Bacchus In Autumn

What a melancholy sight Bacchus and and his four little satyrs make on a cold November day.  You can see ice crystals on the grapes so it must be early morning.  Imagine the temperature of the lead underneath the gilded plomb dore.  Until March, when the women will gather in secret to celebrate the rituals of wine and  liberation, the party's over.

The Marsy brothers, Balthazar (c. 1624-1681) and Gaspard (1628-1674) were sculptors employed by King Louis XIV.  They created the Fountain of Bacchus for the King's gardens at Versailles, along with the Fountain of Latone, mother of Apollo and Artemis, and the Fountain of Enceladus, the grand trumpeter.  If Bacchus was a god of excess, Louis XIV was his fervent acolyte.  Fully a third of the cost of the renovations to Versailles was spent on the waterworks to supply its 50 fountains.  Thanks to Louis XIV,  water is a problem at Versailles to this day.

For furthers reading: Thomas Hedin, The Sculpture of Gaspard and Balthazard Marsy, Columbia (University of Missouri Press) 1983.
Image: Jean-Baptiste Leroux - Le bassin de Bacchus en automne -Chateau de Versailles, Collection Jean-Baptiste Leroux, Paris.

Carriere, Rodin. Steichen

One missing link between painting and photography.

Two artists and one unlikely friendship.

 Three strands of art: the realistic landscape of the Barbizon woods, the Impressionist landscapes of visual perception, and the Symbolist landscape of spirit and emotion.

Even people who had doubts about his painting admired Eugene Carriere (1849-1906).  He came to Paris from his native Strassbourg, after apprenticing as a lithographer, to study painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Unable to return home when the Germans occupied Strasbourg in 1870, he joined the army. After being taken prisoner, he found refuge in  thoughts of art.  In search of commercial work, Carriere spent six cold months in England designing greeting cards.  With a wife and child to support, Carriere returned to Paris.

It was at the Sevres Manufactures around 1880 that he met  the sculptor Auguste Rodin.  They were an unlikely pair but the two became fast friends.  Rodin was a womanizer and Carriere was a family man but the two artists inspired each other and often exhibited together.  Carriere continued to struggle to make a living while Rodin  was lionized, a state of affairs he did everything to promote, unlike the quiet homebody who lived (improbably) in that den of iniquity - Montmartre.  Today the Musee Rodin owns several works by Carriere that Rodin bought, both out of admiration and from a desire to help his struggling friend.  Carriere made a lithograph of his friend at work that was used as the poster for the Rodin pavillon at the Paris 1900 Exposition Universelle.

In hindsight it is easy to see a connection between Rodin's revolutionary technique, the partial figures emerging from the marble block, and Carriere's subjects emerging through his monochromatic palette.  But inspiration and influence are not necessarily simple.  

With successes at Galerie L'Art Nouveau Bing in 1896 and at the first Viennea  Secession in 1898, Carriere was able to open Academie Carriere in Paris.  Among his students were Henri Matisse and Andre Derain . Their radically different styles were linked to their teacher by a common disregard for realistic appearances.

Meanwhile Rodin became the most famous artist in the Western world   We should not let his reputation blind us to the influence that Carriere had on pictorial photographers.  

Edward Steichen, a photographer in transit from his home in Luxembourg to the United States, studied Carriere's work and wrote about its influence on his pictures. Steichen also met Rodin and photographed him in his studio Like Carriere, the Austrian photographer Heinrich Kuhn also made his family the subject of his work.  And an unlikely but documented homage came from Pablo Picasso, who dedicated a drawing of a mother and child to Carriere.

The pictorial way of landscape or its arrnagement of still life can be explained in many ways.  From darkness to light, through the quiet vision of Eugene Carriere, is one worth memorializing.

Images:
1. Eugene Carriere - Nelly C.arriere, daughter of the Artist, Musee d"orsay, Paris.
2. Eugene Carriere - Pot de terre, undated, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
3. Eugene Carriere - Child with a Soupiere, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
4. Eugene Carriere - Auguste Rodin,. lithograph, 1897, Art Institute of Chicago.
5. Edward Steichen - Rdoin and his Thinker, 1902, Metropolitan Museum of art, NYC.
6. Eugene Carriere -  The Writer, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
7. Edward Steichen - La Cigale, 1901, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
8. Edward Steichen - Monnlight. Winter, 1902, Metropolitan Museum of art, NYC.
9. Eugene Carriere -  Breton Cemetery, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Where Light Goes

Again, a painting by the underrated French Symbolist Henri le Sidaner (1862-1939).  In L'Eveche you can almost see the last light of a late autumn afternoon moving indoors.  The colors coalesce around the door, like guests gathering.

Image: Henri Le Sidaner - L'Eveche,  Chartres, 1913, private collection, France.

A Garden For The Laughing Monks

Yesterday I walked through the new Tiger Glen in Ithaca, a garden inspired by three ancient Chinese wise men.   Designed by Marc Peter Kane for his Alma mater, Cornell University, the new Japanese garden is a tribute to  Tao Yuanming, a Confucian poet, Lu Xiujing, a Daoist priest,  and Hui Yuan, a Buddhist monk.  Why a Japanese garden, you wonder? Because the story of the three Chinese wise men was equally beloved in Japan.

The 3rd-century parable of the Three Laughers of Tiger Brook celebrates the virtues of open-mindedness, curiosity, and tolerance.  When the poet and the priest visit their friend  at his home in the mountains, their discussion becomes so animated that they cross the ravine that surrounds the temple.  Realizing that he has broken his vow never to leave his monastery, the monk and his friends break into laughter at the absurdity of artificial boundaries.

In Doun Masanobu's 17th-century silk painting  the three friends are pictured n their moment of recognition.  In the garden, the raging torrent is mimicked by carefully fitted elongated blue-gray rocks.  The garden is new this year, its pines and mosses  come to grow in a sheltered spot on a promontory one thousand feet above Cayuga Lake, the longest of the Finger Lakes.  It, too, is ancient, being about two hundred million years old. 

Image:
Kano Doun Masanobu (1625-1694) -  Three Laughers of the Tiger Glen, Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca, NY.

Wanda Wulz And Trieste

Surrealism is a male domain, or so men have told us, and the outright misogyny  of many of its well known images obscures the surrealist woman.  Hidden in plain sight you could say, with a nod to the rapidly unfolding science of the mind.  Even so, one image and one untethered name keeps popping up: a catwoman and Wanda Wulz.  This is the tale of  my search for the woman behind  Cat Woman and where it has taken me.

For more than a century the Wulz family ran the preeminent photography studio in Trieste.  Founded in 1860 by Giuseppe Wulz who specialized in documentary  images, Fotografia Wulz became known for its portraiture under his son Carlo (1874-1928).  Carlo had two daughters, Marion and Wanda (1903-1984), both  free spirits with a camera.

If  strange convergences and surprises from the subconscious are elements of surrealism then the Wulz family, Wanda especially, were early and exuberant practitioners.  Even father Carlo must have found some playful sense lacking in  his portraits of the bourgeoisie; just look at the infant Wanda in a green-grocer's basket.

Close in age, Marion and Wanda remained  close into adulthood, part of the family business that supported their creative autonomy.  They would have been hard pressed to find another setting so congenial.   Although individuals took these pictures it must surely be more accurate to call them collaborations.  From Marion we have images of Wanda as aviator and as a one-woman jazz band.

The Wulz studio became a meeting place for the artists and writers of Trieste in the 1920s, drawn no doubt by the two fiercely talented and attractive Wulz sisters.  The writer Italo Svevo was one, along with young painters including Giuseppe Garzolini, Alfredo Tominz, Umberto Verduta, and their wealthy neighbor Piero Fragiacomo.

There was another member of the Wulz family:  Pippo-the-cat.  He was often  Marion's subject  but he  was Wanda's cat.     Looking at Wanda's self-portrait and The Cat Without Me and then Cat-woman we find no familiar sentimental mimicking of personalities between pet and person, but a simpatico of claws. 

"The last breath of civilization expires on this coast where barbarism starts," wrote the French diplomat Chateaubriand, not very diplomatically, in 1806.  He was not pleased to be posted so far from  Paris.  

Exactly one hundred years later when the Irish writer James Joyce came to teach at the Berlitz School of Languages there, he eked out time to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  Nevertheless,  Joyce considered his fourteen years in Trieste a time of misery, averring that its isolation ate his liver. While there he also tutored a talented local writer, Italo Svevo.  There are those who believe this was the best thing Joyce ever did for literature. 

But there were others who came to stay.   Dante wrote parts of The Divine Comedy there and six centuries later the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke composed his Duino Elegies (1922) during visits to Castle Duino. located  Originally a Roman watchtower, then expanded in medieval times, the castle belonged to Rilke’s friend Princess Marie von Thurm-und-Taxis Hohenlohe.  Local lore claims that Rilke was inspired by disembodied voices he heard calling to him as he walked the windy cliffs overlooking the city..  And no less tortured a soul than the painter Egon Schiele made frequent stays in Trieste to escape the claustrophobia he felt in Vienna..

Trieste first appears in the pages when of history when the Romans annexed it.  During the heyday of their empire, the nearby Venetians raided Trieste regularly, too, causing the beleaguered city to seek protection from the Hapsburgs.  Yet when Garibaldi's newly united Italy stopped a few miles short of  the city, its citizens were seized with a melancholy strain of nationalism, known as irredentism.  United by a secret deal among the Allies following World War I, the people of Trieste provided a safe haven to Jewish refugees from throughout Europe during the 1930s.  And Trieste has long been a favorite place of exile for deposed royalty.  

Connected to the rest of Italy by a narrow strip land along the Adriatic coast, Trieste is closer in spirit to its Balkan neighbors than to the Mediterranean world.  Further isolated by the Alps hemming it in on the north and subjected ti dry winds sweeping down off the escarpment, Trieste is often covered with a layer of dust, like furniture left in an untended room.  With its mixture of Italian, Slavic, and Germanic influences, Trieste could be both cosmopolitan and backward. 

Multiple personalities are grist for psychiatry and Trieste adopted psychoanalysis with the zeal of a convert, notwithstanding Sigmund Freud's professional failure there as a young man.  In Silvia Bonucci's novel  A Voice In Time (2005)  the emotional claustrophobia  of the period 1900-1940 is dramatized through the decline of the Levi family.  Closer in spirit  and in time to Fotografia Wulz is Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno (1923), the diary of the repetitive compulsions of an old man, written down at the urging of his psychiatrist.  Like Zeno Cosini, with his mistresses and his inabaility to quit smoking, Trieste may appear outwardly unappealing but it is also lovable.

For further reading: La Trieste dei Wulz: 1860-1980 by P. Costantini, et al, Fratelli Alinari, Firenze.

Images: unless otherwise noted, all images are from the collection of the Alinari Archives, Museum of Photography, Florence.

1. Wanda Wulz - Cat Woman, 1932.
2. Wanda Wulz - Self-Portrait, c.1932.
3. Wanda Wulz - The Cat Without Me, 1932.
4. Carlo Wulz - title attributed: Baby Wanda In A Basket, c. 1904.
5. Marion Wulz - Jass-band, 1920.
6. Carlo Wulz - Portrait of Marion, 1927. 
7. Daniel Boudinet - Villa Fragiacomo In Trieste, Mediatehque, Paris.
8. Piero Fragiacomo -  Marina con barcho, Galleria Tommaso Marcato, Milan.
9. Egon Schiele - The Harbor at Trieste, 1907, Neue Galerie Am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz.
10. Ugi Fiumani - The Golden Hour, c. 1900-1930, Museo Revoltella, Trieste.
11.. Wanda Wulz - Three Hats, 1935.

The Voices

"It's OK for the rich and the lucky to keep still,
 no one want to know about them anyway,
But those in need have to step forward,
have to say: I am blind,
or: I'm about to go blind,
or: nothing is going well with me,
or: I have a child who is sick,
or: right there I'm sort of glued together...

And probably that doesn't do anything either.

"They have to sing; if they didn't sing, everyone
would walk past, as if they were fences or trees.

That's where you can hear good singing.

People really are strange: thye prefer
to hear castratos in boychoirs.

But God himself comes and stays a long time
when the world of half-people start to bore him."
 - title poem from The Voices by Rainer Maia Rilke, translated from the German by Robert Bly, Denver, The Alley Press: 1977.

Image: Paula Modersohn Becker - Blind Woman in the Woods, courtesy Temple University Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia.

Let There Be Light

The days get short and we renew our appreciation for artificial light.  Old advertisements have their charms, not least the game of spotting their borrowings from their fine art "betters."  The woman in her Viennese reform dress gazes skyward as if seeking the source of the wondrous new tungsten lamps.   Maybe her next job will be posing for Gustav Klimt, and why not?

Images:
1. Anonymous - Metal-threaded lamps with tungsten, 1900, Albertina Museum, Vienna.
2. Emil Preetorius - Licht und Schatten, 1910, Albertina Museum, Vienna.
3. Heinrich Lefler - Auerlicht, 1898, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.
4. unidentified artists - first prize poster for Festival of Electricity & Transportation, 1928, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
5.  Joe Loe - Motard Kerzen 1910, Albertina Museum, Vienna.

Paradise Without People

If nothing else united them,  Spanish explorers from the 16th century, 19th century gold prospectors,  and modern real estate speculators all shared the dream of California as  a paradise without people. No matter that the state took its name from the myth of a land peopled by black Amazons ruled by Queen Califa. 

Recently, in Landscapeland we looked at California through an art historical lens.  Another way to view  the California landscape is through the eyes of its inhabitants, absent from these sublime images,  and their conflicting aims.

Carmel-by-the-Sea, for example,  was founded by real estate developers in 1903 and  promoted as a colony for artists and writers.  After the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 Carmel and the entire Monterey Peninsula became the relocation destination for photographers, musicians, and theater people, too.

Industrialization in general scarcely  interested California artists  and the Southern Pacific Railroad in particular  was anathema to them, dramatically expressed in Frank Norris's best-selling novel The Octopus (1901) in a scene where a steam locomotive plows mercilessly through a flock of grazing sheep.   Businessmen promoted the state as agricultural cornucopia, which it was, through commercial art.   And "serious" artists like Granville Redmond chafed at demands  to produce fields of flowers.  You can see what Redmond was getting at if you compare his majestic California Poppy Fields with the recently auctioned Marsh Under Golden Skies

In  Our Italy (1891) essayist  Charles Dudley Warner was early to name some obvious similarities between the Golden State and the Mediterranean.  One can see his point in the work of local artists, including Arthur and Lucia Kleinhans Mathews.   Gottardo Piazzoni  's The Land  (at top)  evokes beginnings both Biblical and of the classical Greek and Roman varieties.

 When Leopold Hugo photographed the rock formation called the 'Gates of Night', cinematic was not yet an adjective and Hollywood was a sleepy village with a single trolley line.  Something about the swooping, jagged Pacific coastline was just waiting for the motion picture industry to arrive from the east coast.  California was ready for its close-up.

           

Landscapeland was posted here 0ctober 18, 2011.

 Images:

1. Gottardo  Piazzoni - The Land, 1915,  Berkeley Art Collection, CA.
2.Armin Hansen - Carmel Countryside at Night, undated, private collection, California.
3. Guy Rose - Carmel Dunes, 1918, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
4, Granville Redmond - California Poppy Field, 1926, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 
5. Granville Redmond - Marsh Under Golden Skies, no date, Bonham's & Butterfield's, Los Angeles/
6. Lucia Kleinhans Mathews -  Landscape with Tree, 1908, Museum of Fine Arts, San Francisco.
7. Leopold Hugo - Gates of Night, before 1906, San Diego Historical Society, La Jolla.
8. Anne M. Bremer (1868-1923)  - The Highlands - early 20th century, Museum of Fine Arts, San Francisco.

Face To Face

"...viewing a human face sets off a unique reaction in the human brain. This chemical reaction, not unlike addiction, occurs when we see a face or expression that pleases us, giving us a feeling of well-being. From infancy through old age, we are responsive to human features, sometimes with ambivalence, but always with meaning. " - anonymous collector

A.C., as I think of him (and his wife) are the anonymous benefactors who made possible a jewel-like  exhibition of portraits of all sorts at the Herbert Johnson Museum at Cornell University.  A small gallery suited the fifteen works, lending an intimacy to the experience even when, as is probably the case with a first century bust of Ptolemy of Mauretania, the intention was ceremonial.   Works of human revelation and contemplation, rather than formality and each one intended for the attentive viewer.

Four paintings by the German artist Max  Beckmann (1884-1950) are the centerpiece of the exhibition and suggest the qualities the collectors look for . A contemplative image of the artist's second wife Quappi, one of his friend the Alsatian engraver Sabine Hackenscmidt, and the two reproduced here.  A fiercely thoughtful gaze aimed straight at the viewer belies the height of his successful career, and hints  at the middle-aged Beckmann's attempt to understand the mystical aspects of life.  The Oyster-Eaters provides a challenge of another sort.  Quappi Beckmann lifts the oyster to her lips as Sabine Hackenschmidt looks on, eyebrow arched enigmatically.  A white-jacketed waiter stands behind.  What is last-noticed is an ominous gray face looming in the background that seems to represent all that came after the pinnacle of 1926 for these people.  The Nazis removed Beckmann from teaching and his works from museums, only to abuse them in displays of "Degenerate Art."   Years of living in poverty in Amsterdam efr the Beckmanns ended only when World War II ended.

This version of Incense by Belgian artist Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921)  was made ss a present for  his niece Gilberte on the occasion of  her first communion in 1917.  The better known version  from 1898, which is at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris .  A More intimate and personal vision, a close-up rendered against a neutral background, the priestess seems younger and more approachable - fitting for a young girl.

Balthus (1908-2001) often created images of young girls that are erotically charged.  Not so his Portrait of Rosabianca Skira, daughter of the renowned art published Albert Skira.  Balthus, the son of a Russian Jew,  fled the Nazi occupation of France during World War II for neutral Switzerland.  There Skira gave him employment on his new magazine Labyrinth.  The border painted around  the picture suggests a window sill, the  girl's arm  resting there.  She looks toward her future, which neither of us can see, with apparent calm, or perhaps the privacy of adolescence.

As with Balthus, so with Egon Schiele (1890-1918), it is the expressive faces that have joined this collection: Schiele's patron Karl Otten, Chief Inspector Benesh, and his frequent model Poldi, absorbed in thought.  Only in his clenched Self-Portrait does Schiele express the torment that we think of when we think of his work.  The arms, held tightly to his sides, are as expressive of emotion as the sound we imagine we hear coming from his mouth.

Face to Face, Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca, NY. , August 6 - October 30, 2011.

Images:
1. Max Beckmann - Self-portrait, 1926
2. Max Beckmann - The Oyster Eaters, 1943.
3. Fernand Khnopff - Incense, 1917. 
4. Balthus - Portrait of Rosabianca Skira, 1949.
5. Egon Schiele - Poldi, 1914
6. Egon Schiele - Self-portrait, 1910.

The War Of Nerves: From Peter Altenberg To Emily Holmes Coleman

"I will break all their heads
and lay them in neat rows
and we shall wave high the keys

and all of us shall dance in the snow." 

 - Emily Holmes Coleman, published in The Liberator

An abundance of trained psychologists in late 19^th century Vienna coincided neatly with the discovery of nerves.  Psychoanalysis became its classification system.  Nervous disorders were diagnosed as the response of the refined and affluent to modern life and doctors profited handsomely by treating them.  For this, Josef  Hoffmann was commissioned to design the Purkersdorf Sanitorium in 1905.   If that name is not familiar, Koloman Moser’s black and white checkered chairs are.

Mental illness, on the other hand,  had a long history, exemplified architecturally by the Vienna Narrenturn, or Fools’ Tower, the oldest asylum  in Europe.  A stone fortress built in 1784, it was a step up from the basic dank dungeon where people who were ‘difficult’ to deal with had long been confined. Distinctions between sanatorium and asylum were largely based on class differences. 

Our old friend Peter Altenberg,  social critic of fin-de-siecle Vienna, was of the class of brain-workers who suffered from a vexing assortment of melancholy symptoms that was labeled as neurasthenia: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, insomnia, fatigue, mood swings, migraines, phobias, and sexual dysfunction.  In his  Confessions of a Neurasthenic (1908), William Taylor Marrs wrote  "the best thing about neurasthenia is that it allows one to move in neurasthenic circles"  A sure sign of an exclusive club.. A steady diet of coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol kept Altenberg going.
 

.One of Altenberg's personal hells was the Steinhof Sanitorium where his brother Georg Egblander had him committed in April, 1913.  Being a writer, Altenberg told his side of the story in Das Alternberg Buch: 

“You rotten sod!  Despite my spending the last five months explaining to you that the Superintendant has it in for me and wants to ensure my physical, spiritual, and intellectual ruin, you have nevertheless collaborated with him…although he had declared to me of his own free will: “You are of course released by us doctors as fully cured.  It requires only the simple formality that the person who brought you here contacts us and fetches you. ‘…Since this message of redemption you have allowed days to pass, brother-murderer!”

 

In Sanatorium for Nervous Disorders (1913) Altenberg skewered doctors who turn a medical consultation into a battle of wits with their shallow ‘depth’ psychology.   He understood that it is difficult to live with mental problems in a society whose duplicities are only fortified by the uncooperative  individual. 

It was Peter Altenberg whose  review  for Simplicissmus in 1911 launched the career of painter Oskar Kokoschka as the "mad modernist."    Altenberg's skeptical attitude toward the linking of madness and talent was eminently reasonable, yet still unconventional.  

 “Van Gogh was a famous painter who was nevertheless interned in an asylum seven times.  But those who run around free are by no means ‘van Goghs’ for that reason…Madness is a chance additional extra, like a pimple or a bad cold. My dear sirs, whether normal or abnormal,  it is all a question of ‘original genius.’  Just because you think you are the ‘Emperor of China’ is of limited importance for humanity and, is significant only for the one sanatorium in which the worthless idiot, thanks to money paid by his relatives, terminates his days, that is to say years.   Nowadays people have a colossal concern for madmen who are nothing but madmen.  Just because there have been some who besides the remarkable performance of the brain, are also able to show evidence of other, more important achievements.” – 1911, translated from the German by Edward Neather. 

“Alone in her room at night she stood and pressed her face against the window.  It was the end of March and turned cold again.  And all the thumbs of ice began to whirl in shaking circles, keeping with the wind.  I shall have snow on my glassy fingers, and a shutter of snow on my grave tonight.” - excerpted from The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman, 1930.

Call it a sanitorium or an asylum, the individual is there because of an inability to function in the larger world.    The Shutter of Snow is a remarkable novel in both subject and technique, its author Emily Holmes Coleman unjustly forgotten.   Its title comes from Coleman’s intuitive connection of "heat with destruction and cold with freedom”.  The novel draws on Coleman's experience after the birth of her son John in 1924.

The novel's protagonist Marthe Gail is a young mother  unable to  care for her baby, confined to a mental hospital when she begins to hear voices.  Marthe's suffering is now understood as postpartum depression. Coleman brings us inside  Marthe's struggle to regain a stable identity and her desperate attempts to make herself heard. Her character  is a direct descendant of the narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic The Yellow Wallpaper (1892).

Visits from Marthe's widowed father are occasions of emotional turmoil,  his aggressive neediness is suffocating Marthe. Making. her frantic to escape their shared past, she retreats  into silence.  At the same she needs to speak her mind to important people in her life, her husband Christopher and her psychiatrist Dr. Brainerd, to explain herself to the world.  In  her struggle to regain a sense of self and her desperate attempts to make herself heard, Marthe Gail is the direct descendant of the narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic The Yellow Wallpaper (1892).

The Shutter Of Snow got a negative reception when it was published in 1930. Coleman's use of shifting viewpoints and her subject matter made critics uneasy. They expressed annoyance at the lack of quotation marks to set off conversations, forgetting that these same techniques had been used by Jane Austen and Gustave Flaubert.  When it came to the war of nerves the gift of a double vision was not enough; Alternberg's irony was more acceptable than Coleman's seriousness.

For an obscure author, Emily Holmes Coleman had an illustrious career. Born in Oakland, California in 1899, she lost her mother while a young girl, first by mental illness and then to death. Lonely years at boarding school were followed by four demanding years at Wellesley College. After graduation Emily Holmes married Lloyd Rig (Deke) Coleman, a psychologist. In 1925 they moved to France where Emily was the society editor for the Chicago Tribune and Lloyd worked in advertising. Coleman published stories and poems in transition, a magazine that styled itself the purveyor of "the revolution of the word."

Coleman's time in Europe was eventful. She spent a year in St. Tropez working as secretary to Emma Goldman, editing the anarchist's autobiography Living My Life (1931). While on the Riviera, Coleman became friends with the eccentric art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Back in Paris, Coleman read the manuscript version of Nightwood by fellow. Djuna Barnes. Few people remember that it was Coleman who engineered the publication of Nightwood in 1936. Her skills at suggestion and persuasion worked so well that editor T.S. Eliot and the general public believed it had been Eliot's idea. His enthusiasm for the book led him to call Nightwood "the best book written by a woman in the 20th century."  The Shutter Of Snow should have been so lucky.

The Shutter of Snow is published in the U.S. by Dalkey Archive.

Images:

1 & 3..  Richard Lutsch - Figures for entrance to Purkersdorf Sanitorium, 1905, Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg.,

2. Koloman Moser - chairs for Purkersdorf Sanitorium, c. 1904, Leopold Museum, Vienna.

4.Oskar Kokoschka - The Tempest, 1914, Kunstmuseum, Basel.

5.. Erika Giovanna Klein - Eyes, 1922, Kovacek-Spiegelgasse Gemaldegalerie, Vienna.

6. Lucy Schwob a/k/a Claude Cahun  Self-portrait with Masks, c. 1919, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nantes.

7. Lucy Schwob a/k/a/ Claude Cahun - title attributed: Behind Bars, private collection, France.

8. unidentified photographer - Emma Goldman and Emily Holmes Coleman, Virago Books, London.