weston decided to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship that would allow him to travel through the west photographing landscapes. Charis, who had ambitions to be a writer, helped him craft the application. While they waited for the decision, they traveled to Oceano, where Weston photographed the dunes and made nude studies of Charis that complemented the landforms.

In March 1937 Weston received news that he had been awarded two thousand dollars by the Guggenheim Foundation, the first photographer to be funded by it. The grant was supplemented by a contract from Westways, the Automobile Club magazine, to provide ten photographs a month from his travels for publication. Weston bought a car and camping gear and they set off for the California desert with Cole at the wheel. Their plan was to travel in spurts lasting two to three weeks, return to Glendale with the exposed negatives and develop them in Chandler’s studio, resupply themselves, then set out again. Charis saw her role as being the scribe of the trips, keeping a log of all the negatives and building a narrative of their experiences. She wanted to regard herself as Weston’s equal partner in this adventure, and resented Cole’s presence. After their first excursion to Death Valley, they traveled alone.

Over the course of a year, they crisscrossed the American west, photographing the Mojave and Colorado deserts, Yosemite, the Eastern Sierras, Northern California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Weston grew to trust Charis’s vision, and would rest his eyes while she drove, confident that she would stop at promising viewpoints.

As the end of the award year approached, Weston applied for a renewal of the grant. In March 1938 his request was approved for a second year. Before they set out again, Charis’s father was injured in a car accident. While caring for him, Charis and Leon learned that he was in debt, about to lose his home. His friends rallied to provide him with a small monthly income, and he transferred to Charis and Weston his title to a 1.8 acre property in the Carmel Highlands that the bank had re-possessed. The property was located on a hill overlooking Carmel Bay. They managed to pay off the bank debt, and Neil built them a simple one-room house from pine. He later added a writing studio for Charis. They named their home Wildcat Hill for the numerous feral cats that they adopted.

During the second Guggenheim year, their base of operations shifted from Glendale to Wildcat Hill, and they made shorter trips. They revisited some of their previous destinations—Death Valley and Yosemite—and photographed at a number of other California locations. In April 1939 Weston divorced Flora and married Charis in Elk, Mendocino County. On June 19 Harry Leon Wilson died. Charis and Weston concluded their Guggenheim travels with a journey through the Northwest that included a stop in Vancouver, Canada.

While Weston printed from the hundreds of negatives taken in the course of their two-year odyssey around the American west, Charis wrote the accompanying text. The result of their efforts was published in 1940 as California and the West. Authorship was credited to Charis Wilson Weston and Edward Weston. The book included ninety-six photographs taken by Weston and 122 pages of text written by Charis. The book was well-received, and bolstered Charis’s writing ambitions. “The success of California and the West settled any lingering doubts I had about my value as a partner,” she wrote in her memoir. She also ghost wrote for Weston an article on photography published in the Encyclopedia Britannica. But before long she was disabused of the idea that she could consider herself Weston’s full partner.

In February 1941 Weston was invited by the Limited Editions Club to provide illustrations for a special edition of Walt Whitman’s epic American poem Leaves of Grass. Weston took on the assignment with the understanding that his photographs would not be linked directly to Whitman’s lines, but would convey a parallel vision of America as seen through his lens. The contract gave Weston only one thousand dollars, a budget too small to cover accommodations. Their friend Phil Hanna from Westways plotted a route for them through forty-eight states, and they lined up hospitality from friends along the way wherever they could.

They traveled first into the south, passing through Nevada’s Boulder Dam, the Grand Canyon, El Paso, and White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. In Louisiana a rift opened between them that never healed. Charis saw in the trip another opportunity to exercise her literary skills. But when she suggested a short detour to a location that she wanted to write about, Weston refused to go there, saying that it held no photographic interest for him. When Charis pressed her case he said to her, “It’s my grant,” a remark that opened her eyes to the true nature of their relationship. “Suddenly the picture maker had come unstuck from the man I knew, loved, and trusted. He stood there glaring at me with hostile eyes in which I could read myself a drag, a stumbling block, and worst of all—a stranger.” (Wilson p. 255)

Charis withdrew emotionally from Weston at that moment. Before they reached New York, she had fallen in love with another man encountered on their travels. She had dinner with this man in New York in November, but decided against going to bed with him. “My obligation to Edward included marital fidelity,” she wrote in her memoir. (Wilson p. 289)

During this trip, Tina Modotti died in Mexico at age forty-five. She and Vidali had been assigned at the end of 1934 to work in Spain for International Red Aid. Vidali formed the Fifth Regiment there, a militia force of 10,000 men fighting for the Republican side. Modotti joined the women’s section of the regiment. Vidali acquired a reputation for brutality because of his summary executions of prisoners of war. At the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War she and Vidali moved to Paris. As war loomed, she left for New York, again traveling under the name Carmen Ruiz Sanchez. She was detained by immigration, but allowed to proceed on to Veracruz, where Vidali awaited her. Modotti had given up her membership in the Communist Party in 1939 and the president of Mexico had annulled her expulsion.

Modotti was beaten down from her experiences in the Soviet Union and Spain; her Mexican friends found her depressed and withdrawn. She lived in a small apartment in Mexico City and worked as a translator and as an assistant to two American photographers. On January 6, 1942, while riding in a taxi in Mexico City, she suffered a heart attack and died.

With the United States at war with Germany and Japan, Charis and Weston returned to Wildcat Hill and joined the war effort as volunteers in the Aircraft Warning Service. They were issued gas masks, and Weston made satirical photographs of a nude Charis wearing hers. Weston’s sons entered military service. In July, Charis’s brother Leon was sent to prison for resisting the draft as a conscientious objector without religious affiliation.

Charis gradually drifted away from Weston, who fell into a depression that hindered his work. He antagonized her further when he claimed sole credit for a vegetable garden she had planted and landscaped after their Japanese vegetable farmer was interned. She took a job as a postal carrier and began seeing a therapist, who suggested that the job gave her a reason to be away from Weston.

In December 1944 Charis went to Washington to be with her mother, who was dying from cancer. She visited friends in New York, and while there had a one night stand with a stranger. Her mother died in July.

Charis separated from Weston in the fall, and shortly after she left he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He hoped Charis would remain near him, and suggested they build a second home for her on Wildcat Hill. But Charis moved to Los Angeles to stay with a friend, then went to Northern California to investigate a lumber strike. Like Modotti, she had developed political interests. She met Noel Harris, a twenty-seven year old divorcé with a son being raised by his parents. They traveled together until she settled in Reno, Nevada to establish residency for her divorce from Weston. The divorce was granted on December 13, 1946 and on December 14 she married Harris.

Weston purchased Charis’s share of Wildcat Hill for $10,000, paid in monthly installments of sixty dollars, with no interest. His Parkinson’s disease impaired his ability to take photographs, and in 1948 he exposed his final negative at Point Lobos, though he continued to print. With the departure of Charis, Weston’s romancing and his photographic career came to an end. She was the first and only woman—other than his mother—who ended a relationship with Weston on her own terms, and it seemed to break him. His first love, the camera, was also gone.

After Charis left him, Weston wrote to her brother Leon. “I have set up housekeeping, tried to make a permanent home with a woman four times (Flora, Tina, Sonya, Charis) and failed four times. I’m beginning to think the fault is mine, all mine.” (Wilson, p. 348) In 1954, with Weston’s health deteriorating, Flora came to Carmel to care for him, living in a house that their sons built. Edward Weston died on January 1, 1958. He was cremated, and his ashes were strewn at tide’s edge on a beach at Point Lobos.

Chapter Three — Maria Tallchief & George Balanchine : A Pas De Deux

Out on the dusty plains of Oklahoma, on an Osage Indian reservation, far from the glittering concert halls of Paris and St. Petersburg, was born Maria Tallchief, considered by many to have been the greatest American ballerina of the twentieth century. During the 1940s and ‘50s Maria Tallchief and the choreographer George Balanchine dazzled the dance world with their brilliant artistry. Together, they made classical ballet a major performing art in North America and established the New York City Ballet as an iconic institution, emblematic of excellence and innovation in dance. Their unlikely pairing brought together two vastly different cultural strains and traditions: the ancient mystical rituals of the American Indian, and the more recent aristocratic discipline of classical ballet as developed and refined in Russia at the Imperial Theatres. Their long relationship was marked by continuing tension between their allegiance to each other and their dedication to Terpsichore, the muse of dance. Like the dance itself, the pull between life and art is intertwined in their stories.

Dance is one of the oldest forms of human expression, comparable to body language, facial expression, and speech (including sounds) as a means of communication. Images of human figures in dance positions are found on the walls of caves inhabited by Cro-Magnon man, along with drawings of the animals they hunted and depended upon for survival. Early dance was likely a form of mimesis that magically enabled hunters to gain power over their prey. Native American people used dance to gain entrance into the world of the supernatural, seeking control over weather, food supplies, and enemies through ritual movements performed in elaborate costumes and masks made from animal parts and plant fibers.

We know that dance was performed in ancient Greek ceremonies, such as the rites of Dionysus, and in Roman entertainments that used pantomime. Dance entered Western Europe during the Renaissance, when it was adopted by the nobility as a means of displaying social status. It began in the late fifteenth century in Italy as social dances called “balletti” performed by members of the aristocracy. The marriage of Catherine de Medici to Henry II, king of France, brought dance to Paris. In 1570 their son Charles IX established the Académie de Poésie et de Musiqe, an institution created to promote the Platonic ideals of order and harmony in the universe as found in the rhythms and meters of Greek poetry and music. Dance was regarded as a pattern of movements that reflected cosmic laws operating throughout nature. By dancing, man was participating in this cosmic order, and elevating himself above his purely animal nature.

In seventeenth century France, dance became an elaborate ritual of the court known as “ballet de cour.” Dance was used by the monarchy as an instrument of political control through which courtiers showed their deference to and veneration of the king. Louis XIV established a system of court etiquette based on strict hierarchies conveyed through movement.  There were codes for bowing, offering your hand, or carrying a fan, amongst other gestures.

In 1662 Louis XIV founded the Royal Academy of Dance to advance the art of dancing. His ballet master, Pierre Beauchamps, codified the five basic foot positions that remain the foundation for all ballet steps. Beauchamps designed “la belle danse,” an elaborate show of nobility performed exclusively by men wearing costumes and masks. Classical ballet, as we now think of it, evolved from “la belle danse” and “ballet de cour.” Seven years later Louis XIV established the Royal Academy of Music, which has come down to us as the Paris Opera, and in 1713 a formal school was started there to train professional dancers, including women.

Ballet spread to other European capitals, such as London and Copenhagen, as an indicator of cultural enlightenment. In St. Petersburg, Peter the Great imported ballet masters from France and Italy in an effort to westernize Russian culture. In 1766 Catherine the Great formed state theatres for music, drama, and dance in St. Petersburg that included a Franco-Italian opera and ballet. The dance theatre became known as the Maryinsky and later the Kirov Ballet. In 1783 the Bolshoi Stone Theatre was built in Moscow to house opera and ballet. Bolshoi dancers were serfs who had been trained by their overlords to perform in service to the state. The dancers’ subservience to a state mandated regimen persists today in the culture of the Bolshoi Ballet and in the attitude of Russian dancers towards their profession.

Following Russia’s defeat of France in the War of 1812, Russian ballet began to draw from its own cultural heritage for its themes and subject matter. Ballets that remain popular today, such as The Firebird and Swan Lake, are built on Russian themes and music. The Firebird, based on a Russian folk tale, was first presented in 1822. Swan Lake was first performed in 1877 at the Bolshoi Theatre to music by Tchaikovsky. This was followed by productions of The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and The Nutcracker (1892), both to music by Tchaikovsky, at the Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. The ballets choreographed by the French ballet master Marius Petipa during this period became the basis for classical dance in the twentieth century.

Russian ballet was brought to the West through the efforts of the famed impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Diaghilev settled in Paris and in 1909 founded Ballets Russes, a company whose members included Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, Michel Fokine, and Nijinsky’s sister Bronislava Nijinska. Ballets Russes’ productions of The Firebird and The Rite of Spring, both to music by Igor Stravinsky, astonished Parisian audiences and marked the beginning of the modern era in ballet.

One of the young dancers at the Imperial Theatres was a striking young man named Georgi Melitonovich Balanchivadze. He was admitted to the Imperial Ballet School in 1913, a year before the outbreak of war and the temporary disbandment of Ballets Russes. He was nine years old. Homesick, and reluctant at first to become a dancer, his attitude changed during a performance of The Sleeping Beauty on the stage of the Maryinsky Theatre when as a member of the corps de ballet he first experienced the thrill of dancing for an audience.

The school closed for a year following the Bolshevik Revolution and during this interval Balanchivadze lived with his aunt in St. Petersburg and survived doing odd jobs, including playing piano in silent movie theaters. He resumed his training in 1918, graduated in 1921, and entered the Conservatory of Music in St. Petersburg, where he studied for three years while performing as a dancer for the Maryinsky. His schooling had grounded him in both music and dance.

Balanchivadze began choreographing in 1920, when he was sixteen. In 1923 he formed his own company, composed of dancers from the Imperial School, and presented a program in St. Petersburg that earned the disapproval of the theatre’s artistic director, who forbade the dancers to perform Balanchivadze’s choreography. Feeling stifled creatively, Balanchivadze and his business partner Vladimir Dimitriev took a small company of dancers on a tour of Western Europe that included stops in Berlin, London, and Paris. The dancers included Alexandra Danilova, Tamara Geva (Balanchivadze’s wife), Nicholas Efimov, and Balanchivadze. In Paris, they auditioned for Ballets Russes, and Diaghilev invited them to join his company. A year later, in 1925, Balanchivadze displaced Bronislava Nijinska as choreographer for Ballets Russes. Diaghilev changed his name to George Balanchine. A knee injury in 1926 curtailed his dancing career, limiting him to character roles. Balanchine remained with Ballets Russes as choreographer until its demise after the death of Diaghilev in 1929.

* * *

As Balanchine was beginning his career as a choreographer, on January 24, 1925 Maria Tallchief (Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief) was born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, culturally about as far away from Paris and the world of Ballets Russes as one could get. Yet she was destined to become Balanchine’s wife and prima ballerina, and to be the dancer who brought critical acclaim to Balanchine’s New York City Ballet at its inception. How did their lives come together?

Marie’s father, Alexander Tall Chief, was a full blood Osage Indian independently wealthy on royalties from oil deposits found on Osage land. His grandfather Peter Big Heart had played a significant role in securing mineral rights for the tribe during its negotiations with the federal government for land in Oklahoma. Alexander was a widower with three children from his first marriage when he met Ruth Porter, who had come to Fairfax to visit her sister, then employed as cook and housekeeper for Alexander’s mother. Alexander and Ruth had two other children together, Gerald, who was permanently maimed by a horse kick to his head, and Marjorie (born October 19, 1926), who also became a ballerina.

Ruth had aspirations for her daughters to become performing artists. Marie received her first ballet lesson at age three while the family was vacationing in Colorado Springs, and she also studied the piano from an early age. When Marie was five, she began taking ballet lessons in Fairfax from a Mrs. Sabin, who prematurely put her on pointe, nearly ruining her feet. Ruth arranged for Marie and Marjorie to perform at county fairs and rodeos in Oklahoma, giving them their first public exposure.

In 1933 Ruth brought the family to Los Angeles to gain access to the world of show business. She enrolled both sisters in Ernest Belcher’s School of Dancing. Belcher was an Englishman who had come to America just before the outbreak of World War I accompanying a touring troupe of dancers as a solo dancer performing between acts. The son of a butcher, he had studied ballet in London and built a career dancing with female partners in English music halls. In Los Angeles, Belcher found success as a teacher and choreographer working in the fledgling motion picture industry. He directed dance sequences and coached actors in movement in over two hundred films, and worked with such luminaries as Mack Sennett, D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. De Mille, Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire, and Gloria Swanson. Belcher immediately recognized that the technique Marie had learned from Mrs. Sabin was faulty, and he started her over with fundamentals of the five basic positions and the steps that proceeded from them. Marie credited Belcher with giving her the foundation on which her career as a dancer was built.

Belcher introduced Marie to Bronislava Nijinska, then living in Los Angeles and running her own dancing school. Nijinska would become instrumental in Tallchief’s rapid rise through the ranks of ballerinas. In 1937 Marie began taking lessons from Nijinska and through her made a direct link to Ballets Russes. In the summer of 1940, when she was fifteen, Marie performed as principal soloist in a production of Nijinska’s choreography for Chopin Concerto at the Hollywood Bowl. Marie also took lessons from Mia Slavenska, a former ballerina with Sergei Denham’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, the successor to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Slavenska introduced Marie to Denham when he was in Los Angeles scouting for talent at Nijinska’s school, and Denham showed interest in Marie’s dancing.

Encouraged by his attention, Marie accompanied Nijinska to New York after graduation from Beverly Hills High School in the summer of 1942. Once in New York, she enrolled in the School of American Ballet, where Balanchine was teaching, and met him briefly during a dinner at the Russian Tea Room. Marie secured an audition for Denham, but was told there was no room in the company, which was about to embark on a tour of Canada. But then, through a series of fortuitous events, Tallchief obtained a position in the company. When one of the dancers in the corps de ballet lacked papers to enter Canada, Marie was hired to replace her, and at the end of the tour Denham invited her to join Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo as an apprentice dancer, replacing a dancer who had become pregnant. Her career as a professional dancer was launched.

Nijinska was then choreographing for Ballet Russe and made Marie the understudy to Alexandra Danilova, the company’s prima ballerina, arousing the envy of other corps dancers with more seniority. Danilova mentored Marie and became a role model for her. In October 1942 Marie was given a walk-on role in Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo. It was de Mille who suggested that she change her name to Maria and spell Tall Chief as one word, which to American ears would sound Russian. In May 1943, in Philadelphia, Tallchief was asked to dance a soliste role in Chopin Concerto when Nathalie Krassovska injured her foot. Tallchief danced the role for the remainder of the tour and established herself as a soloist. In less than a year she had achieved a position of prominence in the company that most dancers waited five years to reach. Tallchief later acknowledged the important role that Nijinska had played in her rapid rise. In her autobiography she wrote: “It was from Madame Nijinska that I first understood that the dancer’s soul is in the middle of the body and that proper breathing is essential.” (Tallchief, p. 16)

In 1944 George Balanchine joined Ballet Russe as choreographer. Since the demise of the original Ballets Russes he had led a peripatetic life, moving from one ballet company to another and often working as a freelance choreographer. While still associated with Ballets Russes, Balanchine had fallen in love with Danilova, moved in with her, and dissolved his marriage to Tamara Geva.

Balanchine had formed another company, Les Ballets, and while performing in London he was approached by a wealthy young American, Lincoln Kirstein, who had come to Europe in search of a choreographer with whom he could launch an American ballet company and school. He hired Balanchine and his partner Dimitriev and brought them to America. On December 22, 1933 they opened the School of American Ballet in a studio on Madison Avenue once used by Isadora Duncan. They began with twenty-two students. The enterprise was being subsidized by Edward Warburg, a wealthy friend of Kirstein. On June 8, 1934 the School of American Ballet performed its first work, Serenade, with choreography by Balanchine, on the lawn of Warburg’s father’s estate in White Plains, New York. Classical American ballet was born.

Kirstein, in his history of the New York City Ballet, described Balanchine’s fitness to bring classical ballet to America: “Before he left Russia, Balanchine knew that the twentieth century needed its own tempi, which were jazzy and syncopated, and that asymmetrical rhythm was deep in the motor dynamism of advanced industrial societies.” (Kirstein p. 130)

Balanchine took no salary while teaching at the School of American Ballet and supported himself as a choreographer for Broadway musicals and Hollywood films. He created dances for Ziegfield Follies, collaborated with Rodgers and Hart, and was hired by Samuel Goldwyn to choreograph the film Goldwyn’s Follies. During this production, Balanchine fell in love with Vera Zorina, a dancer from Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo chosen by Goldwyn as the ballerina for his film. Long separated from Danilova, Balanchine married Zorina on Staten Island Christmas Eve 1938.

Kirstein and Balanchine had by now formed American Ballet with dancers from the school and in 1935 the company was invited to join the Metropolitan Opera, performing the dance sequences in its productions. Never a comfortable marriage—only twice was Balanchine allowed to stage his own ballets—the relationship ended after the second season. Over the next several years, Balanchine continued to work for other ballet companies and for the musical theater to support himself. He once choreographed a troupe of elephants for Ringling Brothers, to music by Stravinsky.

Balanchine and Tallchief worked together for the first time in 1944 on a production of Song of Norway performed at the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera to music by Edvard Grieg. The dancers came from Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, with choreography by Balanchine, who was then working for the company. Tallchief danced in the corps de ballet and was understudy to Danilova. Although Tallchief was offered Danilova’s role when the production moved to Broadway, she turned it down because she wanted to study under Balanchine. Many years later, after her retirement from dancing, Tallchief explained the pull of Balanchine. “I remember my first meeting with him. I was nineteen, and he had come to Ballet Russe to stage Song of Norway. I was absolutely astonished at his musicality . . . He expressed poetry and emotion and drama through the way he used the music. You saw the music as he used it. I realized that this was what I wanted to learn, how I wanted to dance. I had to start all over again.” (Mason, p. 236, 238)

Balanchine was known for the rigor of his classes and rehearsals. He conducted class every day for an hour, starting at eleven am. The dancers usually arrived a half hour earlier to warm up. When Balanchine entered the studio, the dancers took up positions at the barre, where they performed a standard set of exercises, beginning with pliés, bending exercises designed to loosen the dancers’ muscles. These were followed by battements, which involved beating movements of the legs and feet. After the barre work, which lasted about ten minutes, dancers moved to the center of the room, where Balanchine put them through a progression of steps that varied from day to day. When the class ended, dancers rested, then rehearsed the ballets in the company’s repertoire. A dance journalist who embedded himself with the New York City Ballet for a year wrote that “taking a Balanchine class is like doing sixty minutes of wind sprints.” (Mazo, p. 27) The speed that Balanchine demanded from his dancers, and that was a distinguishing characteristic of his choreographic style, put great stress on his dancers’ bodies. Some dancers did not like Balanchine’s methods and studied with other teachers. But Tallchief, with her stamina and dedication, thrived under his regimen.

Tallchief was rewarded with solo roles and Balanchine drew close to her, seeing in her a dancer around whom he could construct his ballets. In 1944 she danced a solo variation in Balanchine’s choreography for Danses Concertantes, to music by Stravinsky, Balanchine’s favorite composer, with whom he worked on many ballets. Two years later, in a sign of her growing stature within Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Tallchief danced the role of the Gypsy-Fairy in Le Baiser de la Fée (The Kiss of the Fairy), sharing the spotlight with Danilova and Frederic Franklin, the company’s star dancers.

Nineteen forty-six was a momentous year for the development of classical ballet in America. In January, Balanchine and Vera Zorina divorced. It had been an unhappy marriage for Balanchine, strained by frequent and lengthy separations as Zorina pursued an acting career in Hollywood. During the summer, Balanchine surprised Tallchief by proposing marriage to her. She appears to have had no inkling of his romantic interest in her. She wrote to her mother for advice, and Ruth opposed the marriage, on the grounds that Balanchine was twice her age and twice divorced. But Tallchief, although she didn’t love Balanchine, accepted his proposal. They were married at a Manhattan County Court House on August 16, 1946. “I was overjoyed, married to this man who was a prince of dance, and, I truly believed, a prince among men,” she wrote in her autobiography. “Women fueled his creativity, fed his inspiration. All his previous wives had been dancers because his life was his work. It was simple, for him and for me . . . He was a poet and I was his muse.” (Tallchief, pp.57-58) Tallchief made it clear that theirs was a professional union, not a personal one. “Passion and romance didn’t play a big role in our life. We saved our emotion for the classroom.” (Tallchief, p. 89) The couple slept in separate beds and were not sexually active, perhaps because Balanchine feared making her pregnant. Balanchine seems to have related to Tallchief as a cavalier to his consort on stage. “George was a warm, affectionate, loving husband. Our relationship fulfilled me, and I was content to let work dictate my life.” (Tallchief, p. 89)

Shortly after the marriage, Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein formed a new dance company called Ballet Society, and Balanchine resigned from Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Ballet Society began as a subscription organization with eight hundred members. The company had about fifty dancers, among them the teenager Tanaquil Le Clercq, who would become a rival to Tallchief for Balanchine’s attention.

Following a six month stay in Europe where Balanchine was serving as guest choreographer for the Paris Opera, the couple returned to New York and took up residence at a hotel on West 57^th Street. Tallchief left Ballet Russe to join Ballet Society. Some of Tallchief’s associates at Ballet Russe advised her to remain with the company, where her star was rising. In Balanchine’s company, there were no stars. The dance itself, not the personality of the dancer, was Balanchine’s focus. As choreographer, he was the star. His critics faulted him for creating works that sacrificed spirit and feeling for the sake of pure form. Balanchine made no apologies for his aesthetic, nor would he compromise it. “Nothing is left either to the principals or corps de ballet to do for themselves,” Balanchine stated during an interview early in his career. “I show them every tiny movement and the least mimetic action; and I count their every step.” (Dance Journal, 1931. Quoted in Olga Maynard). Balanchine’s insistence on absolute control alienated some dancers. But others discovered that his demands enabled them to achieve levels of performance they had thought unattainable. Playbills for Balanchine’s ballets listed the dancers alphabetically; no one received top billing, except Balanchine. But audiences knew who the stars were, and paid to see them. Tallchief became a powerful draw.

In April 1948, Ballet Society offered its first production, Orpheus, to the general public. The company rented space at the New York City Center of Music and Drama, home of the New York City Opera. Tallchief danced the role of Eurydice; Nicholas Magallanes was Orpheus. The performance was witnessed by Morton Baum, a key director of the City Center who controlled its finances. Though not a balletomane, Baum knew greatness when he saw it, and following the performance of Orpheus he asked Lincoln Kirstein to bring Ballet Society to City Center and operate under the name New York City Ballet. Thus was born America’s greatest ballet company. Tallchief became America’s first prima ballerina, though her name continued to be listed alphabetically on company programs.

In the fall Jerome Robbins, who had danced for Ballet Theatre and achieved fame choreographing Broadway musicals, joined New York City Ballet as a dancer and choreographer. Balanchine appointed him associate artistic director. At the outset, New York City Ballet was tied to the New York City Opera, and its performances were limited to Mondays and Tuesdays, the weakest nights for theater in New York. The company gave only thirty performances each season. This schedule did not give Tallchief enough work, and in 1949 she toured as a guest artist with Ballet Theatre (forerunner of American Ballet Theatre), a company founded in 1939 by the American dancer Lucia Chase.

On November 27, 1949 the New York City Ballet presented The Firebird, a work made famous in 1910 for being the first of Stravinsky’s ballet scores. Balanchine created a new choreography, performed with costumes and sets designed by Marc Chagall. Tallchief danced the part of the Firebird in a role that brought great acclaim to her and to the company. The fluidity and grace of Tallchief’s movements as she floats across the stage, seemingly on air, her arms fluttering like wings, are breathtaking. The audience and the critics rhapsodized over the performance. Tallchief, interviewed for a documentary film about Balanchine after his death, recalled the moment: “The curtain came down and suddenly the City Center sounded like a stadium at a football game after somebody’s made a touchdown.” (Dancing for Mr. B) Balanchine regarded The Firebird as the New York City Ballet’s first great success.

But not long after this triumph, Tallchief’s personal relationship with Balanchine began to fray. Balanchine had brought his newest protegé, the young Tanaquil Le Clercq, to live with them. Unbeknownst to Tallchief, a romantic relationship had begun between her husband and Le Clercq. Tallchief was also feeling stressed by her sense of responsibility to Balanchine and the New York City Ballet. “In my position as the company’s leading ballerina, and as Balanchine’s wife, much was depending on me . . . That my private life and my job were one and the same made me feel that I was always on, always working. It added to the strain.” (Tallchief, p. 140)

During the New York City Ballet’s tour of England in the summer of 1950, Tallchief told Balanchine she wanted to separate from him. He made no resistance, but asked that the separation not be announced until they had returned to New York from the tour. He assured her that their working relationship would not be affected. In fact, a great weight was lifted from Tallchief’s shoulders. “Now I was responsible only for myself, and what I did on stage would reflect on me alone. That the burden of being Balanchine’s chosen ballerina had fallen on Tanny’s shoulders came as a kind of deliverance.” (Tallchief, p. 149)

Balanchine was following a pattern of serial pairing with his leading ballerinas, always in pursuit of an aesthetic ideal rather than a deeply engaged human relationship. Alexandra Danilova, who lived with Balanchine during his years with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and remained his friend for life, observed that “Balanchine’s attitude toward the women he fell in love with was that of a painter toward his model . . . He actually never found, I believe, his one hundred percent beloved. Maybe that is why he was so creative. His life was creating, having satisfaction in searching.” (Mason, p. 3, p. 6) Joseph Mazo, the journalist who embedded with the New York City Ballet in the early 1970s, came to the same conclusion about the suitor Balanchine. “His real darlings are the muses, and he is one of the most virile lovers they have had all century . . . There are no children by his wives, but his offspring by Terpsichore have peopled the dance floors of the world.” (Mazo, p. 100)

In 1952, Tallchief and Balanchine annulled their marriage, on grounds that Balanchine did not wish to have children. On October 4, 1952, Tallchief married Elmourza Natirboff, a professional pilot who had been courting her since her separation from Balanchine. On December 31, 1952, Balanchine married Tanaquil Le Clercq. She was twenty-three, he was forty-eight.

Tallchief’s performance in The Firebird had brought notice from the dance world. Critics lavished praise on her, and Dance Magazine gave her one of its annual Awards. André Eglevsky, a highly regarded premier danseur, joined New York City Ballet in 1951, and his partnering with Tallchief elevated her stature. When the Washington Press Club named Tallchief Woman of the Year in 1951, her fame spread to the general public. Capitalizing on this, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cast her for the role of Anna Pavlova in Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), a musical directed by Mervyn LeRoy starring Esther Williams. She also performed the pas de deux from Sylvia with Eglevsky on national television. In 1953 the Washington Press Club honored her again as a Woman of Achievement, and the Oklahoma State Legislature declared June 29, 1953 Maria Tallchief Day. Her Osage nation performed a special ceremony in tribute to her. Her performance as the Sugar Plum Fairy in Balanchine’s staging of The Nutcracker in 1954 drew appreciative crowds and made the ballet a fixture of the company’s repertory, giving it financial stability. Watching Tallchief dance had become an imperative for followers of the performing arts.

In the summer of 1954 Tallchief was invited to join Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo for its American tour at a salary of $2,000 per week, an unheard of sum for a prima ballerina. The tour made stops in 103 cities, spreading classical ballet into America’s hinterlands. Tallchief was featured on the October 11, 1954 cover of Newsweek Magazine, confirming her status as a national icon. The magazine called her “the finest American-born classic ballerina the twentieth century has produced.” Tallchief’s success strained her marriage to Natirboff, whose resentment of her long workdays and frequent absences led to arguments. After the Ballet Russe tour, she went to Mexico and divorced him.

In April 1955 Tallchief rejoined the New York City Ballet, touring with it in Europe and the US. While in Chicago, she met Henry Paschen Jr., a member of a prominent and wealthy Chicago family that had constructed many of the city’s landmarks. Paschen came to New York to court her, and on June 3, 1956 Tallchief married him in Chicago. Paschen joined her on New York City Ballet’s summer tour of Europe. When she became pregnant, she ceased performing and went to Paris to stay with her sister Marjorie and Marjorie’s husband, who were then dancing for the Paris Opera Ballet. Despite her precaution, Tallchief miscarried her child. The experience scarred her. She wrote in her autobiography, “As despondent as I was about the miscarriage, that I had failed to live up to my responsibility to George and the company made me feel even worse.”  (Tallchief, p. 225) During the same tour, tragedy struck the New York City ballet when Tanaquil Le Clercq contracted polio in Copenhagen. Balanchine took leave from the company for a year to care for her. She never recovered the use of her legs.

Balanchine returned to the New York City Ballet for the 1957-1958 season, and choreographed Gounod, his final ballet for Tallchief. The leading roles were danced by Tallchief and Jacques d’Amboise. The ballet derived from Charles Gounod’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major. Gounod was a nineteenth century French composer, best known for his opera Faust. Balanchine’s description of this ballet opens a window into his choreographic technique, and his philosophy of the relationship between dance and music.

I do not mean the dancers to imitate or mirror the music in any literal way. Rather, to the time that music keeps, dancers develop other themes. They are complementary, if you like, and with appropriate music for dance, like the symphonies of Bizet and Gounod, there is a kind of balance I aim for between what is heard from the orchestra and what is seen on the stage. (Balanchine, p. 191)

This ability to create interplay between music and dance, counterpoint between two art forms, was Balanchine’s genius, grounded in his dual training as dancer and musician.

In the summer, New York City Ballet embarked on an Asian tour, but Tallchief had become pregnant in April and withdrew from dancing. She moved to Illinois, and she and Paschen set up housekeeping in Winnetka, a suburb of Chicago on the fashionable north shore. Their daughter Elise Maria Paschen was born January 4, 1959. The Paschens hired a nanny named Soeur Ruth (Sister Ruth) to care for Elise. In the fall, Tallchief’s father Alexander died in Oklahoma.

The international star Erik Bruhn joined the New York City Ballet in 1959, another sign of the company’s prestige. Bruhn had trained at the Royal Danish Ballet School and became a soloist with the company in 1949, though his contract allowed him to perform with other companies. But tension built between Bruhn and Balanchine, perhaps because Bruhn’s star status did not accord well with Balanchine’s insistence on the dance itself as star. Bruhn left at the end of the season to join American Ballet Theatre, and Tallchief, who had flourished as his partner, went with him. American Ballet Theatre was preparing to leave on a tour of Europe and the Soviet Union, and Tallchief was conflicted about leaving her one year old daughter. Elise remained in America with Soeur Ruth. In Moscow, at the Bolshoi Theatre, Tallchief danced the Black Swan pas de deux in front of Khruschev and other Russian dignitaries and met the Premier after the performance. She and Bruhn repeated the performance in London at the invitation of Margot Fonteyn.

On her return to America, she continued traveling with American Ballet Theatre, and separated from Paschen, whose attention during her long absences had strayed to other women. She took up residence in New York with Elise and Soeur Ruth. In April, she danced Miss Julie with American Ballet Theatre as Balanchine watched with the audience.

In the summer of 1961, Tallchief returned to Europe to dance with Bruhn at the Royal Danish Ballet. She brought Elise and Soeur Ruth with her, and while she was there she met Rudolf Nureyev, who had recently defected from the Soviet Union and was dancing with The Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas. Tallchief befriended Nureyev, and she, Bruhn, and Nureyev socialized together, an arrangement that led to a complicated romantic triangle. In 1962, Tallchief danced with Nureyev on the Bell Telephone Hour when Bruhn was injured.

In 1963 she and Balanchine were again working together after she and Bruhn rejoined the New York City Ballet. She bought a brownstone apartment on New York’s upper west side and settled in there with Elise and Soeur Ruth. But her star was fading. Balanchine no longer choreographed for her, and she was given fewer and fewer roles. Bruhn resigned from the company when Balanchine asked him to perform without rehearsing. Balanchine’s attentions were now focused on Suzanne Farrell, a brilliant young dancer seventeen years old with whom Balanchine became obsessed. But Tallchief remained America’s prima ballerina in the eyes of the general public, continuing to dance on the Bell Telephone Hour, often paired with Bruhn and Eglevsky, on programs hosted by movie stars such as Shirley Jones. In 1965, partnered with Jacques d’Amboise, she performed at the White House for President Lyndon Johnson.

Tallchief resigned from the New York City Ballet in October 1965. Balanchine invited her to stay on to teach the company class, and in 1966 he asked her to join him as a coach for the Hamburg Ballet. When the Hamburg Ballet performed that summer in Paris, Tallchief danced Cinderella, one of her final performances.

Following her retirement from performing, Tallchief reconciled with Paschen and moved back to Chicago with their daughter. For a time she focused her energies on mothering Elise and became involved with her schooling. Then in 1974 she began teaching ballet for the Lyric Opera of Chicago and directing the dance sequences for its operas. In 1979, facing a large operating deficit, the Lyric Opera discontinued its ballet school. Tallchief, with financial backing from her husband, formed the Chicago City Ballet, a school and company. Her sister Marjorie, now a widow and also retired from performing, joined the company as a teacher. The company gave performances in Chicago and in other mid-western cities. In 1982 Tallchief brought in Paul Mejia to be the choreographer for Chicago City Ballet.

Mejia had danced with the New York City Ballet. In February 1969 he had married Balanchine’s muse Suzanne Farrell. Farrell had declined a proposal from Balanchine made shortly after he had divorced Tanaquil Le Clercq. Angered by what he regarded as a betrayal, Balanchine dismissed Mejia from the New York City Ballet, and Farrell left with her husband to dance with the Ballet of the Twentieth Century in Brussels. After Mejia joined the Chicago City Ballet Farrell performed with the company as a guest artist, lending it her prestige.

On April 30, 1983, George Balanchine, whose health had been in decline since a 1978 heart attack, died after a lengthy hospital stay in New York. Tallchief came to his bedside. Moira Shearer, a British dancer who wrote a memoir about her professional relationship with Balanchine, reported that “Maria was more outwardly upset than anyone . . .” (Shearer, p. 171) Tallchief, in her autobiography, lamented not only Balanchine’s passing, but the fading of his legacy.

The Chicago City Ballet struggled financially and had trouble securing sponsors. The Balanchine style of ballet that Tallchief presented was not popular with Chicago audiences, who preferred the story ballets staged by touring companies like Ballet Russe and American Ballet Theatre. In 1987 Mejia left the company, and the directors hired Daniel Duell, another former dancer with the New York City Ballet, to replace him. He was given the title Co-Artistic Director, which drew the ire of Tallchief, who was in Europe when the appointment was made. She returned to find her role in the company diminished, and resigned. Paschen, who had been subsidizing the company by providing them with free space in a building he controlled, withdrew his support and presented the remaining directors with a bill for $369,000 for back rent. The Chicago City Ballet folded, amidst considerable acrimony in the city’s arts community, some of whom believed that Tallchief’s high handedness had driven away potential donors.

Soon Tallchief’s circumstances worsened. In March 1992 Paschen’s sister and nephew filed a civil racketeering lawsuit against him, charging him with siphoning more than $5M from the family business to pay for lavish renovations to four homes that he and Tallchief owned: one in Chicago, another in New York, a third on Martha’s Vineyard, and a fourth in Florida. Three of the homes, decorated by one of Chicago’s premiere interior designers, had been featured during the 1980s in elaborate full color spreads in Architectural Digest. Paschen had been dismissed from the company a year before the lawsuit was filed. The litigation was settled when Paschen agreed to reimburse the company $1M and to sever all ties to Paschen Contractors. The story of his fall scandalized Chicago.

Then, in December 1998, the US Attorney in Chicago indicted Paschen on charges that he had evaded taxes by using Paschen Contractors to pay for nearly $2M of renovation work at his four homes. Although the Paschens had filed a joint return, Tallchief was not charged. In January 1999 Paschen pled guilty to tax evasion, and in April he was sentenced to prison for two years. Paschen and Tallchief suffered terrible financial losses during this ordeal, having to sell most of their assets to meet their obligations to Paschen Contractors and the Internal Revenue Service, and to pay their legal fees. The stress of the prosecution and incarceration damaged Paschen’s health, and sent Tallchief into psychiatric care. Paschen died from pancreatic cancer on June 2, 2004 at his home in Highland Park.

Tallchief remained in Chicago. In December 2012 she broke her hip, and on April 11, 2013 she died of complications from the injury. She was remembered in obituaries appearing across North America and England as the greatest American ballerina of the twentieth century, and as the instrument of Balanchine’s choreographic style.

Chapter Four — E.E. Cummings : The Enormous Womb

The poetry of E. E. Cummings is widely anthologized in high school and college English literature textbooks. Readers know him as the author of innovative and playful poetry characterized by bold departures from conventional syntax, grammar, spelling, punctuation, and typography. His poems celebrate the intuitive life of feeling, of knowing the world through the senses and the emotions rather than the mind. He reveres the integrity of nature and its processes, and distrusts the artificial world that man has created through science and the exercise of his reason. For Cummings, feeling is the source of unity with the natural world and wholeness of self. Reason, man’s analytical tool, through which he strives to gain control over nature, separates, isolates, and fragments reality, thus cutting man off from his essential self.

To achieve union with nature, to maintain wholeness of self, Cummings—as artist and man—seeks to preserve the child-mind that has not fallen from natural grace into disunity and the realm of dualisms. This child-mind that Cummings insists on inhabiting served his art effectively, yielding poems (and paintings) of startling and unusual beauty. But the strategy carried a price—his inability or refusal to address the issues and circumstances of his life as a responsible adult. He knew that about himself and admitted it on more than one occasion. Late in his life he summed it up succinctly in French: ‘je suis faible dans la vie” (I am feeble in life).

One of Cummings’s best known and most iconic poems written from the child-mind is “in Just-/spring,” a short lyric composed in 1916 when he was a twenty-two year old graduate student at Harvard. Spring was a frequent subject in Cummings’s poetry, important as a natural symbol of the process of continual renewal that people must allow if they are to remain fully alive. The poem also displays many of Cummings’s signature compositional innovations. The typography shows the child-mind at play.

The poem was published in 1923 in the volume Tulips & Chimneys, the first collection of Cummings’s verse. It was placed in a section with the heading “Chansons Innocentes,” an obvious reference to the “Songs of Innocence” of William Blake, an earlier poet-painter whom Cummings admired greatly.

The poem presents a scene from childhood, with boys and girls outside on the street playing innocent games and indulging in their fantasies. Their world is “mud-luscious” and “puddle-wonderful.” Into this idyllic world a disturbing figure enters—the balloonman. He is old, but “little” like a child. He is also “lame,” queer,” and “goat-footed.” That he is a balloonman suggests the circus or a faire. He whistles to attract the children away from their innocent play. The balloons are his lure. Balloons delight children because they are magical—they defy gravity and float in the air like spirits. But the balloonman is carnal, a balloonMan, and his queerness makes him faintly sinister. Being “goat-footed” turns him into a satyr, a mythical figure half-man, half-goat associated with Dionysius and rites of spring that involve drinking and sexuality. Since Cummings is alluding to Greek mythology, the balloonman’s lameness brings to mind the story of Oedipus (swollen foot), whose feet were bound when he was an infant as one of the measures his parents took to foil the prophecy that Oedipus would one day kill his father and marry his mother. These associations place the balloonman into the fallen realm of adults. He whistles a second time to draw the children to him. The poem ends with the children suspended between the world of their innocent games and the fallen world of the balloonman. Cummings strove to remain in this “no man’s land” for all of his life.

We do not have to look further than Cummings’s own childhood to find the origins of the child-mind that he clung to so determinedly. Cummings was born in 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts into a stable, comfortable, loving home. Both his parents came from old New England stock and moved in sophisticated circles. They were introduced by William James, under whom Cummings’s father Edward had studied at Harvard. Edward was preparing for a career in the ministry, but his interest in understanding the changes in social conditions brought on by the industrial revolution led him to study sociology. In 1891 he was appointed to a professorship in sociology at Harvard and in June of that year he married Rebecca Clarke. His writing and activism on behalf of social reforms made him a well-known and respected figure in the community, and when the minister of the South Congregational Church of Boston (Unitarian) retired, Edward was named to replace him even though he had not been ordained as a minister.

Rebecca was by all accounts a generous, kind, and devoted wife and mother. She was fond of poetry, encouraged Cummings’s early efforts at verse writing, and home schooled him until he was eight. The Cummings household in Cambridge was a busy and dynamic place, home to grandparents, aunts, a literary uncle who played with E.E., a cook, a negro handyman who came during the day, and pets—all spread out in a three-story house with thirteen fireplaces. The yard was a welcome playground for the neighborhood children (“My father liked to have us play in the yard and used to say he was raising children, not grass,” wrote E.E.’s sister Elizabeth in an unpublished memoir), and Edward built his son a tree house sturdy enough for him to sleep in overnight. (Sawyer, p. 16)

Edward also acquired a summer home called Joy Farm in Silver Lake, New Hampshire, and on it he built a second house bordering the lake. He dammed a stream that ran across the property, giving the children a pond for swimming. E.E. spent summers exploring the woods, caring for livestock, riding his horse—laying the foundation for his lifelong love of nature.

Cummings was in awe of his father, a mythic figure whom he described in Bunyanesque terms during a lecture he delivered at Harvard in 1952.

He was a New Hampshireman, 6 foot 2, a crack shot & famous fly fisherman & a firstrate sailor (his sloop was named The Actress) & a woodsman who could find his way through forests primeval without a compass & a canoeist who’d still paddle you up to a deer without ruffling the surface of the pond & an ornithologist & taxidermist & (when he gave up hunting) an expert photographer (the best I’ve ever seen) & an actor who portrayed Julius Caesar in Sanders Theater & a painter (both in oils and watercolors) & a better carpenter than any professional & an architect who designed his own houses before building them & (when he liked) a plumber who just for the fun of it installed all his own waterworks . . . (Six Nonlectures, p. 8)

The litany of accomplishments and abilities continues through Edward’s contributions to sociology, to his congregation, to world peace. What emerges is a portrait of a man with whom Cummings—5’ 8” tall, thin, unathletic, shy, solitary, fearful of confrontation—could not possibly hope to compete. Instead, he chose another path, poet-painter, on which he could not possibly be compared to his father. “I make poems because it is the thing I know how to do best,” Cummings wrote when he was about thirty years old.  “In fact it is about the only thing I know how to do.”  (Norman, p. 191)

Though Cummings would rebel against his father’s value system and model of manhood as a way of separating from him and pursuing his own individuality, he remained dependent on him and grateful to him. “No father on this earth ever loved or ever will love his son more profoundly,” Cummings told his audience at the Harvard lecture. (Six Nonlectures, p. 9) Some years after his father’s violent death in 1926 in an automobile accident, Cummings wrote his moving tribute to him, “my father moved through dooms of love.”

Cummings also paid tribute to his mother during the lecture, calling her “the most amazing person I’ve ever met.” (Six Nonlectures, p. 11) After her husband’s death, Rebecca continued to parent Cummings, offering him emotional and financial support as he struggled to pursue his career as poet and painter. He commemorated her in a poem that begins with the tender line “if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have/one.”

Cummings recognized that his childhood had been exceptionally happy and idyllic. He told his Harvard audience, “I was welcomed as no son of any king and queen was ever welcomed. Here was my joyous fate and my supreme fortune.” (Six, p. 11) Cummings concluded this lecture, the first of six that he gave at Harvard during the 1952-1953 academic year, by reading William Wordsworth’s Ode “Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood,” a poem that begins with the line “The child is father to the man.” The poem renders the mystical vision of reality experienced by the child, a vision that fades with the onset of adulthood: “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!,” Wordsworth wrote. But “At length the man perceives it die away/And fade into the light of common day.” This unwelcome but necessary passage from innocence to experience Cummings resisted.

When he was eight, Cummings entered private school in Cambridge, attending Peabody for a year and then matriculating to Cambridge Latin School. Given the literary atmosphere in his home and Rebecca’s encouragement, it is no surprise that he showed high aptitude for languages. He studied Latin, Greek, and French in high school. He disliked math and science, disciplines that called for analysis and precise measurement. As a poet, one of his favorite words was “illimitable.” Cummings preferred mystery to certainty. He was writing verse at this time and had already begun his experiments with unconventional ways of presenting language on the page. He wrote a poem a day.

In 1911 he passed an early entrance exam for Harvard and joined the freshman class at age sixteen. He continued to live at home. He was socially awkward, a loner who spent hours in the college library reading.

His social life picked up in his sophomore year when he joined the editorial board of the Harvard Monthly, a literary magazine. There he met a number of aesthetes who shared his interests, among them John Dos Passos, S. Foster Damon, Scofield Thayer, and Sibley Watson. These young men became lifelong friends and supporters of Cummings. Thayer and Watson, both independently wealthy, provided generous patronage to Cummings as he struggled to support himself with his writing and painting. S. Foster Damon, who went on to become a scholar noted for his explication of William Blake’s metaphysical system, made Cummings more worldly. He introduced him to the moderns in painting, music, and literature—Picasso, Stravinsky, Pound—and brought Cummings to the fleshpots of Boston—burlesque houses, saloons, girls of the street—where his father’s values were trampled.

An amusing episode occurred when Cummings borrowed his father’s car and parked it in front of a prostitute’s house. The police, recognizing the car as Edward’s, towed it and called the minister in the dead of night. In the argument between Cummings and his father that ensued, Edward lamented, “I thought I had given birth to a god.” (Sawyer, p. 69) Cummings was shamed, but did not mend his ways. “I led a double life,” he wrote, “getting drunk and feeling up girls but lying about this to my father and taking his money all the time.” (Sawyer, p. 56)

Cummings graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a degree in English literature in June 1915. In his senior year he wrote the beautiful ballad “all in green went my love riding.” He also delivered a commencement address on “The New Art” that bewildered his audience with incomprehensible quotations from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. He remained in Cambridge for another year, studying for his master’s degree and taking advantage of free room and board under his father’s roof while he wrote. It was during this period that he composed “in Just-/spring.”

In June 1916 Cummings’s close friend Scofield Thayer married Elaine Orr, a beautiful New England socialite. Cummings was attracted to her. Thayer paid Cummings $1,000 to compose an epithalamion for the occasion, and with these funds Cummings temporarily broke free of financial dependence on his father. In January 1917 he moved to New York, sharing a one-room apartment in Greenwich Village with Arthur Wilson, a painter and fellow Harvard alumnus. He found employment at a New York publishing house, P.F. Collier, but was assigned to the mail order department rather than editorial work. He left after two months to devote himself to painting. While at his Collier’s desk, on company stationery, he wrote another of his iconic poems, “Buffalo Bill’s/defunct,” after reading William Cody’s obituary in The New York Times.

While Cummings painted and wrote, World War I was raging in Europe. He adopted a cavalier, one might say puerile, attitude towards the conflict, writing his mother, “I don’t know why I talk of this ‘pseudo war’ as I have no interest in it—and am painting and scribbling as ever . . .I read but one paragraph of Wilson’s speech, being taken with a fit of laughter.” (Cummings, Selected Letters, p. 14) Nevertheless, one day after the United States entered the war in April, Cummings, in order to avoid certain conscription, joined the Norton-Harjes Volunteer Motor Volunteer Ambulance Corps. He sailed for Europe April 28 and on the voyage befriended a young American, William Slater Brown. Before long, their friendship would bring them into the clutches of the French military justice system.

Almost from the moment of their arrival in France, Cummings and Brown distanced themselves from the rest of their unit. On the train from Bordeaux, they became separated from the unit when they disembarked at the wrong station in Paris. The Norton-Harjes offices were closed when they attempted to check in, so they took a room at a cheap hotel. They reported for duty the next day, but the administration there immediately lost track of them and did not discover their error for five weeks. In this interlude, Brown and Cummings sampled the delights of Paris, tramping the city, attending performances of the Ballets Russes, and courting Mimi and Marie, two prostitutes they met on the street. They paid the women for their time but squired them through the evenings as though they were ordinary couples out on a date. Cummings slept with Marie but did not have intercourse with her from fear of contracting venereal disease. Edward’s stern warnings still rang in Cummings’s ears. When their unit finally located them, they were reprimanded, then sent off to Ham, a small village in the northeast of France.

The Germans had withdrawn from the area, so there was no military action requiring ambulance services. Brown and Cummings again set themselves apart from the rest of their unit. They were careless about their appearance and idled with French soldiers, whose company they preferred to their fellow Americans. This behavior brought down on them the ire of the section chief, Anderson, who took away their driving privileges and assigned them menial tasks such as washing vehicles. Unhappy in their section, they applied to become French aviators but were turned down when they admitted they had no desire to kill Germans.

Brown and Cummings were writing letters home. Brown was indiscreet in his descriptions of the low morale of the French soldiers with whom they had been fraternizing and came under suspicion by the French military censors. Lacking an ally in Anderson to defend them, they were transferred to La Ferté Macé, a detention camp in Normandie. The camp was not considered a prison, because Brown and Cummings were regarded as suspects, not criminals, but the circumstances of their life at La Ferté Macé were indistinguishable from prison life.

Brown and Cummings were detained at La Ferté Macé for three months, during which they befriended many of their fellow sufferers enduring the misery of the camp. It was a motley group—English, Poles, Belgians, Russians, even a Mexican—all of whom had been picked up either by mistake or on the flimsiest of grounds. The Mexican had been taken into custody when he asked a gendarme for directions to a ship he was about to board. The men were herded together in a single “enormous room” where they slept, relieved themselves in slop pails, and socialized to pass the time. The camp had a canteen where inmates with cash could purchase food, tobacco, and wine.

At the end of three months, Brown and Cummings were interrogated by a commission of three men. After his interrogation, Brown was sentenced to a prison in Précigne for the duration of the war and transferred away from Cummings. Cummings was set free, with the stipulation that he must remain in France for the duration of the war in a place of his choosing, and report monthly to the chief of police. Cummings chose a small village in the French Pyrenees that had been recommended to him by another inmate. But before he departed, he was summoned to the Director’s office and told to board the next train for Paris, where a man from the American Embassy was waiting for him. Since learning of his son’s incarceration, Edward had been frantically working through American diplomatic channels to secure his release. Cummings sailed for New York a few days before Christmas and arrived there on January 1, 1918.

Cummings had not asked his father for help. From the outset of his ordeal, he had treated the whole degrading experience as a lark, a youthful adventure he was sharing with his friend Brown. After being taken into custody by the officials in Ham, Cummings was questioned sympathetically by three Frenchmen and encouraged to exonerate himself. He was incriminated not by anything he had done, but rather by his association with Brown, who was suspected of being a German spy. But Cummings chose loyalty to Brown over his own freedom. He defended Brown’s character and insisted on his innocence, and when asked the pivotal question, “Do you hate the Germans?” he sealed his fate by answering, “No. I love very much the French.”

Shortly after his arrival at La Ferté Macé, Cummings wrote a reassuring letter to his mother, telling her, “I am having the time of my life.” (Sawyer, p. 121) Upon learning that his father was undertaking efforts to secure his release, Cummings wrote him that he wanted to “see the thing thru alone . . .” (Sawyer, p. 122) He acted as though his imprisonment, for that’s what it was, was actually a liberation. At the end of the first day at the camp, as he was turning in for the night in a room full a filthy men lying on flea infested mattresses and breathing air fouled by the smell of urine and excrement rising from slop pails, Cummings said to Brown, “This is the finest place I’ve ever been in my life.” (Enormous Room, p. 97) His insouciance may have been only an ironic defense against the horror of his situation. But Cummings did find something transforming and illuminating in his experience as a prisoner: the realization of what it means to be truly free. His freedom came not from being released, but from discovering the power of human love in comradeship with other innocents like himself who were enduring the injustices of a brutal and corrupt society that had incarcerated them blindly and cruelly.

Cummings shared this realization with others through the book he wrote about his arrest and detention, The Enormous Room. The book was written at the insistence of his father, who was incensed at the treatment his American son had received at the hands of the French. Edward planned to sue the French government but was dissuaded when Cummings agreed to write the book if it were not used in any legal action. He completed the book at Joy Farm during the summer and fall of 1921 and was paid $1,000 by Edward for the work. It was published in 1922 by Liveright, largely as a result of Edward’s efforts.

The book recounts the series of events leading to his detention at La Ferté Macé, describes the dreary routine of the place—sleeping, eating, walking in the courtyard, eating, walking again, sleeping again—and skewers the brutish, inhuman men who rule and police the camp. But the main focus of the book is the other inmates—their histories, their character, their coping mechanisms. Cummings discovers he is living out of time. “Events can no longer succeed each other . . . each happening is self-sufficient.” (Enormous Room, p. 99) In this suspended state, where no meaningful activity is possible, the uniqueness of each individual becomes vivid. The men become archetypes, called not by their given names, but referred to by their distinguishing features or attributes: The Machine-Fixer, The Barber, Judas (a snitch), The Wanderer, The Russian, The Clever Man, The Bear, The Lobster, Zulu, The Magnifying Glass, The Hat.

Cumming calls out four men for special notice. Three of them he calls Delectable Mountains, alluding to places of rest and refreshment in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Each is an island of spiritual repose for Cummings. The Wanderer was a Gypsy whose wife and children came to the camp to join him. His closeness to his family made love palpable in the camp. “I think The Wanderer, with his wife and children whom he loved as never have I seen a man love anything in this world, was partly happy; walking in the sun when there was any, sleeping with his little boy in a great gulp of softness.” (Enormous Room, p. 181) When it was time for him to be interrogated by the commission, The Wanderer was sentenced to prison and sent away from his family to Précigne. “With him disappeared unspeakable sunlight, and the dark keen bright strength of the earth.” (Enormous Room, p. 185)

Zulu was the second Delectable Mountain. He possessed the supreme Cummings value—“ISness” —the capacity to be. His gift was the ability to communicate entirely by body language through his ISness. A Pole, he had come to France to earn money and been arrested. He brought to the camp the gift of laughter, amusing the inmates with his constant mime.

The third Delectable Mountain, Surplice, was a Fool, disabled by a fall from a scaffolding, the butt of jokes and ridicule, a role he accepted with grace. One day he astonished his comrades with a musical performance on a harmonica. After he played, silence fell on the enormous room. The men begged for more, but Surplice had done. He sat on his mattress and wept. The commission also sent him to prison. What had he done? “I made them dance and they put me in prison.” (Enormous Room, p. 217) Cummings sends him off with an apotheosis: “For he has the territory of harmonicas, the acres of flutes, the meadows of clarinets, the domain of violins. And God says—O you who put the jerk into joys, come up hither. There’s a man up here called Christ who likes the violin.” (Enormous Room, p. 217)

And finally there was Jean Le Négre, a mountain of strength with the mind of a child. He radiated simplicity and joy. He had been arrested for impersonating an English military officer. He had spotted a uniform for sale in a shop window, purchased it, and then decorated it with medals. He promenaded around Paris, returning the deferential salutes of other soldiers, most of whom bowed in respect of the signs of his heroism. He was given to pranks and foolishness that brought joy to the men, and sometimes landed him in solitary confinement. Cummings delighted in his child-mind. “His mind was a child’s. His use of language was sometimes exalted fibbing, sometimes the purely picturesque. He courted above all the sound of words, more or less disdaining their meaning . . . He was never perfectly happy unless exercising his inexhaustible imagination.” (Enormous Room, pp. 229, 227)

For Cummings, Jean embodied the solution to the problem of La Ferté Macé—the problem of society’s repression of the individual. He had achieved transcendence, the ability to be joyous in the midst of misery, to be whole, and wholly independent. He offers Jean a tribute. “—Boy, Kid, Nigger, with the strutting muscles—take me up into your mind once or twice before I die . . . Quickly take me up into the bright child of your mind, before we both go suddenly all loose and silly . . .” (Enormous Room, p. 238)

Cummings arrived in New York at the start of the year 1918 in poor health. He had lost twenty pounds from his slender frame, was suffering from vitamin D deficiency, and his skin was mottled with flea bites. He went to Cambridge to recuperate, and from there aided Brown’s family in securing his friend’s release. He returned to Greenwich Village in February and was joined there in April by Brown. Cummings was again writing and painting, with his father’s support.

He often attended social gatherings at the home of Elaine Thayer. Scofield had separated from her after discovering that he preferred the company of young boys. He was often away in Chicago working at The Dial, a political journal whose editorial board included such heavyweights as Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey. Thayer continued to support Elaine, and when Cummings began to court her, he encouraged their relationship, even to the extent of reimbursing Cummings for expenses he incurred taking her out.

Their romance was interrupted in July when Cummings was conscripted into the Army and stationed at Camp Devens in Massachusetts. He was back in the grip of the war machine that he hated. The staff invited him to train as an officer, but Cummings had no interest in becoming a leader of men. He preferred the company of plain soldiers, as he had in France. It was at Camp Devens that Cummings met the pacifist he called Olaf and wrote the bitter anti-war poem “I sing of Olaf glad and big/whose warmest heart recoiled at war.” Following the armistice in November 1918 Cummings was discharged from the Army. He returned to Greenwich Village, again living with Brown, and resumed his courtship of Elaine. To help support him, Thayer bought his paintings.

According to biographers Richard Kennedy and Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, Cummings was a shy and reluctant lover, daunted by Elaine’s high social standing and wealth, and conflicted about having sexual intercourse with a woman he was idealizing in his poetry. His virginity had come to an end in Paris after his release from La Ferté Macé, when he had a tryst with a waitress who had served him in a restaurant. But he was no lothario. He wrote yearning poems to Elaine in the manner of a courtly lover, leaving it to her to take the initiative sexually, which she finally did during a night of heavy petting.

In the spring of 1919 Elaine discovered she was pregnant. Scofield and Cummings both urged her to abort, but the medication she took did not work and on December 20, 1919 a girl given the name Nancy was born. Scofield claimed paternity on the birth certificate. Cummings retreated from the situation into his painting and writing. Thus began a deception that would haunt Nancy’s life until she was herself married and a mother, many years later.

During this period, in addition to working on the manuscript of The Enormous Room, Cummings was assembling the collection of poems he was calling Tulips & Chimneys (he had a fondness for the ampersand). The collection included a number of Cummings’s well-known, often anthologized poems—among them “when god lets my body be,”  “in Just-/spring,” “Buffalo Bill’s/defunct,” and “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls.” The manuscript was making the rounds of publishers and being rejected. But Thayer and Sibley Watson had purchased The Dial and turned it into a literary magazine. They published several of Cummings’s poems. Edward, who believed in his son’s writing, continued to support him. Cummings kept his distance from Nancy and Elaine. Some years later he would write, “I don’t really, want to participate in my own child! Assume responsibility of ménage! be husband with Elaine as my wife!” (Sawyer, p. 162) He feared he could not be both an artist and a family man.

In the spring of 1921, The Enormous Room and Tulips & Chimneys behind him, Cummings left for Europe with his friend John Dos Passos. The travelers landed first in Portugal, which Cummings did not like, then moved on to Paris. Scofield and Elaine were there with Nancy, arranging their divorce, which was finalized on July 28. Dos Passos left for the Middle East, and Cummings spent the next two and a half years touring Italy and France with Nancy and Elaine, who were accompanied by a maid and governess. They stayed in separate hotels. Cummings, then living on the $85 Edward sent him every month, could not afford the luxury accommodations that Elaine chose, and he did not want to think of himself as a kept man. This arrangement also allowed him to maintain the fiction that he was not bound to them in any way, although he was drawn to the child and showed great affection for her.

In the fall of 1923 Elaine returned to New York with Nancy. She wanted Cummings to marry her and wrote to summon him. Tulips & Chimneys had just been published. Edward sent his son $1,000 as a reward. Cummings returned to New York in December and accepted Elaine’s proposal of marriage. The ceremony was conducted by Edward at the Cummings home in Cambridge on March 19, 1924. Five days later Edmund Wilson’s review of Tulips & Chimneys appeared in The New Republic. He wrote, “Cummings’s style is an eternal adolescent, as fresh and often as winning but as half-baked as boyhood.” (Sawyer, p. 230) On April 24, Cummings legally adopted Nancy, but did not assert his paternity or change her name from Thayer. He acknowledged in his diary the limitations of his role as husband and father. “i am nearest happiness—I feel that i possess E [Elaine] and M [Mopsy] i do no work for them, i am free, i assume no responsibilities—yet i have them to love: to praise: to be proud of.” He saw his family members as self-objects. Within three months of their marriage, Elaine asked for a divorce.

Elaine had been made to realize the shallowness of Cummings’s commitment to her by his reaction to the sudden death from pneumonia of her sister Constance two weeks after the marriage. Cummings failed to provide Elaine with emotional support or to assist in arranging the details of the funeral. It became necessary for Elaine to travel to Europe to confer with her other sister Alexis on settling Constance’s estate. She took Nancy and her entourage with her, leaving Cummings to continue his bachelor ways in Greenwich Village. On board the ship, Elaine met and fell in love with Frank MacDermot, an Irishman who worked for a bank in New York. She wrote Cummings from Europe asking for a divorce, reproving him for wanting to “be like a child,” (Sawyer, p. 244), and reminding him that they had hedged their marriage vows by agreeing to uncontested divorce.

Cummings, thrown into crisis, was at a loss how to recover Elaine. He pleaded, he wept, he threatened suicide, he contemplated murdering MacDermot, but he did nothing to reinstate himself with Elaine. His behavior only deepened her resolve. They were divorced in Paris in December, two weeks before Nancy’s fifth birthday. In a child’s voice, he wrote his daughter a letter she never received:

goodbye dear & next time when I feel a little better we’ll ride on the donkeys & next time on the pigs maybe or you will bicycle & i will ride a swan & next time when my heart is all mended again with snow & repainted with bright new paint we’ll ride you & I

& next time

I’ll ride with you in heaven with all the angels & with the stars & a new moon all gold between me & you & we’ll ride together goodbye dear you and i both of us having yellow hair quietly will always be just touching each other’s hands ride (Sawyer, p. 266)

But it would be a year before there was a “next time,” and longer intervals after that. Cummings had failed to make provisions in the divorce agreement for visitation and custody rights. When Edward learned that he might never see his grandchild he engaged a lawyer in Paris to modify the agreement. Although Cummings was granted unlimited visitation rights and three months custody, Elaine and MacDermot prevented him from seeing his daughter. MacDermot moved the family to Ireland when Nancy was seven. She was never informed that Cummings was her father, or that he had been married to her mother. MacDermot, a Catholic, did not want Elaine’s reputation stained by the revelation that she had borne an illegitimate child while married to Thayer. Cummings did not see Nancy again until she was an adult.

On the rebound from his humiliating break-up with Elaine, Cummings fell into the arms of Anne Barton, a divorced fashion model twenty-six years old with a four-year-old daughter named Diana. Anne was a troubled woman who had been sexually abused by her policeman father. She drank heavily, was sexually free, and kept company with a wealthy older man named Douglas who showered her with gifts. She liberated Cummings sexually but also tormented him with her promiscuity.

At the end of 1925 The Dial awarded Cummings $2,000 “for distinguished service to American letters.” Two collections of his verse—& and XLI Poems—had been issued in 1925. These volumes brought to the reading public memorable poems such as “Spring is like a perhaps hand,” “gee i like to think of dead,” “I will wade out/till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers,” and “Humanity i love you.” With the funds from the award, Cummings took Anne and Diana to Europe, where they spent three months, mostly in Paris. While there, Cummings began work on a play he called Him. The other major character, a woman, was named Me. The play—dedicated to Anne— was long, verbose, surrealistic, and often unintelligible. Though he tried to dismiss it as merely sensible nonsense that borrowed elements from the circus and burlesque, the very incoherence of the play exposed the psychic torments that Cummings was undergoing in his relationships with women. The play was subsequently staged in 1928 at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village, where it ran for twenty-seven performances to full houses. But critics were baffled by it, and it was never produced again.

On their return from Europe, Anne resumed her affair with Douglas. To offset this, Cummings initiated a romance with the socialite Emily Vanderbilt, hoping to make Anne jealous. Rebecca, in an attempt to salvage the relationship, paid for psychiatric treatment for Anne. The doctor offered a pessimistic assessment. Her incestuous relationship with her father had doomed her to promiscuity. Cummings also submitted to analysis, from which he learned, “I have never grown up/assumed the responsibilities of a man/I prefer to have a mistress because it won’t hurt me so much/When I lose her (as a wife)/self-pity=comfort.” (Sawyer, p. 322)

Despite these warning signs, Cummings decided to marry Anne to demonstrate that he could behave responsibly. The wedding took place on May 1, 1929. Dos Passos was best man; Rebecca and Cummings’s sister Elizabeth witnessed. Cummings and Anne were drunk at the ceremony, which took place in New York at the Unitarian Church of All Souls.  The couple honeymooned in Europe, taking Diana with them, but the child became a source of quarrels between them. They returned to the US and spent the summer at Joy Farm. Rebecca, in another attempt to shore up their relationship, deeded the property to them in joint tenancy. Anne now owned half of Joy Farm.

In November 1930 they again went to Europe. Diana was placed in a convent in Switzerland while Anne and Cummings visited Paris, Lausanne, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Berlin. Cummings decided to visit Russia alone to observe first-hand the experiment in communism. During his absence, Anne discovered she was pregnant. They agreed to abort the pregnancy, and Anne returned to New York in company with Douglas, who helped her obtain the abortion.

Cummings’s experience in Russia was a turning point for him politically. Though he had never been politically active, or dealt with politics in his writing, his sympathies lay with the many leftists he counted as friends, men like Dos Passos, Max Eastman, and Edmund Wilson. What he found in Russia—grey, humorless lives surrounded by squalor—reinforced his exaltation of individuality and his utter scorn for political solutions to the central problems of life. He became a conservative who loathed Franklin Roosevelt and sympathized with Joseph McCarthy. The book he wrote about his travels in Russia, called Eimi (“I Am” in Ancient Greek), presents Russia as “this gruesome apotheosis of mediocrity in the name of perfectibility, this implacable salvation of all through the assassination of each, this reasoned enormity of spiritual suicide.” (Six Nonlectures, p. 103) It was published in 1933.

When Cummings rejoined Anne in New York, bringing Diana with him, their relationship deteriorated. They carried on a four-way affair with another couple. She tormented him with infidelities and ridiculed his sexual prowess in front of their friends. After she formed a relationship with a well-to-do surgeon and became pregnant with his child, she divorced Cummings in Mexico and demanded payment for her half of Joy Farm, a request that Cummings denied. Anne married the surgeon in October 1932 and in April 1933 deeded her share of Joy Farm back to him.

In the same month (June 1932) that Anne Barton divorced him in Mexico, Cummings attended a play in New York with his friends Patti and Jimmy Light. Jimmy had directed Him when it was performed at the Provincetown Playhouse, and Cummings had had a brief affair with Patti during his marriage to Anne. After the performance, the Lights introduced Cummings to Marion Morehouse, a beautiful model and actress trying to break into show business.

Marion was twenty-six, tall and dark-haired with fair skin and flawless features. She had been born in South Bend, Indiana, raised as a Roman Catholic, and had left home without finishing high school to pursue an acting career in New York. She found work as a model, posing for Edward Steichen. At the time she met Cummings, she was living in a house on Long Island with several other theater people.

Cummings courted her fervently, and in August she moved to an apartment in Greenwich Village near 4 Patchin Place, the little artists’ colony where Cummings had been living since 1924. They became a couple, and remained together for the rest of Cummings’s life, though they never formally married. Marion brought beauty, love, and steadiness into the poet’s life, enabling him to experience with her the love and joy he celebrated in his poetry. They never had children, and over time, Cummings became Marion’s child, a reality he acknowledged in his journal. “When you refused to let her have a child (unless she ‘do her share’ in supporting it), you sealed your own doom: making yourself her child, her baby—and herself your all-protecting mother.” (Cheever, p. 204)

The patterns of Cummings life had now been set. He spent winters in New York at Patchin Place, summers at Joy Farm in New Hampshire. Whenever his finances allowed, he traveled to Europe, often for extended periods of time. He favored Paris and Italy, but also went to England and Greece. He published collections of his poetry at frequent intervals and exhibited his paintings. His art did not support him, and he remained financially dependent on his mother, who gave him a monthly allowance of $150, and on the generosity of friends like Thayer and Watson.

In April 1933 Cummings was awarded a $1500 Guggenheim Fellowship. The award stipulated that Cummings serve the Fellowship in Europe. Cummings took Marion with him to Paris, where they sublet an apartment from the American poet Walter Lowenfels. While there, they dined with the MacDermots, and Cummings’s troubled history with Elaine surfaced again. Frank MacDermot wanted to run for political office in Ireland but could not because his wife was a divorcee. Elaine wanted Cummings to agree to an annulment of their marriage, on the grounds that their vows had been invalid because of their prenuptial agreement to uncontested divorce. If Cummings would acknowledge this fact to a Catholic priest, the annulment would be granted by the church. As bait, the MacDermots offered to let Cummings visit his daughter. Cummings agreed to this arrangement, but was unable to visit Nancy, who was away in boarding school.

In Paris, Marion found work modeling for Paris Vogue. She was photographed by Baron George Hoyingen-Huene, who considered her the most beautiful woman in Europe. Cummings also found work in Paris. He was contracted by Lincoln Kirstein to write a ballet for George Balanchine based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a project suggested by Marion. Cummings wrote the ballet, but Balanchine rejected it, and it was never performed, though Cummings had it published. The Baron invited Cummings and Marion to stay at his villa in Tunisia. They returned to Paris via Rome and Venice, and in December they were back in New York.

In 1935 Cummings sought publication of a new collection of poems, his first since 1931. His books were not selling. Eimi, his account of travels in Russia, had come out in 1933 and was met with hostility by critics and even some of Cummings’s friends, who were unhappy with his depiction of the Soviets. His new manuscript was turned down by fourteen New York publishers. Rebecca paid the cost of having it privately printed. Cummings dedicated the volume, which he titled No Thanks, to the fourteen publishers, whose names were printed on the page in the shape of a funeral urn.

In May Cummings and Marion went to Hollywood seeking work in the movie industry. Eric Knight, a friend writing screenplays at Fox Studios, encouraged their visit. They traveled by car with another couple, had a falling out in Mexico City, and ran out of money. Cummings wired Rebecca for funds with their last five dollars, which he found in a trousers’ pocket. They flew to Los Angeles and rented a small apartment in Santa Monica. With no prospect of employment for either of them at a studio, they returned to New York after two months, again using funds sent by Rebecca. They hunkered down at Joy Farm. Cummings’s snobbish attitude towards the Hollywood community, and his poorly disguised anti-Semitism, undoubtedly did not win him friends in the movie business.

In 1937 a young editor at Harcourt, Brace, one of the fourteen, persuaded the publishers to issue Cummings’s Collected Poems. The volume held three hundred fifteen poems, including twenty-two new ones. Cummings wrote a rather off-putting Introduction that made clear his sense of isolation from others, his loneliness. It begins, “The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople—it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike . . . You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs.” The statement exposes the stark divisions of reality that formed the basis of Cummings’s personal aesthetic and philosophy of life. It is the worldview of an alienated child who has retreated into himself.

With the advance from Harcourt, Brace, Cummings took Marion to England. There, in an expression of the strain she was under as Cummings’s companion, Marion briefly took a lover. She confessed her infidelity to Cummings, who forgave her, but after their return to New York she had a longer affair with a British film director that rattled Cummings. At his request, she terminated the affair, but her show of independence weakened Cummings’s position in their relationship, making him even more a supplicant for her love.

While in London, Cummings and Marion had tea with the MacDermots, but again he was unable to see Nancy, who was staying with a friend in Vienna. Nancy was seventeen, and she did not know who her father was.

During the war years, Cummings and Marion suffered health breakdowns. Cummings was afflicted with sciatica and acute osteoarthritis that kept him in continuous pain. He wore a corset and took pain-killing drugs. In 1945, Marion was hospitalized for nine months with rheumatoid arthritis. Sibley Watson paid both their medical bills, with help from Cummings’s Aunt Jane. Cummings, opposed to US entry into World War II, retreated from it to Joy Farm. His response was the morality play Santa Claus, a title that conjures the world of children and the magic of Christmas.

The play was dedicated to Cummings’s therapist, Fritz Willels. In five short scenes, Cummings presents a fable about the relationship among understanding, knowledge, love, and death. The characters are Santa Claus, Death, a mob (mostpeople), a little girl, and a bereft woman. Santa Claus encounters Death and complains that no one wants what he has to give, which is understanding. (The parallels to Cummings’s verse and the reading public are obvious.) Death advises Santa Claus that people do not want understanding, they want knowledge, the knowledge that science provides. Science=death. Death persuades Santa Claus to change places with him, in order to offer people knowledge instead of understanding. He won’t even have to give it; he can sell it. Death tells Santa Claus that in the name of science he can sell people something that doesn’t exist—shares in a wheelmine. “The less something exists, the more people want it,” Death tells Santa Claus. Death and Santa Claus exchange masks, and in the guise of Death Santa Claus sells wheelmine shares to the greedy mob.

An accident at the non-existent wheelmine stirs the mob into a frenzy, and it pursues Santa Claus, still masked as Death. His innocence is confirmed when a little girl sees through his mask and recognizes him as Santa Claus, a being that the mob knows does not exist. Santa Claus is spared the fury of the mob.

Death then exchanges physical appearance with Santa Claus in order to pursue a woman. He admits to Santa Claus that he has never loved a woman—it’s a “mistake” he has avoided. The little girls returns and recognizes Santa Claus even though he now looks like Death. “I like you any way—if you’re you,” she tells him. Authentic individuality is all that matters to the child. The child is looking for a woman— “very beautiful and very sad.” The missing woman enters, weeping because “knowledge has taken love out of the world and all the world is empty, empty, empty.”  Santa Claus, still in the appearance of Death, comforts her. She recognizes his voice as the voice of “him I loved more than my life.”

The mob returns with the corpse of Death, who is still disguised as Santa Claus. The little girl says, “That isn’t Santa Claus,” whereupon the mob exits with the corpse, laughing because it knows that there is no Santa Claus. Santa Claus removes his disguise as Death, and he and the child and the woman become “ours” —rather like the holy family that Christians celebrate at Christmas.

The play is full of resonances from Cummings’s personal life and stands as his attempt to resolve in art the issues that he was unable to resolve in life: the childless Marion as the bereft woman, the little girl as the fatherless Nancy, Death as the reality principle that Cummings fought against.

Nancy had come to New York in 1941 to escape the war in Europe. She took a job as a typist. Cummings learned of her presence from John Dos Passos, who had bumped into her, but he made no effort to contact her after Marion and his therapist advised against it, out of concern that his work would suffer if she re-entered his life. Nancy married Joseph Willard Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson, in February 1943. Cummings learned of the marriage when Marion read the announcement in The New York Times. The couple lived in Norfolk, Virginia, where Willard served in the Navy. On September 6, 1945, Cummings became a grandfather when Nancy delivered a boy who was named Simon.

In the summer of 1946 Nancy, Willard, and Simon were staying with friends who lived near Silver Lake, and when Cummings learned they were nearby, he invited them to tea at Joy Farm. Nancy was strangely stirred by Cummings’s voice, which must have sounded like an echo from her childhood. Though Cummings avoided being alone with Nancy for more than a few minutes, contact between them had finally been re-established. They stayed in touch, and in the fall of 1948 Nancy, now living with her husband and two children on Long Island, came to visit Cummings at Patchin Place.

Cummings asked Nancy to sit for a portrait, a way of becoming intimate with her through his art. During the sittings, Nancy became charmed by Cummings’s conversation and manner with her. Her marriage cracking, Nancy found herself falling in love with the painter. She resolved not to return to Patchin Place once the portrait was finished. On her last visit Cummings revealed that he was her father. She told no one what she had learned.

Marion became jealous of the burgeoning relationship between Cummings and Nancy and threw obstacles in their way. Nancy communicated with her father through the mail, sending him letters and poems. But Cummings remained reluctant to take on the role of parent. While she visited him at Joy Farm in the summer of 1950, he told Nancy that her children were to call him Estlin, not grandpa. But after she left, he was melancholy, and wrote in his journal, “it seems to me that she is real, & that my life here (with M) isn’t. What are all my salutings of Chocorua [a local mountain] & worshippings of birds & smellings of flowers & fillings of hummingbirdcups etc etc? They’re sorry substitutes for human intercourse generally & particularly for spiritual give-&-take with a child-woman whom I adore—someone vital & young—& gay.” (Sawyer, p. 474) Cummings looked back into his life from the realm of his art and felt regret.

Nancy came to visit again the following summer, and on this occasion Marion found a pretext to ask her to leave. Nancy had read an unfinished poem that was lying on Cummings’s desk, and when she asked him about it, he became upset. She had trespassed on his art. Two years later, divorced, she moved to Austria with her children. Cummings next saw her in June 1953 when she returned to Joy Farm, bringing her two children and her fiancé, Kevin Andrews.

In the 1950s, Cummings finally achieved financial independence as honors and recognition were showered on him. As late as 1950, at age 56, Cummings was still dependent on family and friends for income. Rebecca had died in 1947, leaving Aunt Jane as his principal benefactress. But in 1950 he received $500 as the Harriet Monroe Poetry Prize from Poetry magazine. Then the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets awarded him $5,000. Since the Collected Poems had come out, he had published 1 X 1 [One Times One] in 1944 and XAIPE in 1950. In February 1951 Aunt Jane died, leaving him $17, 423. He and Marion traveled to Europe, and after their return he was offered the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard for the academic year 1952-1953. The position required him to deliver six hour-long lectures, for which he would be paid $15,000. He and Marion moved to Cambridge for the year, and Cummings delivered his Six Nonlectures to turn-away crowds at Sanders Theater.

After giving a reading at the YM-YWHA Poetry Center in New York, he was approached by Betty Kray, a literary agent who began to book him on tours of colleges and universities. Cummings was a skilled reader who performed his poems with drama and emotion. Audiences loved him. He became a celebrity on the university circuit, able to charge up to $700 for a reading. But the demands of travel and preparation took their toll on him. Sitting on planes aggravated his back, and performance anxiety kept him awake at night. He was taking pain medication for his back, and a tranquilizer for the anxiety. He eventually buckled under the stress, canceling a 1958 appearance at UCLA to deliver two Ewing Lectures for $2500. That year, he was awarded the Bollingen Prize ($1,000), one of the most prestigious honors bestowed on poets. And in 1959, the Ford Foundation granted him $15,000. Cummings had become a national institution.

In 1960, Cummings paid one final visit to Nancy. She was then living in Athens, married to Kevin Andrews, and raising an additional two children. Cummings and Marion came to Greece, but the visit was awkward. They had difficulty making contact, and when they finally did, Marion was rude to Kevin. She wanted Cummings all to herself. Back in the US, Cummings remained an isolated man. He turned down an invitation to attend a dinner for artists at the Kennedy White House, signaling his contempt for the world of politics. Or perhaps he was simply uncomfortable in company with other artists. He once told Henry Miller, whom he met in Paris during the 1930s, that he did not read the work of other writers.

On September 2, 1962, while at Joy Farm, Cummings collapsed from a cerebral hemorrhage after returning to the house from chopping wood. He died at hospital the next day. A small private funeral was held in Boston. Marion died in 1969 from throat cancer.   

We remember E. E. Cummings for the uniqueness of his poetic voice. His style sets him apart from all other poets, a distinction he avidly sought. No one, certainly no modern writing in English, took such liberties with the conventions of the language. His style suited his subjects. He was drawn to the world of the child, a world where the irrational reigns, because the child embodies what Cummings called “ISness” —a state of continuous becoming that is aligned with the always-changing processes of nature. He resisted the fall into adulthood, which brought the threat of stasis, of unliving and unloving, that he saw as the fate of “mostpeople.”

These choices left him in the realm of dualisms, and prevented him from achieving the “higher innocence” of a mystic like William Blake, who also cherished the world of the child, but insisted that continuous growth required a passage through experience in order to reach the more exalted state of awareness in which all our human faculties—sensation, emotion, intuition, and reason—are integrated, making us whole (and holy). Cummings was afraid of “the goat-footed balloonMan,” and did not make the passage. But few of us do.

Chapter Five — Nina Simone : The Melancholy Diva

Nina Simone, famed black musician known for her distinctive musical style and her fiery presence on stage, was born in 1933 into a large family struggling to survive the Depression in Tryon, a small North Carolina town. Her mother, Kate, a deeply religious woman, served as an itinerant Methodist preacher and worked as a housekeeper for a white family. Her father, John Devan (J.D.), scrounged for work as a handyman and gardener after several business enterprises he had established in the town went under. Nina was the sixth of eight children, preceded by three brothers and two sisters, and followed by another sister and brother. Her birth name was Eunice Kathleen Waymon, a name that she changed when she began her career as a professional musician.

The family was musical. J.D. played the harmonica and guitar, and had toured as an entertainer. Kate sang gospels as she cooked, planted her vegetable garden, and tended her children. There was a pedal organ in the home, and later a piano. One day when Eunice was three years old she sat down at the pedal organ and played from memory a tune her mother had been singing. Thus did her musical gift become apparent. Her mother regarded this gift as a divine blessing from God, and believed that it should be put in the service of her ministry.

When Eunice was four, Kate installed her as the organist performing at the start of her Sunday religious services as a way to attract worshippers, who were drawn to the church to see the child prodigy. Eunice also accompanied the choir and played at the Sunday school, a busy schedule for a four year old. Kate forbade Eunice to play any form of secular music because she believed that to do so would profane God’s gift. But when Kate was not at home, J.D. encouraged her to play the popular music that he had performed. So from her earliest years Eunice was exposed to a wide variety of musical forms. But she was also burdened with guilt, because she had to keep her mother from finding out that she was playing forbidden music.

Eunice’s bond with her father deepened when he underwent abdominal surgery and became unable to work. Though she was only four, Eunice was assigned to nurse him through a slow convalescence. She changed the dressing on his wound and fed him liquid meals made with Carnation powdered milk. The older children were taken up with other responsibilities. Her sister Lucille, though only fifteen, ran the household and served as a surrogate mother to Eunice while Kate worked. The oldest child, John Irvin, had landed a job with the federal government and helped to support the family.

When Eunice was six and playing for the church choir at the Tryon Theater, two white women in the audience took note of her talent. Although Tryon was, like all southern towns during the 1930s, racially segregated, whites and blacks lived cordially amongst each other, perhaps because the town was a tourist destination for visitors from the north. Kate’s employer, Katherine Miller, was sitting with Muriel Mazzanovich, an Englishwoman who gave piano lessons. Mrs. Miller and another white woman, Esther Moore, offered to pay Muriel to give lessons to Eunice, and for five years, until she left Tryon for high school, Eunice went every Saturday morning to receive instruction from Miss Mazzy at her home, which had two pianos. Muriel was a loving and affectionate teacher with a devotion to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, whom she considered technically perfect. She exposed Eunice to his music, as well as to the music of other classical composers, including Beethoven and Mozart. Her five years of lessons with Miss Mazzy set Eunice on the path to becoming a classical musician.

“Once I understood Bach’s music I never wanted to be anything other than a concert pianist,” Simone wrote in her autobiography I Put a Spell on You. “Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was Mrs. Mazzanovich who introduced me to his world.” (Spell, p. 23)

Miss Mazzy nurtured Eunice. “She gave me the kind of attention and affection I didn’t get from Momma, and the more she gave the more I needed it . . . In time she became another mother to me, one I had all to myself.” (Spell, p. 24) To ensure that Eunice’s musical education would not end in Tryon, Muriel established the Eunice Waymon Fund and solicited donations from the community. Eunice periodically gave recitals so that her supporters could hear her play, and thus acquired performing experience at an early age. Miss Mazzy also taught Eunice stage decorum, how to comport herself with dignity before an audience.

Her focus on music, her rigorous schedule of daily practice and playing at church services and community events, isolated Eunice from other children and made her feel alone, a feeling that would persist throughout her life. “No one in the family knew how isolated my music made me,” she wrote. “Of all the girls I hung around with I was the only one without a boyfriend. Naturally I started to think that there was something wrong with me.” (Spell, p.30) But shortly before she entered high school, Eunice befriended Edney Whiteside, a Cherokee Indian four years older than she, whose family had recently moved to Tryon. They spent time together every Sunday afternoon when Eunice had finished playing for her mother’s church.

In 1945 Eunice went to Asheville to attend Allen High School, a private school for black girls. Katherine Miller and Esther Moore paid her tuition. She was separated from Edney, but they wrote frequently, and he came to visit her every Sunday. Before she left, she gave a recital at the Lanier Library in Tryon. Her parents attended, and took seats in the front row. Before the performance began, a while couple asked to be given the seats occupied by Kate and J.D. Meekly, they moved. Eunice stood up from the piano and declared that she would not play until her parents returned to their original seats. Amidst tittering from the mostly white audience, an embarrassed Kate and J.D. displaced the white couple, and the recital began. This gesture was Eunice’s first defiance of racism, and foreshadowed her deep involvement with the civil rights movement during the 1960s.

Eunice shone at Allen High School. She rose at 5:30 every morning to practice piano before her classes began. The school arranged lessons for her with Joyce Carrol, a private teacher in Åsheville. She excelled in her studies, was elected president of the junior class, and was also president of the dramatics club. She joined the Allen chapter of the NAACP, and became its treasurer. But despite her many accomplishments, other students considered her “odd.” During vacations, she spent time with Edney and Miss Mazzy, who organized a recital at her home in 1948.

She and Edney were in love, and discussed marriage. “In Edney, whom I loved and who loved me, I had someone to connect with, to tie me to the real world, to love more than music,” she wrote in her autobiography. (Spell, p. 35) But Edney began to doubt that they could make a life together. Her music put her in a realm that was beyond his reach. When Eunice learned that he was seeing her best friend Annie Mae, she became distressed. Edney offered to marry her after she graduated from Allen, but Miss Mazzy had obtained a scholarship for her to spend the summer of 1950 in New York City and study piano at the Juilliard School. Edney came to her graduation, and told her that he believed if she went to New York, she would never come back to Tryon.

Eunice felt that with the weight of others’ expectations on her—her parents, her siblings, Miss Mazzy, Katherine Miller, Esther Moore, and the donors to the Eunice Waymon Fund—she had no choice. Later, she looked back on this decision with sadness. “I found a youthful love and lost it. That was the turning point. I lost a love and found a career . . . [But] I’m a long way from compensating for what I gave up.” (Light, p. 37) The melancholy that infuses many of her love songs—Miles Davis called her “the siren of sadness” —may be rooted in this lost youthful love. After Eunice left for New York, Edney married Annie Mae.

In New York, Eunice stayed with a preacher friend of Kate, Mrs. Steinermayer, who lived in Harlem. The city—its scale, its noise, its crowds—overwhelmed Eunice. From July 3 to August 11 she attended classes at Juilliard on weekdays from 8-4. Her primary teacher was Carl Friedberg, a former European concert pianist who had studied under Clara Schumann. Eunice practiced five hours a day. There were 720 students at Juilliard that summer, most of whom were white. Eunice had no social life away from the school. She kept to herself in Harlem, focused on her music.

Eunice was preparing to audition for admission to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, a prestigious school that provides full scholarships to its students. Its roster of graduates includes such luminaries as Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, and Yuja Wang. Its admissions rate is 4.8%, making it one of the most exclusive educational institutions in the United States. So confident were Eunice’s parents of her acceptance at Curtis that they moved the family to Philadelphia, where Lucille, now married, and her brother Carrol, had already settled.

In mid-August, J.D. walked Eunice to Rittenhouse Square on the day of her audition. There were three openings for piano students. She felt that her audition had gone well, but when a letter from Curtis arrived at the family home, it brought news of her rejection. The decision shocked the family, and embittered Eunice. “They didn’t want me because I wasn’t good enough,” she wrote. (Spell, p. 41) But her brother Carrol believed that race had played a role. She had been rejected because she was black and poor. Although other black applicants had been accepted at Curtis, including one in the piano department, Eunice, perhaps to protect herself from the idea that she “wasn’t good enough,” fastened on the narrative that she had been a victim of racism. “When I was rejected by the Curtis Institute it was as if all of the promises ever made to me by God, my family and my community were broken, and I had been lied to all my life . . . Nobody told me that no matter what I did in life the color of my skin would always make a difference. I learned that bitter lesson from Curtis.” (Spell, p. 41, 44)

This version of events that Eunice clung to reveals the extent to which she had been practicing and performing not for herself, but for others. The belief that racism was behind her rejection accorded well with her sense of being the victim of others’ designs for her.

Carrol urged her to continue her studies and apply to Curtis again. She took piano lessons from Vladimir Sokoloff, a member of the Curtis faculty. He denied that race had been a factor in her rejection. Other applicants had simply been better. He saw that she had a talent for jazz, and suggested she pursue jazz professionally. But Eunice did not want to give up her dream of becoming a classical concert pianist. She saw the jazz label as another sign of racism. Blacks were meant to play jazz, not Bach.

Eunice worked to pay for her piano lessons, first as a photographer’s assistant, then as the accompanist for the Arlene Smith Vocal Studio. She lived alone in a storefront in Philadelphia with a dog named Sheba and her piano. She gave private lessons there. Eventually she opened her own voice studio, pirating some of Arlene Smith’s students. She began singing in order to demonstrate to her students how to interpret songs. She had a limited social life, and was lonely. She concealed from her mother that she was playing and teaching popular music. She had a boyfriend named Ed, whom she met at church, and went to bed with him. She also befriended a black prostitute named Faith Jackson who lived stylishly and shamelessly on the margins of society. (She may have been thinking of Faith Jackson when years later she sang the mournful song “The Other Woman.”) Eunice saw a psychiatrist named Gerry Weiss for about a year during this period. She felt adrift in her own life, uncertain who she was or what she wanted to be. As time passed, she became too old to reapply to Curtis.

In 1954 she learned that one of her students, whose talent was far inferior to hers, had been hired to play the piano and sing at a club in Atlantic City. He was making $90 a week, nearly twice her earnings. Through the student’s agent she was booked into the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City. When she came to audition for the owner Harry Steward, she gave her name as Nina Simone because she didn’t want her mother to know that she was performing in a bar. She came to work the first night dressed elegantly, as though giving a recital. She played a mix of popular and classical music, improvising as she went, sometimes for as long as ninety minutes without stopping. She performed from 9 pm to 4 am. On her breaks, she sat at the bar drinking milk. The second night Steward told her that she had to sing as well as play. Because she had a limited two-octave range, she decided to use her voice as an accompaniment to the piano. She sang a blend of jazz, folk, and gospel, sometimes improvising her own lyrics. If the bar crowd became too noisy, she stopped playing. She was learning to control her audience. Later in her career, she defended her standards. “When you play you give all your concentration to the music, because it deserves total respect, and an audience should sit still and be quiet . . . If an audience disrespects me it is insulting the music I play, and I will not continue, because if they don’t want to listen then I don’t want to play.” (Spell, p.52)

Word of her unique playing style and manner spread along the Atlantic City boardwalk. Soon the Midtown Bar and Grill was packed with workers coming off night shifts at hotels and restaurants. These were her first genuine music fans, mostly young people who responded to her idiosyncratic style and haughty manner. If other customers became too noisy, these fans silenced them so that Simone would not stop performing. But again in Atlantic City she was isolated with her music. She lived alone in an apartment and felt that the music she was playing was beneath her. “I sat on the stage a diva, a professional entertainer for the first time, and played to an audience of drunken Irish bums,” was how she later summed up her gig at the Midtown Bar and Grill.  (Spell, p. 47)

But the money brought her back. In September, as the season ended and she prepared to return to Philadelphia and resume her life as Eunice Waymon, Steward asked her to return for the 1955 summer season. She was moving along the path of the musician she did not want to be.

Back in Philadelphia, Nina resumed her lessons with Sokoloff. Her goal remained to become a classical concert pianist. But she continued to perform in clubs to support herself. Her agent booked her into the upscale Poquessing Club. When her act was reviewed in the Evening Bulletin, she confessed to her mother that she was performing as Nina Simone in order to earn money to continue her classical training. Her mother, considering it sinful, disapproved. But she accepted the money Nina gave her from her earnings. J.D. warned her of the perils of the road musician’s life.

She played two more seasons at the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City. In the summer of 1955 she met Ted Axelrod, a fan who came regularly to hear her play. One evening he invited her to his apartment and played for her a Billie Holiday recording of “I Loves You, Porgy.” Simone added the song to her repertoire and it immediately became a show-stopper at the Midtown. Her rendering of the tender lyric, poignant in its mournful yearning, brings to mind her broken love for Edney, a sign of how her music was becoming an outlet for her personal anguish. “I Loves You, Porgy” became one of Nina Simone’s iconic songs. When she sang it, she corrected the grammar to “I love you, Porgy.”

In the summer of 1956, while she was playing at the Midtown, two white men came into her life. Don Ross was a frequent patron of the bar. He hung around until closing time and began walking Nina home. She was again without a social life, and came to depend on him. “Before I knew it, the idea of being without him was unthinkable,” she wrote in her autobiography. (Spell, p. 56) Ross was a hustler who worked on and off as a fairground barker, becoming idle when he had saved up some money, and playing the part of a bohemian. He moved in with her, and before long she was supporting him. Although she didn’t love Ross, the thought of being alone terrified her, and so a dependency relationship was formed.

She also met, through Steward, the agent Jerry Fields, who came down from New York to hear her perform and offered to represent her. He assured her that he could book her into upscale clubs in Manhattan and secure a recording contract for her. She signed with him and began traveling from Philadelphia to New York for gigs. She was then earning $175 per week, continuing her lessons with Sokoloff, and helping support her family as well as Ross, who lounged around their apartment listening to jazz records and smoking weed. Under the stress, Nina began drinking and taking LSD.

In the fall of 1957, while performing at The Playhouse Inn in New Hope, Pennsylvania, Simone was joined on stage by Al Schackman, a guitarist who was in the audience. She ignored him at first, and tried to lose him with her virtuosity. But when he kept up with her, and even seemed to know where she was going with the music, she gave him a searching look. After the club closed for the night, Schackman came home with her and they played together for hours. Never her lover, Schackman became a lifelong friend and musical soul mate.

In December, Nina went to New York to record an album for Bethlehem Records, a jazz label founded in 1953. The tracks were songs that she had been performing at Midtown. She was paid $3,000 for the rights, with no royalty provision, an omission that would later cost her a great deal of money. The album was released in June 1958 under the title Little Girl Blue. The cover of the album was a photograph of a triste Simone sitting on a bench by a pond in Central Park. The songs included standards such as “Mood Indigo,” “Little Girl Blue,” “Love Me or Leave Me,” “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” “I Loves You, Porgy,” and “My Baby Just Cares For Me.” Bethlehem made little effort to promote the album, sales were disappointing, and Simone never recorded for them again, although the company in 1959, without Simone’s consent, released a second album, Nina Simone and Her Friends, composed of songs laid down for Little Girl Blue but not used. This experience was the first of many that fed Simone’s distrust of record companies and her belief that her musical talent was being exploited.

Sid Marx, a Philadelphia disc jockey, became enamored of Simone’s rendering of “I Loves You, Porgy,” played it repeatedly on his show, and lobbied Bethlehem to issue it as a single. It was released in June 1959 and climbed to #8 on the pop charts. The single spread Simone’s fame, but Bethlehem kept all the money.

Jerry Fields told Nina that if she wanted to advance her career, she should move to New York, which was the center of the jazz world. Nina was fearful of moving away from her family and being alone in New York. She decided to marry Don Ross and bring him with her. They wed in Philadelphia in a civil ceremony witnessed by a passing stranger. Her parents, though they had accepted Ross, did not attend. Early in 1958 Simone and Ross moved to New York, to an apartment in Greenwich Village. Nina continued to travel to Philadelphia to take lessons from Sokoloff.

In the two years after the release of “I Loves You, Porgy,” Simone’s visibility in the jazz world rapidly increased. She became associated with some of the most prominent musicians in the field, and performed at prestigious venues across the country. She signed a multi-record contract with Colpix, the record division of Columbia Pictures, and retained an entertainment attorney, Max Cohen, to represent her. Her performance at New York’s Village Vanguard in July 1959 was favorably reviewed in Billboard and Variety. At the beginning of August she appeared at the first Playboy Jazz Festival in Chicago. In September she performed at The Town Hall in New York on a program with Horace Silver and J.J. Johnson. Colpix later released Nina Simone at Town Hall. October found her at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. In December, back in Chicago, she performed at the Blue Note and was the featured artist on the Playboy Penthouse television show. She sang “I Loves You, Porgy” for Hugh Hefner’s all-white guests—men clad in tuxedos, women attired in cocktail dresses. Ebony magazine gave her a four-page spread. In March 1960 she performed at a charity event in Philadelphia with Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, and The Four Freshmen. Then she appeared on NBC’s Today show with Dave Garroway, and had another booking at The Town Hall, sharing the stage with Max Roach, Sonny Stitt, and Thelonious Monk. She had formed her own band with Al Schackman, Ben Riley on drums, and Chris White on bass. She also appeared at The Village Gate whose owner, Art D’Lugoff, became her manager. Through it all, she continued her classical training, taking lessons from her old teacher at Juilliard, Carl Friedberg.

Her success brought the comforts that money could buy, but also marked the beginning of erratic behavior that gave her a reputation for being difficult and unpredictable. She bought a Mercedes Benz convertible and an apartment on Central Park West. She separated from Ross, who had fastened on her like leech, and divorced him at the end of 1960. She was given to backstage outbursts and to confrontations with her audiences. At the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem she mocked the audience for being boorish, provoking walk-outs. She never performed there again. These episodes made promoters wary of her. She invented a fictional narrative about her childhood and upbringing, claiming to have been a victim of poverty and racism, and failing to credit the white women in Tryon who had helped her. Her pious mother continued to withhold her approval of Simone’s career, but also continued to accept money from her. Nina’s feelings of loneliness persisted, and she resumed seeing a psychiatrist.

In March 1961 Nina met Andrew Stroud, the man who would become her husband and manager for ten years. They met at the Roundtable in Manhattan, a club where Simone performed and Stroud was often a patron. She flirted with him at his table, and after the performance he escorted her home. He introduced himself to her as a bank teller, but in reality he was a thrice-divorced police detective with the NYPD. He worked a beat in Harlem for the vice squad. He had a reputation for being both tough and corrupt, a man you didn’t fool with. He carried a gun. His fearlessness gave Nina a feeling of security. “I felt safe when he was around,” she wrote in her autobiography. (Spell, p. 73) But almost immediately there were signs that he might be a threat to her. Once he slapped her after she arrived forty-five minutes late for a date and was dropped off by another man. He warned her not to trifle with him.

In July, while in Philadelphia for a performance, Nina was stricken with a mild case of polio and hospitalized. Stroud came to her bedside every evening to comfort her. When she had recovered, he proposed marriage to her, and she accepted. Then she experienced a more ominous episode of Stroud’s violence. While they were out for an evening of dancing and drinking at the Palladium Ballroom, one of Nina’s fans recognized her and handed her a note. Nina put the note in her purse, infuriating Stroud, who had been drinking rum all evening. After they left the Palladium, Stroud began to beat her on the street as they waited for a cab. Back at her apartment, he pointed his gun at her head, stripped her naked, tied her to the bed, and raped her. She got free, and fled to Al Schackman’s apartment, where she hid for days. Stroud tracked her down, and when he saw her bruised and swollen face, asked her who had struck her. “You did,” answered Simone. Stroud claimed to have no memory of doing it.

Nina asked Stroud to see her psychiatrist. He went, and also saw another. Nina’s psychiatrist advised her not to marry Stroud. The other psychiatrist waffled. He said it was possible that Stroud’s assault had been an isolated incident, brought on by his drinking. It might not recur. Nina was unable to sever the relationship. Her fear of being alone was stronger than her fear of Stroud. She said, “I needed desperately to love somebody . . . When he was around, I didn’t feel lonely.” (Light, P. 77; Spell, p. 78). They were married on December 4, 1961 in Simone’s Central Park West apartment. Stroud’s five brothers, Nina’s younger sister Frances, Al Schackman, Ted Axelrod, and the two psychiatrists attended. Nina’s parents were not there.

Shortly after the wedding, Nina left for Lagos, Nigeria, on a cultural mission in company with a number of black artists, including Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. This trip was the beginning of Simone’s consciousness of herself as a member of a race whose tribal roots lay in Africa. As a result of befriending Hughes and Baldwin, and from them learning more about the history of her race, Simone began to identify herself as an African woman through her choice of wardrobe and make-up.

The following year, using money from a Colpix advance, Simone and Stroud bought a large house on four acres in Mount Vernon, a segregated suburb of New York located in Westchester County. Nina became pregnant. She hired a housekeeper and a gardener whose duties she compulsively micromanaged, thus increasing rather than relieving her responsibilities. Stroud kept her performing through her eighth month. On September 12, 1962 their daughter, named Lisa Celeste, was born, an event that brought great joy to Nina. “The first three hours after Lisa was born were the most peaceful of my life,” she said in an interview. (What Happened, Miss Simone?) She wanted to breast feed her baby, but Stroud opposed it, saying it made him jealous.

In 1963, Stroud resigned from the NYPD, became Nina’s manager, and set a course for her career. His goal was to make them rich, so that they could retire early and live in luxury. Simone was then earning up to $4,500 a week when performing in top venues.  He formed a production company, hired a publicist and a promoter, and put Simone on a rigorous schedule of appearances and recordings. He booked her into Carnegie Hall, and she performed there in April 1963 to a sell-out crowd that included her parents and Muriel Mazzanovich. The appearance raised Simone’s profile and placed her among the top performers of popular music in her era. “But,” Simone later remarked, “I wasn’t playing Bach.” (What Happened, Miss Simone?) She had realized her dream, but in an altered form that she could not fully embrace.

Simone had become friends with the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who often came to hear Nina play at The Village Gate. Hansberry urged Simone to use her music and her celebrity to advance the cause of civil rights for black people. Hansberry raised Simone’s awareness of race and gender inequality in America. “Through her I started thinking about myself as a black person in a country run by white people and a woman in a world run by men.” (Spell, p.87) A series of events in 1963—the arrest of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Birmingham, the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi, the march on Washington, and the church bombing in Birmingham that killed four black children—propelled Simone into activism. She wrote an incendiary song, “Mississippi Goddam” that many radio stations in the south refused to play and put her music and her performances in the service of the movement. This commitment transformed Simone’s attitude towards her music. “I felt needed . . . For the first time performing made sense as a part of my life.” (Spell, p. 98, 94)

The civil rights movement gave Simone’s music a deeper purpose by elevating it above the category of popular music. The movement made her music comparable in importance to classical music, and brought a spiritual dimension to her performances. She discovered that many people in the movement, including Stokely Carmichael, were fans who played her records constantly.

But her politicizing of her music troubled Stroud. He saw it as a threat to her commercial success, jeopardizing her appeal to mainstream audiences who wanted to be entertained, not preached to. He kept her on a rigorous schedule of touring and recording with the result that she felt pulled in two directions, one charted by her husband who wanted to make money, the other answering an inner need to feel wanted for who she was. The pressure on her increased to the point that she was admitted to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital for treatment of depression. She began keeping a diary in which she recorded her bouts of melancholy, and her sense of alienation from Stroud. The diary reveals that he periodically beat her, and that she felt she deserved it. “Andrew hit me last night (swollen lip). Of course it was what I needed after so many days of depression.” (What Happened, Miss Simone?)

Simone tried to walk two paths. For Stroud she played concerts, cut records, and toured to promote them. For the movement she gave benefit performances with other activists like Pete Seeger, Odetta, and Harry Belafonte. She moved from Colpix to Phillips. But the regimen exhausted her and filled her with resentment. “I was always tired,” she said in an interview. “I could never sleep. The more I played, the less I could relax. Andy wouldn’t let me rest.” (What Happened, Miss Simone?) Her resentment showed in outbursts of anger against her musicians, producers, and audiences. She developed a reputation for being difficult to work with, demanding, ungrateful, and unpredictable. She so antagonized the technicians at Nero’s Nook in Caesar’s Palace that they sabotaged her microphone, ruining her performance.

As Simone continued her balancing act, events beyond her control added to her stress and feelings of alienation. In January 1965 her close friend Lorraine Hansberry died from pancreatic cancer at age 34. Simone sang at her memorial service and later recorded the song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” whose title was taken from Hansberry’s posthumously produced play. The song became a kind of anthem for the civil rights movement. A month after Hansberry’s death Malcolm X was assassinated by members of the Nation of Islam. Simone’s growing disenchantment with race relations in the U.S. disposed her to be sympathetic to black nationalism. She received Louis Farrakhan at her home in Mount Vernon when considering conversion to Islam. Malcolm X’s widow Betty Shabazz was friends with Simone and moved to Mount Vernon with her children. Her daughter Lisa often stayed at her home.

In January, three days after the death of Hansberry, Simone gave her second concert at Carnegie Hall, a solo performance witnessed by her parents and Miss Mazzy. A classical pianist, Céline Gorier-Bernard, remarked the split in Simone’s musical style. “Nina Simone never left classical music, she never ventured into jazz. Even with pure blues pieces, she always plays through her classical sensibility. She uses a range of gestures, linking very short notes and rhythms, that you only find in classical music, never in jazz.” (Brun-Lambert, p. 178) This observation points to another manifestation of the split within Nina that was gradually tearing her apart. Simone had ceased her piano lessons due to want of time, but the pull of her classical training remained strong.

In March, with Art D’Lugoff’s blessing, Simone broke an engagement at The Village Gate in order to perform at a benefit concert in Montgomery, Alabama that preceded Martin Luther King’s voter registration March from Montgomery to Selma. The concert was organized by Harry Belafonte and featured performances by Sammy Davis, Jr., Odetta, and Tony Bennett. Simone sang “Mississippi Goddam” as King and Ralph Bunche sat in the front row along with other dignitaries. The song fired up her audience.

For the remainder of the year Simone toured continuously. In June she left with Stroud and Lisa for her first European tour. It began in London and took them to Belgium, France, and Germany. She discovered that she had a large fan base in England owing to Eric Burdon and The Animals, who had covered her song “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” and made it into a hit in England. Simone resented the fact that white musicians had capitalized on her artistry. While in London she met David Nathan, a music aficionado who had started a Nina Simone fan club. Simone and Stroud brought Nathan and his sister Sylvia into their inner circle and used them to promote Nina’s records and appearances. She returned to the United States for a fall tour and in December she and Stroud were back in Europe, staying in Holland as guests of Wilhelm Langenberg, the head of Phillips. By the time she was back in the US for a concert in Chicago to benefit the Congress on Racial Equality, Simone was exhausted. “Inside I’m screaming ‘Someone help me’ but the sound isn’t audible—like screaming without a voice,” she wrote in her diary. (What Happened, Miss Simone?) She broached the thought of suicide to her husband. Stroud was unmoved. “He let me know that he would not only not suffer, but he would be relieved.” (What Happened, Miss Simone?) His only concern was keeping her working while her star was ascendant. He switched the recording contract from Phillips to RCA.

Early in 1967, while touring with Bill Cosby, she cracked. Stroud entered their hotel room in Baltimore where Simone was preparing for her stage appearance to find her applying black shoe polish to her hair. She was hallucinating and delusional, thinking that Stroud was her nephew. Though Stroud was fearful of letting her go on stage, she insisted on performing. Stroud brought her to the theater and escorted her on stage to the piano. Then he watched from the wings. She got through the concert somehow, and Stroud dismissed the episode as an anomaly that wouldn’t be repeated. He kept her touring.

Other blows fell in 1968. On April 4, King was assassinated in Memphis. Simone was scheduled to perform at Dartmouth College that evening and cancelled. On June 5, while Simone was touring Europe again, Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles. Simone saw these events as ringing down the curtain on the civil rights movement, to which she had given her heart, only to have it broken again.

In August 1969 Simone fled. Without telling Stroud where she was going or when she would be back, she left her wedding ring on the bedroom dresser at the Mount Vernon house and flew to Barbados, where she had booked a room at Sam Lord’s Castle Resort. She initiated a romance with a bellboy named Paul who took her for rides on his motorbike. Paul had no idea who Simone was, and Nina kept it that way. When she returned to Mount Vernon, she discovered that Stroud had moved to an apartment in New York, taking all his belongings with him and parking Lisa, then seven, with his mother. Simone and Stroud never lived together again, although their business relationship continued for another year.

Over the next three years, Simone’s life began to unravel. The structure that Stroud’s management had established for her appearances was still there, and she kept the concert dates that he had scheduled. But without his steadying hand and stern discipline, Simone struggled to maintain her professionalism with promoters and audiences. She went to Philadelphia to ask Sam Waymon to manage her, and he agreed, but he lacked Stroud’s authority. Nina was not afraid of him, and he became a target of her abuse. She behaved erratically at her performances, arriving late, and sometimes berating her audiences. Occasionally there was a racist tinge to her remarks. She once told a mostly white audience that she was singing for the black people in the theater, a slight that was met with embarrassed titters. She refused to perform at the Academy of Music in New York because she had not been paid in advance, triggering an audience riot. Scheduled to perform on NBC’s The Tonight Show, Simone missed her cue to go on and the producer shuffled in another guest in her place. During an appearance in New Orleans where she was opening for B.B. King, she returned to the stage during his set, disrupting the show. Her eccentricities alienated a great many people, and alarmed her closest musical ally, Al Schackman. Sam Waymon was hard-pressed to control her, and came under considerable stress. Her long-time attorney, Max Cohen, ceased to represent her.

Simone’s self-destructiveness severely impacted members of her family. While in Philadelphia to recruit Sam as her manager, she overheard her father telling Sam that he had always been the main provider for the family. J.D. was a proud man, perhaps ashamed that his role as bread-winner had been diminished. Stroud had been sending the Waymons money every month, and Kate had carried the family during J.D.’s period of illness and unemployment during the Depression. Simone broke with her father, a rupture that must have caused her enormous regret and guilt. She wrote in her autobiography, “I felt the same disgust as when I heard the news of the Birmingham church bomb . . . I walked into the kitchen and told him he wasn’t my Daddy anymore because I disowned him. From that moment I had no father.” (Spell, p. 124) Two years later, J.D. was back in Tryon, dying from prostate cancer. He asked for Nina, but she refused to see him. On the day of his funeral, she performed at the Kennedy Center for the Arts in Washington. A month later, Lucille also died from cancer.

Simone also had a troubled relationship with Lisa, who moved in and out of her life, and was shuttled from one caregiver to another. For a time she lived with Betty Shabazz in Mount Vernon. Then she alternated between Kate’s home in Tryon and Al Schackman’s farm in Massachusetts. In 1973 Lisa accompanied Simone on a tour of Australia and Japan. Simone made Lisa a target of her racism, berating her for being light skinned, and physically abusing her. Lisa arranged to go to New York to visit her father, and did not rejoin Simone on the tour. Simone blamed others for her unhappiness. “I began to feel that all my troubles were pieces of the same problem, which was that I had been betrayed.” (Spell, p. 123)

Simone sought solace for her troubles in Barbados. She resumed her affair with Paul the bellboy, and in a fit of vanity decided to impress him with her celebrity. The prime minister of Barbados, Errol Barrow, was hosting a reception at his home. Simone had Paul drive her there, and burst in uninvited. Barrow handled the intrusion with grace, and offered to put her and Lisa up at a cottage by the sea on his estate. During nightly visits to the cottage, Barrow became her lover, and they trysted when he traveled to New York. Simone had fantasies that Barrow would leave his wife and marry her. She made plans to move permanently to Barbados, and shipped all her belongings there. When Barrow learned of her plan, he instructed customs not to admit her possessions, and shortly thereafter he broke off with her out of fear that she would ruin him politically.

In July 1974 Simone performed at Philharmonic Hall in New York, and recorded her last album for RCA, aptly titled It Is Finished. A few months later, she accepted an invitation from her friend Miriam Makeba to join her in Africa, where she was then living with her husband Stokely Carmichael, who had changed his name to Kwame Touré. Simone traveled to Liberia with Lisa and took up residence in Monrovia, the capital. She remained there for two years, during which time she performed only twice, once at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and once in Paris.

Simone did not find peace or happiness in Africa, the place she hoped would become her tribal home. She continued to look for salvation outside herself, and her dysfunctional life continued. Not long after her arrival, she created a sensation in Monrovia by stripping naked as she danced in a nightclub. The president of Liberia treated her as an honored guest and provided her and Lisa with a residence on the beach. She was courted by a wealthy, elderly Liberian who upon meeting her proposed marriage. He brought her to his country estate, but when during a visit to his bedroom Simone was unable to arouse him sexually, his ardor cooled. A friend took Simone to see a witch doctor who immediately asked her, “Who is this person on the other side who loves Carnation milk?”  (Brun-Lambert, p. 223) The witch doctor told her that she could re-establish contact with her father if she observed a ritual. She must stay in his house for three days without seeing or speaking to anyone. She must abstain from alcohol and tobacco, wrap her head in a scarf, and go to bed with a tin of Carnation milk under her pillow. She must imagine her father sleeping next to her in the bed. At the end of three days Simone awoke and felt a great weight lifted from her. She claimed that she saw her father, who had forgiven her.

Simone’s relationship with Lisa continued to be turbulent and abusive. Lisa, later in life, said that her mother could be “a monster.” (What Happened, Miss Simone?) Simone enrolled Lisa in a boarding school in Switzerland, and then moved there herself in order to be near her daughter. Before she left, she fell in love with Imojah, a wealthy farmer, and carried a torch for him after she settled in Geneva.

In Geneva, Simone lived with Susan Baumann, a lesbian who wanted to become her manager. Sam had relinquished that role before Simone left for Liberia. To escape her mother, whose visits to the boarding school upset her, Lisa returned to New York to her father’s custody. He placed her with his sister-in-law, who lived in upstate New York, and Lisa attended public high school there. Simone returned to Liberia in hopes of persuading Imojah to marry her and move to Europe, but was rebuffed.

While there, she made the acquaintance of Winfred Gibson, who presented himself to her as businessman who could restart her career. They went to London together on his assurance that he would arrange bookings and a recording contract. After several days had passed at their posh London hotel, Simone was approached by the manager, who inquired when she would be paying down her bill. Simone angrily confronted Gibson, who assaulted her and left her unconscious in her room. When she awoke, she called hotel security and the police, who gave little credence to her story. After they left, she swallowed thirty-five sedatives. A hotel nurse found her and called for an ambulance. After being treated at a hospital, Simone was transferred to a clinic near Oxford, where she underwent a psychiatric evaluation. She was diagnosed as manic-depressive. Lithium and rest were prescribed.

Simone called Stroud to ask for his help. He offered to manage her career again. She arrived in New York in June 1977 and was immediately taken into custody on charges of tax evasion. During her absence, the Internal Revenue Service had been investigating her for failing to file returns. Stroud had always handled such business details, but since their divorce in 1972 he had no legal connection to her. A sympathetic district attorney who was a fan of her music persuaded her to plead guilty to the charge of failing to file her 1972 return. She was fined and given a suspended jail sentence. But the ordeal unnerved her, and she was a no-show for a performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in Carnegie Hall. She returned to Europe alone. Before she left she was awarded an honorary degree from Amherst College, and from that time forward she called herself Dr. Nina Simone.

For the next several years Simone drifted aimlessly, a waif without a home or a manager. She performed in Amsterdam, London, Israel, New York, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Montreal. She recorded the album Baltimore in Brussels. She returned to Geneva for a stay in a clinic. She lived for a time with her brother Carrol in San Diego. In June 1979 she came uninvited to attend Lisa’s graduation from high school. Lisa joined the Air Force in search of order. Simone’s erratic performance behavior continued, and her reputation for instability and unpredictability spread. Audiences came as much out of curiosity to witness her eccentricity as to hear her sing.

In 1981 she moved to Paris, where she remained for a year. She performed regularly at Les Trois Maillets, a nightclub in the Latin Quarter. Word spread quickly, as it had in Atlantic City when she first began performing. Jacques Bonni, the owner of Les Trois Maillets, found her an apartment and served as her financial guarantor. While giving a concert at Palais des Glaces in Paris, she met Raymond Gonzalez, a manager, who booked her into a festival in Pamplona, Spain. She scandalized the town, appearing naked in the hallway of her hotel, performing drunk, insulting the audience with racist remarks, and calling the organizers of the festival thieves. To avoid arrest, she and Gonzalez fled across the border to Biarritz.

Simone came to Los Angeles in the summer of 1983 to seek distribution of a concert video recorded in France. She met Anthony Sannucci, who offered to manage her. She moved into an apartment he owned and recorded an album he produced called Nina’s Back. They traveled to London together, where Sannucci had booked her into Ronnie Scott’s, a top tier jazz club where Simone often performed. Sannucci set up a two-week engagement, then agreed to extend it for a third week without consulting Simone. Simone fired him, and re-teamed with Gonzalez.

Gonzalez was assisted in managing Simone by Gerrit De Bruin, a Dutch fan who had met Simone in 1967 before she gave a performance at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. De Bruin finessed his way into Simone’s presence by pretending to be one of the crew bringing her musical equipment into the theater. They became friends, and he followed her career and her personal life through its ups and downs. De Bruin persuaded Simone to move to Nijmegen, an ancient city in Holland near the German border. With his help, she rented an apartment there. He arranged for her to see a doctor for treatment of her violent mood swings. The doctor diagnosed her as suffering from bipolar disorder, and prescribed Trilafon, an anti-psychotic drug used to treat schizophrenia and depression. The drug, when she took it, stabilized Simone, but over the long term would take its toll on her motor skills, affecting both her voice and fingers. Gonzalez and De Bruin hired a personal assistant, Jackie Hammond, to keep Nina on her medication and help her with daily functioning. They also brought in from London Roger Nupie, who had taken the reins of the Nina Simone fan club and kept an extensive archive of her recordings. This team worked together to restart Simone’s career. She began touring Holland and England. Lisa, then stationed in Frankfurt, came to visit her.

Simone’s revival was given a boost in 1987 when Chanel No. 5 used her recording “My Baby Just Cares For Me” as the theme song in an advertising campaign. Simone had recorded this song for Bethlehem on her very first album. The song became a hit in Europe, to the financial benefit of Charly Records, which had acquired the copyright from Bethlehem. Her exclusion from the revenue stream flowing from this hit reinforced Simone’s belief that her talent had been exploited by the music industry, that she had been betrayed professionally. She had retained an attorney, Steven Ames Brown, to track down and recover unpaid royalties from her numerous recordings, and he succeeded in obtaining $150,000 from Charly Records as Simone’s share of the “My Baby Just Cares For Me” bonanza.

Nina tired of Nijmegen, moved briefly to Amsterdam, then resumed her nomadic lifestyle. She toured South America, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. She performed in Italy with Miriam Makeba and Odetta. Although her musical ability had peaked years before, she still earned up to $60,000 for her concerts. But happiness eluded her. She continued to feel undervalued and unappreciated as a performer. She declined physically, gaining weight and walking with a shuffle. Her terror of being alone never left her. Gerrit De Bruin, a man who understood her and cared for her selflessly, remarked, “Nina wanted to find love, protection and a home where her brain would not attack her. Of course, that was impossible, being the Nina she was. That led her to search for substitutes and be hurt by deception a lot of the time.” (Hampton, p. 173)

In July 1992 Simone purchased a house in Bouc-Bel-Air, a small village near Aix-en-Provence in Southern France, and moved there alone. De Bruin, fearing that she would fall apart without the support of her team, urged against the move, but Simone ignored his advice. She stopped taking her medication and quickly became a danger to herself and to others. She started a fire in her kitchen that might have destroyed her house and possibly killed her, but fortunately De Bruin was visiting at the time and extinguished it. More troubling was an episode of violence against her neighbors. Teenage boys who lived next door were making noise that bothered Simone. When she asked for quiet, the boys responded with a racial taunt. Simone went into the house and returned carrying a loaded shotgun that she kept for protection. She fired it at the boys, injuring them. She was arrested and brought to trial. A local attorney, Isabelle Terrin, who had befriended Simone, represented her in court. Simone avoided a jail sentence, but was ordered to pay civil damages and undergo psychiatric treatment.

Following this episode, Simone’s brother Carrol, a psychologist, came to Bouc-Bel-Air and brought Simone to Los Angeles with him. She visited her mother Kate, then living in Sacramento with John Irvin and his wife. Simone owned a condominium in Los Angeles, purchased during the time of her business relationship with Anthony Sannucci. She got into a violent altercation with one of her neighbors, was arrested, and then hospitalized. While in the hospital she became attached to a gay orderly, Clifton Henderson. Upon her release from the hospital, Simone hired Henderson to be her caregiver and brought him with her to Bouc-Bel-Air.

Despite the turmoil of this period, Simone continued to perform and record. De Bruin and Gonzalez arranged bookings for her in Europe, Brazil, Lebanon, Australia, and the U.S. Michael Alagro, a young record producer working for Elektra, signed her to make an album that was released in 1995 as A Single Woman. Alagro skillfully handled Simone on a promotional tour for the album, once joining her fully clothed in her bubble bath at a London hotel. Nina could be playful when in her manic phase.

But gradually Henderson took control of Simone’s life and made her inaccessible to De Bruin and Gonzalez. In 2000 she fired Gonzalez and moved to Carry-le-Rouet, a seaside resort on the Mediterranean near Marseille. She was then living with Henderson, now her manager, and Javier Collado, a young musician who played in her band and also served as her bodyguard. De Bruin was shut out. When he tried to reach her by telephone, he was told that she was not at home, but he could hear her voice in the background asking who was calling. He once came to Carry-le-Rouet and rang her doorbell. When the door opened, her heard her voice and called out to her. She welcomed him and asked him why he had not been in touch with her. Simone had again fallen into the clutches of men who were exploiting her.

In 2001 Simone was diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent surgery and a program of chemotherapy. Her mother died in April. In June Simone gave a last concert in Paris, and struggled to perform. Still, in July, she gave another ten concerts, nine in the U.S., and one in England. She was paid $80,000 for a concert at Carnegie Hall, but sang only four songs. A year later, in Sopot, Poland, she performed for the last time. In the spring of 2003 she suffered a stroke, and on April 21, 2003 she died from a tumor on her brain. Four days later, a funeral service was held for her in Carry-le-Rouet. Gerrit De Bruin was denied access to the church. Simone was cremated and her ashes scattered in Africa. Two days before her death, Lisa arranged for the Curtis Institute to confer on Simone an Honorary Doctor in Music and Humanities degree.

* * *

All artists struggle with the tension between their commitment to their art, through which they define themselves and express their identity, and their need for and responsibility to others. In both their art and their personal lives, they are connecting to other human beings, though in vastly different ways—one formal, governed by the rules of their art, the other informal, following social conventions and norms.

In the career of musician Nina Simone we see the artist’s torment over the imperatives of her talent at full boil. Though extremely gifted with musical ability, Simone from her earliest years regarded her talent as an isolating force that separated her from other people, including members of her family, and prevented her from being loved for herself. “Talent is a burden, not a joy,” she said once during a concert at Royal Albert Hall. (Cohodas, p. 298) The conviction that people were drawn to her because of her unique gift was reinforced by her experience with her mother and both of her husbands, who made her musical skill an instrument of their own ambitions and needs, giving rise in Nina to feelings of unworthiness and betrayal. The acceptance that she sought beyond her music she could only give to herself. But her lifelong search for an other with whom she could overcome her fear of being alone kept her looking outward, not inward, for serenity.

Her bipolar disorder, long ignored and undiagnosed, was a major factor in her unhappiness. Though physicians as far back as the Greek Hippocrates recognized melancholy and mania as mood disorders, the illness did not enter the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until the early 1950s, about the time that Simone’s loneliness and chronic sadness began to appear. These affections infused her music, giving it a profound poignancy and yearning.

Bipolar disorder is believed to be genetically based, but environmental factors such as abuse and stress can play a role in exacerbating it. Certainly the treatment that Simone received from Andrew Stroud during the ten years of her marriage to him increased Simone’s risk of manic-depressive episodes. Even when confronted with obvious manifestations of psychosis, such as she experienced on her tour with Bill Cosby, Stroud kept her in harness like a mule. Her suffering may well have accentuated what many came to regard as her musical genius, her ability to fuse two radically different styles of music, classical and jazz. This ability was on display when she performed her hit “My Baby Just Cares For Me” at a concert in Europe. As she vocalized the words, her fingers played a Bach concerto on the keyboard, astonishing the audience. De Bruin played a recording of this performance for Miles Davis, who exclaimed, “How does she do it?” (What Happened, Miss Simone?)

Both De Bruin and Roger Nupie addressed this aspect of her artistry. “There has always been the question that Nina was a genius, but would she have been a genius without her disease?” he wondered during an interview with Sylvia Hampton. “I don’t know, but I’m sure her music would have been less intense.” (Hampton, p. 172) Nupie observed of her, “Behind the ‘diva’ Nina Simone, the one people described as moody or difficult, was a single woman who was trying very hard to find love.” (Hampton, p. 173)

Chapter Six — Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen : Sharing The Muse

In January 1970 a retrospective exhibition of the work of sculptor Claes Oldenburg traveled from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to the Stedilijk Museum in Amsterdam. Oldenburg accompanied the exhibition to oversee its installation, and there met Coosje van Bruggen, an assistant curator at the Stedilijk who had been assigned to edit the exhibition catalog. Van Bruggen held a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Groningen and was deeply versed in European culture and its literature. She was married, and the mother of two children.

The MOMA show that had traveled to Amsterdam and brought Oldenburg into contact with van Bruggen was an overview of his first ten years working as an artist in New York. He had come to New York from Chicago, where he had been employed variously as a newspaper reporter and as a commercial illustrator. A graduate of Yale University who had majored in literature and theater, he had also taken art classes in his senior year. While working in Chicago, he studied art at the city’s famed Art Institute. He drew and sketched and wrote frequently in his journals, recording both his impressions of the urban life around him and his own responses to it. His first show took place at Club St. Elmo restaurant on North State Street alongside the work of two other local artists, one of whom was Richard Indiana. The show presented drawings Oldenburg had made based on the short stories of Nelson Algren, a writer who dealt with the underbelly of American society.

When Oldenburg came to New York in 1956 to become a professional artist, he thought of himself as a painter working in a figurative tradition. Poor and without social or artistic contacts, he lived in a run-down neighborhood on Manhattan’s lower east side. He found part-time work in the library at Cooper Union Museum and Art School and read widely in the library’s collection of books on art history. In his spare time, he wandered the streets of the Bowery, sketching what he observed and making notes in his journal. He was absorbing the city.

In 1958 he met Allan Kaprow, a painter who was leading a revolt against the aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism. At the time that Oldenburg arrived in New York, Abstract Expressionism, as practiced by painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, was the prevailing art movement. It was favored by eminent art critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, sold in upscale art galleries scattered throughout mid-town Manhattan, and bought by wealthy private collectors and museums. But its insularity in a time of growing concern among artists and writers over the widespread materialism of American society provoked a response. Abstract Expressionism was a non-representational art that had narrowed its interest to three simple elements: the canvas, paint, and the artist’s psychological and emotional states during the act of painting. The drip paintings of Pollock were the most notable examples of the style. His paintings are beautiful to behold because of their complex, random patterns of line and color and form that resulted from Pollock’s instinctive, unpremeditated, careless application of paint.

Kaprow wanted to bring painting back into the “real” world, the external world of objects and people. And he wanted to remove painting from the sacrosanct halls of fancy galleries and bourgeois museums supported by wealthy private collectors. But he also wanted to preserve the randomness, the element of chance, that operated in Abstract Expressionism. The result was “Happenings,” a form of theater created by painters, musicians, and writers who staged events involving people, objects, sounds, and lights thrown together helter-skelter, in the manner of a dream, creating surreal and dadaesque effects on the viewer—a three-dimensional Abstract Expressionism moving in time. They were staged in frumpy artist’s studios and seedy galleries on the lower east side, and sometimes in the streets. Though plotless and scriptless, they were choreographed and rehearsed before being offered to an audience. Performances might last only a few minutes, or as long as an hour and a half. The professed aim of the pieces was to upend audience expectations about art, to provoke and disturb entrenched sensibilities. Although they had small followings, Happenings did succeed in alarming the critics, who were largely appalled by the deliberate chaotic ugliness of the performances.

Oldenburg joined the party. In January 1960 his installation The Street was presented in the basement gallery of the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in Greenwich Village. The installation, described by a reviewer as “a chaotic accumulation of objects made of cardboard, wrapping paper, scraps of newspaper and fabric, bottles, and all sorts of debris,” (The Sixties, p. 31) captured Oldenburg’s experience of the urban landscape around him, including the art scene, in a style that he described as “objective expressionism.” He also referred to it as “a nightmare, my personal nightmare.” Oldenburg staged a Happening in The Street titled “Snapshots from the City,” in which he and his future wife Patty Muchinski performed. In May a second exhibit of The Street was presented at the Reuben Gallery, a bigger space that prompted Oldenburg to produce larger, free-standing objects that viewers could walk around. This exhibit marked Oldenburg’s transition from painter to sculptor. Although he would continue to draw, sketch, and paint throughout his career, and his two-dimensional art would continue to be sold in galleries and exhibited in museums, the work that he did on paper with pen and brush served as a preliminary step in realizing three-dimensional forms taken from everyday life—Pop Art.

The next step in Oldenburg’s artistic development was The Store, an exhibition of objects for sale in the artist’s studio at 107 East Second Street. Simultaneously a satire on both art galleries and department stores, The Store offered for sale objects Oldenburg made from muslin soaked in plaster, shaped over a chicken wire frame, then painted with enamel. Each object was unique, a kind of sad sack version of “real” objects that could be purchased in conventional stores or food outlets: cheeseburgers with everything, pastries, a piece of pie, clothing, lingerie, a can of 7-Up. The objects were “manufactured” and offered for sale under the auspices of the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company, a fictional entity that Oldenburg created based on the toy gun that had been merchandised from the Buck Rogers comic strip. In his notebooks, Oldenburg gave free rein to his fantasies about the Ray Gun and its powers, which he came to associate with his own creative source and potency. He collected hundreds of objects, some made, some found, that held the form of the Ray Gun, turning the object into a personal fetish. He made a sculpture of the Ray Gun that likened it to male genitals, with the barrel resembling a penis and the handle, testicles. The Ray Gun was also a theatrical impresario that staged Oldenburg’s Happenings.

When The Store moved to the larger Green Gallery in mid-town Manhattan, Oldenburg again increased the scale of the objects, making them out of sections of canvas stuffed with Styrofoam and sewn together by Patty, then painted. The art buying public got its first view of Oldenburg’s whimsical soft sculptures in the form of a “Giant Ice Cream Cone” and a “Floor-Cake” the size of a sofa. Although old-line critics were dismayed by Oldenburg’s cheesy vernacular, the public was enthused and started buying. Oldenburg, and Pop Art, had arrived.

The Store and the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company reveal Oldenburg’s child-like sensibility, his propensity to invent and inhabit imagined environments. Barbara Rose, an art historian and early interpreter of Oldenburg’s work, traced this tendency in his work to an elaborate childhood fantasy that he recorded in his notebooks. Rose was given access to the notebooks for the long essay she wrote for publication in the MOMA exhibition catalog. She found in them Oldenburg’s invention of a country called “Neubern” (newborn?) located in the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and South America. He created a full portrait of the country—its history, geography, sociology, economics, and science. He even made model airplanes to serve as an Air Force for Neubern, an early sign of his determination to actualize his fantasies. Oldenburg invented this imaginary world soon after his parents had settled in Chicago in 1936. His father Goesta was a Swedish consular official who had been appointed to run the consular office in Chicago. His mother Sigrid Elisabeth was a concert singer. Oldenburg had been born in Stockholm, and when his parents located in Chicago, the boy was seven years old and spoke no English. He felt himself to be an outsider and made himself at home in a fantasy world that he controlled. The Street, the Happenings, and The Store perpetuate this imaginative activity, as do the large-scale projects that lay ahead.

Oldenburg continued to think in terms of enlarging the scale of forms based on objects used in everyday life, divorcing them from their utilitarian function, and placing them in unexpected urban settings that would give them a surreal quality. In this he differed from other Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein who were directly copying mass-produced commercial art and displaying their work in conventional settings like galleries and museums. Oldenburg wanted to remove art from exclusive spaces trafficked primarily by an economic elite and make it part of the stream of everyday life. In this sense he was a populist artist as well as a Pop artist.

Following the success of his show at the Green Gallery, Oldenburg sought fresh stimulation and became a peripatetic artist for several years. He and Patty, who had married on Staten Island on April 13, 1960, moved to Venice, California in 1963 and rented a house on one of the small canals. He drew and sketched, produced Happenings, and began using vinyl as the covering for his soft sculptures, which were becoming larger, more colorful, and more humorous, as their titles alone indicate: “Giant Toothpaste Tube,” “Soft Pay Telephone,” “Giant Loaf of Raisin Bread.” In an interview, Oldenburg explained the impulse behind his soft sculptures. “My images derive from the American ambience . . . The soft sculptures are based on the structure of the human body, which is both hard and soft. Many of my sculptures have things inside them which can be felt through the surface like bones.” (Coplans, Art in America, p. 70) This statement is Oldenburg’s ironic admission that in these pieces he was attempting to humanize objects that had become so commodified through mass production that they had lost their magical properties as fetishes. He was trying to invest them with life. Barbara Rose argued that Oldenburg’s soft sculptures were a radical innovation that contradicted received notions of what constitutes sculpture—their hardness and fixed form. Instead, Oldenburg was creating “a yielding, vulnerable surface covering a loose, relaxed form subject to the force of gravity . . .” (Rose, MOMA, p. 136) Through these floppy forms, Oldenburg was seeking “an end to man’s alienation from his industrialized environment.” (Rose, MOMA, p. 139)

It was only logical that Oldenburg’s imagination would inflate his concepts for large sculptures to the scale of the urban environment itself. In 1965, briefly back in New York after traveling extensively in Europe, Oldenburg made the first in a series of “Proposed Colossal Monuments” that were meant as a commentary on the urban landscape. The proposals were deliberately unfeasible and dadesque: A melting Giant Good Humor Bar to replace the Pan Am building on Park Avenue in Manhattan, Giant Scissors where the Washington Monument stands, a Giant Fan substituted for the Statue of Liberty. He even went so far as to submit a drawing of a Giant Clothespin to an architecture competition for a skyscraper in Chicago. (Some years later, this project was actually carried out and placed in a civic plaza in Philadelphia.) Rose observed about these proposals, “The monuments were conceived as a satire on the banality of American life, the absurdity of the urban environment, and the irrelevance of the heroic monument to modern culture in general.” (Rose, MOMA, p. 103)

The first proposed monument to be realized was “Placid Civic Monument” in 1967. More a piece of performance art than a monument, it consisted of a group of city employees digging a grave in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then filling it in. Oldenburg, wearing a suit and tie that made him look like a museum official, supervised the gravediggers as they buried the concept of museum-housed art.

In 1969 Oldenburg received a commission to produce a monumental sculpture on the campus of his alma mater, Yale University. The commission was initiated by a Yale graduate student seeking to make a public statement about the Vietnam War. The student formed the Colossal Keepsake Corporation, a fundraising vehicle that solicited the money to pay for the commission. Oldenburg designed “Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Track,” a twenty-four-foot-high lipstick made from aluminum, steel, and wood, and topped with bright red vinyl. The piece was manufactured in North Haven, Connecticut by Lippincott, Inc., a metal fabricator that worked with artists, and installed on the Beinecke Plaza in front of a neo-classical building that commemorated Yale men killed in World War One. The sculpture resembled a tank with its turret pointed towards the sky, the red vinyl suggesting flame. It also resembled an erect penis whose tip was overly excited. The installation provoked controversy, and some Yale trustees and alumni unsuccessfully attempted to have the sculpture removed. Oldenburg received a great deal of free publicity because of the piece, and before long other commissions followed. Lipstick marked a turning point in Oldenburg’s development as an artist. In the year that he produced this sculpture he said, “The idea of an object as a magic thing no longer obsesses me as it once did . . . I became far more interested in the architectural form.”  (Anthology, p. 482) It was at this stage in his career that he met Coosje van Bruggen.

In April 1970, a month after the exhibition at the Stedilijk closed, Oldenburg and Patty Muchinski divorced. His next encounter with van Bruggen occurred in June 1971 in the city of Arnhem, the Netherlands, where Oldenburg was participating in Sonsbeek ’71, a sculpture exhibition held periodically in a park. The exhibition was being curated by Wim Beeren, chief curator at the Stedilijk, and he assigned van Bruggen to co-edit the exhibition catalog. Oldenburg’s submission was a “Sculpture in the Form of a Trowel Stuck in the Ground,” a forty-two-foot-high silver shovel made of steel coated with zinc primer. (Was Oldenburg still thinking about the grave he had dug in Central Park?) Van Bruggen later recounted that she didn’t like the piece and regarded Oldenburg as the bearer of American cultural imperialism.

But he was smitten, and when in 1976 he was commissioned to rework the trowel for the grounds of the Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller in Otterlo, the Netherlands, she suggested that he change the color to the bright blue of Dutch workmen’s overalls and place the trowel in a garden surrounded by wild parkland. This was their first collaboration, and it set the pattern for their subsequent work together, in which van Bruggen often served as the conceptualizer who contributed cultural and historical context to the design process, while Oldenburg served as the artisan, the maker. “Though Coosje does not hand-make any of the models or drawings, she often defines the position or treatment of a subject,” Oldenburg later said. “In choice of subject, or in any detail, in form or color, there is no part of a large-scale project Coosje cannot determine, with my hand responsive to her words.” (Bottle of Notes, p. 14) This union of head and hand in their partnership indicates a fusion of opposites in a true artistic marriage.

By the time she and Oldenburg had reconnected in 1976, van Bruggen had left the Stedilijk to teach art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Enschede. She was divorced and living with her two young children in Deventer. Oldenburg joined her there in the spring of 1977 and set up a studio. They worked together on the design of the Mouse Museum, a large container shaped like the head of Mickey Mouse that would hold objects that Oldenburg had archived from The Street and The Store. Van Bruggen also collaborated with Oldenburg on his commission to produce a large-scale sculpture for the city of Munster, in Germany. Oldenburg and van Bruggen scouted potential sites for the sculpture, and information that she provided about the history of Munster helped to define the shape of the project. The result was the installation of three giant pool balls made of concrete on the lawn of Aaseeterrassen, a public park shaped like a pool table. The pool balls alluded both to the tradition of ballooning in Munster and to a cannonball that van Bruggen had noticed embedded in one of the city’s walls. The collaboration is a good example of how van Bruggen’s cultural awareness blended with Oldenburg’s fondness for metaphoric forms.

On July 22, 1977, while in Allegan, Michigan supervising construction of the Mouse Museum, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen were married. She moved to New York with her son Paulus and daughter Maartje and took up residence with her husband in two adjoining five-story warehouse buildings on Broome Street in lower Manhattan that Oldenburg had purchased in 1971 and converted into studio and living space.

Oldenburg was then working almost exclusively on large-scale projects that came to him in the form of commissions from cities, museums, and other institutions such as universities. He did no work for private collectors, although many of them bought the drawings and models of his large-scale works from his dealer, Arne Glimcher. After several proposals solicited by corporations were rejected in the drawing or model stage and never realized, Oldenburg and van Bruggen decided to forgo that market for their work. Oldenburg’s reputation and fame had spread internationally, so there was no shortage of commissions.

As she settled into Broome Street, van Bruggen began to inventory the objects that Oldenburg had been randomly collecting or saving from The Street and The Store and that were now scattered throughout the residence—his quarry. This was her way of getting completely in synch with him artistically. The inventory was prelude to making a selection for the Mouse Museum and its adjoining Ray Gun Wing. The items ran the gamut from a toothbrush, a golf club, a dish in the shape of a carrot, to souvenirs of the US capitol and the Iwo Jima flag raising, to miniature houses made from cardboard. The Ray Gun Wing, shaped like a pistol, would hold Oldenburg’s collection of ray guns, which ranged from slick plastic toys in various shapes, sizes, and colors, to plain objects that carried the F-shaped profile of a gun, anything from a bent nail or straw to a faucet. The museum and wing traveled as an installation from museum to museum in the U.S. and Europe over a period of several years. In this project, van Bruggen played the role of curator. She then wrote a history of Oldenburg’s work contained in the installation.

She also served as an advisor to Oldenburg on a commission he had received in 1975 from the General Services Administration to create a monument for a public space in front of the Harold Washington Social Security Center in Chicago. Drawing from the baseball fever of his native city, home of the Cubs and the White Sox, Oldenburg designed the ten-story Batcolumn, made from steel and aluminum in an open mesh pattern that made the bat hollow and translucent. Van Bruggen suggested the dark grey color that complemented but did not match the deep blue of the Center. The sculpture was manufactured by Lippincott and weighed twenty tons when completed. From small objects in his studio Oldenburg was now making epic statements, and van Bruggen joined him in the creative process by interpreting the grand scale of their urban contexts. Oldenburg noted after their collaboration was underway, “The whole idea of placing a piece in relation to its setting is Coosje’s idea more than mine . . . Now the large-scale projects grow out of observations of a particular place.” (Cochran, Arts & Antiques June 2007, p. 52)

Their first co-signed project was Flashlight, commissioned by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in November 1978. As was usual for commissions, Oldenburg and van Bruggen were given free rein to create a proposal. After studying the site—a small plaza between a concert hall and a theater—to determine scale and thematic elements, they decided on a monumental flashlight.  This “stereotypical object” tied in with several features of the site: its proximity to the brilliantly lit Strip in Las Vegas, its resemblance to some species of cactus plants found on the desert, notably the saguaro, and its relevance to the adjoining columned neoclassical building where ushers used flashlights to seat people. The flashlight as a subject for a monumental sculpture had been on Oldenburg’s mind since 1968 when he sketched “Flashlight Across the Hollywood Hills,” one of his fantasies.

Oldenburg built two model versions of the sculpture before he and van Bruggen and the client were fully satisfied. The piece was then constructed at Lippincott at a cost of $105,000, transported to the campus, and installed in March 1981. In its finished form Flashlight was thirty-six feet six inches high, eleven feet wide at its widest, seven feet ten inches wide at its narrowest, and weighed thirty-seven tons. Twenty-four fluorescent lamps were placed in an eighteen-inch wide well surrounding its base. It was van Bruggen’s idea to turn the flashlight upside down. At night, Flashlight glowed eerily and mysteriously, reminiscent of the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Initially controversial among some members of the university community who were startled by its architectural dominance, Flashlight has become an icon not only of the campus, but of the city. Tour buses regularly make a stop at the plaza so visitors can view it.

Three months later, another project that had been commissioned in 1978, Split Button, was installed on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Oldenburg wrote an account of Split Button’s evolution that reveals the playful and imaginative process by which he and van Bruggen worked together.

Coosje proposed a large button lying on the ground, similar to one she had seen in a drawing I did in 1972. She felt that the subject would harmonize with the landscape and contained an ideal of form in an everyday object to which students could respond . . . In its broken form, as Coosje saw it, the button represented an object of the least value, the most discarded object one could imagine, as in the remains of a student’s shirt button broken in the laundry . . . The choice of color for the button was white, not only to match the color of a typical shirt, but to establish a constructivist scheme with two other sculptures in the park . . . (Claes Oldenburg Coosje van Bruggen, ed. by Germano Celant,  pp. 205-206)

In preparing a cardboard study for the sculpture, Oldenburg and van Bruggen discovered, by accident, that folding the button along a crease created a work of art. “Split but not totally disconnected, the button could rise, presenting itself as a sculpture . . . Seen from above and somewhat diminished, we can imagine it having blown off the coat of the colossal statue of William Penn by Alexander Milne Calder atop City Hall.” (Ibid, p. 206) Students now use it as a bench to sit on while they study or sun themselves.

Commissions flowed into the couple’s Broome Street Studio in a steady stream, like customers coming into The Store to buy Oldenburg’s fantasies, only now they were van Bruggen’s fantasies as well, and the merchandise was much larger (and more expensive). Their projects became more whimsical, more complex, looser. It was clear that they were having fun with art, and people wanted to share in the humor. The City of Salinas, California, requested a “large abstract sculptural work” for its Community Center, a park on the outskirts of town that adjoined a rodeo grounds. After visiting the site with Oldenburg, van Bruggen suggested “something blowing in the wind . . .Or something thrown.” (Large Scale Projects, p. 65) As an example, she referred to a drawing Oldenburg had made in 1974 of a fedora hat blowing down a sidewalk. The result of their conceptualizing was Hat in Three Stages of Landing, a sequential sculpture of three identical western-style hats, representing a single hat blown from the head of a rodeo spectator. The hat was shown in three stages of descent, the third being the landing on the grass. The two “flying” hats supported by stanchions were large enough to provide shade for park visitors, as an actual western hat does for its wearer. The hats were made of aluminum and steel painted yellow with polyurethane enamel. They were installed in March 1982.

The University of Hartford in Connecticut solicited a proposal in 1980. After a site visit, Coosje envisioned a piece based on her husband’s toothbrush, which rested downward in a cup on their bathroom sink. She found in this image similarities to the forms of cubism and constructivism that were two of her favorite areas of study. Oldenburg noted, “From the start the subject was associated with Coosje’s viewpoint.” (Bottle of Notes, p. 148) The sculpture was composed as a group of objects—the toothbrush, the paste, the cup, the sink—clustered together to make a single piece. A vertical slice, also Coosje’s idea, produced a cross-section view that gave the piece its full title: Cross-Section of a Toothbrush with Paste, in a Cup, on a Sink: Portrait of Coosje’s Thinking. Oldenburg’s explanation of the allusiveness contained in the sculpture makes explicit the expressiveness of their work—how they viewed inanimate objects as holding human attributes.

The sculpture [in its allusions to cubism and constructivism] reflected Coosje’s profession of art historian. The colour scheme was reminiscent of the Dutch flag (she was born in Groningen), and also reminded me of the red sweater and blue jeans I had often seen her wear when we lived in Deventer in an earlier period. Moreover, the sculpture seemed to suggest Coosje’s physique, an association she confirmed, commenting that like her body the sculpture was “bony, with little soft parts.” (Bottle of Notes, p. 151)

In November 1980 Oldenburg and van Bruggen presented a model of the work to university officials, including the President, who supported it. But in March 1981 the Board of Regents rejected the sculpture by a 3-2 vote. It later found a home in Krefeld, Germany on the grounds of the Haus Esters, a residence built in the late 1920s by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and subsequently converted into a museum for contemporary art. The finished piece, made of steel, reached a height of twenty feet. The toothbrush handle was painted blue, the brushes white, the paste pink, the “rubber” tip a dark red that matched the color of the cup. The sink was painted blue green. The geometric form of the piece—the cross-sectioning thinned it to the shape of a sundial—blended very well with the clean modern lines of van der Rohe’s building. 

In 1983 van Bruggen and Oldenburg began a professional collaboration with the architect Frank Gehry that spanned several years and three projects. The couple had visited Gehry in January 1982 at his home in Santa Monica, California. Over the summer, van Bruggen and Gehry both served on the selection committee for Documenta 7, an exhibition of modern art in Kassel, Germany that exhibited Oldenburg’s work. Later that year, in November, Gehry and his wife Berta repaid the visit at the Broome Street Studio in New York. In August 1983 van Bruggen and Oldenburg visited Gehry’s offices in Venice, California, and were shown the model of Gehry’s plans for the Loyola University Law School campus in downtown Los Angeles. Out of that meeting came their first collaboration, triggered by an off-hand remark that Gehry made about an architectural feature of his plan whose cold perfection he wanted to disturb. The feature was four perfectly shaped cylindrical columns placed on a platform outside one of the campus buildings. Improvising, Oldenburg made a model of a workman’s ladder from stray materials he found in Gehry’s office. The ladder was perched precariously on one leg. A can of paint that had been placed on the top step was falling, spilling its contents. Thus was born Toppling Ladder with Spilling Paint. In 1985, Gehry obtained funding for the sculpture from a private donor, enabling van Bruggen and Oldenburg to carry out the project. A fourteen-foot-high ladder made of steel and aluminum was placed on the ground adjoining the four columns. This image of arrested motion suggested a larger, geologic, disturbance common in Los Angeles—an earthquake.

Given the sculptural quality of Gehry’s architecture, and the architectural quality of van Bruggen’s and Oldenburg’s large-scale public projects, it is not surprising that their collaboration continued. In March 1984 the Italian art critic Germano Celant arranged a one-week workshop on architecture and art, to be conducted by Oldenburg, van Bruggen, and Gehry, at the Polytechnic University of Milan. The workshop led to a proposal for a piece of performance art combining architecture, sculpture, and theater to be presented in Venice, Italy. Van Bruggen suggested a Swiss Army knife as the unifying element, as it carried architectural shapes when opened, and had the utilitarian function of “cutting” that had applications for the methods of the architect. The artistic dimension was added by Oldenburg, who transformed the knife’s shape into a galley with oars protruding from its sides. The galley would float on the water next to the dock of an abandoned naval yard in Venice known as the Arsenale. Van Bruggen regarded the piece as a coupling of their joint large-scale projects and Oldenburg’s 1960s Happenings.

The workshop participants and teachers from the university went to Venice with Oldenburg, van Bruggen, Gehry, and Celant to study the site for the performance. Van Bruggen wrote a scenario for the piece that featured three main characters: Dr. Coltello (the knife, played by Oldenburg), described by van Bruggen as “a connoisseur of hedonistic flotsam, aware of his weakness for accumulating collectibles”; Frankie P. Toronto, “a barber from Venice, California,” played by Gehry; and Georgia Sandbag (van Bruggen), “a former travel agent—now exploring the sweet life on her own.”  (Anthology, p. 418, 420, 422). The students fashioned costumes and props to flesh out the surrealism of van Bruggen’s vision. Celant made the necessary arrangements with Venetian officials, and in September 1985 Il Corso del Coltello (“The Course of the Knife”), with a supporting cast drawn from the students and Gehry’s family, was presented before a crowd of bewildered but amused onlookers. Oldenburg’s Knife Ship, forty feet long made of wood, steel, and aluminum, its blades and corkscrew upraised, floated in the lagoon next to the Campo dell’ Arsenale. Subsequently, the Knife Ship was exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1986) and then at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1987).

A third collaboration began in January 1986 as Gehry was working on plans to build a headquarters in Venice, California for the Chiat/Day advertising agency. As he studied the model for the building, he decided he wanted to add a sculptural element to it. In his office was the maquette of a pair of binoculars that had been made for Il Corso del Coltello but never used. He placed the maquette on the model and then called Oldenburg. In May, Oldenburg and van Bruggen came to Gehry’s office and agreed that the binoculars could be integrated into the design of the building as a functional architectural feature. “The binoculars were conceived as a set of two identical rooms connected to a larger conference room in the main building,” they wrote. (COCvB, ed. Celant, p. 316) Jay Chiat approved the concept and in 1991 the building, centered around the binoculars as the dominant visual feature, was completed.

Toppling Ladder was not the couple’s first large-scale sculpture that played with the force of gravity by presenting a precarious equilibrium among its parts. Oldenburg and van Bruggen over the course of their thirty-year collaboration created a number of large-scale projects that represented actual or imminent movement. During an interview he gave in 2009 shortly after his wife’s death, Oldenburg credited her as the impetus behind these works. “I tended to make sculpture symmetrical and static but she favored objects in movement. She would say, ‘This is too boring’, and preferred things that moved.” (Richard Cork. “It Was Good to Have an Opposite.” Financial Times (London) August 29, 2009, p.11.)

In 1981, Rolf Fehlbaum, the owner of Vitra, a German manufacturer of contemporary furniture, commissioned Oldenburg and van Bruggen to create a large sculpture as a gift for his father’s seventieth birthday. This was the couple’s first private commission. Their initial thought was a giant tack based on a model Oldenburg had made in 1978. But Fehlbaum rejected this idea. Van Bruggen then suggested “tool gate,” a portal made from balancing carpenter’s tools—screwdriver, hammer, pliers—that are used in the manufacture of furniture. Experimental arrangements of the three tools were made with models in a search for the right equilibrium. They ultimately were positioned with the screwdriver and pliers serving as supports for the hammer, placed horizontally across the top. The piece, like Toppling Ladder with Spilling Paint, seems precariously balanced.

Although Frank Gehry did not collaborate with Oldenburg and van Bruggen on the sculpture, he played an important role in its siting. Gehry was with the couple when they visited the site in April 1984 after the architectural workshop in Milan. Gehry was subsequently commissioned by Fehlbaum to create a museum devoted to chairs on the factory grounds. After the museum opened in 1988, Balancing Tools was relocated to serve as its gateway. For Oldenburg and van Bruggen, the sculpture signified more than a gateway. “The arch—not triumphal, but vulnerably wobbly—might also appear as a passage from one period of life to another. Tilted and turning at the very edge of control, the dynamic relation of the three components of the work suggested an acrobatic act as well, such as a chair balanced at the end of a stick . . . The grouping could also be seen as a dance. We thought of the annual spring ritual in Basel in which symbolic representations of the city’s workmen’s guilds—the Wild Man, the Gryphon, the Lion—dance together on a bridge over the Rhine . . .” (Co CvB ed Celant, p. 296)

Shortly after their return from Europe in 1984, van Bruggen and Oldenburg received a commission from the Metro-Dade County Art in Public Places program to create a fountain for a civic plaza in Miami. The couple traveled to Miami in November to study the site, and found it surrounded by a jumble of clunky architectural forms.  Van Bruggen thought that a sculpture comprised of numerous parts scattered in apparent randomness about a central fountain would unify the setting. Inspired by the proximity of Miami’s famed Orange Bowl, the couple proposed “a broken bowl with fragments and contents strewn about it . . . The bowl began to be imagined as having dropped into the plaza, spilling its contents of [orange] slices and peels.” (CO CvB. Ed Celant, p. 338)

Preparation and fabrication of the parts at Lippincott took more than four years. The fountain consisted of four pools of water, one large and three smaller, designed to look like a splash, repeating the theme of randomness. There were three jets in the large pool, one each in the smaller pools. The motors for the jets ran on timers set to accentuate randomness. The sculpture, made of reinforced concrete, steel, fiberglass-reinforced plastic, and stainless steel consisted of seventeen separate parts—eight bowl fragments, four peels, five orange sections. Each peel weighed 7,500 pounds. To give the effect of a random moment frozen in time, some of the peels and slices lay on the ground next to the fragments of the bowl, while others were raised above the fountain on stanchions.

Van Bruggen and Oldenburg explained how the sculpture captured their impressions of the city of Miami. “The primary effect of randomness, a variety of forms and colors shifting in space and time, suits, in our view, the city of Miami. Miami is not whole, neither in its opposing architectures nor in the composition of its varied and clashing population. It is a city in process . . .” (CO CvB. Ed. Celant, p. 338)

One of the couple’s most astonishing pieces is Flying Pins, commissioned in 1998 by the city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands in anticipation of hosting the 2000 World Cup. The city asked for something “eye-catching,” and Oldenburg and van Bruggen happily complied. The site they chose was the grassy median of the Kennedylaan, the main boulevard leading into the city center. The location, which faces a busy intersection, pulses with civic energy. They saw in the form of the median between two lanes of traffic a bowling alley bordered by gutters. The Dutch word “laan” (lane) enriched this metaphor. Bowling “fit the location because the movement of inbound vehicles on the Kennedylaan could be equated with the imagined roll of a ball in a bowling lane.” (Sculpture By The Way, p. 168)

The sculpture freezes the moment just after impact, the twenty-four-foot-high pins scattering in all directions. The black ball, with its three finger holes, is partially submerged in the ground. The pins fly up at odd angles. Some have landed precariously on the ground. Others are in flight in clusters of two and three pins, balanced haphazardly. The piece combines visual elements of both Toppling Ladder and Dropped Bowl through its play on randomness and its defiance of the forces of gravity.

One of the couple’s most whimsical sculptures is Floating Peel, a thirteen-foot-high banana peel produced in three editions in 2002. The piece was made from fiber-reinforced plastic painted in two shades of yellow with polyester gelcoat. Four strips of the skin have been peeled back from the fruit, a small piece of which remains uneaten. The sculpture is balanced delicately on one peel. The other three strips float in the air, visually suggesting several metaphors: the blades of a fan, the petals of a flower, the arms and legs of a dancer in motion. Floating Peel is nearly unique in being based on a purely natural form, although altered by the human hand that peeled the banana. The utter banality of the piece, its transience, its humorous allusions to English vernacular, its visual metaphors, make it perhaps the ultimate expression of Pop Art.

Not all of their public monuments worked aesthetically, either as forms or as enhancements to the setting. In 1999 they were asked to create a monument on the Piazza San Marco in Venice for an exhibition of their work to be held in the Museo Correr, which occupies a former palace. They were seeking to design a piece that would contrast with the repetitive columnar architecture of the square. Their solution was the tail of a lion, symbol of the city. The tail was constructed from hollow curving sections of aluminum painted yellow. The tail ended in a brush-like cluster of brown canvas strips, to give the effect of the bushy tuft at the end of the tail. The piece protruded from a second-floor window, dangled over a balcony, and hung down in front of an archway opening into the building, leading the viewer to suppose that the lion’s body was inside the museum. Unfortunately, the visual association produced by this image was not a lion’s tail, but rather a section of plumbing pipe discharging waste onto the piazza. The British critic Craig Raine, in Venice to review the exhibition, roasted the installation in the following description:

From an upstairs window a yellow plastic rubbish-chute protrudes . . . From it hangs a dark brown torrent of arrested dirt . . . As I neared the installation, I realized that the apparent chain of buckets was not in fact telescopic. Their configuration was much more a segmented length of flexible pipe—a sewage outlet. So I stood underneath pondering the feathered suspension of liquid shit. It swayed in the breeze like a layer-cut wig, or black and brown strips of seaweed, with its coiffure faintly suggestive of Henry V . . . It was only the cover of the catalog which altered me to my misprision [sic]. (Craig Raine. “From Palladio to Blueberry Pie.” Modern Painters (Autumn 1999), v. 12, issue 3, p. 66)

His contempt for the piece leads Raine to wonder, “How much of their work is any good? How much is shit?” He goes on to denigrate van Bruggen’s role in the artistic partnership, consigning her to the status of helper. “He, after all, is the artist, not she, ” Raine grandly proclaims. The meanness of Raine’s review, its snobbish tone and smug sense of superiority, exemplifies the highbrow attitude towards art that Oldenburg, from his earliest days as an artist collecting detritus for The Street, rebelled against. Pop Art did not please everyone.

* * *

In 1995 Oldenburg and van Bruggen were commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture to create a large-scale sculpture for a new park planned for a site on the outskirts of Paris. While traveling through the French countryside on their way to factories that were fabricating the resultant sculpture (Buried Bicycle, based on Samuel Beckett’s anti-hero Molloy, who falls from his bicycle into a ditch), van Bruggen was stirred by childhood memories of time spent in France. She persuaded her husband that they should acquire a second residence there. In 1992 the couple purchased Château de la Borde, an eighteenth-century castle located in Beaumont-sur-Dême in the Loire Valley. The castle had once been the home of Gustave Auguste de Beaumont, a life-long friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, who accompanied de Tocqueville on his tour of America. Subsequently, de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America while staying at the chateau. The literary lineage of the castle held strong appeal for van Bruggen, who had studied French literature and culture at the University of Groningen.

The couple spent several months of the year at the estate, using it as a retreat where they could enjoy solitude, reflect, and work on plans from their commissions. They converted the stables into a studio where Oldenburg could sketch and draw, and the two of them could work on models. They undertook restoration of the house and grounds and used both interior and exterior as settings for their work. They turned the castle’s salon into a music room where they displayed soft sculptures of musical instruments—a sagging viola, an unwound French horn, a trumpet tied in knots, a Stradivarius violin sliced in two pieces, a metronome made from canvas, wood, and hardware. They placed large-scale sculptures on the park-like grounds—a giant slice of blueberry pie a la mode resting on a stanchion, an enormous unfastened safety pin, standing on its head, reminiscent of the ray gun, a giant plantoir similar to Trowel 1, the piece that brought them together.

Van Bruggen believed that the chateau broadened their horizons as artists by encouraging them to think of their projects in terms of man’s relationship to nature as well as to the urban landscape that is the setting for so much of their work.

Until we began to spend time in Beaumont-sur-Dême, we worked mainly within cityscapes, with architectonic structures, such as skyscrapers, bridges, ferry boats, water towers, chimneys, and the like. In harmony with the overgrown and neglected park at the Château de la Borde, our inner resources were released into a more organic approach to sculpture. (Sculpture By The Way, p. 32)

Oldenburg sold the chateau in 2010, the year after his wife died from metastatic breast cancer. Their final project together was Tumbling Tacks, commissioned in 2009 by Kistefos-Museum in Jevnaker, Norway. Oldenburg wrote about this project on the couple’s website in a manner that suggests he thought of it as his wife’s burial ground.

Our final Large-Scale Project together was for a site in the Norwegian countryside, in a sculpture park called “Kistefors,” two hours by car north of Olso. The park is developed around the remains of a 19^th century wood pulp factory, preserved by Christen Sveaas, the grandson of its proprietor, and filled with contemporary sculpture. When we were asked to make a sculpture for the collection, we responded in our usual way, not by providing an already existing work, but by visiting the place in order to determine a sculpture particular to the site.

Within the terrain, Coosje was drawn to a quiet hillside, which she saw as a backdrop for some colorful forms that first were thought of as giant flowers. Closer examination showed a wide path over the hill, lined with birches and nearly overgrown with lush greenery, that had once served to transport logs. Coosje reached into our image bank and brought forth not flowers, but a vision of four large industrially manufactured tacks tumbling down a hillside, each with its own distinct trajectory, yet all alike and propelled by the same force of gravity. The tacks appeared to her to signify the transition from the mechanical, repetitive reproduction found in the mill to a playful, free format, setting tacks loose to tumble like skiers down a hill, waving the circles and points of their poles. Just as one cannot think of tacks without their function of pinning, so the process of grinding logs into pulp cannot be disconnected from its transformation into paper. Pulp and tack both imply the presence of paper in absentia.

Tumbling Tacks is the only Large-Scale Project to be situated in Scandinavia and the first to be created in a forest environment. It will not be truly completed until the grass, the flowers and the trees, cleared for the installation, have returned, and the sculpture has been observed in the area’s contrasting seasons. There will be a Tumbling Tacks of summer, of autumn, of winter and, again, Tumbling Tacks of spring.

Coosje lived long enough to see the Tacks completed, choose their color, and define their location. She died of cancer on January 10, 2009, four months before their installation.

Although the image of the artist as a solitary creator has wide currency in our culture, artistic collaboration has a long pedigree. In western civilization, we can find it as far back as the artisans who first shaped and then painted the Greek amphorae, and the Roman workers who assembled mosaic tile floors. Masons built cathedrals in Europe, and major painters such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens, and Rembrandt employed studio assistants to work on their paintings. In the twentieth century, there have been a number of notable artistic collaborations in the visual and performing arts as well as in literature. The interaction of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris during the early 1900s gave birth to Cubism and the beginning of modernism in art. Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz formed an artistic partnership based on the principles of modernism and sustained each other’s work over the span of many decades. They were also lovers. The husband-and-wife team Will and Ariel Durant co-authored a number of non-fiction books on western culture, including the classic The Story of Civilization. The choreographer George Balanchine collaborated both with several of his prima ballerinas, two of whom he married, and with the composer Igor Stravinsky. Other couples who collaborated in one way or another over the course of their artistic careers include Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Anais Nin and Henry Miller.

Collaboration takes many forms, across a spectrum of involvement. In some cases, it may occur as emotional and financial support during the critical early years of an artist’s development. When Henry Miller was struggling to find himself as a writer living in Paris during the Depression, Anais Nin gave him money for food and shelter, recognized his literary gift and declared her belief in it, helped him find a publisher for Tropic of Cancer, then borrowed the money to pay for its printing. He in turn encouraged her diary writing and gave her editorial assistance for her attempts at fiction. Their collaboration was one of mutual support. They went their separate ways as artists, writing in vastly different styles about their vastly different life experiences. The relationship between Sartre and de Beauvoir is another example of this type of mutually supportive collaboration between artists pursuing different goals.

At the other extreme is the partnership of the Durants, who co-authored a number of books that were published under both their names, a form of collaboration that has been called integrative because two artists fuse their talents in order to accomplish together what neither could accomplish alone. It’s as though their books were written by a third hand. When The Age of Reason was complete, Will Durant wrote, “I saw that it was a cooperative labor, and that simple justice required that the title page should bear both our names . . . Now we proceeded hand in hand, topic by topic, volume by volume, united as we had never been before. It was as if our marriage had received a second consummation.” (John-Steiner, p.14)

There are many reasons why artists collaborate. In addition to the emotional support and encouragement collaboration provides, there is the benefit of varying, perhaps contrasting perspectives on both reality and the uses of artistic media in rendering reality. Writers and painters can learn from each other’s styles and themes. On larger scale projects, such as the environmental art carried out by Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude, there is the advantage of shared labor. Christo focused on design and technical planning while Jeanne-Claude attended to administrative details and financing.

From almost the beginning of his career, Claes Oldenburg was a collaborative artist. Collaboration was part of the revolt against Abstract Expressionism in which he took part. Abstract Expressionism was a movement that exalted the individual artist. Oldenburg’s shift from painting to sculpture came about as a result of his participation in the Happenings of the early 1960s, artistic events that were premised on improvised collaboration not only amongst the performers but with audience members as well. Patty Muchinski’s talents as a seamstress not only enabled Oldenburg to create his revolutionary soft sculptures, her skill may well have sparked the very concept in a synergistic flash. His first “public monument,” the grave in Central Park, was a collaboration using city employees as gravediggers. And his first large-scale project, Lipstick, was created on the initiative of a graduate student at Yale. All of Oldenburg’s subsequent large-scale projects were built as the result of commissions issued by museum and civic officials—they were in this sense all collaborations. Pop Art itself can be seen as a form of collaboration in which the artist appropriates readymade objects from popular culture and puts them in service of an artistic vision not originally intended by their maker.

When Oldenburg met van Bruggen and brought her into his artistic orbit, she changed the nature of his work and enabled, by her vision, the creation of epic public sculptures, beautifully engineered and fabricated, daring in their conceptual originality, striking in their impact on conventional public spaces and on the people who inhabit them. Although some critics have consigned her to the stereotypical female role of “helper,” or “assistant,” or “curator” of Oldenburg’s work, the fact remains that without her involvement in every stage of the creation of their jointly authored works, the art that we think of as Oldenburg’s would have a very different look. Theirs was a true marriage of minds and hearts and sensibilities.

The artistic partnership of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen was unique for both its duration—over thirty years—and for the number and scale of its completed projects—over forty placed in public spaces in Europe and the United States. Not all artistic partnerships between spouses or life-partners endure, or reach such heights of achievement. The marriage and artistic collaboration of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath  ended with her suicide and was followed by years of bitter recriminations against Hughes by Plath’s allies. Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, who made several well-received films together, ruptured their working relationship and their marriage with a vitriolic divorce and custody battle that continues to provide fodder for the scandal sheets. In a number of cases involving painter couples—Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner—traditional gender biases have unfairly and often harmfully diminished the stature of the woman, treating her as the moon to her husband’s sun. Oldenburg, throughout his long partnership with his wife, has gone to great lengths in both interviews and in accounts of their joint projects to treat her as his artistic equal and fully integrated collaborator. So, if I may paraphrase the bard, let us not to the marriage of two minds admit impediments.

The Jealous Muse, Chapter Seven — Henri Matisse : The Jealous Muse

Matisse is an example of an artist so committed to his muse—painting—that he became consumed by it, subordinating even his most intimate personal relationships to his art, fracturing his family, and finally retreating into a hermetic world that he created to resemble one of his paintings.

His origins were an unlikely incubator for what would become one of the most brilliant artistic careers of the twentieth century. He was born on New Year’s Eve, 1869, in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, a town in Picardy, a dreary, colorless province in the north of France bordering Belgium. His father Hippolyte was a grain merchant who ran a general store in Bohain-en-Vermandois, where Matisse spent his childhood. His mother, Anna, more sophisticated, worked as an interior decorator in Bohain, advising her husband’s customers on color schemes for their homes. She also painted china, and before marrying Hippolyte had worked in Paris as a milliner.

Matisse was a dreamy, sickly youth, fond of pranks, given to unrealistic fantasies about a life in the theater, and prone to episodes of abdominal distress. His father, a practical man, sent him to Paris to study law, and after passing his examinations in August 1888 Matisse returned to Bohain to take up a position as a clerk in a law office. Bored and dissatisfied, Matisse was rescued from the law when he suffered a hernia in 1889 that required hospitalization followed by bed rest. During his convalescence, Anna gave him a paint box to help him pass the time, a gift that changed the direction of his life. Many years later Matisse would write, “From the moment I held the box of colours in my hand, I knew this was my life . . . It was a tremendous attraction, a sort of Paradise Found in which I was completely free, alone, at peace.” (Quoted in Spurling I, p. 46) He painted his first oil, a still life of books on a table in a darkened room, in 1890. At this point in his career, Matisse was painting within the tradition and giving no hint of the revolutionary painter that he would become.

Matisse decided that he wanted to return to Paris to study painting, a move that his father adamantly opposed. But Anna interceded for her son and persuaded Hippolyte to provide Matisse with an allowance of one hundred francs a month for a trial period of a year. A local painting instructor in Bohain provided Matisse with a letter of introduction to Adolphe William Bouguereau, a prominent academic painter who taught at the Académie Julian.

After moving to Paris in the fall of 1891 and studying under Bouguereau, Matisse applied for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, the pre-eminent French painting school where contemporaries of Matisse such as Alfred Sisley, George Seurat, and Renoir had trained. He failed the entrance examination, but Gustave Moreau, who taught at the École, invited Matisse to study under him. Moreau, a Symbolist painter, was a popular teacher known for encouraging his students to pursue their own visions and find their own styles.

In the summer of 1892 Matisse met and courted Caroline Joblaud, a young woman who worked as a model in Moreau’s studio and went by the name Camille. The daughter of a carpenter, orphaned at a young age and raised by nuns, she had come to Paris from the provinces looking for a more stimulating life. Attractive and lively, fond of music, she found work in a fashionable hat shop and modeled to supplement her income. 

In 1894 Camille and Matisse set up house together at 19 Quai St-Michel. Camille was pregnant, but marriage was out of the question for Matisse, because the law required him to have parental consent. Their daughter Marguerite was born on August 31, 1894. Hippolyte expressed his displeasure by blocking her right of inheritance. At the time, Matisse was enrolled in École des Arts Decoratifs, seeking the degree that would qualify him to teach art in state schools. A teaching position appeared to be Matisse’s only hope of earning money from his art.

In addition to her responsibilities as “wife,” mother, breadwinner, and studio assistant, Camille modeled for Matisse. He painted her twice in 1895, as the figure in Woman Reading and Camille with Lemons and Blue Jug.  Woman Reading was the first of his works to be bought by the state, at the Salon de la Nationale in June 1896. The purchaser was Madame Félix Faure, wife of the President of the French Republic.

In the summer of 1895, Matisse, Camille and Marguerite traveled to Belle-Île-en-Mer, a small island off Brittany’s Atlantic coast, in company with other painters and their models. Matisse and his family took lodgings with a peasant family in their small cottage shared with farm animals.

The paintings that Matisse brought back from Belle-Île —mostly landscapes—gained him entrance into the Societé Nationale in 1896, assuring him the right to exhibit up to ten paintings at the annual Salon. Several of his works sold, and his parents came to Paris and proudly viewed his work hanging at the Champ-de-Mars. Matisse’s career seemed to be taking off.

Matisse, Camille and Marguerite returned to Belle-Île in the summer of 1896.

They settled in Kervilahouen, where they became part of the social circle that surrounded the resident Australian painter John Peter Russell. Russell’s color theory, formed under the influence of Van Gogh, inspired Matisse to lighten his palette.  Matisse painted Breton Serving Girl and The Open Door, Brittany, works whose pictorial features⎯a woman surrounded by domestic objects in an interior with an open door or window⎯anticipated themes of Matisse’s later work.

In the winter of 1897 Camille modeled for The Dinner Table, the painting that ruptured their relationship. The trouble began when Matisse spent their dwindling funds on fruit that they could not eat despite their hunger because it was being used as a visual element of the painting. This was an early instance of Matisse’s willingness to put the claims of his art above the claims of his personal life. The style of the painting also alarmed Camille. It reflected Russell’s influence and indicated that Matisse was moving in a direction that would take him away from the commercial mainstream. The painting is less representational than his previous work, and its complex composition shows Matisse’s interest in patterns created by objects with similar forms—glasses, plates, carafes, silverware, fruit, flowers. Camille implored Matisse to make the painting more conventional, and when he refused, she stopped modeling for him. Matisse replaced her with a wooden dummy and moved out of their studio apartment to a room above the École des Arts Decoratifs. He also signed official papers that verified his paternity of Marguerite.

Camille and Matisse reconciled in May 1897 and spent another summer together on Belle-Île, a period that marked the beginning of his life-long struggle with insomnia, brought on by the relentless pressure of his compulsive need to paint. Camille became increasingly shrill and critical, berating him for the sleeplessness that destroyed their night’s rest and left him unfit for work in the morning. Camille left him, taking Marguerite with her to live with the Russells. Matisse returned to Paris without them in October to attend a wedding at which he was best man.  At this wedding he met Amélie Parayre, who three months later became his wife. Amélie was the bride’s maid of honor. They were seated next to each other and felt an immediate attraction. At this time she worked for her Aunt Nine who owned a hat shop in Paris, the Grande Maison des Modes.

Amélie and Matisse were married on January 10, 1898 in a church just off the Champs-Elysees in the most fashionable district of Paris. Amélie knew very little about painting, but was proud to have married a man she viewed as a visionary. She was untroubled that her husband had confessed to her before their marriage, “Mademoiselle, I love you dearly, but I shall always love painting more,” words that would later bear a bitter fruit. (Spurling I, p. 148) They honeymooned in London. Matisse spent his days studying Turner at the National Gallery. After their honeymoon, they stayed eighteen months in Toulouse, with an interlude in Corsica (Ajaccio), where they rented two rooms at the Villa de Roca. Matisse painted numerous landscapes as well as interiors of their residence. His painting continued to move away from strict representation as he sought to express through color the emotions aroused in him by his subjects. His palette continued to brighten. He simplified forms in pursuit of their essence. Later he would say, “Little by little I began to paint as I felt. One cannot do successful work which has much feeling unless one sees the subject very simply, and one must do this in order to express oneself as clearly as possible.” (Flam. Matisse on Art, p. 66)

The basic pattern of their life together was set on Corsica: a daily routine of work, rest, walks and modeling sessions. A broader life rhythm alternating winters in the south and summers in Paris was also established. Matisse’s painting was the center of their lives, and Amélie fully supported him.

Amélie posed for three paintings by Matisse in the first year of their marriage: a back view of her reading with still life on a table to her left (reminiscent of Woman Reading), a side view of her sewing in the kitchen at Villa de Rocca, and The Invalid painted in January 1899 around the time of the birth of their first child.

A son Jean was born in Toulouse January 10, 1899.  In February, Amélie and Matisse went to Paris in search of work, leaving Jean in Toulouse with a wet nurse. They lived initially in Matisse’s studio at 19 Quai St-Michel. In May, Matisse decided to buy a seminal painting by Cézanne, Three Bathers, although the dealer Vollard’s asking price of 1,500 francs was far beyond his means. Amélie agreed to let Matisse pawn her emerald engagement ring to raise the funds for him to purchase the painting. This sacrifice was a metaphor of her life-long subservience to his art. At this point in his career, Matisse had no dependable income from his art and continued to rely on an allowance from his father.

In June 1899 Amélie opened a hat shop at 25 rue de Chateaudun with a partner. This business venture provided income for her family to live on while Matisse advanced his art. The couple lived in a tiny attic apartment above the store. That fall, Amélie offered to adopt Marguerite as her daughter, putting an end to a tense standoff between Matisse and Camille and giving legitimacy to Marguerite. Camille, as an unmarried woman, had little choice but to accede.

A second son, Pierre, was born on June 13, 1900 in Bohain at the home of Matisse’s brother, Auguste.  Amélie and Matisse returned to Paris for the summer, leaving Pierre in the north with a wet nurse. These arrangements set a recurring pattern in which Matisse’s commitment to his painting took precedence over family unity.

Struggling for sales of his work, Matisse cultivated the dealer Ambroise Vollard, who was a dinner guest at 19 Quai St-Michel, then fell asleep after the meal without looking at the paintings Matisse had planned to show him. But Vollard exhibited forty-five of Matisse’s paintings at a show in June that led another dealer to agree to pay Matisse four hundred francs per painting for academic still lifes. Matisse created several of these paintings and then, fearing they were leading to his artistic death, destroyed the one he was working on. Amélie and Marguerite (now 10), furiously scrubbed the paint from the canvas so that Matisse could reuse it.

In the spring of 1904 Matisse wrote to the painter Paul Signac, whom he had met that winter in Paris, inquiring about the availability of rentals in St. Tropez, a small fishing village on the Côte d’Azur in the south of France where Signac lived. Signac was a practitioner of the style of painting known as Pointillism, a successor to Impressionism that sought to create powerful effects on the eye through the use of contrasting but harmonious combinations of bright color applied to the canvas in dots of paint. Signac lined up a small two-story cottage with four rooms. The Matisses left Paris in July, bringing with them only Pierre because the cottage could not accommodate the entire family. Jean remained in Bohain with his grandparents and Marguerite stayed with a relative.

The brilliant light of the Côte d’Azur, the heat, and the influence of Signac affected Matisse’s painting profoundly, setting him off in new directions in his use of color and his renderings of form, and yielding canvases that were entirely fresh and new, and noticeably brighter in tone. In both his landscapes and his interiors, the colors are vivid, the forms simplified, and the pointillist technique prevails. His most notable painting from this summer was Luxe, Calme et Volupté (“Luxury, Calm and Pleasure”), a decidedly pointillist work in which naked women lounge in various poses on the shore of the bay. A sailboat is moored behind them on the water and a tea set has been laid on a tablecloth on the ground. A clothed woman, modeled by Amélie, sits tensely in front of the tea set—an obvious reference to domesticity—intently observing the naked young women who seem to exist as her fantasy. The painting, in addition to its stylistic innovations, contains the first hint of the tension that Matisse felt between conventional domestic life and the pull of his imagination, which tended towards the sensual and the erotic.

Luxe, Calme et Volupté was shown in Paris at the Salon des Indépendents in the spring of 1905, along with seven other paintings by Matisse. It created a stir amongst the public. Signac subsequently purchased it for 1,000 francs. It now hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, a gift of Signac’s daughter. Another of Matisse’s paintings exhibited at the Salon, View of St-Tropez, was purchased by the state. Matisse was being noticed in the upper circles of the French art world, most especially by Roger Marx, a civil servant with considerable influence over purchases made by state museums. Marx had championed Matisse’s work as early as 1894 and remained supportive as Matisse’s style evolved.

In May the Matisse’s returned to the Mediterranean coast, this time to Collioure, a remote fishing village near the border with Spain that Amélie had discovered while visiting her sister Berthe, who lived nearby in Perpignan.  Jean and Pierre accompanied them, while Marguerite stayed in Bohain with her grandparents. The family took rooms at the Hotel de la Gare, and Matisse rented a room above a café in the port to use as his studio. From there he painted many scenes of life in and about the town, landscapes and interiors, often with Amélie as model. His painting continued to evolve along already established lines: bright, expressive colors, simplification of forms that became suggestive rather than descriptive, with an emphasis on patterns that he combined to make a harmonious whole. He later explained his method as a painter:

For me, the subject of a painting and its background have the same value, or, to put it more clearly, there is no principal feature, only the pattern is important. The picture is formed by the combination of surfaces, differently coloured, which results in the creation of an “expression.” In the same way that in a musical harmony each note is a part of the whole, so I wished each colour to have a contributory value. (Flam. Matisse on Art, p. 120)

He also began to use thematic elements that would become characteristic of his work. Interiors often opened out to exteriors through a window that resembled the frame of a painting, creating the illusion of a painting within a painting Through the open window the outer world, whether landscape or cityscape, enters the painter’s studio and becomes subject to his control.

Amélie regularly posed for Matisse during their stay in Collioure and comforted him as he continued to battle insomnia and anxiety.  Matisse sought relief from the unrelenting pressure of his work through friendship with Etienne Terrus, an older painter who lived ten miles away in Elne. Terrus took the Matisses to meet the sculptor Aristide Maillol and his wife, who lived down the coast in Banyuls-sur-Mer. Matisse, desperate for company, also wrote to the painter André Derain in Paris, urging him to come to Collioure immediately with the promise that his work would benefit greatly from the light and color of the region. Derain arrived in July and took up residence at the Hotel du Gare. The Matisses, economizing, moved to the home of Paul Soulier, a local wine grower who had befriended them. Derain joined Matisse in his studio, and the paintings they produced there that summer, blazing with color, gave birth to Fauvism (so named because the critic Louis Vauxcelles derided the painters as “fauves”—wild beasts) when they were later shown at the Salon d’Automne.

What was remarkable about these paintings was their non-representational use of color, using color not to copy nature but to express the emotions aroused in the artist by his subject. The result was a rendering of reality that was unfamiliar to contemporary viewers, who were conditioned to expect the trunks of trees to be brown, not a violent red or a muted purple. Matisse, and others who painted in this style—Derain, Vlaminck, Jean Puy, Kees van Dongen, Georges Braque—were offering the public a new reality for painting, and the public reaction in Paris was shock, as it was when Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was performed before the musical audience.

The stress of being a revolutionary in seeing took its toll on Matisse. The insomnia that had plagued him on Belle-Île returned as he wrestled with the energy his painting had released. Amélie also went without sleep, reading to him through the nights to calm him.

After they returned to Paris in the fall, Matisse began work on a painting that would stun the art world and change his fortunes as a painter. Woman in a Hat, an allusion to the millinery history of Camille and his wife, was a portrait of Amélie. She was seated in a chair, giving a three-quarters viewing angle. Her head was turned so that her eyes gazed at the viewer. On her head was an enormous hat that looked like a bowl of fruit, with blobs of colors piled on—blue, orange, yellow, green, purple, brown. Her hair beneath the hat was red. Her forehead was green and blue, her face yellow and blue, her ear orange, her neck yellow and red. She held a large fan that covered her chest and shoulders, painted in these same colors. Her dress was dark green and black, slashed with streaks of red and orange and blue. As she posed for this picture, Amélie was dressed entirely in black, which left Matisse free to see the colors he felt. When Woman in a Hat was hung at the Salon d’Automne, throngs of visitors crowded around it, muttering their disgust and jeering it. One viewer tried to stab the painting. An exception was Sarah Stein, who was attending the showing with her brother-in-law Leo and sister-in-law Gertrude.

The Steins, from San Francisco, had recently settled in Paris. They were art dilettantes, living comfortably on incomes derived from the estate of Daniel Stein, a wealthy businessman. Sarah’s husband Michael managed the family’s wealth. Both Stein families were collecting modern art, and hosted salons at their separate residences, five minutes apart in Paris’s Sixth Arrondisement near the Luxembourg Gardens. Leo Stein was the art connoisseur of the family. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University with a Bachelor of Arts degree he had gone to Florence to write a book about the fifteenth century Italian painter Andrea Mantegna, and while there he befriended the noted art historian Bernard Berenson.  Berenson steered Leo into collecting modern art by urging him to view the Cézannes in Vollard’s gallery. When he reached Paris, Leo began buying Cézanne. At his weekly Saturday salons, Leo held forth on the virtues of the paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, and Renoir that he and Gertrude had purchased. The salon rapidly became a gathering place for art lovers, intellectuals, and painters looking for buyers.

As Leo stood with Gertrude in front of Woman in a Hat, marveling at it but unsure what to do, Sarah called out above the din, “It’s superb!” and urged Leo to buy it, which he subsequently did, after haggling unsuccessfully with Matisse over the five hundred franc price tag. Thus began a period of patronage from the Steins that would last for several years and put Matisse on the path to financial security.

Not long after his purchase of Woman in a Hat, Leo was taken by the painter Henry-Charles Manguin, another Fauve, to visit Matisse at his studio. Subsequently, Leo brought Sarah and Michael to the studio, and during this visit they purchased Nude Before a Screen. Over the coming year, Sarah and Michael would purchase seven more  Matisse’s, including The Green Line, another striking portrait of Amélie notable for the green stripe that ran from the top of her forehead down the bridge of her nose to her mouth. As Sarah and Michael focused their collecting exclusively on Matisse, they became close friends with the Matisses, often going with them on social outings. Sarah was an ardent advocate of Matisse’s work, and he came to trust her to the point of sharing with her his struggles as a painter. When her friend from Baltimore Etta Cone and her sister Claribel came to Paris, Sarah brought them to Matisse’s studio and they too began collecting his work. Leo and Gertrude also continued to buy Matisses, notably Le Bonheur de Vivre, a large painting in the Fauve manner whose scene of pastoral delights—nude nymphs and shepherds playing pipes, dancing, and making love—drew howls of derision from the spectators. Matisse had now abandoned pointillism, and the colors and spaces of Le Bonheur showed the influence of Gauguin. But Leo eventually tired of Matisse’s style, complaining that his paintings had become “rhythmically insufficient,” while Gertrude, enamored of cubism to the point that she imitated it in her own writing, concentrated on Picasso, who had become a frequent visitor to her salon.

The relationship between Leo and Gertrude and the Matisses came to an end in the summer of 1907. The Steins had invited them to stay at their rented villa in Florence and Matisse, wanting to give Amélie a vacation, agreed to the trip. But in Florence, as Matisse accompanied his host on tours of art galleries, he became annoyed by Leo’s didactic commentary and was unable to conceal his irritation. After the two families had returned to Paris, Leo and Gertrude never bought another Matisse. In 1915, they sold Woman in a Hat to Sarah and Michael.

Despite, or perhaps because of the uproar surrounding Woman in a Hat, Matisse’s stock was rising. The dealer Eugène Druet was buying up Matisses, paying the painter 2,000 francs for each canvas. But his most significant collector was Sergei Shchukin, a wealthy Russian industrialist who had come to Paris to collect modern art. Shchukin had made his fortune in textiles and had developed an eye for color and design. He had been buying the Impressionists—Monet, Renoir—as well as Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, for his residence in Moscow. His dealer was Vollard, and on a visit to his gallery he asked to meet Matisse, whose paintings he had seen at the Salon. Vollard brought him to Matisse’s studio, where he bought an early still life, Dishes on a Table, painted when Matisse’s palette was darker and showing the influence of Cézanne. Although he did not buy another Matisse for two years, he began commissioning paintings from him just as the Steins’ buying tapered off.

In May Matisse returned to the south of France, and after a brief detour to Algeria, settled again in Collioure, this time with his entire family, the first time in three years they had all been together. Over the coming months, in addition to the usual landscapes and still lifes, Matisse painted a number of portraits of his daughter Marguerite.

Marguerite was a studio child who never received formal schooling because of her father’s wandering life and because of a chronic throat illness. In July 1901 she contracted diphtheria and a tracheotomy was performed to open her air passages. Her father held her down on a kitchen table during the emergency operation. While in the hospital she came down with typhoid fever and barely survived. She was frail and sickly for the rest of her life, but maintained an indomitable spirit. Matisse painted her for the first time that year (Marguerite) following her recovery.

In Marguerite, a full-frontal portrait, Matisse’s daughter wears a high-collared dress that covers the scar from her tracheotomy. Marguerite’s hair, predominantly dark brown, but accented with green and red, frames her face. Not striving for a fully descriptive, i.e. “representational,” portrait, Matisse presents us with a distinct likeness that carries his feelings for his daughter. She is both pretty and precious, a faint smile showing on her lips, à la Mona Lisa.

Another painting, Portrait of Marguerite, done later that year, back in Paris, is simple, more austere, and Marguerite looks older than her twelve years. She wears a plain dark blue dress open at the neck. A black choker conceals her scar. Her hair, now pulled up on the top of her head, is a subtle swirl of dark green and black. She stands out against a darkened gold background. The letters M-A-R-G-U-E-R-I-T-E spell out her name above her head. The effect of simplicity and directness is striking. Sometime the following year, Matisse exchanged paintings with Picasso, whom he had met at Leo and Gertrude Stein’s salon the previous spring. Picasso chose Portrait of Marguerite, perhaps remembering a visit she had made to his studio in company with her father. He hung it in his studio, where it was used as a dart board by Picasso’s painter friends. Thoughtfully, the pranksters used darts with rubber suction cups so as not to ruin the painting. It now hangs in the Musée Picasso in Paris.

Following the San Francisco earthquake in April 1906 Sarah Stein and her husband sailed for California to determine the condition of their home and belongings. They carried with them several Matisse paintings, including Nude Before a Screen and The Green Line, which they had purchased that winter. After their return to Paris in January, Sarah, with encouragement from Matisse, began painting. She and Hans Purrmann, an aspiring painter from Germany, hired models and used her home at 58 rue Madame as a studio. Matisse had been holding a weekly open house at his Quai St-Michel studio during which he explained his evolution as a painter to attendees, who often included Sarah and Purrmann. They suggested that Matisse offer classes, and he agreed to do this, on condition that they obtain studio space, find pupils, and collect the funds to pay for rent and models. They found space at Couvent des Oiseaux, where Matisse already had a second studio, and Michael covered the rent. Matisse did not accept a fee for his instruction. They recruited pupils from the group of Matisse devotees who had gathered in Paris to absorb his work: Leo Stein, Oskar and Greta Moll, Max Weber, Patrick Bruce, a Dutch girl, a German fraulein, and Annette Rosenshine, who had followed Sarah and Michael from San Francisco after their return. The school began as a drawing class, the students working from plaster casts. Later, when they had moved on to painting, he sent them to the Louvre to copy the masters, as he had done when studying under Moreau. The principles he elucidated when commenting on their work, his aesthetics of painting, were subsequently captured in “Notes of a Painter,” an essay published in December 1908 in La Grande Revue.

Matisse states, “What I am after, above all, is expression . . . Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter’s command to express his feelings.” To truthfully express the artist’s feelings, the painting must have unity and integrity. “For me, it is all in the conception. It is thus necessary to have a clear vision of the whole right from the beginning . . . If there is order and clarity in the picture, it means that from the outset this same order and clarity existed in the mind of the painter, or that the painter was conscious of their necessity.”

His aim in creating a work of art was to achieve serenity, which may explain that he painted ceaselessly in order to free himself from the psychological tensions and anxiety that assailed him. “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art that could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair that provides relaxation from fatigue.” (Flam, Matisse on Art. Pp. 38-42) It is this aim that gives rise to a religious quality in Matisse’s art, in which the painting induces an altered state of consciousness in the viewer in which harmony and wholeness are experienced.

After the 1908 Salon des Indépendents, Shchukin came to Matisse’s new studio in the Convent of Sacré Coeur, a spacious building that housed Matisse’s family, his studio, and several of the students in his school. Shchukin brought with him Ivan Morosov, another wealthy Russian collector, and was taken with the sight of Bathers with a Turtle, a new work painted in a completely different style that Matisse had just sold to a German collector. Bathers with a Turtle, an obvious homage to Cézanne’s Three Bathers, depicts three nude women grouped around a tortoise at their feet. Shchukin begged Matisse to let him bid against the buyer, and when Matisse refused, he commissioned two paintings. So began a period of patronage that lasted until the outbreak of World War I and gave Matisse financial security. Shchukin ended up buying thirty-seven paintings, almost as many as Sarah and Michael, who owned forty.

In March 1909, Shchukin wrote Matisse from Moscow asking him to provide sketches for two new decorative panels. The works that resulted from this commission, Music and Dance, were done in the style of Bathers with a Turtle: nude men and women, their forms become increasingly generic, used as elements in a design. Shchukin paid Matisse 27,000 francs for these two large paintings, a sum that allowed him to move with his family to a large rented house on an acre of land in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a suburb of Paris. Amélie, after years of sacrifice in service to Matisse’s art, finally had a comfortable residence in which to raise her children.

Matisse completed Dance and Music in the fall of 1910 and exhibited them at the Salon d’Automne in October. Reaction from the critics was so hostile that Shchukin decided not to take them, purchasing instead a large painting by Puvis de Chavannes. The Bernheim brothers, who were dealing the painting, had the effrontery to ask Matisse if the painting could be shown to Shchukin at the studio in Issy, since it was too large for their gallery. On his way back to Moscow, Shchukin changed his mind, and cabled Matisse to send him Dance and Music. Matisse sent them off, but the imbroglio greatly upset him, and shook his confidence. He went alone to Spain to recover. The experience illustrates the risks an artist takes when relying extensively on a single patron. Matisse had painted Dance and Music in the primitive style of Bathers with a Turtle because Shchukin had fancied that work. Shchukin, to make up for his waffling, commissioned two new paintings from Matisse, who was under a doctor’s care in Seville. The project, though it revived him, further upset Amélie because it delayed his return.

Another disturbing force in Matisse’s domestic life was the presence of Olga Meerson, a beautiful thirty-year-old Russian who had come to Paris to be at the center of modern trends in painting. Meerson was already an established painter, trained at the Moscow Art School from the age of thirteen until she left for Munich in 1899 at the age of twenty-one to join the group of artists who had gathered there around the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. She came to Paris in 1905 and was admitted to Matisse’s school in the summer of 1908, at the time he was painting Harmony in Red for Shchukin.

Meerson was a skilled portrait painter but had decided to pursue a more individualistic vision under Matisse’s tutelage.

Meerson, though talented, lacked the stamina to walk the lonely path that Matisse was following. Although she changed her style of painting, she was plagued by self-doubts that inhibited her. She found herself between two chairs—unable to go back to what was familiar, unable to proceed blindly. Her physical and mental health suffered, and while Matisse was away in Seville wrestling with his own demons, Meerson was admitted to a clinic in Neuilly-sur-Seine just outside Paris. Her stay there may have been brought on by drug use.

In July Matisse brought his entire family to Collioure. Meerson came with them. Was she there because she needed the protective wing of Matisse’s family? Or was she there as Matisse’s mistress? Or both? An undated correspondence from him to Meerson at the convent holds an ambiguous clue. He wrote to apologize for intruding on her room because of “imaginary suspicions” and begs her to forgive his “moment d’égarement”—his momentary distraction. He asks her to tell no one of the incident. What were his suspicions? That she was with a lover? That she was under the influence of drugs again? After Amélie had returned to Issy to place Jean and Pierre in school, Meerson remained in Collioure with Matisse and Marguerite for several more weeks, and during this time Matisse painted Portrait of Olga Meerson.

Shortly after Matisse returned to Issy, he left with Shchukin for a trip to Russia. He stayed at Shchukin’s residence in Moscow, which now, filled with paintings, resembled a museum of modern art. Matisse visited Meerson’s two sisters, who hosted a party in his honor. He discussed with them the advisability of Olga returning to Moscow to live for six months of the year so that she could earn money from her portrait painting on which she could live for the other six months in Paris. This seems an unlikely solution to Meerson’s artistic dilemma. If she could not find her way as a painter in Paris with Matisse, how would it be helpful for her to split her artistic self into two parts, one painting in her old manner in Moscow, the other searching for a new identity in Paris?

Meerson had been staying at Issy with Amélie while Matisse was in Moscow. He learned from his wife that Meerson, upon hearing of this proposal, had resumed her use of drugs. Matisse informed Meerson’s sisters of this and they had her admitted to a clinic in Switzerland run by Dr. Paul Dubois, an eminent psychiatrist. Matisse corresponded with Dubois about Meerson, but limited the information that he provided to his role as her painting teacher. Meerson felt that Matisse had betrayed her. When Amélie intercepted a letter from Dubois that described Meerson’s feelings of deep attachment to Matisse, she too felt betrayed. Matisse then broke off all contact with Meerson and her family.

After her treatment at the clinic, Meerson returned to Munich, resumed painting, married a musician, and bore a daughter. She never saw Matisse again. But the depression that crippled her in Paris continued to haunt her. In 1929 she leapt to her death from the fourth story of a hotel in Berlin. For his part, Matisse left Moscow with a commission from Shchukin for ten new paintings, for which he would be paid 6,000 francs each.

With commissions from both Shchukin and Morosov in hand, Matisse decided to buy the house in Issy-les-Moulineaux. The 27, 000 franc down payment used up nearly all of his ready cash. On the recommendation of his painter friend Albert Marquet, Matisse decided to travel to Tangiers in Morocco. He was seeking fresh imagery and an exotic setting in which to carry out the figure paintings that Shchukin has requested. He brought Amélie with him in an effort to repair the damage to their marriage from the Meerson affair. Pierre was placed in the care of Amélie’s sister Berthe, now living on Corsica in Ajaccio, where she ran a school. Jean was in Bohain, studying with a tutor in preparation for boarding school. Marguerite was left alone in Issy to manage the house. The family was once again dispersed to accommodate Matisse’s painting regimen.

They arrived at the end of January in torrential rain that lasted for weeks. They were staying in a modest hotel owned by a French woman, and they were low on funds because of the house purchase. The rain kept Matisse confined to his room, forced to paint interiors that would not satisfy the criteria set out by Shchukin. The Moroccans’ distrust of Europeans made it nearly impossible for him to obtain the models that he had hoped to paint in their Arab dress. His anxiety grew as the rain persisted, and he became unable to sleep. During breaks in the rain, they went for rides in the countryside, Matisse on horseback, his wife, who was afraid of horses, on a mule. When the rain finally ceased, they made an excursion via mule to the coastal town of Tetuan, and Matisse was briefly refreshed by the landscape they crossed. They made the acquaintance of other painters working in Tangiers, an Irishman and a Canadian, to give them a semblance of a social life. Marguerite, lonely and bored in Issy, wrote them plaintive letters wondering when they would return. Matisse began to view the trip as a fiasco and complete waste of his time.

Near the end of March, the proprietress of the hotel procured a ten-year-old Arab girl named Zorah to model for Matisse, and he painted her twice before fear of reprisals from her brother terminated the arrangement. Amélie left Tangiers on March 31 to rejoin Marguerite, but as he said his farewells to her at the harbor, Matisse’s pent-up anger and frustration spilled onto her in front of other travelers, humiliating her. He was then tormented by guilt and wrote her daily letters of apology.

Once back in Issy, Matisse completed work on The Conversation, a portrait of him and Amélie that he had begun in 1908, when Meerson entered their lives. The portrait captures the tense state of their marriage at that stage of Matisse’s career. Matisse stands in profile on the left side of the frame, wearing blue pajamas with white stripes. His right hand is in his shirt pocket, suggesting that he is concealing something from her. Amélie, dressed in a long black dress with a green collar, sits in a chair, facing him. Matisse stares down at her; she gazes steadily back at him, recoiling slightly from his rigidity. Between them an open window gives a view of a garden with a tree, a lawn, and flowers. The wall of the room forms a dark blue background that sets off the figures. The “conversation” seems to be a staring contest. The open window that separates them resembles one of Matisse’s paintings. It is his art, which once bound them together, that now keeps them apart.

In 1913 some of Matisse’s paintings traveled to the United States for exhibition at the Armory Show in New York, giving Americans their first view of his work. Leo and Gertrude Stein lent Blue Nude, which so outraged viewers that copies of it were burned by art students in Chicago and Matisse himself was hanged in effigy. One American who attended the show and saw in it the future of painting was Alfred Barnes, a wealthy doctor from Philadelphia who would later become an American Shchukin.

Over the summer, Matisse worked feverishly on a painting of his wife that required one hundred sittings to complete and exhausted them both. Portrait of Mme. Matisse is one of the painter’s most famous and most beautiful portraits. Amélie sits in a plain wooden straight-backed chair directly facing the viewer. Matisse has chosen cool colors for the portrait: shades of dark blue for the background that match the colors of her coat and skirt. Her blouse is aquamarine, matching the color of the chair. An orange sash drapes from her shoulder and wraps around her left arm. She wears a black pillbox hat embellished with a flower and a feather. Her face is an oval mask, grey-blue, shaped like the face of a Cycladic sculpture, but with the thin line of her mouth curving upward in a slight smile. Amélie wept when she saw the finished painting. Matisse submitted the painting to the Salon d’Automne, from where Shchukin carried it with him to Moscow. Amélie never posed for her husband again.

On July 28, 1914 Austria declared war on Serbia following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and in August Germany declared war on France. Initially, French citizens believed that Germany would quickly be repulsed, and the war would be short. But within months the Germans had overrun Belgium, and French forces were driven back from Picardy. Bohain, where Matisse’s mother and brother Auguste lived, came under German control. Auguste was deported to a prison camp in Germany. Anna Matisse dug in and refused to leave her home. Matisse soon realized that the war would be prolonged and set about adjusting to it. His painting came to a temporary halt as the art market in France dried up and his energies were directed towards aiding the war effort.

In September the French army requisitioned the Matisses’ home in Issy as a military headquarters, and for the duration of the war the residence became a way station for soldiers moving to and from the front, and a gathering place for Matisse’s friends. The children were sent to Toulouse to live with their grandfather, while Matisse and Amélie went to Collioure. Short of money, and worried about his mother, Matisse returned to Paris in October. He was unable to secure an advance from his dealer Bernheim-Jeune, and learned from Shchukin in Moscow that his patron could not transfer funds. He was unable to get news about his mother. He was called up for a medical examination but rejected because of his health (weak heart) and age. In November, Amélie brought the children to Paris and they all stayed at the studio apartment on Quai St-Michel.

Matisse then completed a portrait of Marguerite that he had begun in July, Head, White and Rose, one of the few paintings he executed in the Cubist style. Marguerite had been through a difficult period. She had ambitions to become a doctor, perhaps because of the important role that doctors had played in her life. But she had struggled with her studies and her poor health had prevented her from taking the exams for her baccalaureate degree. She abandoned plans to further her education and fell back into Matisse’s studio world. He painted her numerous times during the war years, at the studio in Paris and later in Nice.

In the winter of 1916-1917 Matisse found a new model, a young Italian woman named Laurette, and once again his painting changed direction. He first painted her in November 1916 as The Italian Woman, and over the course of the next year she sat for him dozens of times in a variety of poses, costumes, and settings. His portraits of her, while not fully representational, rendered her long oval face, dark eyes and hair, and pointed chin in a way that made her easily recognizable as an individual. Matisse often rendered her as an object of desire, a treatment of his models that became increasingly common in subsequent years. He painted her wearing turbans and colorful dresses, lying clothed on the ground next to a coffee cup, lying nude on a bed on top of a flowered bedspread, in a variety of hairstyles, and in company with other women. With Laurette the model became an actress costumed for different roles, and the studio became a stage, an invented world in which Matisse’s imagination could roam. Matisse’s older son Jean, training to become an airplane mechanic at a factory in Issy, fell in love with Laurette, perhaps responding to the eroticism she exuded on the canvas. After an intense twelve month studio partnership with Matisse, Laurette never posed for him again, but she opened the door to a new kind of relationship with the model for Matisse, one in which the model is presented as a sexual object in an intimate, private setting. Matisse played with variations on this theme for several years after the war when he situated his studio permanently in the south of France.

Jean was drafted into the army that summer and posted to Dijon.  Before he left, Matisse painted a group portrait of his family, The Music Lesson. The viewer looks at a scene in the living room of the house in Issy. In the lower left corner of the frame sits a mustached Jean, wearing coat and tie, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He is reading a book he clenches tightly in both hands. To his left, Marguerite stands close to Pierre, who is seated at a grand piano. An open case holding a violin rests before them on the top of the piano. (Matisse had long been a student of the violin, and during the war had practiced it for hours each day as an outlet for the tension he usually relieved by painting.) Behind Marguerite and Pierre a window opens to the garden, where Amélie sits in a rocking chair, head bowed over her sewing. Beyond her is a small oval pool of murky water surrounded by greenery. At the edge of the pool Matisse has placed a sculpture of a voluptuous nude woman, the muse that beckons the painter to a realm beyond the world of his family.

On Christmas Day 1917 Matisse went to Nice, set up a studio in his room at the Hotel du Beau Rivage, and began painting there. Amélie and Marguerite joined him in January. Nice became Matisse’s new home as a painter and ushered in an entirely new period in his career.

Over the next decade Matisse consolidated his painting base in Nice while maintaining his support system in Paris, where the market for his work existed through the Bernheim-Jeune gallery. Shchukin was no longer buying. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin had confiscated Shchukin’s collection and turned his home into a state museum. Shchukin retreated to Nice with enough of his fortune to live a comfortable retirement. To this day his descendants are trying to recover the paintings that were taken from him by the Bolsheviks. Sarah and Michael Stein had left Paris for the countryside during the war and sold much of their collection to a Danish grain merchant. But Matisse’s paintings were now popular with the public, if disdained by the critics, and he sold well.

After the war, Matisse’s family dispersed among his numerous residences. The house at Issy was managed by Amélie and a housekeeper, while Jean and Pierre moved into the studio apartment at 19 Quai St-Michel and tried to become painters. Marguerite shuttled between Issy and Nice, where she frequently modeled for her father. Amélie, when she became bored and lonely, would join her husband in Nice for brief periods of time, but often had to return to Paris with Marguerite, whose damaged trachea needed frequent medical attention and sometimes additional surgeries. Amélie also suffered from poor health—rheumatism, weak kidneys, back pain, as well as bouts of depression brought on by the constant separations from her husband.

The highlight of the year came in the spring when Matisse would ship a fresh batch of canvases to Issy, where Amélie and Marguerite would prepare them for exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune. Matisse usually came to Issy for the summer to escape the Mediterranean heat, and for a couple of months the family would be reunited, until he returned to Nice in September and the cycle would repeat itself. The pattern of disruption and separation wore Amélie down, and in the fall she often went to spas for treatment after Matisse had returned alone to Nice.

In 1921 Matisse gave up hotel living in Nice and established his studio in a two-room apartment at 1 Place Charles Felix, located in the old section of town near the sea. This became his home in Nice for a number of years. He eventually occupied the entire top floor of the building. He worked there with a young model named Henriette Darricarrière, a dancer and violinist. She came to the studio every day except Sunday and stayed for seven hours. On breaks from painting, she and Matisse played violins together. Henriette was the central figure in what became known as Matisse’s odalisque period. She posed, in a variety of settings, nude or in costume, as the submissive concubine in a harem, presented as a passive object of sexual desire, languid, seductive, remote.

Commentators have remarked on Matisse’s use of the sexual charge exuded by his models to energize his paintings by transferring to the objects under his gaze, through color, the emotions aroused in him by the model. And Matisse himself said about his relationship to the model, “The presence of the model counts not as a potential source of information about its makeup, but to keep me in an emotional state, like a kind of flirtation which ends in a rape. Rape of what: of myself, of a certain emotional involvement with the object that appeals to me.” (Janet Hobhouse. The Bride Stripped Bare, p. 94)

It is tempting to see in his rendering of Henriette as odalisque the expression of Matisse’s relationship to his muse, an idealized female figure who holds him in thrall, demanding that he obsessively, relentlessly, paint. His subjugation of the model as concubine, his transformation of the studio into a harem, places them both in the private world of his own psyche, with the woman serving as the anima figure with whom he seeks imaginative union through his brush. The outside world—the world of a society that engages in war, of critics who fault him without understanding him, of family that makes demands on his time and calls him away from the studio—is the world of imperfection, of tension, of disharmony that he seeks to resolve in his art. The critic Donald Kuspit traces Matisse’s intense connection with the female model to the profound role that Anna Matisse played in his development as an artist.

Without his mother’s help, Matisse probably would not have become an artist. She gave birth to his art as much as she gave birth to him . . . His every act of art became an unconscious re-creation of her presence: a return to her as the origin of his art, as well as a “proof” that she and Matisse were one in and through art . . . She taught him that to be an artist meant to be as sensitive, empathic, and responsive as a woman, but also as determined as a man. It meant to put oneself in a loving state of being, in which one was open to inspiration . . . Above all, it meant to have profound empathy, even passionate concern, for the spectator, who turned to art as a last resort, the last possible cure for his ailments. (Kuspit, pp. 34-36)

As the decade unfolded, the dispersed family members remained involved with Matisse’s painting. His art was the sun around which others’ lives orbited. Amélie, increasingly marginalized and irrelevant to Matisse’s studio, became chronically ill and morose, her spirits lifting only when the sadness in her letters to him prodded Matisse to summon her to Nice. When her father died in November 1922, Matisse was too absorbed in his painting to accompany his wife to the funeral.

By 1929 Matisse had painted himself and Henriette into exhaustion. He had featured her in nearly one hundred paintings over the course of their collaboration. Henriette ceased modeling, married a schoolteacher, and became the mother of a girl who would one day pose for Matisse. Matisse hired a seventeen-year-old dancer, Lisette Lowengard, to replace her as model. But his painting had momentarily dried up. He complained to Amélie of standing before a blank canvas with no ideas. His left arm pained him, and a doctor, after diagnosing acute neuritis, insisted that Matisse put down his brush and rest. As he often did when reaching a dead end in his art, Matisse decided to travel in search of fresh light and new colors and patterns. He reserved a double cabin on a steamship from San Francisco to Tahiti, planning to cross the United States from New York by train. But three months before their departure on the Ile de France, Amélie collapsed in Paris while undergoing treatment for her various ailments. Her doctor ordered months of complete bed rest. She returned to Nice to convalesce, and Matisse hired Lisette to serve as her caregiver while he traveled. He sailed alone for New York on February 25, 1930.

Matisse marveled at New York, its skyscrapers and busy streets, which he found modern and energetic. He visited the gallery that Pierre had opened there, went to the Metropolitan Museum, and attended a Broadway show. A fellow painter traveling on the Ile de France alerted New York’s cognoscenti of Matisse’s presence among them, and social gatherings in his honor were quickly organized. After three days, he left for San Francisco, with stops along the way in Chicago and Los Angeles

Upon his arrival in Papeete eight days later, he was met by Pauline Chadourne, a local beauty whose mother was Tahitian, her father French. Pauline had booked him into his unpretentious hotel, and served as his guide and companion throughout his nearly three months stay. He paid his respects at Gauguin’s unmarked grave, and had a meeting with the painter’s son Emile, an illiterate fisherman who lived without a care in the world. The filmmakers F.W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty were in Tahiti filming Taboo, and they invited Matisse to stay at their filming location on a remote part of the island. Matisse wrote long daily missives to Amélie in the evening before going to bed and sent them out in batches on departing ships.

Matisse was put off by the decadent hauteur of the French colonists, who looked down on the native Maori while taking advantage of the liberality of their customs, especially their sexual freedom. And despite the splendor of the setting, Matisse was not experiencing the visual rejuvenation he had sought in coming to the South Pacific He became impatient to leave. But the trip was redeemed for him when he sailed to the coral island of Apataki, where he stayed as the guest of Francois Hervé, a French administrator and friend of Pauline. The isolation of the island, the stillness, the kindness of his host, but most of all the changing colors of the sky under which he strolled at sunset, and of the lagoon where he swam, with its strange, beautifully colored tropical fish, gave Matisse’s eye the renewal he had been seeking.

A tearful Pauline saw Matisse off at the harbor on June 15. After a six-week voyage home via the Panama Canal, his vessel Ville de Verdun docked at Marseilles on July 31. Matisse went immediately to his studio in Nice and resumed work on a painting of Lisette he had begun before the trip. Amélie was still bedridden.

But in September he was back in the United States, serving as a juror for the Carnegie International Prize, which was awarded to Picasso. During this trip he arranged a meeting with Dr. Albert C. Barnes, a wealthy businessman who was in the process of creating a museum to house his large collection of modern art. He owned nearly two hundred Renoirs and eighty Cezannes, in addition to works by Matisse and Picasso. Matisse traveled to his residence in Merion, Pennsylvania, and while there Barnes commissioned him to produce a mural for the central hall of the museum, an enormous undertaking for which Barnes would pay Matisse $30,000, a sum that Pierre, when he learned of the contract, thought woefully insufficient. But Barnes knew that the art market had dried up with the onset of the Depression, and Matisse was happy to have the project. He came back to Merion in December to study the central hall and take measurements.

The Barnes commission took two years to complete, and left Matisse in a state of exhaustion and despair. It was the largest scale work he had ever attempted and was further complicated by the architecture of the central hall, whose three rounded archways partially dictated Matisse’s design. He rented a large garage in Nice to serve as studio and set to work. His theme was the dance, all female figures to be modeled by Lisette. They went to the garage each morning at eight am, leaving Amélie alone in her fourth story bedroom at 1 Place Charles Felix. Matisse put Lisette on a strict program, limiting her diet, requiring regular exercise to keep her fit, and insisting that she retire to bed each evening at an early hour so that she would be rested and fresh for the next day’s work.

Matisse devised a whole new way of working in order to carry out the commission. Using a piece of charcoal on the tip of a long bamboo pole, Matisse drew the figures in the dance on a white wall. He then experimented with color combinations using paper cutouts that Lisette would pin to his designs. The process was arduous, as Matisse continually altered the shapes, searching for a harmonious composition. After a year’s work, as he approached completion of his design, Matisse discovered that the measurements of the central hall that he had taken were inaccurate. Barnes was furious and came to Paris to discuss with Matisse how to proceed. Matisse, undeterred, proposed simply starting over, and Barnes agreed. The mistake, by serving as a trial run, enabled Matisse to proceed confidently with the second version.

In September 1933, with the second design completed, Lisette, no longer needed as a model, resumed her duties as Amélie’s caregiver, and Matisse employed a young Russian woman to serve as his assistant as he added color to the design. When he had made his color selections, Matisse hired a housepainter to apply paint to the canvas. Matisse then held a showing of The Dance at his garage studio, attended by family members, painter friends, and an American journalist, Dorothy Dudley. No one else in the French art world saw the finished painting.

On May 12, Matisse arrived in New York. Pierre drove him down to Merion with the canvases. Barnes would not allow Pierre to accompany his father to the central hall, and after the tryptic was hung, he announced that he would not permit anyone to view it. He relented only to enable Pierre to photograph the three panels. Matisse never saw them again, and they were withheld from the viewing public for decades. An article written by Dudley and published in Lincoln Kirstein’s literary quarterly Hound and Horn provided the only eyewitness account of the painting. The results of Matisse’s two-year struggle were almost completely hidden from view, locked away in Barnes’s museum.

After his return to Nice following the Barnes fiasco, Matisse did very little painting for several years while his life was consumed with a variety of domestic problems. His difficulties began when he decided, perhaps out of frustration that his largest scale work to date would not be seen by the public, to resume work on the aborted version of Barnes’s commission for The Dance. His obsession with completing this piece, to the neglect of his marriage, drove Amélie to move nearby to her sister’s apartment, which Matisse was renting for her. During the three-year period that Matisse worked on both versions of the commission, Amélie had never left her bedroom.

A contrite Matisse, bearing gifts, made daily courtship visits to Amélie, and in November, after he had completed the project, she returned to their residence. This version of The Dance was subsequently purchased by the director of the Petit Palais, a new museum in Paris, but immediately went into storage in the basement, and so it too remained unseen by the public.

Matisse hired the young Russian woman who had replaced Lisette as his studio assistant to be Amélie’s caregiver and companion. Lydia Delectorskaya was a twenty-four-year-old Russian émigré living marginally in Nice, scraping by on odd jobs as a model and movie extra. She was born in Siberia and orphaned at age 12 when both of her parents died in epidemics of typhoid and cholera. She was brought up by an aunt who fled with her to Manchuria to escape the Revolution. They later moved to Paris. Although accepted as a medical student at the Sorbonne, the tuition fees charged to foreign students were beyond her reach. At 19, she made a disastrous marriage to an older man that lasted only a year.  With a boyfriend, she moved to Nice to join the community of Russian émigrés seeking work as models, film extras, and casino dancers. After she had assisted Matisse with The Dance, he loaned her 500 francs with which to open a tearoom, but her boyfriend lost the money in a single evening at the casino. She performed in dance marathons to earn the money to repay Matisse, and when he learned of this, he forgave the debt and later, at Amélie’s urging, hired her again.

In May 1934, Lydia accompanied Amélie to her sister’s residence in Beauzelle, where she planned to spend the summer. Also with them was Marguerite’s son Claude. Marguerite was then coping with the breakdown of her marriage. Her husband, George Duthuit, had become romantically involved with a married Englishwoman while staying in London to deliver a lecture series on modern art. Marguerite had collapsed in Paris under the stress, and when she recovered had gone to stay with Pierre in the U.S. In Beauzelle, Amélie also collapsed. Matisse shuttled from crisis to crisis, arranging nursing care for Marguerite at her sickbed in Paris and seeking medical help for Amélie in Toulouse.

As the new year opened, Amélie was back in Nice. Claude was also living with them, while Marguerite embarked on a new career in Paris as a couturier. Lydia moved in with the Matisses, continuing as companion to Amélie and nanny to Claude. In March, Matisse painted her for the first time, and a shift took place in their relationship. Although Lydia had experience working as a model, she had not enjoyed it, and Matisse had shown no interest in having her sit. In her memoir of this time, With Apparent Ease, Lydia remarked that she was “not his type.” But one day as she sat in a characteristic pose, leaning into a chair back with her head resting on her crossed arms, Matisse ordered her to hold still and proceeded to sketch her. The sketch became the basis for The Blue Eyes, the first of more than ninety portraits of her he would execute in the coming years. She became his artistic soul mate, and in the process eventually displaced both Amélie and Marguerite.

In May Matisse began painting her as The Pink Nude, a canvas that took him six months to complete. In this painting, Matisse has returned to an emphasis on geometric form. A pinkish-red nude figure sprawls across the canvas, lying on a blue and white checked fabric. Her limbs swirl in voluptuous curves that move the eye along her body. Her oval-shaped head, disproportionately small, is swiveled to face the viewer. Matisse is working primarily with mass and color in a way that produces a nearly abstract painting. The model has been reduced to pure form.

The approaching war was felt in the Matisse household, and across France. Alarmed by Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Amélie left for her sister’s house in Beauzelle, accompanied by a nurse and carrying paintings. But when the Munich Agreement appeared to defuse the crisis, Lydia was sent to fetch her back to Nice. On her arrival there, Amélie demanded that Lydia be dismissed. Matisse resisted, insisting that he needed her for his work.

The Matisses had moved that year to large apartments in the former Hotel Excelsior-Palace, and Lydia had moved with them. In December, she left to take a room in a boarding house, with the understanding that she would come in daily for work in the new year. Amélie also opposed this arrangement. Ten days after leaving the Matisse household, Lydia shot herself. But her life was spared because the bullet struck her breastbone, and she accepted the result. She left for Paris to live with her aunt. In March, Amélie also moved out, taking up residence at the Matisse apartment in Paris with Marguerite, and retaining an attorney to draw up papers for a legal separation and division of property. Matisse located Lydia and asked her to return to work for him.

When France declared war on Germany in September 1939, Matisse was also in Paris, taking part in the inventory of his work. He and Lydia, the painter and his muse, fled to the sanctuary of the studio in Nice, refugees from family and war. A new cycle in Matisse’s life began.

Matisse’s family blamed Lydia for the breakup of his marriage. In her fury, Amélie spread scandalous gossip about the relationship between her husband and his assistant, but Lydia in her memoirs insisted that theirs was a chaste relationship, defined by the boundaries of his studio. She slept in the attic at the Excelsior-Palace, reported for work every morning, and addressed her employer with the formal “vous” as a way of maintaining professional distance. But her behavior during the war years, as Matisse’s health deteriorated, reveals that there was a strong emotional bond between them, perhaps more on the order of a father and daughter. In 1939, Matisse was seventy, Lydia twenty-nine.

The war disrupted life for Matisse and his family, as it did for everyone living in France. In May 1940 Germany invaded France, and German troops entered Paris on June 14. Matisse’s brother Auguste fled Bohain with his family and relocated in Beauzelle, where Amélie and her sister maintained separate households. Marguerite brought Claude there also, but when France capitulated and the Vichy government was formed, she sent her son to New York to live with his uncle Pierre for the duration of the war. The stress of events brought on a recurrence of Matisse’s abdominal pains.

In December 1940 Lydia wrote to Marguerite warning that her father’s life was in danger. The treatment that Matisse was receiving from doctors in Nice was not relieving his symptoms, which were acute. He was in severe pain, losing weight, and unable to sleep. Marguerite came immediately to Nice and arranged medical care for Matisse at a hospital in Lyon. Matisse underwent a colostomy to remove a blockage in his colon that doctors traced to the hernia that had disabled him as a young lawyer. He remained in the hospital for three months, and once was close to death from a pulmonary embolism. Too weak to travel after his discharge, he moved with Lydia to a hotel in Lyon at the end of March, before returning to Nice in May.

Matisse lived as a convalescent in his studio, which existed as a world apart from the insanity of the war raging around them. The studio was fitted out to resemble the scene in one of his interior paintings, with flowers, elegant objects, birds kept in an aviary, colorful textiles—the environment of “luxe, calme et volupté” that remained Matisse’s ideal. He was bedridden, attended by day and night nurses, and too weak to paint. He drew instead, and worked on Themes and Variations, a book of his drawings to be published with a prefatory essay by the surrealist poet and Resistance fighter Louis Aragon, who visited him in December. Lydia reported that despite his weakened condition, he kept to his regular work schedule and would also draw or sketch at night when he was unable to sleep.

Matisse resumed painting in August, using as models young women washed up on the shores of Nice by the war. In September his eye was taken by Monique Bourgeois, a young woman who had been hired as a substitute night nurse, and he asked her to pose. Monique would become a pivotal figure in the crowning achievement of Matisse’s career as an artist, the Chapel at Vence.

Monique was an inexperienced, frightened woman whose family had been displaced from their home in Metz by the war. Her father had died, her mother was ill, and she developed tuberculosis, from which she was only partially cured when she met Matisse. She was living in a boarding house in Nice and had sought work through a nurses’ placement bureau when she was assigned to Matisse’s bedside. Monique attended Matisse for fifteen nights until his regular night nurse resumed her duties. Matisse was immediately taken with her innocence and freshness, and after her service ended, he asked her to pose for him. He painted her in Monique in a Grey Robe, Interior with Bars of Sunlight, and The Idol in 1942, and for Monique Bourgeois in 1943. Disappointed that the portraits did not resemble her, Monique asked Matisse why he did not paint realistically, and he explained his theory of painting to her.

In May 1943, as U.S. troops moved up the peninsula of Italy, Matisse, fearing the destruction that an allied invasion would bring to Nice, moved his studio and household to Vence, a hillside town fourteen miles to the north. He rented a simple house there above the town with the ironic name Villa le Rêve (The Dream House). The Germans sequestered the basement of the house as a canteen for their soldiers. Amélie and Marguerite returned to Paris from Beauzelle to join the Resistance. Amélie, now seventy-two years old, had shed all her ailments and cast off her depression since separating from Matisse. Marguerite served as a courier, while Amélie worked as a typist of intelligence reports being transmitted to London. Both women were arrested by the Gestapo on the same day in April 1944. Marguerite was imprisoned in Rennes and tortured. Amélie was sentenced to six months imprisonment in Fresnes. When the Allies landed in Normandy in June, Marguerite was deported to a concentration camp in Germany but escaped when the train carrying her was bombed by Allied planes. Paris was liberated on August 24, and shortly thereafter Amélie was released from prison. When Allied troops landed on the southern coast, Vence was also liberated.

As the war raged, Marguerite faulted her father for distancing himself from the destruction by continuing to paint decorative interiors, still lifes, and pretty young women posing in colorful outfits. Indeed, the titles of the paintings that he produced during the war years testify to his determination not to bend his aesthetic to the circumstances of time and place, no matter how terrifying. He steadfastly pursued tranquility and harmony, the hallmarks of his work, as though to assert their overriding permanence and preeminence. Venetian Armchair with Fruits, Seated Woman with Flower, Dancer in Blue Tutu, Lemons and Saxifrages, Anemones and Chinese Vase defiantly insist that the war will not sidetrack him from his artistic mission to uphold a higher reality.

Lydia also proved her mettle during the war. As food and basic necessities like fuel for heating became virtually unobtainable, and Matisse refused to patronize the black market, Lydia roamed the countryside on her bicycle, foraging for firewood and bartering for produce from local gardens. Though she was under suspicion as a Russian national, the authorities allowed her to continue as Matisse’s assistant, perhaps out of deference to Matisse’s stature as an artist and his delicate health.

For the duration of the war, and in the years following, Matisse had maintained contact with Monique Bourgeois. She visited him, shyly showed him her drawings, and corresponded with him when she traveled to visit relatives in other parts of France. Matisse adopted towards her the attitude of a benevolent grandfather, encouraging her art, sending her money, hard-to-obtain delicacies like fresh fruit, and medicines. Struggling with poor health and poverty, she had been unable to pursue her nursing studies and had decided to join the Dominican religious order in Vence, Foyer Lacordaire, a nursing home.  She took her temporary vows in September 1944 and was given the name Sister Jacques-Marie. The nuns were planning to create a chapel in an abandoned garage bordering their property, which faced Villa La Rêve. Sister Jacques was given the task of designing stained glass windows for the chapel. She brought a watercolor to show Matisse, whereupon he declared that he would design the windows. So began a project that would last four years, drain Matisse of much of his remaining life force, and exhaust Lydia with its demands on her time and spirit: The Chapel at Vence.

Initially, Mère Agnes, the mother superior, and the nuns at the Foyer opposed Matisse’s involvement in the project. They regarded as sacrilege the idea that a hedonistic painter whose works often featured young women in various states of undress would design the holy space of their chapel. Sister Jacques knew from her correspondence with Matisse that he regarded his art as divinely inspired, produced in service to God, but as a novice she had no standing to argue with her superiors. After taking her vows, she had written to Matisse that she now felt separated from him spiritually because he did not take the sacraments. Her letter provoked a lengthy response from Matisse in which he revealed the religious impulse that lay behind his painting.

I have no need to receive priestly lessons at the end of my life. I have had no need of sacraments to glorify the Creator the entire length of my life. I went all the way to Tahiti to admire His beautiful light, in order to bring it from there to others through my work . . .

You pray for me, thank you. Ask God to give me, in my last years, the light of the spirit that will keep me in touch with Him, which will permit me to finish my career, long and laborious, because I have always sought to reveal to blind man His obvious glory through exclusively earthly nourishment. Ask Him to give me health for that, although this wish may have to take second place . . . (Soeur Jacques. Henry Matisse: La Chapelle de Vence, p. 55)

Fortunately for Matisse and Sister Jacques, who was caught in the middle of a contest of wills between Matisse and Mère Agnes, a Dominican priest with a sophisticated knowledge of modern art was recuperating at Foyer Lacordaire and, upon learning that Matisse lived nearby, arranged a meeting with him to discuss the stained glass windows. At this meeting, which took place in December 1947, Brother Louis Bertrand Rayssiguier and Matisse drew up a plan not simply for the stained glass windows, but for the entire chapel, down to details for a decorative wall depicting the Stations of the Cross, the vestments and altar cloth, and the goblets holding the sacred wine. As the ultimate expression of his aesthetic principle of harmony and tranquility Matisse would design and oversee the construction of a sacred space dedicated to the worship of God.

At the beginning of 1949, Matisse decided to move his studio operations back to the Regina in Nice, where he would have a much larger space in which to work. His crew of helpers included a cook and housekeeper, a day nurse and a night nurse, studio aides, and models. Matisse worked from a taxi-bed that could be rolled from room to room as he experimented with color combinations for the seventeen window panels, in addition to designing the Stations of the Cross, drawing a portrait of Saint Dominic for the ceramic wall behind the altar, a portrait of Mary and the baby Jesus for another ceramic wall, and sculpting Christ on the cross with modeling clay. No detail, whether it was tiles for the roof, the heating and ventilating system, or the candlesticks for the altar, escaped his eye. Lydia ran the entire operation like a factory foreman. So intent was Matisse on completing the project that his crew was required to live at the Regina with him, and he enforced a strict curfew, turning the studio into a kind of artistic monastery. A local architect was retained to supervise the construction of the chapel. In a strange coincidence, the dimensions of the chapel matched the dimensions of the Regina studio.

The first stone of the chapel was laid on December 12, 1949.  A year later the windows were installed. Matisse did not attend these ceremonial events, though he did make visits to the construction site. He was also absent when the completed chapel was consecrated on June 25, 1951. A Mass was celebrated, and the Little Singers of the Côte d’Azur performed songs. Father Couturier, a church official from Paris, read a letter from Matisse.

The chapel sits on a hillside above the town of Vence, giving views of the Mediterranean coastline and the sea. The building is oriented on an east-west axis to capture the most sunlight. The south wall carries fifteen stained glass windows designed in floral patterns of green, blue, and lemon-yellow glass that transmit their colors onto the white marble floor and onto the facing white tiled ceramic wall on which Matisse has drawn figures of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus in black outlines. On the rear wall, Matisse has drawn, again using simple black outlines, the Stations of the Cross.

The apse holds a plain marble altar and the nuns’ choir. Nine stained glass windows throw their light on the choir. Behind the altar, two stained glass windows, predominantly blue, but decorated with green and yellow flowers, represent The Tree of Life. Matisse has designed these two windows to give the appearance of hanging drapes. On the white ceramic wall facing the nuns’ choir Matisse has drawn the robed figure of Saint Dominic, the patron of Sisters’ order. Father Couturier modeled for this drawing, also done in Matisse’s abstract outline style.

The chapel is quite small: fifty feet long, twenty feet wide in the nave, thirty-five feet wide from the apse to the nun’s choir. The simple elegance of its forms, the brilliance of its colored light effects, give the sense of bringing the visitor inside one of Matisse’s paintings. Matisse considered it his masterpiece, the crowning achievement of his career. The nuns and Mère Agnes, so long stubbornly opposed to the project, were won over when they experienced the sacredness of the chapel’s space during the first service. They became its strongest defenders against conservative critics who faulted Matisse’s abstract iconography. The chapel is now a major tourist attraction in France and has been compared to the Sistine Chapel.

At the conclusion of the war, Matisse attempted to reunite his family, but met with only partial success, due in part to the continued presence of Lydia in his life. Marguerite came to Vence in January 1945 and stayed with her father for two weeks, leaving him in despair from her descriptions of her treatment by the Gestapo. The torture she endured became so unbearable that she had contemplated suicide in her cell. The protests of other prisoners probably saved her life.

In July Matisse and Lydia went to Paris, where they stayed in Matisse’s apartment on Boulevard Montparnasse. Pierre flew in from New York. Jean was then still living in Issy with his wife and son. But in the following year his marriage broke up, and Pierre’s shortly followed suit. Marguerite had taken her own apartment, which she shared with Amélie. Claude remained in New York with his father. The reunion was awkward for Matisse and Lydia because Amélie refused to speak to them. In 1946, Matisse and Lydia made another visit to Paris, spending the winter there, to the detriment of Matisse’s health.

After Matisse and Lydia returned to Vence in the spring of 1947, Picasso and his lover Françoise Gilot were frequent visitors. Matisse astonished them with displays of his cut-out paper technique as he sat up in his bed with scissors and paper shaping colored patterns that fell to the floor of the studio like leaves from a tree. But Picasso, an avowed Communist and atheist, was not sympathetic to Matisse’s chapel undertaking, suggesting rudely that Matisse’s time would be better spent designing a brothel. Matisse was amused, but Gilot was horrified.

Matisse had one final burst of easel painting in 1947, before he began work on the chapel. His subject matter remained unchanged—beautifully dressed women in colorful interiors—but he was pushing his style towards more abstraction. When he was finished with the chapel, he resumed working with paper cutouts and drawings. His final work was a stained glass window commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller to commemorate his mother.

Following the completion of the chapel, Matisse’s health went into steep decline. His doctor said that Matisse had worn out his heart working on his masterpiece. He died on November 3, 1954 at the age of eighty-four, with Lydia and Marguerite at his bedside. Sister Jacques had suggested that Matisse be buried in the chapel, an idea that Lydia vehemently opposed and discouraged the Sister from even mentioning to Matisse. A funeral Mass, attended by family members and local dignitaries, was performed in Nice by the Archbishop. Lydia was not invited, nor was she any longer in Nice. She had left the day following Matisse’s death, carrying with her artwork that Matisse had given her for her financial security. She donated this artwork to Soviet Russia before she died in 1998. Marguerite and Amélie, who was now living in Aix-en-Provence, resumed their roles as caretakers of Matisse’s oeuvre and artistic legacy.

The Jealous Muse, Epilogue : The Bargain with the Muse

What do the varied life stories of these artists tell us about the terms of engagement with the muse? What does the muse demand from her supplicants? What does she give them in return?

In the arts, there are no guarantees of success, either artistic or financial, but the career paths followed here show that success in any form does not come without unswerving dedication and unhesitating commitment. The artist must place service to the muse above all other commitments if he or she hopes to master a medium. From the earliest years of her childhood, the keyboard was the center of Nina Simone’s life. She practiced for hours each day, foregoing the simpler pleasures of playmates. As a young woman, she pursued her formal training with a single-minded devotion to her aim of becoming a classical pianist, to the exclusion of personal relationships. Weston was in love with his camera, preferring it to all other companions. It was his means of mediating with reality. Cummings lived to write and paint, and deliberately kept himself ineffectual at doing anything else. And Matisse famously said to the woman he was about to marry, “Mademoiselle, I love you dearly. But I shall always love painting more.” The muse insists on uncompromised devotion.

Talent is also needed, and often reveals itself early. This is the muse beckoning. As a child, Anjelica Huston amused herself and her father’s famous houseguests by inventing characters, costuming them, and performing them. Oldenburg, when still a boy, invented a fantasy world that he populated with real objects, anticipating the environments he would create over the course of his long professional career. The teenage Weston thrilled at the sight of the first prints yielded from his box camera and felt his life changed. Matisse found himself as a young man with the box of colors his mother gave him in his sick bed.

The muse requires helpers, and they usually come in the form of family members and friends. Matisse and Cummings were both supported financially by their fathers at the start of their careers, and in Cummings’s case, the support continued long after he was established as a poet. Anjelica Huston, raised in a theatrical family, was given her first acting job by her father, whose standing in the motion picture industry gave her access to roles. Maria Tallchief’s mother charted a course in ballet for both her daughters and sought out teachers of the highest professional quality for them. Weston was helped by his sister and his wife. Throughout his career, Matisse relied on his wife and daughter to pose, to assist in his studio, and to manage his business affairs. Not all family support was selfless. Nina Simone’s mother attempted to appropriate her daughter’s talent and put it in the service of her own mission as an itinerant minister. This pattern of being used by others was repeated by her husbands and became a source of profound resentment in Simone.

Friends also come to the aid of the muse. Cummings found patrons in two of his college classmates. Two white women in Simone’s hometown subsidized the child’s piano lessons and high school education, and raised money for her continued education in New York. And support sometimes comes from institutional patrons, like Weston’s Guggenheim Fellowships and Cummings’s Ford Foundation grant. Not all art, even of high quality, sells.

The demands of the muse, the sacrifices that she exacts, often have two severe and related psychological consequences—loneliness and self-centeredness. Mastering an art form, whether it is music, or poetry, or painting, or sculpture, requires years of solitary practice. Performing artists, dancers and actors, hone their crafts in social circumstances, working with other performers, but still must develop a singular artistic personality that distinguishes them from everyone else.

Nina Simone was acutely aware of the loneliness that accompanied her dedication to the piano. Her aim to become a black female classical pianist exacerbated her sense of isolation. Her loneliness made her vulnerable, susceptible to the designs of others who wanted to use her talent to further their own aims.  She did not often enjoy her own talent and regarded it as a burden that had kept her from happiness. She was angry with her muse.

Matisse also suffered from his sense of isolation, not only from bourgeois French society, but also from many of his fellow artists. His isolation resulted from the restless innovation that drove his work. In continually seeking new forms of expression, Matisse distinguished himself, creating an art that was unique and groundbreaking. This was the mark of his greatness as an artist, but he paid a heavy price for it in frequent bouts of anxiety and insomnia brought on by self-doubt. He also had to fortify himself against misunderstanding and ridicule from the art public.

The self-centeredness of artists, their susceptibility to narcissism, is often remarked. Weston, in his journal, forcibly justified putting his own needs before all other considerations. His art was a higher calling. Cummings refused to develop a sense of responsibility to others, most especially his own daughter, because he feared doing so would take him away from his muse. This self-centeredness compensates for the loneliness that the artist experiences. The uniqueness of the individuality that the artist forms through complete dedication to a craft makes finding common ground with others difficult. Might the artist’s devotion to and love for his muse be a form of self-love?

Loneliness and self-centeredness give rise to other problems that beset many artists. Chief among these is difficulty forming and sustaining intimate personal relationships. Actors and actresses are especially noteworthy for the transience of their relationships, changing romantic partners almost as frequently as they change roles. The serial affairs and multiple marriages of Weston, Tallchief, Balanchine, Anjelica Huston, Cummings, and Simone are a sign that artists’ primary loyalty is to their muse, which is to say to themselves. Healthy relationships result from other-centeredness, not self-centeredness. Tallchief in her autobiography admitted that her marriage to Balanchine was based not on personal attraction, but on their mutual dedication to dance. Balanchine’s numerous marriages appear to be his attempt to live with an embodiment of his muse. He shed romantic partners in the same way that Matisse went through models.

Little is known about Matisse’s personal relationship with the young women who posed naked for him. We do know from his own words that the sexual energy stirred in him by the presence of the model fueled his art. If Amélie was not physically betrayed, she certainly felt emotionally betrayed by her husband’s attachment to his models. Their long marriage ultimately collapsed under the weight of Matisse’s self-centered priorities.

Scattered throughout the stories of artists are numerous symptoms of unhappiness: alcoholism, drug use, scandal, criminal behavior, depression, suicide.  But Matisse once said, “One wouldn’t paint if one were happy.” (Hobhouse, p. 100) So perhaps for some artists attachment to the muse is not a cause of suffering, but a release from it.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen are rarely mentioned in this epilogue. They led private lives, and there is very little on the record about their personal relationship outside their work—their home life, their parenting roles, their personalities. I sought an interview with Oldenburg for this book, hoping to probe him about his marriage and how it blended with his artistic partnership with his wife, but was politely turned down.

But theirs seems to have been a rare and fruitful collaboration, bringing each of them both artistic and personal satisfaction. Though the public may think of Oldenburg as the artist, he took considerable pains to position van Bruggen as his full artistic partner, bringing to their work a dimension that he would not have found on his own. Their marriage lasted thirty years, ending only with van Bruggen’s death, and they created together over forty highly regarded public monuments located in Europe and the United States. Perhaps they found the same space together as Will and Ariel Durant, renewing with each new project not only their own creative sources, but also their personal relationship. They appear to have tamed the muse and made her their servant, not their master.

What then does the muse give her acolytes in exchange for their long dedication, their hard work, their skill, their personal torments and disappointments? Some, not many, achieve fame and wealth. Some only fame, and often not in their own lifetimes. But a great many artists labor anonymously, without reward or recognition, living in dire poverty or supporting themselves with simple labor. Raymond Carver worked as a janitor. Charles Bukowski was employed by the US Postal Service as a mail carrier. Henry Miller begged and borrowed. Van Gogh died without ever selling a painting. There are probably hundreds more examples.

What the muse gives all her devotees is beauty, a transcendent gift that transports them, and their audiences, to a higher reality. This was the declared aim of Matisse through his painting, and it is what the viewer experiences watching Tallchief dance as the Firebird, or Anjelica Huston become Maerose, or what the spectator feels while standing beneath a sculpture by Oldenburg/van Bruggen, or listening to Nina Simone as she sings “Wild is the Wind,” or reading “all in green went my love riding” by Cummings, or studying a photograph of a pepper by Weston. Like the goddess that inspires them, these men and women are not without flaws. But the muse transforms them into angels of light and understanding who make the soul visible to others. And this is why, more than politicians, or businessmen, or scientists, or athletes, or even priests, we revere them and hold them in our highest esteem.

Arthur Hoyle (www.arthurhoyle.com) is the author of The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur and Mavericks, Mystics, and Misfits: Americans Against the Grain. He reviews biography for the New York Journal of Books. His Substack newsletter Off the Cuff offers periodic commentary on the American cultural scene. Subscribe at https://arthurhoyle.substack.com.