Twyla Tharp and Picasso

Read on Two Coats of Paint.

That a work of art can mean something from generation to generation, that it can continue to reflect not only the time in which it was made but also make us think years later, is what makes it a masterwork. Seldom in the realm of dance, the most ephemeral of art forms, is a work appreciated across disciplines, its worth acknowledged by a broader audience than originally targeted. We are lucky that at any time we can wander into a museum and stand face-to-face with a masterpiece by Picasso, Matisse, or O’Keeffe. We can’t do this with dance. Perhaps as virtual technology continues to expand, we will be able to experience the great dances of our time as if breathing the same air of the performers. Until then, we must wait. It’s been sixteen years since I last saw In the Upper Room by Twyla Tharp.

Original cast of thirteen premiering at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1987 included Erzsebet Foldi, Stephanie Foster, Julie Nakagawa, Cathy Oppenheimer, Karen Stasick, Ellen Troy, Shelley Washington, Jamie Bishton, John Carrafa, Richard Colton, Kevin O’Day, Kevin Santee, William Whitener. Photo © Tom Brazil.

Although I studied ballet, I’m no balletomane. I first learned of Tharp’s ballet, which premiered August 28, 1986, not through its performance, but referential through the ballet In a Crowded Room, choreographed in 1993 by my friend Julia K. Gleich.

Clocking in at around 40 minutes, Tharp’s is a terror of a dance that starts with the dial set to ten then turns it north to twelve, thirteen, fourteen… you get it. The duration is equivalent of two grueling back-to-back VO2 Max treadmill tests (as a former professional track athlete, this is the treadmill test requiring an athlete to push themselves to exhaustion to determine their fitness).

Unlike a painting that remains in statis the moment it is complete, a dance is only as good as those performing it. Fortunately, during its recent four-day run at City Center, this dance was exceptionally performed by Tharp’s chosen cast of: Jeanette Delgado, Benjamin Freemantle, Jada German, Kaitlyn Gilliland, Daisy Jacobson, Lloyd Knight, Julian Mackay, Marzia Memoli, Stephanie Petersen, Reed Tankersley, Cassandra Trenary, Daniel Ulbricht, and Richard Villaverde.

The nine-section dance alternates between ballet and modern groups, which pump themselves up to a level of compulsive virtuosity (and undress) culminating in a furious finale. “You have the modern men which Twyla considers like the bass voices in the piece,” explained the dancer Kevin O’Day, who was part of the original cast, “and the modern women, who are like the alto voices. The ballet women are more like sopranos, and the men are like tenors. The movement is ‘voiced’ like that.” There’s some special terminology to go along with the ballet/modern distinction too. “The modern half are called stompers and squatters because the cast wears sneakers. And the ballet half are just called the ballet people,” said O’Day. He further noted:

I think what Twyla is doing in In the Upper Room is that she’s combining all the dance styles that you could grab onto to mold them into a new classic dance style. Even the movement that the modern people do in the piece is very classic. It’s bigger movement – really expansive and really open.

Beyond the peculiarities of genre, Tharp’s standards are simple: execute with precision and commitment. “One thing Twyla hates is a conservative performer,” O’Day said, “That’s her pet peeve. She hates people who hold back. She yells at people. Says it’s boring. Fix it. Change it.”

Tharp recognizes the difference between ballet and modern but believes that dance has a single root. In 2000, she told Charlie Rose:

I have always believed that dance has a root, and that is in the human body. And the human body can move. Anyone isolating any camps saying this belongs here and this belongs here was misguided. The techniques to be learned in the Classical ballet are real and the vocabulary has been developed for over 300 hundred years. The techniques of the so-called modern world are in a way much more recent, but in a way much more ancient because they have been practiced since the beginning of time – in tribal dances and in the beginnings of theater. As long as you know you are going home you can learn a lot from the Egyptians.

In those days, Tharp had been working with Teddy Atlas, a boxer who had trained a young fighter named Mike Tyson. It still shows in the choreography: she once described the piece as “a display of athletic prowess based on endurance, power, speed, and timing.” Indeed, the cast I saw at City Center performed with a bracing air of reckless daring – on the edge of control in the way that Tharp is famous for. The speed of dancers’ movements reminded me of the long-exposure studies of light the photographer Barbara Morgan did in the early 1940s. As they moved on stage, my eye could capture only the traces of their ephemeral gestures, lending the enterprise a preternatural quality.

Tharp often references her childhood growing up on a Quaker farm in Indiana. She saw how the earth worked and understood the ancestry of place. She experienced how an entire community worked as an entity—tasks performed with precision. These elements of her background coalesce in In the Upper Room. High-energy repetitive moves fit with Philip Glass’ relentless score, which in 1987 critic Tobi Tobias – erroneously, in my view – dissed as “harsh” and akin to “a train rushing at great speed, boldly hooting.” Jennifer Tipton’s lighting design exists in a dense fog that makes the dancers appear spontaneously – reportedly the exact effect Tharp wanted. In his book Seventy-nine Short Essay on Design, Michael Bierut described Tipton’s design this way:

In the Upper Room is staged in an even, featureless haze. The dancers are invisible until they are picked out by Tipton’s precise, razor-sharp lighting. It’s a simple effect, familiar to anyone who has driven a car on a foggy night, but in the hands of this brilliant designer, the results are as mesmerizing as anything by James Turrell. As the piece reaches its climax, dancers materialize out of nowhere before your eyes… Tipton’s lighting is the kind of magic that delights you even when you know exactly how the trick works.

Tobias described the costumes, designed by Norma Kamali, as “full wardrobes ranging from glossy pajama outfits in convict stripes to screaming-red skimpies, the women’s accessorized with red pointe shoes over matching socks.” She added that Tharp “still hasn’t overcome the modern dancer’s grudge against classical dance. She’s set up this piece so that her dancers look handsome and confident only when they’re in sneakers.” If she really had it in for ballet, as Tobias suggested, I’m not sure the attitude endured. She told Rose that it had taken her 35 years to “size up against the absolutes” – namely, Martha Graham (whom she studied with) and George Balanchine (whom she never met but revered). I’d argue that she is not a reckless iconoclast, and that her creative genius – her directness, her temperament – could go a few rounds with the likes of Picasso. But we’ll never know because you can’t hang a Tharp alongside Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Don’t we all agree that Faith Ringgold gave Mr. P a run for his money when MoMA rehung the collection in 2019?

As a sidebar, it’s remarkable how powerful Tharp makes her women. Within duets, in which women typically succumb to the muscling of their male partners, the women are the ones dictating direction. Even when she makes them take a knee, they rise with authority, intent, and drive. It is a pair of women that open and close In the Upper Room, striking a marching pose with hands gripped into fists.

“Every dance directs the next so it’s always about learning,” Tharp said in a 2019 video interview, “It’s how do we launch from where we are to the future.”

The future where I can see the great Tharp “hanging” alongside a great Picasso.

In the Upper Room by Twyla Tharp, Choreography by Twyla Tharp, Music by Philip Glass; featuring Jeanette Delgado, Benjamin Freemantle, Jada German, Kaitlyn Gilliland, Daisy Jacobson, Lloyd Knight, Julian MacKay, Marzia Memoli, Stephanie Petersen, Reed Tankersley, Cassandra Trenary, Daniel Ulbricht, and Richard Villaverde . NY City Center, October 19-23, 2022.

About the author: Jason Andrew is an independent curator and writer based in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. Follow him on Instagram: @jandrewarts

Frank Owen, trailblazing innovator

Read on Two Coats of Paint.

I first came to know the work of Frank Owen over two decades ago through the sculptor Joel Perlman. I stepped off the elevator at Perlman’s studio on West Broadway and immediately encountered an Owen painting. It seemed fitting to discover such a physical painter as Owen through a sculptor. Only recently I learned that the title of that painting was Augmented Position, also fitting insofar as Owen has challenged and changed the way one can experience painting. The proof is in his current show “Retrospection,” on view at Nancy Hoffman Gallery.

Owen’s paintings have always been about expanding the painted field. He arrived in New York City in the 1970s and recalls with wonder living and working in SoHo during that period. He was among the few “painting is dead” deniers and took to redefining painting through process, addressing the picture as a space defined not just by a height and width but also depth. To convey this, he developed and mastered the unique technique of building a painting inside-out or in “verso,” like sculpting via mold making. The process dates back to when artists carved into the surface of clay, poured paint on that surface, then meticulously pulled back the “skin” of the painting, stretching it to canvas. To learn more about Owen’s process, see Alexi Worth’s interview with him from 2020.

Process for Owen was not a means to a preconceived end, nor a response to Richard Serra’s molten throwns or Lynda Benglis pile pours. Instead, Owen was taking a strong position on the act of looking. Just as Mark Di Suvero rescued us from Minimalist sculpture by introducing his thrusting and sprawling dynamic tensions, Owen offered a new way of experiencing painting through what could be called tensile articulation. 

With inspired inventiveness, he engineered a way to harness the expressive nature of the medium, capturing it in a surface plane with layered depth. Any number of elements could cohabit there in floating stasis. Paintings thus became scaffoldings of shapes compressed in layers of paint as if preserved like fossils in amber. 

When a fire consumed his SoHo loft in the 1980s, Owen headed for the hills of Keene Valley in the Adirondack Mountains. Distilling the lifeforce from nature continues to be the dominant theme in his work.

In Calipers of the King Fisher, composed of linear and arching shapes, Owen captures nature and a new kind of paleo-kinetic vibe. Rough-hewn with layers upon layers of jut and jab, the painting fuses constructed and fluid elements of abstraction with subtle yet stern emotion. Shapes found in the painting were often generated on his wife’s desktop computer, then made into posterboard templates which could be reused. 

Three decades later he painted Gala, which consists of multiple sheets of chromatic industrial polyethylene with premanufactured painted elements, collage, and glue. Here Owen relies heavily on an exhaustive combination and recombination of prefabricated modules of visual information.

Embracing the bold and the garish, his recent work is centered on a series he calls the Venetians – paintings that bustle with deep, rich colors, patterns emphasizing surface, and layers playing on the effects of light. On view are over a dozen compelling paintings in evolved from this series, all measuring 50 x 40 inches, different but related. Their juxtaposition is repetitive and coercing on purpose as Owen charged himself in these recent paintings, to draining himself of everything he could think to do with the intention of exhausting the viewer.

Undulating with color and texture. Amplify and Gala, and Southwest and Elements, are paired. Each generates a zany equilibrium and idiosyncratic rhythm. Owen creates swirling spaces with forms, tendrils, fractured grids, and looping lariats. Each has a distinct veil of color with a jagged armature conjuring worlds within worlds that move in art-historical orbits near those established by surrealists like Max Ernst and Roberto Matta. 

What Frank Owen achieves is a cascade of suspense without definition. That, I feel, lies at the heart of his poetic disposition. “Retrospection” offers both his mind-blowingly chromatic new paintings and a sampling of his career defining old ones. What is revealed is a trailblazing innovator of non-representational art. His work references and aggregates time itself.

“Frank Owen: Retrospection,” Nancy Hoffman Gallery, 520 West 27th Street, New York, NY. Through September 2, 2022.

About the author: Jason Andrew is an independent curator and writer based in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. Follow him on Instagram: @jandrewarts

The protean paintings of Zachary Keeting

Contributed by Jason Andrew

Whatever strategies an artist employs to express their art intellectual, psychological, or mythological it must be first and foremost visually striking. In his first solo exhibition in New York, painter Zachary Keeting clears a high bar with a stunning set of ten paintings, on view at Underdonk through March 27.

As co-producer of Gorkys Granddaughter, the longstanding and ongoing documentary interview series on artists, Keeting has been a firsthand witness to art making in New York, visiting the studios of nearly 600 artists since 2010. These studio visits capture the working processes of artists. Each episode is a time capsule of ideas, personalities, and places, driven by Keetings curiosity. He has turned this quality inward, forging a unique path for his own passions.

Keeting has described his works as gushes of feeling, and there is certainly an emotional urgency to these expressionistic works, which span a spectrum of sanguinity and sincerity, dreariness and disheartenment. Its easy to get caught in the earthy clutches of every line a vicious lie or sail into the celestial embrace of heated and hammered and beauty was beauty.

Milestones in the life of the artist such as September 11, the death of his mother, and the pandemic have influenced both the compositional and the gestural direction of these new paintings. Titles for the works are crucial to understanding them and add a layer of poetry to his narrative that sometimes explains his inner compulsions and sometimes obscures it. Above all, Keeting, like other expressionists from Kokoschka to Soutine, renounces la belle peinture, preferring instead to pour, stain, whip, spill, and shunt paint in an effort to reorder our traditional reality. Coat after coat, the paintings topography sates the eye with sensations of color and sensual relief.

sour lake is a sweeping prismatic painting, seemingly carved out over time. Layers of paint drift unweighted by any need for an anchoring horizon or conventional point of perspective. Elements in this painting relate more to shapes found in nature than they do to the more strictly regulated objects of human invention. The absence of a hard horizon positions Keetings paintings in the realm of the cosmic. He frames his works with terms like gaseous and volcanic, which makes sense as one looks hard at the aqueous and bubbly surfaces.

A composer of electronic music, Keeting knows how to build phrasing. Long strokes like those in the painting and so little by little he began to go wrong in the head set an undertone for a cacophony of epicedial collisions, while hard geometric edges make for abrupt and syncopated stops. Keetings orchestration of these pauses keep the painting still but not stiff. mastaba is a fine example of this musicality.

Not every aspect of Keetings process is left to chance. He stays conscious of the physicality of the brush and he wants us to see it. Though the paintings in this group are easel-size, they dont come from the easel. Keeting often works on the floor, circling and straddling the canvas to control direction and manipulate the surface. Painting from observation is also an important activity for him. According to the artist, wads of paper towels and used tape piled up in a corner of his studio become the subject of drawing elements that appear in the work. This is particularly evident in every line a vicious lie.

Abstract art and our appreciation of it has come a long way over the last century. Its exciting to see such a confident and successful contribution by Keeting a true tour de force.

Zachary Keeting: Haunt the Margins, Underdonk, 1329 Willoughby Avenue, #211, Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY. Through March 27, 2022.  

The new theatrical space of Amy Lincoln

Amy Lincoln, installation view. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

Originally published by Two Coats of Paint
Contributed by Jason Andrew

 Amy Lincoln’s Soaring trajectory has locked in the natural world, the phenomena within it, and the epic world of myth. Ten new paintings now on view at Sperone Westwater embrace these pervasive elements while exploring a bold new theatrical space.

I first met Lincoln well over a decade ago and have curated several shows that included her work. As a recent grad of Tyler School of Art (Stanley Whitney was one of her instructors), she had just returned from short teaching stint in Yokohama, Japan, and was living in a fourth-floor walkup loft above a laundromat at Melrose and Central in Bushwick. A bunch of artists had landed there including Jesse Bercowetz, Ianthe Jackson, Kevin Curran (now married to Lincoln), and Ben Godward. They were part of the genesis of Bushwick’s nascent but growing art scene, and Lincoln was its Henri Rousseau.

She has always had a highly stylized approach to her work. Even back then, we came to appreciate her offset proportions, one-point perspective, and use of sharp chromatic color in her small portraits of friends, still lifes of plants, and well-placed interiors on MDF. Lincoln’s distinctive approach to painting bordered on the primitive, leaving one with a sense of mystery and eccentricity.

As the complexity of her paintings grew, they moved beyond mere observation into the realm of phenomenology and meaning. Her panels expanded to include landscapes teeming with flora and fauna bathed in the sun, the stars, the moon, or a combination of the three. By resolutely skirting human truths and contradictions in terms of imagery, her work paradoxically seemed to embrace them remotely in suggesting themes such as urban isolation and alienation.

“I find myself trying to figure out how realistic things should be versus imaginatively depicted,” Lincoln said in a 2019 interview with Maria Vogel. “I think whatever makes the painting more compelling is what I try to choose. There’s a range within a painting. Some things are more realistic, other things more like symbols.”

Pam Glick’s code theory

Pam Glick, installation view

Pam Glick, installation view

Originally Published by Two Coats of Paint
Contributed by Jason Andrew

Artists often have generative strategies for jumpstarting a work. The AbExers’ had their automatism and the minimalists had their procedural arrangements. For her new paintings, on display at The Journal Gallery in their rotating “Tennis Elbow” series, Pam Glick seems to embrace both the automatic and the procedural.

I’m a huge fan of the sci-fi action film The Matrix. When Keanu Reeves’ character Neo begins to intuitively translate the binary numeric system cascading down a post-apocalyptic computer screen, the film gains momentum. Staring intensely at Glick’s paintings I found a way into her work—by thinking about code theory.

Glick has been celebrated for her “improvisational flair,” and for many years her paintings have been compositionally based on a matrix. Densely painted, the new paintings incorporate painted marks that are sectioned into rows that generate linear combinations. Through multiple works, there is a single band of painted information uniquely chroma-keyed to the surrounding fields. This single vertical row space serves as a generator-matrix, driving the narrative of a given painting towards a final resolution. As in The Matrix, these bands seem to reference the “real world” as distinct from a controlled and regulated one – privileged moments of consciousness within Glick’s matrix.

Joan Snyder: Painting from the inside out

Joan Snyder, installation view. Left: Ode to Summer (2019); Right: Weeping Cherry Tree & Thee (2020) / Courtesy CANADA

Contributed by Jason Andrew

In a 1976 Cincinnati Enquirer review of Joan Snyder’s paintings, the reviewer, Owen Findsen, surmised that she had “picked up a little of this, a little of that … and made it all uglier.” While he found her work offensive, even questioning it’s validity, for those like me who have come to love Snyder’s work, it couldn’t be a bigger compliment. Joan Snyder paints her world from the inside out.

Unabashedly expressive, her paintings are born of sorrow and moods, loss and struggles, and yes, peace and love as well. The new paintings now on view at CANADA echo a familiar cantata – an unapologetic narrative. “They are a form of keeping time,” Helen Molesworth writes in her witty catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition, “of remaining present, of acting as both observer and recorder.” The catalogue also features commentary by Wallace Whitney and Sean Scully.

Consistent throughout her work since the 1960s is Snyder’s use of a “stroke” – a heavy gesture succinctly pulled horizontally. Conceived as an alternative to the Great God Grid, this mark can be interpreted as a cancellation, a kind of crossing out. At first, at least, it was distinctly her own. Each stroke works in tandem with saturated orbs, scribbles, and textured elements of collage. While overtly physical, her paintings, often multi-paneled, are not lost to the oblivion of expression.

Snyder has always been outspoken, and her paintings are a kind of glorious outrage. When asked by Ruth Iskin, Lucy Lippard, and Arlene Raven to describe her art and its relationship to Feminism in 1977, she responded with an associative fusillade:

layers, words, membranes, cotton, cloth, rope, repetition, bodies, wet, opening, closing repetition, lists, life stories, grids, destroying grids, houses, intimacy, doorways, breasts, vaginas, flow, strong, building, putting together many disparaging elements, repetition, red, pink, black, earth feel colors, the sun, the moon…

The exhibition features a return to a common theme for Snyder, that of her “Field Series.” These works, painted in her studios in Woodstock and Brooklyn, continue to be about the sacred, the serene, fields of moons, moons in mud, rippling ponds, landscapes stretched out, and daily diaries exposed. These lush visions tell powerful stories.

An Education Over Coffee: Black Mountain College and Its Legacy

Installation shot of Black Mountain College and Its Legacy exhibition, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, 2011 featuring, among other works, Kenneth Snelson's Easter Monday, 1977, foreground, and Jack Tworkov's Day Break, 1953, to left

Originally published by ArtCritical
Contributed by Jason Andrew

Black Mountain College and Its Legacy, co-curated by Robert Mattison and Loretta Howard, reflects the impressive roster of artists that made the institution outside of Asheville, North Carolina legendary. As expected, the exhibition features work by many of the College’s bold-faced names—Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, Hazel Larsen, Ray Johnson, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Jack Tworkov—most of whom served as teachers at the school.  However, the show excels for including lesser-known artists like Leo Amino, Jorge Fick, Joe Fiore, and Richard Lippold. The exhibition often juxtaposes works at Black Mountain with something representative and later. Adjacent photographs of the artists facilitate the narrative.

For nearly two decades Black Mountain College (1933-1956) puttered and spurted along offering an improvised curriculum and a revolving door to artists, poets, composers, scientists, and anyone else who wanted to participate in its program known for placing individual creative discovery at the top of an alternative agenda. The founders hoped to intertwine living and learning, believing, as quoted by Martin Duberman in his 1972 study on the College, that “as much real education took place over the coffee cups as in the classrooms.” The college was notorious for it’s spontaneous discussions in its dining hall overlooking Lake Eden.

Anni Albers wrote in an early issue of the Black Mountain College Bulletin, “Most important to one’s own growth is to see oneself leave the safe ground of accepted conventions and to find oneself alone and self-dependent. It is an adventure which can permeate one’s whole being.” This statement captures the essence of Black Mountain College making it fitting that an exquisite tapestry by the artist is one of the first works visitors encounter.

Josef Albers features prominently in the exhibition. Despite my personal aversion to his stringent methodologies there can be no doubting his influence upon the young itinerants who stumbled into his classroom. Both his 1937 monochrome, Composure and his Homage to the Square (1960) hanging opposite are fine examples of his strict color code, but boring in their overtly calculated way.

Most impressive of the exhibition’s early against mid-career comparisons is Kenneth Noland’s small painting V.V. (1949), and Soft Touch (1963). One can feel the presence of Albers’ teachings in the colorful quadrilateral symmetry of the earlier work. Noland’s short geometric gesture stretches out in the later work to become one of his celebrated V-shaped Chevrons.  In another comparison, an early photograph by Kenneth Snelson of dewdrops suspended on a spider web from 1948, offers a remarkable insight into the artist’s use of line and tension that can be found in sculptural works in the years that followed.

Certain pairings are more referential: Pat Passlof’s early example borrows gesture from de Kooning, with whom she traveled to Black Mountain to study in 1948, while the later piece builds up color from Milton Resnick, who she married in 1961. Passlof tells the story that after Albers tore up Elaine de Kooning’s homework in front of class, Passlof promptly gathered her things and left his classroom never to return. Elaine is represented by a fabulous enamel on paper titled Black Mountain Number 6 (1948).

The exhibition could have benefited from stricter curatorial selection, most notably in the case of Franz Kline from whom there are six works from various periods, but no masterpieces. Robert Motherwell also fares poorly, although there is an interesting photograph and preliminary sketch from 1951 proof that Motherwell was working on the Millburn Mural commission at the time. The exhibition hits a home run, however, with its timely selection of works by de Kooning that includes a preliminary drawing for the painting Asheville.

Dorothea Rockbourne was one of the few students at Black Mountain with prior  training, as she had attended her native Montreal’s Ecole des beaux-arts. She arrived in search of a more diverse education and latched on to the only mathematics professor there, Max Dehn, whose basic lessons in geometry and topology had a lasting influence on her career. Her Gradient and Field (1977) –reconstructed for this exhibition-is a sophisticated installation of vellum sheets placed at prescribed levels above and below a vectored horizontal line in such a way as to amplify the divergent fields.

Tworkov’s first comprehensive NYC survey opens this week

Jack Tworkov in his Provincetown studio. Photo by © Arnold Newman, for an article written by Robert Hatch, “At The Tip Of Cape Cod,” July 1961 issue of Horizon.Via the Provincetown Artist Registry.

The UBS Art Gallery presents New York City’s first comprehensive survey of the work of American painter Jack Tworkov (1900-1982). “Jack Tworkov: Against Extremes – Five Decades of Painting” reflects the artist’s transitions and evolutions over his five-decade career. A founding member of the New York School, Jack Tworkov is regarded as one of its defining figures, along with Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, whose gestural paintings and dramatic strokes defined the Abstract Expressionist movement in America. “Against Extremes” will feature 26 paintings and related drawings, including many rarely seen works from the artist’s estate. Highlights range from the artist’s Social Realist paintings and drawings of the 1930s and 1940s, to major Abstract Expressionist canvases of the 1950s and 1960s, and finally to the geometrically inspired paintings of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Ford + Biala: A Fateful Meeting

Originally published by ProQuest
Contributed by Jason Andrew

There must be young men and women, of genius even, who are unsuited to gain their early living at normal occupations, or whose feelings will not let them do so. For these New York is the best place in America... but it is not a good place because it does not arrange itself to suit their necessities. Until it does so it must be content to see such young men and women drift... into expatriation. For them there is... Paris.

Ford Madox Ford, New York is Not America1

When the young American painter, Janice Biala, met the great English novelist Ford Madox Ford, she was twenty-six and he was fifty-seven. They met in Paris on May Day, 1930, at one of Ford's regular Thursday afternoon salons. She had arrived from New York just five days prior, travelling at the invitation of her best friend Eileen Lake, an aspiring poet.

Lured to the gathering at Ford's with the promise of meeting Ezra Pound, whom she much admired, Biala instead found herself alongside Ford, the incorrigible romancer. Ford, legendary and proud, perched himself on the edge of the long divan, and in the dim light the pair 'seem to be alone...' recalled Ford in his collection of poems dedicated to Biala.2 Their meeting was the kind of spontaneous fiction for which Ford was famous - the principal character being himself.

Biala hoped that France would offer a new life she so desperately desired. She had a massive fascination with France. As a child she collected 'as many books as one could find on the subject'. These well-worn novels and picture books, tucked secretly under her bed, fed her already excessive imagination. She would later tell French art critic René Barotte that it was because of Porthos that she became an artist.3 The Three Musketeers was her favourite.