I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but
everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t
stop where it once used to. I have an interior
that I never knew of. Everything passes into it
now. I don’t know what happens there …
I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning.
It’s still going badly. But I intend to make the
most of my time.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, The Notebooks of
Malte Laurids Brigge
Only days before Bullock Hathaway’s death, Joan had started classes at the School of the Art Institute.
Founded in 1866 as the Chicago Academy of Design and rooted in neoclassical tradition, the School of the Art Institute had originally shaped its curriculum around the idealized representation of the human body, the application of Old Master techniques, and the idea of art as moral uplift. Eighty years later, humanist values still underpinned its training of painters. In first- and second-year classes, students concentrated on craft and anatomy, drawing from plaster casts in preparation for working from the live model. Thus, unlike many artists identified with Abstract Expressionism (Willem de Kooning is a notable exception), Joan had rigorous Beaux-Arts training, the kind that should belie the skepticism of a certain public quick to label abstract artists as inept, if not fraudulent.
At the School of the Art Institute, Robert von Neumann remained Joan’s favorite teacher, though two others reigned like demigods: each student “belonged” to either Boris Anisfeld or Louis Ritman. Joan belonged to Ritman. Russian born and Chicago raised, Joan’s mentor was nonetheless considered French, having spent eighteen summers at the artists’ colony in Giverny, the home of Impressionist Claude Monet, where the American had shelved somber academicism in favor of a fluid intimism à la Renoir and indulged the shadowy blues and pale yellows of an Impressionist palette. By 1944, history had long since passed Louis Ritman by, and Joan secretly sided with history, yet she pulled out all the stops for her teacher. In her three years at the school, she took his class (three hours daily) every term, slaved over his assignments, and never earned less than an A.
Thanks to her credits from Smith, Joan’s only academic requirement was two years of art history with Kathleen Blackshear, a protégée of Helen Gardner, the author of the enduring textbook Art Through the Ages. Emphasizing her own favorite periods, styles, and artists—Romanesque architecture, early Renaissance painting, Cézanne, Cubism, and what was then termed “primitive art”—Blackshear complemented her lectures with class trips to the Oriental Institute and the Field Museum. A painter herself, she emphasized the formal elements of art from many cultures and assigned as homework an Egyptian mural, a Japanese scroll, a Kuba mask, and a Cubist oil, projects Joan tackled with enthusiasm.
More important than any teacher, however, was the glamorous material presence of the great museum upstairs, which served as an injunction to think within history, look beyond Chicago, and take what one needed for one’s art. Joan fell in love with—her ultimate competition—Giotto, Bellini, Chardin, Degas, and the Mexican modernists. Some works she copied; some she visited more or less daily. Among the latter was Édouard Manet’s radiant kitchen still life Fish (Still Life), which depicts a shimmery copper kettle behind a hefty stippled-white carp, an ugly little redfish, a gleaming eel, a rocky heap of oysters, and, off to one side, a lemon as candent as the sun, which Joan loved and mentally kept with her always.
Although she claimed to dislike ugly Darwinian behavior, Joan quickly earned a reputation as a head-butting competitor with no qualms about taking sly advantage of family connections or hustling into a painting studio early on the first day of a pose to stake out the best spot. Artist Leon Goldin, whose years at the school overlapped hers, once spent the better part of a day fending off Joan’s strident demands to see his paintings, which were rolled up and ready to load into the car for a trip to California. “Well, unroll them.” In the end, he relented, but, watching her reaction as he unfurled the canvases, he realized she wasn’t genuinely interested in his work. She just wanted to see if he was competition.
Goldin was among the dozens of returning GIs who, in Joan’s second September, set the school spinning with their unruly energies and sheer numbers. Whether hanging out in the smoking lounge or tagging along to the New Orleans jazz clubs around Rush Street, where they all danced, sucked on Camels, traded wisecracks, and nursed boilermakers, Joan, the youngest of the gang and often the only female, held her own with these vets, and woe to any man who came across as wishy-washy about his life or his art.
Sauntering around school with T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets under her arm, Joan could also give the impression of aloneness and hard-shell reserve. “Her manner set her apart,” reflects painter Ellen Lanyon, who was a year behind her. “She was fairly austere. I don’t want to use the word arrogant because that’s too harsh. But she was a person unto herself. She had an aura of sophistication.” That aura of sophistication doubled as self-protection: at times emotional closeness so frightened her that she had to shut her eyes for relief, other times hostility spilled out of nowhere. Once, as she negotiated a narrow corridor carrying a paint-laden palette, Joan brushed up against a classmate walking in the opposite direction and, accidentally or not, smeared the other’s sleeve with paint. According to the story that went around school, she immediately launched a preemptive strike: “You deserved that!”
As for her money, it set her apart, and it didn’t. Some of Joan’s less privileged classmates were stuck in revolving doors of school and work. Her friend Herby Katzman, for instance, arrived at six a.m., did his janitorial chores, attended classes, reverted to janitor at lunchtime, attended more classes, finished cleaning, and then headed for night school. Joan, on the other hand, not only commanded her own schedule but also purchased the finest oils and linen canvas and tooled around in a new Buick coupe. On days when she left it at home and had the chauffeur drive her to school, she insisted he drop her a few blocks away so she could appear to have walked. Romanticizing poverty, she had little idea how bitter and incapacitating it can be.
Considering a working-class style to be testimony to artistic authenticity, she tried for a proletarian look. Her cousin Sally Turton tells a story about a former neighbor in Columbus, Ohio, who once mentioned having attended the School of the Art Institute, to which Sally responded that she had had a cousin there, Joan Mitchell. And the neighbor replied, “Oh, poor Joan! I felt so sorry for her. All her clothes had holes in them, and she didn’t have any shoes to wear. We shared everything with her because she had nothing.” But another classmate remembers Joan ambling down a hall dragging a fur coat behind her.
Joan’s spending money came in the form of a monthly allowance from Jimmie and Marion. She griped to Sally, still at Sarah Lawrence:
Both parents claim I use them—i.e., only live here—spend their money but don’t give a damn about them—if they want it that way they’ll get it—and then apologetically mother comes in to talk—haven’t I any news—one minute they grovel—the next they’re resentful—why can’t they act like people—I guess my ignoring them gets them down and they act nice. Anyway I’ve been looking for part time jobs—doesn’t look too hopeful—and there are a lot of things against moving out so I’m being rational and waiting at least until you come home—furthermore if I did leave I could never return and if I got syphilis in a back alley it would be slightly distressing—when I get my degree I’ll be able to teach and that will be something else again … J. Herbert gives me about two packs of weeds per week—if you could do anything on that score it would be much appreciated.
Toward Jimmie, Joan had assumed an attitude of scornful amusement, telling friends he had a bloated opinion of himself and tagging him the “skin and siph” man, which sounds like a song-and-dance man from hell. Marion, too, was treated perfunctorily or angrily rebuffed when she gingerly broached the subject of Joan’s relationship with Dick Bowman. When Joan joined her mother and father at their daily cocktail hour, battles would rage over Bowman or politics or the Jews. At school, she broadcast her hostility toward her uptight, conservative parents and congratulated herself for combating their anti-Semitism.
Joan did hold strong opinions about social justice. Her next big move (around 1945), joining the Communist Party, hewed to her values but also served to spite her parents and atone for their position and wealth. Deeply moved by a quote from Lenin (“Man’s dearest possession is life, and since it is given to him but once to live he must so live as to fear no torturing regrets of years without purpose …”), she embraced Communism in order to help liberate the mental power of the masses, even as she questioned the party’s positivism and doctrinaire positions on art.
A portrait of Joan by boyfriend Dick Bowman, lithograph, 1945 (Illustration credit 5.1)
Packing a party membership card, which she once carelessly left on the El, Joan studied the classic Marxist texts and regularly attended meetings, where she learned a great deal about the dynamics of power. Yet she refused to follow party rules that made no sense to her. Once brought up on charges of sleeping with a Trotskyite (Dick Bowman, who was also trying his political wings) and of liking Picasso (having joined the party in 1944, Picasso had won acclaim in the French Communist newspaper L’Humanité as the greatest painter alive, but Chicago remained at antipodes to Paris), she was in and out of trouble with her comrades.
On North State Parkway, the shock value of Joan’s relationship with Dick rivaled that of her politics. As often as not during this “terribly sick period” (as she later framed it), Joan spent the night at her boyfriend’s slummy basement apartment at Forty-third and Ellis on the South Side near Cottage Grove. She had something to prove to herself by frequenting the dingy bedbug- and cockroach-infested flat: shortly before starting art school Joan had made her debut (low-key, like that of most on the 1943 list, because of the war), the traditional coming-out party replaced by a luncheon at the chichi Pump Room. More recently, she had modeled at the high-society Ravinia Festival Style Show. These were (and would remain) secrets from the art world. If Joan did not technically lie about being a debutante, a word she spit out dripping with scorn, she came close. (Another secret: until well into the 1970s, her name appeared annually in the Chicago Blue Book, the city’s social register.)
From Dick’s point of view, theirs was a committed and exclusive relationship, a prelude to marriage. From Joan’s, it was almost a thing of the past, though Dick remained useful as both mentor teacher and irritant to her parents. In a reversal of the usual script of that era in which a young man itches for sex but a young woman rejects premarital experimentation as too risky of pregnancy and too damaging to her reputation, Joan had proved a willing sex partner to Dick but also cheated on her boyfriend (who was oblivious) at every opportunity. Sally dubbed her “D.G.,” Damaged Goods. Joan did scruple to sleep with married men whose marriages were intact, yet when Sally got engaged to quarterback-handsome Yale dropout and bandleader I. Newton Perry III the following year, Joan reportedly attempted to seduce her sister’s fiancé.
Though careful to get a diaphragm and contact information for a good abortionist, Joan operated from a resolve to live fully and radically, which was considered normal for a man but intolerable in a woman. But there was also an edge of desperation in Joan’s sexual adventuring. Because eros is experienced as surging beyond one’s psychic boundaries and merging with the other, sexual fusion left her feeling less frighteningly alone. Moreover, by making a raw connection with another human being, casual sex skips the awkwardness and discomfort of getting acquainted. Still, at times she experienced the sex act as attack and reacted with panicky rage.
Meanwhile, she had set her wits to learning everything she could from Dick Bowman. The two spoke endlessly about French artist Pierre Bonnard, whose intimate, luminous, and evasive canvases Dick considered kin to his own. And Joan sat for at least two portraits by her boyfriend, a lithograph that adopts her bold and direct manner and an oil that depicts her as a remote, psychologically divided, and vaguely troubled soul.
That March, Richard Bowman made his New York debut at Pinacotheca, a gallery on West Fifty-eighth Street, with a show that won raves from ArtNews for its “powerful abstractions” and “vision … of the strength and might in things elemental.” In New York, he lunched with artists Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning and visited the studio of painter Fernand Léger. Unimpressed with the young man’s success, Jimmie buttonholed Dick upon his return to give cold notice that Joan should not marry an artist “unless he was of the reputation and stature of somebody like Picasso.”
At the end of Joan’s first year at the School of the Art Institute, she and Zuka, her friend from Ox-Bow, struck out for Mexico, triply alluring to foreign artists for its affordability, aura of bohemian radicalism, and rich modernist heritage. During the Depression, many U.S. painters had found inspiration in Mexican paintings that propounded revisionist histories or protested capitalist injustices. Others had renewed American Scene painting by enlarging their definitions of “American” to include colorful markets, colonial towns, and volcanic landscapes south of the border. Moreover, a number of School of the Art Institute teachers and traveling fellowship winners had worked in Mexico; their art, along with that of Mexican painters and printmakers, proliferated in local galleries and museums, spinning a complex web of artistic and personal connections between Chicago and Mexico. Spending a summer in Mexico was a smart move for an ambitious young painter.
Originally objecting to Joan’s travel plans, Marion and Jimmie finally surrendered to their daughter’s intransigence and proceeded pragmatically. Wise to Joan’s ploys and half-truths, Marion promised her daughter her own copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover if she made it through the summer without getting pregnant or contracting syphilis, while Jimmie supplied a colossal duffle bag bulging with medicines, bandages, and cans of purified water, atop which Joan and Zuka piled paint boxes, Anderson portable easels, and tins of turpentine. Hoisted onto the Texas Eagle in Chicago, this behemoth was off-loaded in Laredo, where the travelers caught Rita Hayworth in Gilda and spent the night, then on-loaded the next morning for the long gritty haul to Mexico City.
Their final destination, some 250 miles from the capital, was Guanajuato, a self-contained and virtually unmappable colonial city crammed into a long, narrow ravine. Guanajuato’s crooked streets, plunging staircases, ornate mansions, Churrigueresque churches, and ochre, turquoise, and rosy pink houses hewed to steep cliffs, propped each other up, and strove for order but lapsed into disorder, as if they were the product of some deranged Mexican Cézanne. There the two friends took rooms in a faded palace-turned-hotel on a leafy plaza where noises and smells drifted in through tall, old-fashioned windows. Setting up her easel in their light, Joan quickly got down to energetic and sustained work, leaving no question about her iron will and unstoppable ambition.
Joan’s self-portrait from her art school years, graphite on paper, c. 1944 (Illustration credit 5.2)
For raw material, they roamed the streets, sketchbooks in hand, besieged by begging children and would-be Romeos. Joan’s softly modeled pencil drawings typically depicted a figure or two sensitively placed on the page: a boy feeding pigeons, two miners conversing, an everyman with head bowed and arms defensively locked across his chest (the latter a leitmotif of her work in these early years). Clearly she was involved in both the physical feeling of gesture and its emotional impulse.
Excited by Guanajuato’s abundance of “real” subject matter, Joan also used her sketchbook to work out ideas for paintings. These focus on the urban underclass, particularly melancholy waifs, nuns, beggars, weeping women, and nursing mothers. Fusing stylization (stem legs, a big-eyed mask/face) with meticulous rendering (an oversized hand, a gnarled foot), she isolated social types in an aestheticized vision of poverty, availing herself of stagy gestures and agitated drapery in a way that manages to suggest modern dance as much as capitalist injustice. Her use of chiaroscuro heightened the dramatic effect while simple horizon lines acted as framing devices and signaled barren landscapes and lives.
Typical of Joan’s figure paintings that summer is her portrait of a sleeping young man whose head and arms hug a stark white table suggesting a halo, a favorite device of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Carefully structured, appealingly roughcast, chunky and restricted in palette (chiefly zinc white, bituminous blue black, raw sienna, and thalo green), Joan’s canvas effectively mixes abstracting spatial ambiguities with expressionistic rendering. But her subject’s tortured posture and shapeless clothing don’t quite mask the shaky draftsmanship of an art student who fretted that she was, in her classmate Herby Katzman’s overstatement, “a lousy figure painter.”
In subject and style, Joan’s Mexican painting reveals a confluence of sources. Besides Cézanne, a constant presence in her early work, it invokes the Picasso of the Blue Period, particularly The Tragedy (this bleak depiction of an impoverished family belonged to the Chester Dale collection, then on extended loan to the Art Institute) and the woeful Old Guitarist, a fixture at the Chicago museum. Joan’s art also points to her familiarity with that of José Clemente Orozco, relevant to her for its dynamic gesturalism, organic groupings of figures, and sociopolitical cast. Not least, she struggled to emulate the powerful and ennobling images of the poor by German printmaker Käthe Kollwitz, whom she venerated. Kollwitz, who had recently died, was a feminist, social democrat, and shining example of a wealthy woman who ran a household with servants while commanding respect as an artist of the people.
Joan’s Mexican oils exhibited at the University of Illinois gallery, 1947 (Illustration credit 5.3)
But all was not work in Guanajuato. Joan and Zuka (whose marriage had ended) soon acquired Mexican boyfriends, Zuka’s a recent law school graduate named Eugenio Trueba Olivares, and Joan’s his best friend, Manuel de Ezcurdia, a slender young man with cherubic dark blond curls, pale skin, and round brown eyes. An economics student, poet, and romantic hedonist, Manuel shared Joan’s love of Mexican hot chocolate, Bacardi Special Reserve, Monte Carlo cigars, Chopin’s preludes, and Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto. The two danced (she was a marvelous dancer) to “You’ll Never Know,” “La Bamba,” and the haunting theme song from the film Laura, which was everywhere that summer. Manuel read Neruda to Joan, and she read Eliot to him. With Zuka and Eugenio, they attended bullfights and spent many evenings at El Estudio, the informal salon of Guanajuatan intellectuals (both boyfriends would go on to distinguished academic careers) where Joan, who had taken Spanish lessons at Berlitz that spring, strained to follow the political and philosophical debates. From her hours with Manuel came “Juana,” Joan’s longtime pet name for herself at her happiest with men.
Enraptured by Guanajuato, Joan and Zuka laid plans to return in the summer of 1946. That second year, they visited the famous Mexico City murals by Orozco and Rivera. In an initiative worthy of her father, Joan had arrived in Mexico bearing letters of introduction from Art Institute Director Daniel Catton Rich to these two of the three (along with David Alfaro Siqueiros) Mexican grandes. Rivera was out of town, but the young women did finagle a visit to the studio of Orozco, a better painter than Rivera in the opinion of the typical art student of that time because Orozco was more expressionistic and Rivera more decorative. (Joan was a font of such judgments, another being that “Michelangelo had no sense of color.” Zuka harbored doubts, but Joan wore an incontrovertible air of authority.) From the awkward encounter between the sexagenarian Mexican master and the young American students fumbling with their Spanish, Joan took Orozco’s remark that Matisse was the world’s greatest painter, which would prompt her to make a close study of the French artist’s work.
The two friends had rented the upper rooms of a house clinging to a hillside on the outskirts of Guanajuato. Driven by Joan’s powerful work ethic, they again put in long hours of painting, fueled by plates of tortillas and beans delivered by the black-braided criada. The rooftop terrace, theirs for the summer, commanded a splendid view of the mountain La Bufa, thus dictating plein air landscapes. La Bufa became Joan’s Mont Sainte-Victoire—Cézanne’s perennial late-career motif—as she attempted to marry Mexican subject matter with the methods of the Master of Aix.
In the lower half of Joan’s painterly oil La Bufa, a concretion of houses wedges between a road zigzagging to the left and a staircase ascending on the right. These angular forms contrast with the curvy, writhing flanks of the mountain above, which converge in a V mirroring that of the buildings’ edges. From Cézanne, Joan had learned to favor formal composition over verisimilitude and to break her subject into dynamic angled planes rotating around a central axis: thus the dramatically receding road, outsized staircase, and flayed and stretched houses. She also borrowed from Cézanne the technique of setting up linear continuities among objects at various distances. But La Bufa does more than recapitulate lessons from Cézanne. Its slit-like windows and doors, wrought-iron balconies, and other incidentals rhythmically hopscotch across the lower half of the canvas in a very Mitchell manner, and the artist audaciously bisects the image with a telephone pole, thus playing rupture off continuity and auguring her multi-panel paintings of the future.
One of Joan’s two known early self-portraits, a Matisse-like pencil drawing, probably also dates from that summer in Mexico. Here the artist depicts herself as a visual person: her big eyes are overarched by heavy brows and encircled by the frames of the glasses she had had since age three but rarely wore except when she worked. (They corrected both farsightedness and an astigmatism that unevenly blurred her vision. Without them, she admitted to Zuka, she strained to see the details of what lay before her.) In this self-portrait, however, Joan’s eyelids droop, and her gaze is averted and interiorized, as if she were mentally roaming her canvas, listening to music, or wandering in “the lost and silver land.” We see her but we don’t.
Joan Mitchell, La Bufa, oil on canvas, 1944 (Illustration credit 5.4)
In another picture of Joan in Mexico, a snapshot with Zuka, she wears a pretty pinecone-print sheath baring arms that, for once, are neither smeared with paint nor dotted with the gentian violet her father insisted she apply to cuts and bites. The Californian returns the photographer’s gaze, but the Chicagoan again slips away. One wouldn’t guess that Joan was the bolder and more flirtatious of the two, the one who played her men as enthusiastically as the little band whose Sunday concerts they attended at the Jardín de la Unión did their brass winds.
Dick Bowman visited Guanajuato that summer, even though, from Joan’s point of view, their relationship had all but ended. He, on the other hand, fixes the time of their breakup as the following fall when he discovered she had been sleeping around. Meanwhile Manuel continued to lay siege to her. She briefly embraced, then rejected, a future of “bearing Catholic children in Mexico.” That August, Barney Rosset, a Parker graduate she had been dating in Chicago, also drove down to Guanajuato. Suddenly it was the day before classes were to start at the School of the Art Institute, so Barney sped Joan home nonstop except for the time he dozed at the wheel, the car drifted off the road, and they rattled into a ditch—“it was a marvelous trip!”
Bridesmaid Joan, groom I. Newton Perry III, and bride Sarah, 1946. Note one of Joan’s still lifes hanging on the wall. (Illustration credit 5.5)
In her third and final year at the school, twenty-one-year-old Joan took life drawing five times, served as monitor for both Max Kahn’s lithography class and Louis Ritman’s painting class, and edged out all rivals for the faculty high mark. “Talented painter, very promising,” glowed Ritman.
Yet she labored under the handicap of gender: the wisdom of the day held that women couldn’t really paint. Supposedly men were by nature creators and women by nature followers, and thus even the most brilliant female artist was no match for a male. Influential New York teacher Hans Hofmann typified the attitude of the 1940s when he critiqued the work of his then student, painter Lee Krasner: “This is so good that you would not know it was done by a woman.” And when at a dinner party thrown by another Hofmann student, sculptor Lila Katzen, he gave a toast to art that included the phrase “Only the men have the wings.” Female students lacked role models, endured what is now termed sexual harassment, and lived with the reasoning that men had to support families and thus, in all fairness, should take priority. If a woman was serious about her art, people said, she should remain single, even though, in those postwar years, a woman’s whole happiness and success were equated with idealized marriage, child rearing, and domesticity. How were such attitudes internalized and self-negotiated, affecting the woman’s sense of artistic personhood? In Joan’s case, with denial, defiance, and a certain bewilderment. Over coffee at the Walgreens across from the Art Institute, she and Peggy Polivka, a poet who had become engaged to Dick Bowman, bemoaned the unfairness of it all and tossed around the question of whether a woman should take her husband’s name after marriage. Arguing that she should have a life independent of the one she shared with a man, Joan vowed to keep her own.
Yet, abruptly jettisoning her ideas about parity for women and her disdain for high society, Joan took star billing in “Society Artists,” a March picture story in the Chicago Sunday Times that led with the sentence “Idle hours of Chicago debutantes are converted into talent at the Art Institute.” Logically, the piece should have galled her—probably it did—but, had the Times passed her over, she would have been no less galled. “No dilettantes,” the story continued, “the debs are serious about studies.” But simply raising the issue implies genteel dabbling and minor accomplishment. Moreover, by directing readers’ attention to the physical charms of its five subjects, including the classy sexiness of Joan Mitchell, and treating their art as fashion props, the feature turned the female art students into objects to be visually consumed. Not one returned the viewer’s gaze. They were not future professionals but rather their parents’ daughters who had proven “artistic,” a word, as art historian Anne Bermingham has written, that “inscribes art on to the body and into the personality of the subject who makes art. ‘Artistic types’ are works of art themselves, embodying art without necessarily mastering it.”
“What’s this? What’s this? Is Joan Mitchell really married or is she turning to fiction like her famous authoress mother, Marion Strobel Mitchell?” teased gossip king Cholly Dearborn (actually, the collective nom de plume of local Hearst society tattlers) in the Herald-American’s May 28th “Smart Set.” Tidbits about the Mitchell family showed up regularly in Dearborn’s column, as they did in those of rivals Irv Kupcinet of the Chicago Sun-Times and Judith Cass of the Tribune. “The story as we heard it is that Joanie took herself a husband last summer while she painted in Mexico, and, what must have been a great strain on all of her feminine instincts, kept it a secret all this time … and for those who think she’s kidding there’s a wedding ring on her third finger, left hand.” The secret marriage, Cholly rambled on, eliminated Richard Bowman as “the matchmaker’s favorite man for Joan.” (Dick, in fact, had just wed, his friends Gordon and Jacqueline Onslow Ford cheering him for choosing Peggy and dumping that “bruja [witch] Joan.”) Milking the idea that his subject was “just the Bohemian to say pooh-pooh to the conventions” of Gold Coast society, Dearborn continued: “Has Joan Mitchell told papa and mama … that she has a husband?” The very next day, papa and mama’s preferred chronicler, the Tribune’s Cass, published Joan’s denial. The young socialite, Cass revealed, wore a wedding ring just for fun. (“If anyone in Chi kept a close watch on the papers,” Sally once observed, “we sound like a very odd family.”)
Neither reporter knew that, having fallen in love with Barney Rosset, Joan was jokingly threatening to make another wedding ring by twisting a swizzle stick because she wanted “like hell to get married.”
Joan had first noticed Barney eight years earlier when she was a lowly eighth grader and he a tenth-grade BMOC at Parker. An actor, track and football star, participant in student government, and mover in the school’s chapter of the American Student Union (a national organization of radical and progressive students), this cheerful hell-raiser and champion of social justice and freedom, his own very much included, was as prone to giggling hilariously as to waxing nostalgic over the great cause he had missed because of his age, the Spanish Civil War. Medium in stature, with wire-rimmed glasses, dark hair, and an endearingly Chaplinesque gait, he was less handsome than high-strung, excitable, shy, and contentious.
Not until two years later, during a break from college, had Barney asked Joan for a date. On that occasion, the two saw Citizen Kane, then zoomed around Lake Michigan in a motorboat, her frilly white dress tossing in the wind. She briefly had a crush on him, but he was in love with someone else and soon disappeared from her life.
That boat, along with flashy cars and other marvelous toys, came courtesy of Barnet L. Rosset Senior, the wealthy and powerful head of Chicago’s Metropolitan Trust, business partner of Jimmy Roosevelt, and big-league investor. A self-made man of Russian Jewish descent, Rosset had married Mary Tansey, the Irish-Catholic beauty-queen daughter of a construction worker and a housewife from Marquette, Michigan. Barney was their only child.
After Parker, Barney had hopscotched from Swarthmore to UCLA to the University of Chicago (not to complete his BA until years later at the New School in New York), then, inspired by Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, wangled a lieutenancy in the Army Signal Corps photographic service in China. Back in Chicago one evening after the war, he glimpsed Joan walking down the stairs from the ladies’ room at the far end of a Rush Street bar called Tin Pan Alley. They chatted briefly. Later he phoned. They clicked. Then came Mexico.
Joan proved highly susceptible to Barney’s antic charm. Once, during a snowstorm, he took her up for a high-bouncing ride in the Air Cougar he co-owned with his best friend, cinematographer and fellow Parker alumnus Haskell Wexler, a ride which ended in a deliciously dangerous skid off the runway. Another time, he dug up a pair of walkie-talkies and gave one to Joan. As luck had it, nothing but open space separated his bedroom in the Rossets’ penthouse at 1540 Lake Shore Drive from Joan’s on the tenth floor at 1530 North State Parkway. Below sat the august residence of the cardinal of Chicago. Their radiowaved messages flew back and forth over the head of His Eminence like very naughty putti.
Then in the first weeks of 1947, Barney (who had long since rejected the idea of following his father’s career path) left for New York to gauge the possibility of producing a feature film based on a screenplay written by an Antioch College professor. Joan shot him one letter after another:
January 27: hell I miss you—the coffee—the pinching—the fucking—and now after some 20 hrs of sleep I feel like a vitamin pill in a bottle and I can’t very well go wrestle with my father … I convinced von Neumann that marriage wasn’t such a bad institution and he gave me wine and a copper plate to etch on and was nice to my ego.
January 29: God it was wonderful to talk to you—I love you madly and your letter rode down on the bus with me this morning—second best to you and the Oldsmobile.
January 30: Today it was so dark I could only paint for a little while and I felt it was darkness wasted—you must come soon because this missing you makes me miserable and I’m a spoiled child and want to be on the floor and scream I want Barney … But I did lots of good drawings today and read lots of Marx and wanted so to get in the Oldsmobile and pinch and bite and be generally irritating and go drink beer with potato chips and go fuck and then drink six cups of coffee and talk about China and whether Marshall will move the troops and tell you how God damn much I love you.
February 4: I went out to the water at North Ave, thinking I might paint water and something desolate looking … I loved your letter—Thank you muchly but now put a stamp on your rump and come special delivery … I’m thinking it was mean of God, not to let me draw like Kollwitz.
February 11: At this moment I feel almost drunk—maybe 8 shots are warming me insides—it all came out of a bottle and very quickly—for medicinal purposes of course but it’s making me feel a little desperate like ringing my alarm and waking father up. [The bottle was likely Jimmie’s: her father had begun hiding his gin in her underwear drawer, to which he made frequent visits.]
February 24: I think I’ve been mad at something or someone ever since you left. I don’t know—something violent is eating me and painting has been like walking up an escalator when it’s going down—it’s so easy to hate. You told me to be happy but B.R. isn’t around and so there isn’t any me to be happy with.
During spring break, Joan flew to New York to join Barney at his apartment on Brooklyn’s Old Fulton Street almost under the Brooklyn Bridge. In this romantic box seat on the spectacle of the East River, heaven for young lovers rebelling against their hidebound families, the two feasted upon each other.
Back in Chicago, Joan poured herself out on paper:
I don’t know where to how to begin and so soon it’s all squashed together—the little boat—the tremendous curve of the bridge and you—semi yellow against the blue walls making eggs—naked and with big slippers—the night noises—the bus—the fog horns and train whistles and always so damn warm against me in the little white room was Barney—the whole end of Fulton Street became human so quickly and the air wailed like a horse below glad we had found a bed at last—Rosset you were wonderful—I love you—I love you and I got in that plane and wanted to crawl under the seat and cry—it was all so much more than I knew existed.
At the apartment she shared with Barney on Brooklyn’s Old Fulton Street, c. 1948 (Illustration credit 5.6)
That spring Joan intended to gather up as many trophies as possible and make a triumphal exit from the School of the Art Institute. In January her long-planned two-person show with Dick Bowman opened at Rockford’s Burpee Art Gallery (where she scandalized locals by showing up barefoot) before traveling to the University of Illinois gallery in Champaign-Urbana. From that show she culled several pieces for the ten running feet of wall space allotted graduating students for their senior exhibitions. Among the pieces was Still Life, in which she emulates Matisse by handling paint in a supremely felt manner and including a painting-within-a-painting, namely the French master’s 1939 portrait France.
On the basis of the senior exhibitions, the entire faculty voted for winners of the four coveted traveling fellowships, though the final decision rested in the hands of a committee headed by Dean Hubert Ropp. One afternoon around this time a handful of students observed Joan “taking Ropp [into one of the painting classrooms] and being outraged about something,” recalls Ellen Lanyon. “And Joan ended up with a traveling fellowship. Not to say that she conned him into it, but there was some contention.” In fact, Joan picked up one of two top awards, the James Nelson Raymond Travel Fellowship, worth $2,000, yet, curiously, she would erroneously remember that she had received the Edward L. Ryerson Travel Fellowship, a second-tier prize amounting to $1,500. One plausible scenario is that, slated for the Ryerson, she had pressured Ropp into giving her the Raymond but later confused the two names. Joan always testily contended that she had succeeded in school on merit alone, but would a student who had not known the dean since childhood and whose parents were not the close friends of the man’s longtime patrons have found the nerve to dress down the brass?
Talking things out with Barney on the East River under the Brooklyn Bridge, c. 1948 (Illustration credit 5.7)
June brought the museum’s Chicago and Vicinity Annual, a juried exhibition to which any artist living within one hundred miles of the city was eligible to submit work. Accepted in 1944 and 1945, Joan had been humiliatingly rejected in 1946. Thus she sweated and fussed over her 1947 entry, Tired Children, a lithograph depicting two urchins simplified to downcast heads and crisscrossed asparagus limbs. Not only did it earn a place in the show, but it also netted the Print Committee Prize of $150 from a jury that included painter Philip Guston. That meant a full-page reproduction in the catalog and a mention in ArtNews. Moreover, she basked in the prestige of having a “SOLD” sticker next to her print; the buyer, it turned out, was one James Herbert Mitchell.
Only days after graduation, Joan, still yammering about hating her parents, bolted from 1530 North State Parkway, sneaking out in the middle of the night and, with Francine Felsenthal, a girlfriend from school, burning up the highway to Brooklyn. Along the way, she felt awed by “the great and vast country we drove through—so beautiful with American Legion posts and signs advertising God … What paintings I could do in Pittsburgh—in Gary—ah that orange smoke—the bridges—the people.”
Yet when it came time to put brush to canvas in Brooklyn, Joan was neither satisfied with the results nor able to move forward. What kind of painting should she do now that she had left school, where the figure had been all-important? Her native sensibilities inhered in the small, moody, loose (if occasionally belabored) landscapes she had never stopped painting in her free time. Often done en plein air in Lincoln Park, these watercolors and gouaches over pencil sketches depict—in sensuous greens and reds, blues and oranges, yellows and violets—an opalescent lagoon, a billowing grove, a turbulent sky. But this was no way to make important modern art.
Believing her sensibilities to be wholly different from those of Picasso, whose influence was omnipresent in the work of young artists “going modern,” Joan strove to avoid the Spanish master “like the plague,” yet the interlocking planes, open scaffolding, and cloisonné color of her increasingly abstract oils betray his powerful pull. At first she trotted out “Mexican” subject matter like beggars and nursing mothers, but soon she turned to the Brooklyn Bridge hulking outside her window. In the robust, congested, awkward post-Cubist canvases it inspired she sought “bridgeness” in a grammar of line, shape, color, texture, and pattern. The bridge lent itself beautifully to formal inventiveness but also embodied the city’s energy, modernity, and power, and thus possessed the social meanings she still wanted for her art. Or did she? She wondered.
What these paintings missed, although she didn’t understand this until years later, was the fact that the bridge so moved her.
Meanwhile she and Barney lived simply, doting on Gluten, their cat, and entertaining friends with dinners that sometimes ended with everyone sprawled on the floor, banging out accompaniment to jazz LPs on their pots and pans. Marriage had become less urgent, even vaguely frightening, to Joan, and in any case Barney’s attention remained riveted to his work as producer of Strange Victory, a one-hour documentary directed by Leo Hurwitz that declared Hitler alive and well as long as bigotry persisted in the United States. Joan vowed to use her own time equally constructively. In order to come to grips with her self-concept as a “neurotic child” whose parents drove her nuts, she tried psychoanalysis, but her analyst turned out to have his own flair for driving her nuts. She also restlessly cruised Manhattan’s East Fifty-seventh Street galleries. At Betty Parsons, she discovered Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, which she disliked; at Pierre Matisse, she gazed approvingly at Surrealist Roberto Matta’s elastic humanoid forms in cosmic space; at Julien Levy, she fell in love with the tense and sensuous canvases of Arshile Gorky.
Hans Hofmann also exhibited that winter, at Samuel Kootz. Seeing this German-born artist’s intensely colored abstractions may have finally decided Joan to try the Hofmann School on West Eighth Street, which she knew about from clippings Barney had mailed to Chicago. Integrating Matisse’s Fauvist ideas about color with Cézanne’s concepts of structure, Hofmann’s systematic approach to picture making stressed the flatness of the canvas but also implied pictorial depth. Working from a model or still life, Hofmann students learned to activate the entire image, consider positive and negative space, regard a painting as a metaphorical field, and think in terms of complexes of colored planes (rather than perspective or modeling) in a dynamics of space he termed “push and pull.”
Hofmann would seem to be precisely what Joan needed at this unsettled time. Besides offering substantially different and more purely aesthetic approaches to painting than she had previously known, the sixty-seven-year-old master teacher fostered in his students the same excitement about the vital importance of art that Joan took for granted, not to mention that enrolling in the Hofmann School would give her a community of peers. One afternoon she ventured over to Eighth Street. But Hofmann’s nearly incomprehensible English put her off, as did his practice of correcting student drawings by erasing and redoing, or tearing off and moving, certain sections. Back in Chicago, Ritman had irked Joan by repainting the hands of her figures. (Each time he headed in her direction, she would hide the brush she knew he would want to use.) “They were only drawings,” she reasoned of the student work Hofmann rectified, “but I wondered why and why and why?” After a single lesson, she scurried back to Brooklyn, vaguely frightened, not to set foot again for a long time in the Hofmann School. Still, Hofmann’s ideas and methods crept into her work. She wasn’t crazy about his art, but she believed he was right about painting.
Meanwhile, Joan had been posing for photographs Barney was taking in and around their classic brick-and-fire-escape building at One Old Fulton Street. Nude, tousled, silken, and bitchy, she lollygags on their unmade bed, about to claw up a pack of cigarettes, arching her brows as she shoots her lover that challenging look that kept people taut in her presence. Barney caught her too in the unvarnished wintry light outside the bar and grill downstairs. Her haunted eyes, the plainness and forties-ness of her cloth coat, and the straight-arm gesture with which she pulls open a door—that physical directness paralleling her verbal directness—make these black-and-whites surprisingly poignant. Other pictures focus on tugboats plying the East River or on the Whitmanesque Brooklyn Ferry landing across from their building. Once a friend captured Barney and Joan together lounging on the rotting, fishy-smelling piers in the shadow of the bridge. At sunset, guttural river noises blended with the dim racket of the city like the tremulous, shimmering sound of the voix céleste, the organ stop in which two pipes are tuned slightly off pitch.
The year of Arshile Gorky’s Agony, Willem de Kooning’s Zurich, Jackson Pollock’s Cathedral, and Mark Rothko’s Untitled, 1947 saw the awakening of New York painting, not that anyone besides a handful of fellow artists and a few others was paying attention. As unsure of herself as she was filled with yearning to become a great painter, Joan made no attempt to take Manhattan by storm or meet more sophisticated artists. Her next move? The traveling fellowship, intended by the School of the Art Institute to be used immediately after graduation, still hung fire. Back in Chicago she had announced her plans to travel to China in order to study prints and then, as she put it, to lose herself in the country’s vastness in order to work day and night. But no one had doubted she would ultimately choose Paris. After thirteen months in Brooklyn, it was time.
On June 24, 1948, Joan sailed for France on the Liberty ship SS Ernie Pyle. Greeted in Le Havre ten days later by an apocalyptic scene of sunken warships lit by a low, red, swollen sun, she felt simultaneously horror-stricken and flooded with joy at the thought that she was about to set foot upon the continent of Mozart.
In Paris, Zuka and Nancy Borregaard met Joan’s boat train bearing a big bouquet of blue and orange flowers. A lively painter buddy of Joan’s from Chicago, Nancy had come to Paris on a 1945 School of the Art Institute fellowship, fallen in love with a Frenchman, and never gone home. As for Zuka, having been invited to travel around Europe with a wealthy Los Angeles collector and dealer, she had remained after her mentor’s departure to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and then married Polish-born leftist political cartoonist Louis Mitelberg. Joan was to stay with the Mitelbergs, who lived near Pigalle, until she found a place of her own.
Paris disappointed her. Thanks to the GI Bill, the French capital was once again swarming with Americans on the café circuit, but Joan found it shabby and sad. People trudged along heads down, loaves of brown bread (there was no white flour) tucked under their arms. Even the children looked listless and old. Though disoriented, she managed a pilgrimage on foot up to Picasso’s old Bateau Lavoir studio in Montmartre and prowled the quays of the Seine, where she turned up her nose at the bridges, “squat like dachshunds” and sorely lacking the splendid grittiness of New York’s. Seeing the old treasures of Paris only cemented her scorn: “charm all over the God damn place” but “no guts.”
Self-pity spilled from her letters to Barney:
Christ how I’m missing you—really—at times life at 1 Fulton St. seems like a dream—Gluten—you and the bridge—it doesn’t seem real—like it happened—and anyway you make up your impression of a place starting with the person you love and building around it … when please will S.V. [Strange Victory] be finished—you must have seen the first print by this time—good?—of course—what I’m asking is when will you be here—I’m lonely—and writing you makes me think of it more and I don’t want to think of it more because I don’t know why I came in the first place and I haven’t all this Promethean strength one is supposed to have and I don’t know what to paint.
For four dollars a month, Joan had rented a one-room flat sans running water or electricity. Rats scurried through the hallway outside her door, and on the landing festered a stand-up toilet that flushed with a bucket of water. Situated on the ancient rue Galande in the Latin Quarter near the Seine, her building was drafty and damp. Yet just outside her two tall windows admitting the north light ideal for painting stood the Romanesque Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, whose interior bathed in chilly white medieval stillness, and across the river was Notre Dame—“this view, I mean, God!”
Joan faced not only the great achievements of the past but also her own blank canvases. Having bet everything on painting, she found she knew neither what nor how to paint. Besides, she was thrown off by the paint itself, Lefebvre-Foinet oils she purchased directly from their artisanal manufacturer on the rue Bréa. (In later life, she would absurdly claim she had been so poor during these first months in Paris that, unable to afford art supplies, she had had to “fuck for canvas.”) The actual colors of her French oils were rather different from those of American brands, but so too were the colors of their names: “terre de Sienne brûlée,” for instance, was greener than the silverish (the color name, not the paint itself) “burnt sienna.” Hunched over her palette, Joan muttered, “Why don’t I quit this stuff, be strong enough to kick this?” But what else could she do? There was no other way. The eighteen paintings Joan eventually completed in Paris stayed turned to the wall whenever she wasn’t working. Her upstairs neighbor, sculptor Eldon Danhausen, an ex-classmate and friend from Chicago, who was also in Paris on a traveling fellowship, found her annoyingly buttoned-up and uncollegial. He would ask to see her canvases, “and she’d reply, ‘Oh, they’re not ready yet.’ ” For once, she found herself incapable of competing.
Neither could she “eat enough or smoke enough or get warm or sleep or keep clean.” A lump of anxiety, she would lie in bed at night choking on “so much nothing—strange and stupid choice I made—expensive choice—so white these walls and hollow noises in the street,” then blearily get up at two or three a.m., light a kerosene lamp, and try to paint. Once, craving blueness and warmth, she laid her hands on a car in order to flee Paris for Avignon, in the south of France. Several days later she threw the episode on paper for Barney: “strange how I left at night after painting so hard telling nobody and not caring—I … drew the bridge—lonely—without you and beautiful in October and no people—I went to the sea and got brown and swam and talked to the fisherman—the fluid ran out of the brakes but they fixed them—Christ what am I.”
Joan, Barney, and the Braque-like stove on the rue Galande, 1948 or 1949 (Illustration credit 5.8)
Not long after her arrival, Joan had had a brief affair with an English writer, the first in a string of casual lovers who eased her self-consciousness and loneliness that summer and fall. A practiced deceiver whose usual ploy was to tell a fraction of the truth, she casually mentioned the Englishman in a letter to Barney, slyly adding that he was “married just so you won’t think impossible thoughts.” Yet she desperately missed Barney. In mid-August, Strange Victory finished at last, he had come to Paris; in mid-September he had left again to handle its distribution and promotion. A month later Joan wrote, “I wait Christ how long—to wake and find you and hold you and smell you, darling with all my heart I want you and the tears and salt are mixed.”
His return that November brought Joan back from the brink of emotional collapse. Not only was he there for her in the night, but also he cooked for her (badly, the spaghetti once coming out in a single chunk) and improved her social life. Joan and Barney spent time with their upstairs neighbors, painter Herby Katzman and his bride Duny. They also saw a lot of young artists Warren Brandt and Herman Cherry, who introduced Joan to Philip Guston when the older painter stopped in Paris on his way home after a year in Italy. And Timmy Osato’s sister, the famous ballerina Sono Osato, and her husband, Victor Elmaleh, in Paris that winter, got them together with visiting entertainer Gene Kelly and his wife, actress Betsy Blair, and the six of them went dancing at the famous Le Bal Nègre, hopping with African Legionnaires and American coeds.
All the same, life in the City of Light continued dismal. The fetchingly Braque-like stove in Joan’s apartment stung their eyes with its acrid smoke but proved no match for the penetrating November chill. Coal, bread, eggs, butter, milk, and cheese were rationed. Thanks to the jeep station wagon Barney had flown over—his father’s friend owned the airline—and a foreigner’s relatively generous allotment of gas, the two did have the luxury of short getaways: excursions to see the Romanesque architecture Joan loved and, with Zuka, a quick and rather miserable trip to Franco’s Spain, where they visited Guernica and the Prado and locals pelted with rocks their obviously American car. Reacting to bad memories of grand-touring with his parents, Barney refused to indulge in anything that smacked of tourism: they drove, ate, saw the town and the museum, and whipped back to Paris.
Two weeks later, Joan and Barney flew to Czechoslovakia, officially to present Strange Victory at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, but also to get a feeling for a country that was Sovietizing after February’s Communist coup. In those early days of the Cold War, the Communists enjoyed enormous prestige among French intellectuals and Joan had been attending party lectures in Paris, but in Prague she and Barney found the discourse stifling and the art leaden. Having long romanticized Communism, which they equated with personal freedom, they were appalled when authorities attempted to confiscate Barney’s bottle of cognac, a small thing but telling. Nor could the two get visas for Hungary, where they had planned to join Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. They took pains to sort out and weigh their observations, but essentially they left Prague as apostates. Shortly before Christmas, the Communist chapter of Joan’s life closed at Ruzyně Airport: “Let’s be bourgeois pigs,” joked Barney, “and go back to Paris!”
Nineteen forty-nine staggered in at a huge party at a friend’s hôtel particulier with tattered red velour walls where everyone got sick on bad liquor. For weeks, icy rain had been slicing down. January days were only quick yawns of light. Joan fell into deep depression, then developed bronchitis. When she was briefly hospitalized at the American Hospital in Neuilly, her doctor advised that she finish out the winter in the south of France.
So, taking advantage of Sono Osato’s connection to Sidney Simon and Joan Lewisohn Simon, a wealthy American couple who were leaving their rented villa in Le Lavandou, between Toulon and Saint-Tropez, Joan and Barney moved to Provence in late January. Designed by a Dutch architect and used in the 1920s by the writer André Gide, the lovely Villa Le Pin had eleven rooms, including a big living room with a wisteria-framed view of the Mediterranean that served as Joan’s studio.
Joan felt as if she had been whisked from ditchwater murkiness into the magical color and light of the art she loved best. The boats on the beach might have been those van Gogh had painted at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, and the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, a short drive east, came straight out of Matisse. It was an easy run to Cannes, where the couple liked to alight at a certain hotel bar for the brandy Alexanders they consumed for the cream as much as the liquor before rolling on to Italy (where there was no rationing) to stock up on olive oil, coffee beans, and other luxuries. At first Joan’s spirits soared, but the Mistral unstrung her, and boredom lurked. She and Barney played bridge with their real estate agent and his wife, but, with few other artists or friends at hand, Le Lavandou felt more isolated than paradisiacal.
For subject matter in her painting, Joan turned to the picturesque Provence where fishermen untangle their nets, old men play billiards or boules, and solitary figures brood by the edge of the sea. All lent themselves to semiabstract treatment (the reticulation of the nets, the X of crossed cues, the scatter of rocks along the shore) and blessedly offered a provisional answer to the question: What constitutes meaningful subject matter? Not only did the new work alternate between dullish and vividly hued (Mediterranean blues, baize greens, velvety ochres), but also it straddled two paradigms. Trained to think in terms of fixing an optical relationship with a modeled figure using a plumb line, Joan had begun paying stricter attention to ways in which marks map relationships to each other and to the rectangle they occupy. (Hans Hofmann taught that the first lines of any composition are the four sides of the paper.) Yet Joan’s attempts to combine the two strategies in paintings of reductive human forms in tumbling architectonic spaces yielded, at best, semi-satisfying results.
Her most abstract works were her most resolved: Game of Boule, for instance, with its interlocking geometric and curvilinear forms, attention to lights and darks, and clothespin-like human figures, including a recurring standing figure with arms crossed as if in a straitjacket. Another relatively successful work, the Cubo-Futuristic-looking Bicycle Race, Tour de France, painted after Joan and Barney watched the annual contest, then chased it in his jeep, centered around a dynamic streak of palmated circles. This canvas would win acceptance to the Art Institute’s 1950 Society for Contemporary American Art exhibition. Later it was purchased by Marion’s wealthy friends Julia and Augustine Bowe, who hung it above a marble bust of Dante in the living room of their lakefront apartment. There it became a familiar presence to the Bowe children and their close pal, a young art student named Claes Oldenburg.
Come August, Joan put down her brushes to travel with Barney, Zuka, and Zuka’s husband Louis to Italy, where she was seduced by the Belliniesque landscapes, by Venice, and especially by Florence, so lucid, untouristed, and architectural—so yellow!—that it resembled a dream of Florence. In one snapshot from Florence, Barney idles on a sun-baked wall along the Arno as Joan—young and summery in her white shirt, full skirt, and strappy sandals—drapes an arm over his leg and relaxes into him. She stares at the camera as he throws her a look testifying to his tender and resilient devotion. “He cared so much about her,” observes one friend. “It was really one of the great love stories.”
But that trip too had its miseries, in part because Louis, a Jew, relished telling Jewish jokes to which Barney responded with humorless theories about how ethnic jokes seed prejudice. And when Louis capped their discussion of artist Käthe Kollwitz with the comment “Well, I wouldn’t want to be married to her!” Barney interpreted the remark as anti-woman and exploded, and Joan seconded him. The two were adamant about speaking out against what they were quick to see as intolerance. (Ironically, Louis’s fiercely satirical sculptures and drawings in the tradition of Daumier, works published in L’Humanité, L’Express, and Le Monde using the moniker “Tim,” were to win him a reputation as a leading French champion of democratic values, free speech, and human rights.) The two couples split.
Still puzzling over his life’s work, Barney had spent his first months in Le Lavandou writing and planning a film he hoped to make in China, but gradually lethargy and depression had slackened this coil of energy, leaving him staring at the horizon or creeping back to bed at noon. The sight of him sleepwalking through the day irritated Joan, yet she had not refused the marriage proposals with which he had been peppering her since his arrival in France.
Eventually, she wrote to ask advice from her mother (distance had brought the two closer), who replied that this choice must be fully her own. Having recognized that the “marriage deal” was too “solemn and non-elastic” for comfort, Joan knew she was unready for matrimony “in the deep sense.” Yet in the end she decided to close her eyes and do it quickly. She was not immune to the charms of having a husband, and it was understood that the usual rules would not apply. It never crossed anyone’s mind that Barney’s career would automatically take priority or that Joan would iron his shirts and cook his pot roast. Was she still in love with him? Friends felt she took him for granted. The more cynical among them, aware of Joan’s steely self-interest when it came to painting, suspected she was marrying a wealthy and supportive man in order to further her art. What were her other options?, she wondered. Return to Chicago? Hardly. Her allowance wasn’t big enough to make it in New York on her own. The clincher: she had gone through her fellowship money, and Barney claimed he wouldn’t take her home unless they wed.
The two erstwhile Communists made arrangements to depart Cannes, traveling first class on the SS Atlantic, for which Barney paid $960, nearly half the amount of Joan’s fellowship. He also underwrote transport for her paintings, which were ferried by rowboat to the ship anchored offshore, without her having to unstretch them.
But first, on the morning of September 10, 1949, Joan and Barney married at the town hall of Le Lavandou. In a paroxysm of Gallic enthusiasm, the mayor put the icing on the ceremony with his cry “Vive Chi-ca-go!” But Chicago was history. They felt the gravitational pull of New York.