Alone Together: Juliana Force & Guy Pene du Bois

"Solitude does not consist of living alone; it consists in living with others, with people who take no interest in you." - excerpt from Diary of a Chambermaid by Octave Mirbeau  (1900), translated from the French by Douglas Jarman

History is not kind to most reputations.   Juliana Force (1876-1948) and Guy Pène du Bois (1884-1958), to name just two, are no longer so well known as they were in life.   This is a more  because our collective memory is always almost full rather than from a lack of interesting material.. 

Juliana Force was the founding director of the Whitney Museum of American Art but that hasn't counted for much to historians who  have given most of the credit to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, heiress to a railroad fortune and the granddaughter of  "Commodore" Vanderbilt. Force, a private secretary with  ambition plus abundant but unfocused energy, was the daughter of a grocer from a small town in Pennsylvania.  Yet the meeting of these unlikely two in 1906 set in motion a chain of events that led to the founding of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1931.  They opened the Whitney Studio Club in 1914 where their exhibitions became known for their unpredictability and their inconsistent quality.  What they shared was a fervent desire to advance American art and marriages that did not get in the way of their efforts.  

Early in her married life, Whitney realized that her husband would not be faithful and turned her energy elsewhere, while Force was so drawn to Whitney' and her circle that  that her own husband  was reduced to a background figure in her life.   Beyond that, they both suffered from slings and arrows hurled in their direction by male artists and critics.  Whitney always thought that her work as a sculptor would have been received more seriously had she been a man and that others believed the commissions that came her way were unearned, a byproduct of her wealth, while Force was labeled in unflattering terms as being ":arrogant" and even "hysterical", at least partly, I suspect, because her family lacked social standing.

Force enjoyed the trappings of art as much as art itself: she delighted in meeting artists, giving speeches, and attending exhibition openings like the one pictured above.  When Pene du Bois painted this picture of Force in 1921, he was an up-and-comer in the New York art world, having scored his first solo exhibition at the Whitney Studio Club just three years earlier.  The red-haired Force (her name as apt as that of a character in Pilgrim's Progress) stands, her back to the viewer, as she looks at a painting. She is wearing a dress that no faint-hearted woman would have dared at the time.   The  studio itself is clad in rich colors, another anachronism, so different from the studied neutrality of modern art galleries.

Pene du Bois was, as his name suggests, was as much a product of his French ancestry as his American upbringing.  Although he studied with William Merritt Chase (an impressionist of sorts) and then with Robert Henri (of the Ashcan School), Pene du Bois was never associated with any particular group. By necessity, he earned money by writing art and music criticism for various publications, an occupation that put him in the public spaces that he chose to depict in his paintings.

So how does  Juliana Force at the Whitney Studio Club fit into this artist's work?   In retrospect, the Pene du Bois paintings separate into two groups, one that shows smartly dressed young women strolling in public, smoking, and sitting in cafes.  The other group, including the one above, shows women and men together on social occasions, surrounded by invisible tension.  How would I describe these pictures?   It seems to me that in a Pene du Bois painting a woman is never so alone as when she is with a man, a feeling many of us know well.

Note: When Royal Cortissoz published an updated edition of Samuel Isham's influential History of American Painting in 1926, he listed Guy Pene du Bois as an important contemporary artist.  Then in 1931,  Cortissoz published a monograph on Guy Pene du Bois with a forward by Juliana Force.

For additional reading:
Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art by Avis Berman, New York, Atheneeum :1990.

Image: Guy Pene du Bois - Juliana Force at the Whitney Studio Club, 1921, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC.