The Beginning of My Love Affair With Art

My grandmother was an artist. I was introduced to this fact early on, while during visits to her home in Pennsylvania, she would take my sisters and I on sketching outings. She supplied us with sketch pads and charcoals and lovely locations. We became plein air artists - she’d park the car and send us off to find secret spots.   I remember she called one of my sketches "lovely". 

And she would show us her art that she did while she was a student at Pratt - beautiful, sensitive, subtly expressive drawings. She didn’t say much as she unrolled and unbound her works that had been put away, perhaps waiting for us. I think I understand now, that in introducing us to her world of art, her belief and passion that art is important in a life has been passed on.

My grandmother studied art at The Pratt Institute in New York City around 1915, which was an amazing place and time in the world, and the world of art.  Modernism had been ushered in with the new century on the heels of urbanization, industrialization, socialism, and Darwinism.  Several artists defined this countercultural movement, this break from 19th C. Romanticism/Realism to 20th C. Revolutionary - Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Duchamp, and Cezanne.

International Exhibition of Modern Art, 1913
Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art

   . . . and  I wonder if my grandmother attended the Armory Show in NYC in 1913 (the International Exhibition of Modern Art) which was the first large showing of European Modern art in America and one of the most important events in the history of American art. This exhibition was the catalyst for American artists and patrons to liberate themselves from the constraints of what art had been and move toward independence, experimentation, and the possibility of what art could become.  I wonder if my grandmother was one of those astonished viewers who were introduced to Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, and Symbolism while “news reports and reviews were filled with accusations of quackery, insanity, immorality, and anarchy”.  I'm imagining she was pretty blown away.  This was the birth of "avant-guard".

How exciting!

 

Nude Descending a Staircase No.2

Marcel Duchamp

1912

Improvisation No. 27 (Garden of Love)

Wassily Kandinsky

1912

I wonder a lot about what she thought of this undeniable transformation of the art world, about her own art, and that she chose to leave it behind and marry a dentist and raise two sons, perhaps more comfortable following the path expected of her.  I was so young and I never asked and she never said.  But never knowing has given me the chance to create a totally romantic and dramatic story of her life as a young artist in NYC.  It does identify, for me, also, the beginning of my love affair with art.