Broad Strokes, page 7
Then Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Then renewal. That fall of 1889 an American artist studying in Paris came to the house at By to act as translator for John Arbuckle, the New York coffee magnate who’d gifted the mustangs. Arbuckle wanted an excuse to meet the famous artist. Bonheur said a hasty thanks (before giving the horses to Cody), then set about seducing the young translator, Anna Klumpke.
Born in San Francisco but trained as an artist in France, Klumpke had been lame in one leg since childhood. Her parents figured she’d never marry. She also had a big enough nose that Bonheur gallantly compared her to the great French lover of the grand schnoz, Cyrano de Bergerac.
Like Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother who hung cutouts of English cathedrals above his cradle, Klumpke’s mother raised four daughters to excellent, varied careers by nurturing them since childhood. She’d given Anna a Rosa Bonheur doll to cherish as a girl, and later a print of The Horse Fair for inspiration. It worked. Anna studied painting at the renowned Académie Julian in Paris and won an honorable mention at the Salon of 1885 for a portrait of her sister.
When Klumpke met Bonheur she was ready to adore the older woman, who adored her at first sight. Yes, it’s a little creepy, like Katie Holmes crushing on Tom Cruise in a Toledo movie theater as a girl and then growing up to marry him. But it’s also a little bit wonderful. For a gruff bear of a woman, Bonheur had the tenderest of hearts. “The thing is decided, right?” Bonheur wrote, once Klumpke had promised never to leave her. “This will be a divine marriage of two.”
Bonheur died at the age of seventy-seven and was buried alongside Nathalie in Paris’s legendary Père Lachaise Cemetery. Forty-some years later, Anna Klumpke joined them there, forever.
Two years after her death, a monumental bronze in memory of Rosa Bonheur was dedicated on the Place Denecourt in the town of Fontainebleau. The Rosa Bonheur Monument did not depict the artist herself, but rather—in rare sympathy with an artist’s heart—featured a life-sized bronze bull, muscular and striding forward. A beautiful beast.
CHAPTER 6:
EDMONIA LEWIS
I thought of returning to wild life again; but my love of sculpture forbade it.
—EDMONIA LEWIS
IN THE LATE 1980S, independent scholar and curator Marilyn Richardson was researching the life of nineteenth-century sculptor Edmonia Lewis. Biographical evidence was scarce, and Lewis’s most celebrated work, The Death of Cleopatra, (see page 74) had been missing for a century. As one did in those pre-Internet days, Richardson put out a call in the New York Times Book Review asking for material of any kind.
A curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, perhaps lingering over bagels and orange juice some lazy Sunday, happened to see it and recalled a recentish letter from one Frank Orland, a dentist/history buff from a Chicago suburb, who’d written to the Met looking for information on the very same Edmonia; he thought he might have something of hers. The museum curator, feeling generous, set down the juice and contacted the number listed in the Times.
Richardson pounced on the lead. She called. And called. She left messages. They were not returned. So what would any academic on an independent scholar’s salary do? Damned straight—she got on a plane, then in a car, and then marched up Frank Orland’s front steps and rang his bell.
A now-pliant Orland led Richardson to a barren corridor in a nearby suburban shopping mall. Hardly the place one might expect to find, say, a monumental marble statue of an Egyptian queen. Here’s where things in a detective caper might turn sinister—Don’t go in there, Marilyn!—but no, Frank was okay. In a nondescript industrial hallway, he and Richardson stopped before a closed door. Orland pulled out his keys.
A moment as iconic as Howard Carter and George Herbert unsealing the ancient tomb of King Tut in the Valley of the Kings and striking a match. But this was way more American: Orland leaned into the storage room and flicked on the light.
Edmonia Lewis. The Death of Cleopatra. 1876.
There sat Edmonia Lewis’s The Death of Cleopatra, a regal monarch limp on her marble throne. Tragic, moving . . . and, noted Richardson, “surrounded by holiday decorations and papier-mâché turkeys and Christmas lights and Christmas elves.”
Richardson was shaking.
A celebrated work by one of nineteenth-century America’s most important sculptors, lost for a hundred years, was now quite suddenly found.
Why is an artist lost and then found? In the case of Lewis, the reasons are almost too numerous. The low-hanging ones: she had no descendants, her Neoclassical style—so beloved in America of the 1860s to 1880s—fell out of favor. There was nothing to keep her in the news, no one to complain about her lack of attention. For a century, no one knew what happened to her. Some said she died in Rome, some said Paris, some even believed she died in Marin County, California, and was buried in San Francisco. In fact, she died in 1907 of Bright’s disease (painful), and was buried in London. Her will identifies her as “spinster and sculptor.” That leaves out a lot.
In an 1866 interview with a British critic, Lewis described her origins this way: “My mother was a wild Indian, and was born in Albany, of copper color, and with straight black hair. There she made and sold moccasins. My father, who was a negro, and a gentleman’s servant, saw her and married her. . . . Mother often left her home and wandered with her people, whose habits she could not forget, and thus we her children were brought up in the same wild manner.”
It goes without saying that being black and Indian wouldn’t make Lewis’s future path any easier. And then she was orphaned.
Both parents had died by the time Lewis turned nine. She spent the rest of her childhood with her mother’s people, who were Chippewa (Ojibwe), wearing moccasins and selling beads and other wares to tourists around Niagara Falls. Samuel, her brother, was called Sunshine then and she was Wildfire. Her Indian name suited the headstrong girl.
At some juncture Samuel left for the gold rush in California and Lewis began studying at New York Central College, though she was soon “declared to be wild” and was asked to leave. With Samuel’s financial support and assistance from abolitionists, Lewis next enrolled at Oberlin College.
Oberlin was an abolitionist hotbed, the first college in the United States to educate men and women, whites and blacks. Together.
Lewis lived with the family of the Reverend John Keep, where things were pleasantly unremarkable, until the winter of 1862:
Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 11, 1862. Mysterious Affair at Oberlin—Suspicion of Foul Play—Two Young Ladies Poisoned—The Suspect under Arrest.
The poisoned were white girlfriends of Lewis’s. Wine was involved, as was a sleigh ride on a winter evening alone with male companions. The poison: Spanish fly. Lewis was accused of sneaking the dangerous aphrodisiac into the girls’ drinks.
It’s worth noting that the Civil War had begun the year before; even in idealistic Oberlin times were tense. Before she could be officially charged, Lewis was abducted by vigilantes one evening as she left the Keep home, taken to a deserted field, stripped, beaten, and left for dead. She was bedridden for days, and on crutches after.
Not long after the beating, she was arrested. Fortunately, her lawyer was John Mercer Langston, one of Oberlin’s first black graduates and later the first dean of Howard University’s School of Law. A brilliant orator, Langston ended the trial with a six-hour closing argument. Lewis was acquitted of all charges.
It’s a testament to Lewis’s phenomenal grit and ambition that she returned to Oberlin—only to be accused the following year of stealing art supplies. Again acquitted, she was not allowed to re-enroll.
Not to be too Pollyannaish, but being forced out of Oberlin was probably a blessing.
Lewis struck out for Boston in pursuit of art. There she met William Lloyd Garrison, a hell-raising newspaperman, abolitionist, and suffragist. He introduced Lewis to her future teacher, sculptor Edward A. Brackett.
Brackett specialized in busts of great men, and Lewis, a quick study, started out the same way. Her bust of Robert Gould Shaw, the fallen Boston Brahmin who led the first all-black regiment in the Civil War (i.e., Matthew Broderick in Glory), sold over a hundred copies at $15 each. With the first real money she’d made from art, Lewis set sail for Rome. “The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor,” she told the New York Times a dozen years later.
I’ve always seen Lewis as an awesome inversion of Paul Gauguin, who late in the same century left staid old Europe for uninhibited Tahiti. Lewis abandoned the New World for the Old in 1866. The reversal worked.
Can it be a coincidence that the first important piece she completed as an expatriate was called The Freedwoman on First Hearing of Her Liberty?
That work is now lost, but Lewis followed it with the celebrated and similarly themed Forever Free, depicting a male and female couple, slaves, at the moment of hearing news of the Emancipation Proclamation. The woman, barefoot and in a simple belted tunic, kneels with clasped hands, gazing upward. Her long hair, parted in the center, falls softly to either side of her classically idealized face. The man standing beside her is nearly nude, wearing only loose-fitting shorts. His large right hand rests protectively on the woman’s shoulder. A chain hangs from his still manacled left wrist, but he raises that fist in triumph.
His left foot rests atop the ball of his broken chain, where in a classical statue the head of a vanquished enemy might be (see Donatello’s David for a Renaissance take). Positioning one leg higher than the other causes Lewis’s contemporary figure to naturally stand in that most classical pose: contrapposto, a trick of the Greeks whereby having one active leg enlivens a standing figure (check out the Doryphoros by Polykleitos).
Though Lewis celebrates a recent (for her) historical event in Forever Free, it is thoroughly grounded in tradition. This marriage of new and old is her genius. A clothed woman with an unclothed (or barely clothed) man can be seen as far back as ancient Egypt (Prince Rahotep and His Wife Nofret, for example). Or in the Kore and Kouros figures of Greece, where male Kouros are nude and female Kore wear belted peplos, tunics similar to the one worn by the kneeling woman in Forever Free (see the Peplos Kore from the Acropolis). Forever Free was as timely as America itself and as timeless as the classical world.
Lewis found her own freedom in Rome, the eternal city, alongside a small group of fellow women expats. They included the sculptors Harriet Hosmer, Margaret Foley, and Emma Stebbins. (The internationally successful Hosmer helped Lewis secure the former studio of Italian Neoclassical master Antonio Canova.)
Edmonia Lewis. Forever Free (The Morning of Liberty). 1867.
The equivalent boy clubs must have been threatened; they let it fly.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose wife Sophia was herself a painter, wrote a popular novel called The Marble Faun that treated women artists as mere copyists, doomed to tragedy. (Hawthorne had even less respect for women writers, telling his publisher, “All women as authors are feeble and tiresome. I wish they were forbidden to write on pain of having their faces deeply scarified with an oyster shell.” To which, if I might interject, the only possible response is, Screw you, Nate.)
But it was Henry James whose blow stuck. In his biography of male expat sculptor William Wetmore Story, James describes the women artists of Rome as “that strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’ who at one time settled upon the seven hills in a white marmorean flock.”
Marmorean being a fancy word for marble.
Flock being a condescending way of saying they were flighty, undifferentiated followers of one another, a huddled horde shitting on great art. Birdbrains, maybe.
And just as once pejorative labels like Impressionist and Fauve would stick to later movements, “White Marmorean Flock” became shorthand for the women sculptors of mid-nineteenth-century Rome.
But James didn’t stop there. “One of the sisterhood . . . was a negress, whose colour, picturesquely contrasting with that of her plastic material, was the pleading agent of her fame.”
In truth, James had much in common with Lewis (maybe his screed was self-abuse). Both were Americans alone abroad. Both were unmarried and childless, very likely gay. Both were dedicated to their arts. The difference was that while James might pass as straight, and Lewis might as well, she couldn’t pass as white. For some reason James wanted to stab home that point, in print.
While we’re on the subject of color, I can’t go on without bringing up Lewis’s medium: white marble. Lewis worked in marble because that’s what fine artists did. There’s no message in it and no “self-hating” aspect to it either (both have been proposed). Newsflash: Caucasians aren’t white like marble either. That’s why in the ancient world, sculpture was always painted (Google classical Greek art polychrome and prepare to freak out). Marble is an academic conceit that telegraphs this is high art. It’s an imaginary state that has nothing to do with specific skin color, whether people, horses, leather breastplates, or anything else.
Italy appealed to sculptors because of its abundance of marble and the great tradition of its stonecutters. Sculptors generally created a smaller-scale model that they turned over to a stonecutter who used pointing machines to accurately copy and enlarge the model into a full-size version in stone. The nearly finished work was then returned to the sculptor, who added glossy final touches.
Edmonia Lewis. The Wooing of Hiawatha (Old Arrow-Maker and His Daughter). 1872.
This simple fact of sculpture making is as true today (Jeff Koons, anyone?) as it was in the nineteenth century. But critics of the Marmorean Flock used it to raise the ageless trope against women artists: they are not the authors of their own works. Marmorean Flock member Harriet Hosmer railed against such spiteful ignorance: “We women-artists have no objection to its being known that we employ assistants; we merely object to its being supposed that it is a system peculiar to ourselves.” Nearly all sculptors of the time used stonecutters and other artisans in executing their works.
Except, not Lewis. She famously wielded the chisel herself. Early on she probably couldn’t afford assistants, but she no doubt continued because as a woman of color she could not afford any hint of fraud.
This makes The Wooing of Hiawatha (also called Old Arrow-Maker and His Daughter) all the more remarkable.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” was the most popular American poem of the nineteenth century. Many esteemed painters and sculptors created works inspired by it, but none of those artists was able to be inside and outside of a scene. That is, be artist and Indian, Western chronicler and Native knower.
But Lewis could.
The Wooing of Hiawatha is an exquisitely detailed scene of a moccasin-clad father crouched beside his daughter, both looking up mid-task. The man, again less clothed than the woman, is chipping an arrowhead, while his daughter weaves a mat balanced across her knees. At their feet lies a small, dead deer.
The artist’s mastery of stone is on full display here. From soft leather moccasins to the heavy skins the figures wear, from the hard flint held by the father to the soft mat in his daughter’s lap, there is a sensitive, tactile profusion of weights and surfaces.
In addition to her mastery of material, The Wooing of Hiawatha is further remarkable for what it makes of its viewers. English speakers of her time would all have known Longfellow’s poem of a Chippewa brave who falls in love with a girl from the rival Dacotah tribe:
At the doorway of his wigwam
Sat the ancient Arrow-maker,
· · ·
At his side, in all her beauty,
Sat the lovely Minnehaha,
Sat his daughter, Laughing Water,
Plaiting mats of flags and rushes
· · ·
At the feet of Laughing Water
Hiawatha laid his burden
Hiawatha is nowhere in Lewis’s piece, but there is the deer lying before Minnehaha, and it’s us she looks up at. We are Hiawatha. Lewis has done away with the privileged white viewer, even while depicting the work of an august white poet. We are all Chippewa now.
I’m white, but two of my siblings are Native American. My sister Diane, an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Nation, is eleven years older than me. A great boon to my childhood, since she could drive and, crucially, still liked going to fun places, such as Taco John’s and the YMCA. And every summer of my childhood she took me for long days at the Montana State Fair.
One summer when I was about eight, our brother Tom won a blue ribbon for one of his paintings. His canvas of a man in a hospital bed was one of very few in the Fine Art Hall not on a “Western” theme (what art I saw growing up mostly concerned horses, cowboys, Indians, bison, and the like). I held Diane’s hand as we walked along looking for Tom’s painting, silently bestowing titles on those we passed: Indian Girl with Doll. Cowboys Shooting Up Saloon. Braves Painted for War. Singing Cowboy on Horseback. They all looked a little bit the same, like illustrations in books of fairy tales. Nothing like Western life as I knew it.
Diane stopped walking. She was staring at a painting of a young Plains Indian woman, about her age. The woman was pretty, like my sister, with high cheekbones and dark braids falling over buckskin-covered breasts. Her brown eyes stared back at Diane’s, but they were vacant, like an Indian doll. Nothing like my lively sister, whose favorite fair ride was the terrifying Zipper.
Henry Rocher. Carte-de-Visite of Edmonia Lewis. c. 1870.
The first time I saw Edmonia Lewis’s work, when I was an undergrad, I thought of that long-ago day with Diane. I happened to open a slim book on Neoclassical sculpture directly to a reproduction of The Wooing of Hiawatha. I’d never heard of Lewis, but already liked what I saw. Her father and daughter pair was idealized—a Neoclassical tenet—but there was also something bright and vibrant in them. Not other, but us. Like people I knew. Like my own family.
