MARION GREENWOOD: PORTRAIT AND SELF-PORTRAIT: A BIOGRAPHY

By Joanne B. Mulcahy

The University of Alabama Press. 360 pages. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-6198-3

Reviewed by Jim Burns

Mural painting perhaps doesn’t rate too highly in most people’s estimation when it comes to thinking about art. Yes, we’re amused by Banksy’s exploits and there may be some murals that earn respect because of their historical value. But reviews rarely focus on murals as opposed to art in galleries. Other countries have different traditions. Mexico, for example, where Marion Greenwood, the subject of this engaging biography, spent time in the 1930s and later. She carried the lessons she learned into the work she produced in the United States when, for a period of a few years, the state sponsored artists to paint murals in post offices, schools, hospitals, and government buildings. This was as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) programme to provide employment for impoverished artists, writers, and musicians.

Marion Greenwood was born in Brooklyn in 1909. Her father had ambitions to produce art, but economic circumstances forced him to earn a living as a house painter. Greenwood’s mother, who was to play a large, if not always beneficial role in her life, wrote poetry and followed the theosophical teachings of Madame Blavatsky. Greenwood had a sister, Grace, who was also an artist, and brothers who became commercial artists. Marion herself showed promise when she was young and left school at the age of fifteen to enrol at the Art Students League in New York. Joanne B. Mulcahy notes that, although Greenwood’s family were probably looked on by their neighbours as “bohemians”, she rejected the description. But Mulcahy points out that, in fact, “she would perfectly realise the bohemian’s heady mixture of art, hedonism, and dissent from bourgeois life”.

An early influence on Greenwood was John Sloan, a painter associated with the Ashcan School, so called because the group looked to life on the streets for inspiration, and portrayed everyday activities and their surroundings. Greenwood was never inclined to favour abstract art and was always a social realist in terms of what she put on canvas or when painting murals.

It was around the same time that Greenwood was a student that she visited Woodstock, an artists’ colony located “a hundred miles up the Hudson River”. Woodstock now tends to arouse visions of the famous 1969 music festival, but it had a history going back to 1902 when Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, “a British dreamer”, established a utopian community in the area. His inspiration was the Arts and Crafts movement’s “revolt against industrialisation and its discontents”. By the time Greenwood arrived, there was a thriving artistic gathering of painters, poets, musicians, and others, in and around Woodstock. She studied with the German-born artist Emil Ganso, “excited by the possibilities of lithography”. I think it’s fair to say that she took to the bohemian atmosphere quite readily, and joined in the social activities of the community. There is a quote from something her mother said that might indicate an aspect of Greenwood’s life-style: “Marion isn’t a bad girl, she just gets lonely at night”.

I’m moving quickly through Greenwood’s involvements. She was invited to Yaddo in 1927, and was asked to paint a portrait of Spencer Trask, one of the founders of this famous artists’ retreat. When she was paid one thousand dollars for the commission she decided to head to Europe with her mother and sister. While she was in Paris she attended two schools, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Colarossi, mixed with other American artists and, Mulcahy says, “experimented artistically, inspired by the buzz of modernism”. She hadn’t yet moved towards murals, so was painting portraits and street scenes with elements of European expressionism showing in the “loose brushstrokes” and “exaggerated features”. She was particularly impressed by the work of Kathe Kollwitz. It was in Paris also that she met the sculptor Isamu Nogachi, who became one of her numerous lovers. There is a photograph of them together in the book, and it is convincing evidence of why so many men found her appealing.

Back in America she studied with the German artist Winold Reiss in New York (she created a conté-crayon portrait of him which captures some of his intensity), and then visited Taos in New Mexico, where she painted the portrait “Native Boy”, a picture of a young Navajo (bribed to pose with a bar of chocolate) and which was, according to Mulcahy, “a violation” of Navajo traditions and offensive in their eyes. In New York, however, it was acclaimed when shown in an exhibition, with viewers seeing it as “exotic”.

Greenwood continued to frequent Reiss’s studio in Greenwich Village and, exhibiting with the G.R.D. studio group, sold several paintings. She was starting to make a name for herself in the New York art world, and sketched and painted portraits of “leading figures like George Gershwin and Buckminster Fuller”.  In the early-1930s she “worked for the theatre section of the Sunday New York Times, which gave her an opportunity to “express her genre-crossing interests in music, dance and theatre to match those in literature and visual art”.  This sort of work did bring in some money, and would have made her family happy. Mulcahy says that the Depression “intensified (their) economic woes” and “Whenever she moved away from lucrative work they hounded her” and saw “her adherence to fine art only a way of escape and selfish”.

It was during another sojourn at Yaddo that Greenwood met Philip Stevenson and started an affair with him. He was a writer, married, and some years older than her. Later, he was a Hollywood screenwriter who would be blacklisted and a novelist who wrote, for political reasons, under the name of Lars Lawrence. Greenwood’s episode with him wasn’t a happy one, and she turned for advice to another Yaddo resident, Josephine Herbst. She was a published novelist and journalist and, with her husband, John Herrmann, also a writer, was politically committed to left-wing causes. This isn’t the place to say too much about Herrmann, who wrote novels and short stories (his “The Big Short Trip”, published in Scribner’s in 1932, is a classic of Depression literature) and was an active communist who, around 1950, moved to Mexico in an attempt to avoid the attentions of the FBI when they were investigating  his links to Alger Hiss.

Greenwood’s relationship with Herbst was to become a long-lasting one and went much deeper than friendship. It was a love-affair that continued while Herbst and Herrmann were still married and for some years after, though it seems to have been the only same-sex relationship that Greenwood had. Certainly, it never stopped her short-term or longer  liaisons with various men. There is, incidentally, a character in Josephine Herbst’s 1947 novel, Somewhere the Tempest Fell, supposedly based on Greenwood.  

In December 1932 Greenwood went to Mexico with Herbst and Herrmann. There’s no doubt that, by then, she shared their political views, even if not to the level that they did. And she had met the Mexican muralists David Siqueiros (a Stalinist supporter) and José Clemente Orozco when they visited New York. She had yet to encounter the man who was seen as the leading Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera. Greenwood was excited by the prospect of working on murals.

She was hired to paint a mural for a hotel, a useful exercise, though it meant that what she painted was restricted by its context. Mulcahy says that “The design mimics the ascent of a hotel guest up the stairwell”. What she really wanted to paint were the ordinary people of Mexico, and she had a greater opportunity to do that with work on what was known as the Taxco Market Mural, a postcard of which is reproduced in the book. It shows Mexican men, women, and children, all of them portrayed with care and respect for their dignity. Greenwood did not reduce them to figures of fun or menace, as so many American filmmakers and writers often tended to do.

There were other trips to Mexico, including one where she had an affair with Diego Rivera. And there is evidence to indicate that she had, in some ways, grown closer to the Communist Party. Mulcahy is of the opinion that, “Once just an acolyte, Marion now fully embraced communist rhetoric”. Her “embrace of a radical agenda wasn’t a huge shift. She was committed to painting the poor, workers, and people otherwise invisible. The Depression’s devastation reinforced that commitment. Now her passion had a name”. The Mexican mural, “The Industrialisation of the Countryside” is a good example of her concerns. Was she ever an actual member of the Communist Party, either in Mexico or the United States? Mulcahy doesn’t enter into any discussions about it. And Greenwood appears to have turned against communism in the 1950s, though that could have been a protective measure when America was experiencing McCarthyism.

On her return to New York in 1936, Greenwood worked on a twelve-by-fifty- foot mural for a housing project in Camden, New Jersey, which showed “women clustered around sewing machines, workers welding steel for ships, men filling a bin with Campbell’s soup cans, and that symbol of the industrial age, a smokestack”. She had met Charles Fenn, and married him in June 1937. The couple visited Europe in 1939, and on their return Greenwood painted a mural for the Red Hook Housing Project in Brooklyn. A photograph of her, suitably clad in overalls and standing on the scaffolding, catches her at work on what must have been a fairly large undertaking for a single artist and a couple of assistants.

Another stay at Yaddo brought her into contact with Harry Roskolenko. He was a poet with links to the Trotskyist movement in America. His 1938 collection, Sequence on Violence, was presumably what qualified him for Yaddo, and Greenwood appears to have got along with him, despite any political differences they may have had. According to Mulcahy, they “haunted the Saratoga Spring dive bars where she sketched jockeys from the nearby racetrack”. Roskolenko later published novels, travel books, and memoirs, including When I was Last on Cherry Street, a  fast-moving and colourful account of growing up in poverty on the Lower East Side, going to sea when he was thirteen, political commitments, and much more.

To earn money from her lithographs Greenwood arranged for her work to be handled by an organisation called Associated American Artists (AAA) which sold prints through department stores and similar outlets. It’s easy to understand that, with the potential buyers not being art intellectuals, nor radically inclined, the subject matter of the prints tended to keep clear of the disturbing and the contentious. The experimental wasn’t popular. There is nothing wrong with someone wanting an attractive picture on their wall, and the AAA helped numerous artists to earn some money by marketing their work outside the elitist channels of galleries, critics, and art dealers that many people never experience. Mulcahy says that Greenwood placed prints through AAA for over thirty years. In March 1944 she had a solo show of her paintings at the AAA gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York. Three of them sold and the exhibition received positive reviews in the Herald Tribune, Art Digest, and the New York Times. She had gained some attention but worried that changes were underway that might make her realistic style seem dated. She was suspicious of new movements, and described surrealism as “a smart fashionable racket as is much of the abstract”.

Charles Fenn had been away for most of the war years, serving with the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA), and though Greenwood spent time with him in Hong Kong in the immediate postwar period, their marriage was failing. They divorced in 1950. Mulcahy says that Greenwood was increasingly anxious about her age, her financial situation, and her capacity to earn a living from art: “Everyone thinks I’m so strong and gay and independent and talented and still beautiful etc. etc. Look what it’s brought me – nothing!”. She wasn’t a practical person when it came to questions of money, housing, and such matters, and had never paid a great deal of attention to cooking and simple domestic concerns. Her view was that “life must be sacrificed for art”.

She needed someone to look after her, and luckily someone did turn up. Bob Plate was an aspiring writer, ten years younger than Greenwood, and much more astute with regard to establishing some sort of routine that would allow them both to work at writing and painting while keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table. Their relationship did help Greenwood to lead a more stable life. She won a prize in 1952 for one of her paintings, was hired by the Standard Oil Company to “document their facilities and employees” in Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Trinidad, and in 1954 was invited to paint a mural at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

She continued to be active as an artist through the 1950s and into the 1960s, travelling to Mexico and Spain, and painting a mural entitled “Tribute to Women” at Syracuse University. But she had doubts about her work, and  felt that having to stick to realism, when she often wanted to veer more to the kind of expressionism she’d seen in Europe, had restricted what she could have achieved. She also thought that, with reference to murals, “a decade of painting walls….. had delayed her command of easel portraits and entry to galleries”. It tied in with her re-assessment of her earlier political beliefs. By the mid-1950s she claimed to no longer have any faith in communism and was of the opinion that adhering to its ideology had imposed a “rigid idea of propaganda which I think was very bad for all of art at that time”.    

In September 1969 Greenwood suffered a cerebral haemorrhage while working on a lithograph. She lingered in hospital until February 1970, when she died.

I have to admit that I knew little about Marion Greenwood before I read this book. I’d seen her referred to here and there in connection with mural painting, and I’d read Elinor Langer’s Josepine Herbst: The Story She Could Never Tell, in which Greenwood is mentioned a number of times. But Joanne B. Mulcahy fills out the picture in much greater detail than I’ve been able to indicate in this review. What we get is a story of a woman who was determined to establish a place for herself in the male-dominated art world. She had flaws as a person, and Mulcahy doesn’t back away from making them part of her narrative. And certain people might have glibly criticised Greenwood for taking on some commercial work, and for compromising by painting portraits that catered to bourgeois tastes. But having inflexible principles doesn’t pay the rent.

Marion Greenwood : Portrait and Self-Portrait is a well-researched book that not only looks at the life of its subject, but places her in the context of the times she lived through and the people she met. It has numerous notes, a useful bibliography, and relevant illustrations, though I wish there were more of them.

Having enjoyed reading what Joanne B. Mulcahy has to say, it may seem churlish to point out a few errors. The IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) are referred to as The International Workers of the World in the text, but oddly enough appear correctly in the index. John Herrmann loses an ‘r’ and is called John Hermann. And on page 149, Charles Fell, in a scene set in 1937, is said to think of a song, “Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger”. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it was the hit tune from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, which only opened on Broadway in 1949. Minor mistakes, perhaps, but an alert editor should have spotted them.   

 

 

 

 

 

       

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

A