Exodus • The artist John Baldessari, who died in 2020, was born in 1933, in National City, California, an industrial, working-class suburb that borders the south San Diego neighborhoods of Encanto, Skyline, and Paradise Hills. He taught at community colleges, was well-liked, and pursued the shock of the new, movements with manifestos, in the 1960s, many of which were trapped, as the critic Barry Schwabsky wrote, “between expressionist agony and academic restraint.”1 He stayed in National City and searched for venues to show his work. He got so tired of rejection that he, like lots of talented locals, left his “invisible” hometown for Los Angeles at 37. We read a lot about him these days because, post-death, art elites are finally, truly, prizing his work, one of the nimblest practitioners of Conceptualism, the postmodern irreverence that art can be about art or against art.

A trickster in the tradition of the Dadaists—put a frame around anything or stick an object in a museum and, set apart, voilà, it’s “art”—Baldessari made a series of images, combining banal snapshots, often over- or underdeveloped, with a mundane comment, in Calvin Tomkins’s phrase, “photography-based art-about-art.” He drove around National City and took Polaroids of the ordinary: local stores, billboards, street scenes. He attached witty titles like “Econ-o-Wash, 14th and Highland” to one shot or, to a whole series of photos, “The Backs of All the Trucks Passed While Driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, Calif., Sunday 20 Jan. 63.” These pieces noticed the unsightliness of the everyday with a kind of eventless curiosity. He dubbed one set of such photo-texts “Pure Beauty.” (His standard flippant response: “Truth is beautiful, no matter how ugly it is.”) As for his product, he conceptualized an “art” that would take minimal effort to produce—stretch a canvas, glom on via photo-emulsion a photograph, send it off to a trained sign painter to letter the title on the lower half of the canvas. The titles were tongue-in-cheek: “Is this art?” or “I will not make any more boring art.” He bent-if-not-broke our expectations about fine art as “labor-intensive”—the sedulous genius, like Rembrandt, who never leaves his atelier. Instead, Baldessari emphasized the DIY view that the very specialness of the found and the accidental, the wry and the plain, had value if only to its facetious creator.

Developing this anti-aesthetic in the late 1950s, early 1960s, Baldessari pitched local galleries and was laughed out. As object and muse, National City, famous for its “Mile of Cars,” not its licentious spirit, was an oxymoron—still is. Better put, it’s a place that isn’t quite “here” or “there,” because of its banality, its obviousness, yet is seen, recorded, and interpreted by the artist. If anywhere, the unnoticeable is in-between, its identity desultory, its location ever near-to. In the environs of San Diego, National City is near-to but not the beach; it’s near-to but not downtown; it’s near-to but not the Navy-anchored bay; it’s near-to but not the border with Mexico. It’s close by the jewels of Balboa Park, the coastal surf funk, fresh seafood restaurants, harbor cruises, the Vietnamese strip malls—all that just a short drive away, provided, these days, you can find parking. National City is set apart but so is any other mundane landmark: Baldessari’s point.

Nothing stirring, Baldessari sought action in the mecca to the north, artists and art investors in Los Angeles, the historical ground of the California Impressionists and Pop Art formalists like Ed Ruscha. Baldessari I-5’ed himself to LA and studied at the Otis Art Institute (1957-1959), after which he returned to National City and taught classes. (Famously, he had a degree not in studio art but in art education and was an inspiring teacher. Ever the self-mocking truth teller, he said, “I didn’t even know who Matisse or Picasso were when I went to college.”) In the 1960s, he would drive to LA once a month to view exhibits (nothing in San Diego stirred him), among them a Duchamp retrospective in Pasadena as well as Andy Warhol’s first one-person show of Campbell’s soup cans at the Ferus Gallery near the Sunset Strip. After Baldessari fashioned the photo-text images, David Antin, of the newly staffed Fine Arts Department at UC San Diego, arranged for a show—where else but the very hip Molly Barnes Gallery in LA. Antin said later that “There was a deadpan comedy about those literal pictures of a desperately uninteresting town [National City]—the image of provincialism as a front for considerable intelligence and wit.”

Which, because of such praise, invites the question: How much can a desperately sad and plain-Jane hometown absorb one’s artistic interest? Apparently, quite a lot.

Though very few works he did until 1968 attracted buyers, Baldessari felt the photo-text pieces captured his nice-guy/bad-boy sensibility. Memorializing his self-definition was an epiphany: For a commemorative performance piece, he decided to burn everything (123 pieces) he’d done prior to 1966, except the photo-text images. He called the conflagration the Cremation Project and, in its honor, had the following statement notarized: “[A]ll works of art done by the undersigned [J.B.] between May 1953 and March 1966 in his possession as of July 24, 1970 were cremated on July 24, 1970 in San Diego, California.” The sole commonality these “works of art” had was that they never sold.2 To bury them, respectfully, he searched for a local mortuary who might burn the paintings; most said no until one finally agreed, but only after hours. Of the ashes left, he had them baked into “cookies” and put into a single jar: Another work of art, exiled from itself, but still, for sale.

Post-blaze, Baldessari worried that he’d never get out of National City. He was married with two kids; he loved teaching and his students but despaired—not even the Cremation Project put him on the map or into the discussion. Years later, in 1996 and lionized by contemporary critics and collectors, he recalled his “fond frustration” with San Diego as a place he knew he had to leave: “There should be more than one newspaper in the town,” he said. “There should be more than one or two art critics. That’s just for openers. The same things still remain twenty-plus years after I left San Diego. Why? Everything else has grown. I don’t get it.”3

In 1970, he took a job at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, a half-hour northeast of Los Angeles, the Disney-funded school where animators and artists of all stripes study. There, he mentored many artists (the collagist David Salle was one) who diverged from Baldessari’s conceptualism but did absorb his love of the double-take, the lie that tells the truth. Within a year of relocating to Santa Monica, he had his first New York exhibition. (Alas, none of those works sold either, so he really must be a genius!) In time, artists and critics and the fickle public cottoned-to his experimentation, perhaps, got the joke, often on them. Which funny or not still posed a fundamental question: Exactly what might art be other than what it had been?

The Way Out Is The Way Back • In 2007, to that fundamental question, the market dug deep in its pockets and produced an answer. Baldessari’s “Quality Material,” a canvas from his National City period, dated 1967-68, on which he printed this text (quality material - - - close inspection - - good workmanship. all combined in an effort to give you a perfect painting) sold at Christie’s for $4.4 million. Today, it’s worth double that.

What a minute. How’s that possible? Baldessari’s drive-by photos of corner gas stations, wry observations “stating the obvious,” a picture of a man standing in front of the trunk of a palm so that the palm seems to grow out of the man’s head, titled “Wrong,” were, by the 2000s, hanging in cutting-edge galleries and echoey art museums, bought at auction and displayed in the Park Avenue apartments of the hedge-fund horde. Who suddenly found value in his pieces? Guessing how the market works is pure divination. Still, once the critical cohort noted that Baldessari owed context and inspiration to the ridiculed backwater of National City, well, that assessment kick-started an awakening, which said, there was a plan in place, unbeknownst to every interest, including the artist, all along.

So such becomes his legacy. His hometown—and much less his LA getaway—shaped his creed that the blander the subject matter, the more the artist’s capture of that blandness startles us. Eventually, the idea is institutionalized: what in the present is not art and misunderstood may be art only the future lets us get, may be worth the investment. I find this intriguing, for it elevates—and has made permanent—the artist to seek marginalization as a rite of passage. In his own way, Baldessari had to self-marginalize his anarchic vision of National City, feel a failure for doing so, burn a good deal of the work he was right that few cared for (maybe even him), and leave his surroundings for the moneyed and academic opportunities in the artsy locus 100 miles north. There, he manifested recognition, in a sense, agenting his own reception. I wonder whether this self-representation, the hyper-individualizing of the artist as brand from the get-go (think Jeff Koons, Thomas Kinkade), wasn’t Baldessari’s discovery, which nowadays is de rigueur for the “influencer.”

Perhaps this life-art mirror, indebted to Duchamp and John Cage, rewired Baldessari as well, in the 1960s and throughout his career. As art critic Hugh Davies has written, National City is “no longer an artistic wilderness and certainly [the artist has become] a prophet in his own land.”4 Indeed, his recording its uneventuality and abandoning it for fame and fortune elsewhere is a grand paradox. And yet the grandness congeals only after his death when we see that the way out of National City is also the way back. To redefine home as exile means having both and neither.

Exile • For me, Baldessari’s “meaning” resides less in his art and more in his life, the gutsy use, elegant and inelegant, of his escape hatches. (I admit to my bias on how the artist’s autobiography creates the artist’s creative content, in part, because he illustrates my thesis—where he’s from and what he left says the most about his composition. I realize such may resemble a People magazine approach to cultural interpretation, but so be it.) Another fascination about Baldessari is that because of his love of the superficial, he’s comfortable being banished from the craftsman and aesthetic sides of art, landing, instead, between huckster and dilettante, a playfulness reminiscent of the Futurists and Fluxus. Think of the perseverance that artists had to have 50 years ago to be so far outside convention as one of few means to christen a new convention. 

Exile seems right—to leave or to be forced out. In his case, personal, geographical, artistic, a clumsily confounding artist-less art. Namesaked in his classic text-piece: Everything Is Purged from This Painting But Art, No Ideas Have Entered This Work. Voilà, “a painting,” which is an artistic product since “no ideas have entered the work.” Hah! The very idea is that ideas have been “purged” so the result can only be “art.” Hah! Hah!

Once Baldessari became an “LA artist,” he announced that he “wasn’t an LA artist” and, instead, fancied himself a global creator. In his career, he left any group that critics repurposed him among, even if it meant dodging categories was his celebrity more so than his painting, famous for avoiding fame. What good was trading the obscurity of the hapless non-scenery in San Diego with the buddy-boy fraternity of the LA art world when the whole point was to shed identities, not to accrue them? Baldessari wanted to be everywhere and nowhere, conceptual and post-conceptual and nonconceptual. Rootlessness propounded theorylessness, and he did yeoman’s work resisting artistic tags—minimalist, deconstructionist, anti-hierarchical, obscurantist, significant, none of which fit until, later in the game, the art circles proclaimed him an exemplary postmodernist (the all-purpose tag for the many who have never fit). Which meant, as Christopher Butler writes, “It was not the object itself” that counted in the postmodernist’s work “but the conceptual processes behind it.”5 By all means, something must count. Such concepts seem to require an idea before an artist executes. Or the artist needed to think relentlessly about the making of the work while the work was being made, so the work didn’t sideline its idea and fall to improvisation, by definition, the absence of thought: first stroke, best stroke. The work had to be the end result of an inner process that thought it into evidentiary being and, at the same time, seemed whimsically of the moment.

Much art, at least, the derring-do, has this quality of exile—to abscond and become itself because it’s been uprooted. It has left the realm of what it was or should have been, for those things were too limiting. Baldessari violated what the artist and critic had agreed to, namely, that prevalent images and techniques and membership in a historical continuity constituted the content. From that he was exiled or he self-exiled. Take your pick. And there’s a tasty third slice: Baldessari first made a lot of stuff, then jettisoned himself and the pieces (by burning most of it) to enter a new naked realm and meander without an idea where he was except elsewhere. 

It’s also exilic to flee, that is, prior to being forced out, deracinated. Realizing (often too late) that the authorities are coming for your removal. The Jews exiled from their native land in Palestine and in their adopted home, Central Europe, millennia later. Adam and Eve banished from the Garden. In some religions, a people spend their lives in exile from their true home, Heaven for many, a Rest Area from which they came and to which they’ll return. (God sent them out of Paradise and onto a baleful earth so they’d appreciate the little house on the prairie once they returned, conditionally, of course.) Add Dante, exiled from Florence, or Pasternak, exiled within Russia, for the ripest of sins: poetry against church and state. To be expelled, sent off, isled like Napoleon or Papillon. To be expatriated. Or, contrarily, to be exiled for treason and wander the seas by ship like the man without a country.

And another meaning for exile: to thin, to attenuate, to reduce: to become meager, scanty, lean, barren, poor, to disembowel. The OED brings this to life: “an actual division of the whole into so many subtile, exile, invisible particles.” A whole can be minced and produce not a loss of matter but matter’s far-flung disaggregation and disbursement. Broken away from its original constitution. A scattering. The Big Bang expending matter into an expansively exiling universe. 

Attending this sense of dispersal is the transference of reality to appearance, a concept whose loveliness Baldessari might have approved: “It is not . . . the paper that is, in fact, the substitute for money but something still more exile; the promise . . . stamped upon it.”

That an entity can have a representative value that is exiled from itself yet still, somehow, retain its value. A painting sells for $1 million, its worth no longer intrinsic, if it ever was. Its worth resides solely in its exchange—the canvas as a commodity for the person who possesses the money to buy and own it: provenance. 

Enlarge that to the artist who must leave his home/hometown for recognition, a career, or just raw adventure. A constituent necessity within that home/hometown is missing. The artist wants it and espies it elsewhere, in the gallery promises of Los Angeles or New York or Houston, of a savvy market and its critical buzz. And there I find the final lesson of Baldessari: the place from which he is exiled or self-exiles must exist as less than, as a reverse elsewhere. Once he got to LA and felt some degree less homeless, of settledness, he realized that ending up there, not here, was his fate. The fate of the pushed out was to begin pushing himself. 

Why has no one but me, a literary critic, made this point?

I don’t get it.

Journalist, book/music critic, and memoirist Thomas Larson is the author of Spirituality and the Writer: A Personal Inquiry (Swallow Press). He has also written The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease (Hudson Whitman), The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ (Pegasus Press), and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative (Swallow Press). He is a 24-year staff writer of longform journalism for the San Diego Reader, a seven-year book review editor for River Teeth, and a former music critic for the Santa Fe New Mexican. www.thomaslarson.com

As a young man, I knew exactly where all three of A. P. Ryder's paintings hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. These pieces, diminutive even for easel paintings, were like three odd jewels almost hidden in a corner of the American wing. I would go there to study these tortured-looking paintings. They were like nothing else in the museum, their skins cracked and oozing oil from thick brushstrokes, with paint globs in some parts and scraped down to the gesso in others.  I didn’t know much about technique at the time, and these were the only Ryders I had ever seen, I don’t know that I understood then the effect of light he was trying to capture, but the paintings had done their job and grabbed my attention. 

Ryder’s The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse) is possibly the most notorious painting in a body of work known for being odd by a painter whose career and life remain somewhat of a mystery. He was active for about 30 years and yet generated fewer than 200 paintings. Regardless, he gained both commercial and critical success and was sought out long after he retreated into a self-imposed hermitage in his New York apartment. Death on a Pale Horse was the last major work he painted and perhaps the reason he stopped painting all together.  

Alpert Pinkham Ryder was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1847, just about the time Herman Melville was making the town infamous by writing it into his forthcoming masterpiece Moby-Dick. Little is known about Ryder’s childhood or early life until his family uprooted and moved to New York City in 1867 to join his brother who was having great success there as a restaurateur.

He was apprenticed to portraitist and miniature painter William Edgar Marshall from 1870-73, 1874-75. At the same time, he studied at the National Academy of Design where he exhibited his first work in 1873. Ryder's first known works were much like those of his contemporaries: open-air landscapes where men worked with their animals, appearing minuscule against the immensity of wild nature all about them. 

In 1877 Ryder traveled to Europe for the first time. When he returned, the influence of contemporary symbolism he saw in France became evident in his work, which also had become less vibrant in color but more nuanced in tone. Some of his pieces from this period are almost monochrome. Back in New York, he helped found the Society of American Artists with whom he showed his work from 1878 - 1887. 

By the mid-1880s his paintings began to focus on scenes from literature, operas, and Bible verses. These dramatic pieces used elements from the Barbizon School that was popular in France at the time and the Dutch tonalists, but his style was becoming ever more unique. He experimented with layering heavy paint over still-wet coats of paint beneath. He scraped and layered his paintings, searching for a way to create a luminosity that emanates from within the painting. This technique was perhaps most effective in the nocturnal seascapes under the moonlight for which he is probably best known. 

In 1895 Ryder painted The Race Track ( Death on a Pale Horse), which would have marked a new period for him if it hadn’t been his last major work. The canvas size is larger by half than his usual work. The paint body was slightly thinner, but he was still employing the techniques he had worked and reworked to create the haunting light of the piece. 

He painted the work in effigy of a friend, a waiter who served in his brother’s restaurant, who committed suicide after losing his life savings at a horse race, a sure thing, that like most sure things, wasn't.

 “…[the waiter] told me that he had saved up $500 and that he had placed every penny of it on Hanover winning this race. The next day the race was run, and, as racegoers will probably remember, Hanover came in third. I was immediately reminded that my friend the waiter had lost all his money. That dwelt in my mind, as for some reason it impressed me very much, so much so that I went around to my brother’s hotel for breakfast the next morning and was shocked to find my waiter friend had shot himself the evening before. This fact formed a cloud over my mind that I could not throw off, and 'The Race Track' is the result.” In the artist’s own words as reprinted in McBride, ​“News and Comment,” quoted in Broun, Albert Pinkham Ryder, 1989.

The racetrack centered in the painting's almost otherwise barren landscape disappears over the horizon in an infinite loop. The course is surrounded by a shabby fence that is already broken open just at the viewer's eye level where a fat serpent hovers, flicking its tongue towards the almost skeletal rider on its pale horse. The painting is rich with symbolism. Death rides the pale horse forever, always just on the other side of a fragile border which is broken open by the serpent of temptation who guides the viewer towards the track and into the reach of Death's great sweeping scythe. The only tree that stands is dead, perhaps a farm long abandoned fuses with the forest in the background under what seems an indifferent sun that casts a cold light. 

The death of his friend must have affected him deeply for this to be his last major painting, one that he worked on for as many as fifteen years. Building it up, scraping it down, submerging it in tin-lined drawers full of oils as he did with so many of his pieces. From 1900 on he did little more than rework old pieces as he slipped into a kind of self-imposed exile among his rooms. 

Still, his paintings remained popular and he was a venerated personality in the art world. Younger painters and artworld hangers-on sought him out and he welcomed them into his home, cluttered and filthy as it was reported to be. 

In 1913 he was honored by his peers to hang ten pieces at the now-famous 1913 New York Armory show, a show that established New York’s place among the cities of Europe where great art was being made and could be viewed. It was the first major show of modern art in the United States and resulted in a lawsuit that defined modern art in terms of tax duty compared to appliances, a judgment which import-exporters still go by. 

By 1915 Ryder's health was failing and he ceased working altogether. In 1917 he died among friends who took care of him at the end of his life. Ryder’s popularity waned in general postwar, as American art took on a grander scale, even though many of those artists were inspired by his work. For painters, though he has always been there to study. Like some sort of alchemist, he transformed his works into living things with sagging skins that cracked, bunched, and split, releasing trickles of amber from their wounds. There’s no doubt that his paintings look different today from when he painted them because of their never-drying properties, but they still retain the ethereal light he sought with his technique. 

John McMahon is a freelance writer/former art world schmuck who now lives on a beach in Thailand.

“I am charmingly original. I am delightfully refreshing. I am startlingly bohemian. I am quaintly interesting—the while in my sleeve I may be smiling and smiling—and a villain.”

Mary MacLane, the author of this confident prose, was born a Canadian, in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1881, but her family decided to migrate to the States. They would eventually settle in Butte, Montana, which would form the basis of her nickname “The Wild Woman of Butte.” MacLane would identify as an American for the rest of her life. Generally dissatisfied with the isolated and unstimulating existence of her small community and lower middle-class family, MacLane in her adolescence and young adulthood seized upon scraps of happiness found in highbrow literature and long, solo country walks during which she mused on various philosophical queries. These intense inner debates were meticulously documented in a diary she wrote under the working title of I Await the Devil’s Coming.

MacLane’s publisher, fearing the inevitable backlash of this provocative declaration on the cover of a book, changed the title to the more subdued The Story of Mary MacLane without consulting MacLane, who most certainly would have protested this distillation of her individuality. Only in 2013 was it republished under its original and far more intriguing first title. The book, upon its first release in 1902, was an astounding bestseller, and the profits allowed MacLane to escape rural America and dive headfirst into a fast-living, bohemian city life, which she did so with swashbuckling gusto.

At the heart of Mary McLane’s writing style is a profound, unashamed love of the self. She considered herself the most fascinating possible subject she could write about and committed to that notion throughout her career. Her views on everything, from history to sexuality, were mutinous against conventionality. Emperor Napoleon was a brilliant tactician and opportunist, not a tyrant. Her romantic, bisexual feelings for another woman were perfectly legitimate and acceptable, not a glitch in the natural order. And why worship a stern and unforgiving God when you could worship the more attractive and accommodating Devil instead? She went as far as to admit that the Devil was, in her eyes, the only suitable husband for her. “And so here I stand in the midst of Nothingness waiting and longing for the Devil, and he doesn’t come,” she boldly writes. “I feel a choking, strangling, frenzied feeling of waiting—oh, why doesn’t my Happiness come!”

I Await the Devil’s Coming is not so much a typical memoir, relating everyday events in chronological order with occasional insight, but an unabashed mental adventure in which the author, brazenly throwing open the doors of her mind, invites readers into what can only be described as a wild psychological dance party she’s hosting for fun. This form of self-preoccupation and self-marketing can be seen in the titles of her other published works as well, which always include her name. Whether a book or an article, at center stage is Mary MacLane: “Mary MacLane Soliloquizes on Scarlet Fever,” “Mary MacLane Meets the Vampire on the Isle of Treacherous Delights,” “Mary MacLane on Marriage,” and I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days are just a few examples of her very personalized, trademarked output.

MacLane also dabbled in filmmaking and was, of course, the star of a now-lost film titled Men Who Have Made Love to Me. Based on her previous article of the same name, the film daringly depicts MacLane’s saucy real-life love affairs in the style of a confession made directly to the audience. Ironically, this gutsy experiment was (reportedly) a silent film. Cinematic technology simply wasn’t ready for the full raw power of MacLane’s voice and delivery. Perhaps that is why her film career never took off.

Tragically, the flame of her success eventually died out, and Mary MacLane died in obscurity. She was discovered dead in a Chicago motel room in 1929 at the age of forty-eight, ravaged and ultimately defeated by poor health and the debilitating after effects of her libertine, devil-may-care lifestyle. Though she repeated her own name incessantly in the literary world, it has been almost forgotten. Mention her and you’ll get, “Who was Mary MacLane?” as a response, rather than the more appropriate, “Who was Mary MacLane?”

However, some modern creative minds still draw inspiration from her work. In 2020, Plain Bad Heroines, by American writer Emily M. Danforth, was published. Half of the novel, set in 1902, follows two young women who emulate Mary MacLane’s example by exploring their own rebellious intellectualism and lesbian attraction to one another. As critic Jessica Crispin writes in her introduction to I Await the Devil’s Coming: “But reading her now, we see that Mary MacLane was always more than just an outrage. She speaks to the displaced. The thwarted, the unfamous, the trapped in circumstance, the girl filled with impossible longings.”

I Await the Devil’s Coming is available for purchase on Amazon, but it may be more of a tribute to MacLane’s memory to venture out to your local bookshops and scour the shelves for a copy. As you will discover from reading her work, MacLane was never one to sit still and wait for good things to come to her. She knew from a young age that you have to tap into your willpower and summon them, just like you would the devil.

E.R. Zarevich is an English teacher and writer from Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Fascinated by women's literary history, her biographical articles on female writers have been published by Jstor Daily, The Archive, Early Bird Books, and The Calvert Journal. She is also a writer of fiction and poetry. 

She was born on May 8th, 1929, and when she exited the world fifty-five years later, she would leave behind a bizarre legacy in the school of New Age literature, a genre of Western writing, beginning in the 1960s, that documented experimental religious and spiritual practices. A great mystery still surrounds her death. Did she, by passing on into the next realm, unite at last with the ghostly specter of “Seth,” her supposed celestial possessor and mentor and the true mastermind behind her best literary works, or did “Seth,” perhaps an entirely made-up entity concocted to publish and sell more books, simply die with her?

The American writer, psychic, and spirit medium Dorothy Jane Roberts was born and raised under circumstances that groomed her to reject a traditional set of beliefs in favor of a form of spirituality that allowed her to enjoy the agency denied to her in her childhood. An invalid, suicidal, and emotionally abusive mother and her own poor health plagued her unhappy upbringing in Saratoga Springs, New York. With her mother, who was her lone parent, she never felt safe or cherished, and she was forced to take on a caretaker role at a young age. Though she received some stability and support from some local religious figures, Roberts would ultimately abandon her faith in God and Catholicism after the death of her beloved grandfather when she was nineteen. She had a mind more inclined to science and the mystic than conventional Christianity. She also had an unquenchable thirst to write. At the time of her grandfather’s death, she was attending Skidmore College on a prestigious poetry scholarship. She had been honing her technique since age five, both as a creative outlet and as a coping mechanism for her trauma, and according to her memorial on Find a Grave, she would bravely seek out help and inspiration from the Yaddo art colony as a child.

As an adult, she found help and inspiration for her writing from an odder, more unorthodox source. It happened on the night of December 2, 1963, when Roberts and her second husband, Robert (Rob) Fabian Butts, also an artist, were playing around with a Ouija board for research purposes. Roberts claimed that before their experiment she had already been experiencing unnerving psychic revelations in the form of scientific concepts. The voice whispering in her mind and consequentially expanding it identified himself, through the Ouija board, as “Seth.” From that day on, Seth and Roberts’s existences were intertwined. Roberts was the puppet, and Seth the puppeteer. Seth spoke through Roberts and used her as his host. Through Roberts Seth dictated to Butts, who happily took on the role of secretary for his wife’s extraordinary demon, a series of texts on science, philosophy, and metaphysics that would come to be known as the Seth Material. (The Seth Material is available for purchase in volumes, each labeled A Seth Book.) A cult following soon sprung up around Roberts and Seth, and fascinated onlookers attended ESP (extrasensory perception) sessions to hear Seth convey dialogues through Roberts, as if he were a regular lecturer. Seth was also a fiction writer and a poet. If he were real, both he and Roberts can be given credit for being versatile writers.

Of course, Roberts had, and still has, her skeptics. There are those who, understandably, believe she had some sort of mental illness, such as dissociative identity disorder. There are those who insist she was a fraud, and that “Seth” was a ridiculous gimmick to supplement what some considered a mediocre writing style in order to obtain fame. Others who have faith in the occult are willing to accept that Roberts bonded with an ingenious, kindred, quite literal spirit, but question Roberts’s ability to transcribe her “friend’s” words in such detail due to the complicated intricacies of mediumship (which often don’t allow such intimacy between the summoner and the summoned). But then there are those on the opposite side of the spectrum, who not only fully maintain that Roberts could channel Seth’s ideas through her body but consider Seth’s scientific theories seriously as well. One such loyal follower, Paul M. Helfrich, Ph.D., seemingly brushes off Seth’s strange origins in his essay “Seth on ‘The Origins of the Universe and of the Species’” before commencing a complete deconstruction of Seth’s take on the creation myth, all the while respecting Seth as a physicist and philosopher in his own right. In the essay, Roberts herself is barely mentioned, and is interpreted merely as Seth’s convenient mouthpiece.

“To his credit,” Helfrich writes. “Seth constantly works around the inherent limitations of English and its penchant for linear cognitive constructs that deal with objects and processes in space and time. Seth uses simple metaphors to explain complex concepts like the emergence of Mind into Matter, Timelessness into Time, Spacelessness into Space, dream oceans, plants, and bodies into physical oceans, plants, and bodies.”

One particular blogger remembers Roberts with fond affection, commemorating her as a remarkable and unforgettable eccentric separate from her Seth persona. “Without putting down my intent,” Roberts’s former follower Richard Kendall recounts, “Jane explained to me that while she had her highs, her life was not an endless series of peak experiences but was filled with ups and downs like anyone else’s life.” According to Kendall, who regarded her as a teacher and a friend, Roberts never aimed to become something like a sect leader or a God on Earth, but rather a writer who just so happened to have an uncanny connection with the Other Side. Whether or not Seth was real or counterfeit remains up to debate and interpretation, but those who want to believe will continue to believe.

E.R. Zarevich is an English teacher and writer from Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Fascinated by women's literary history, her biographical articles on female writers have been published by Jstor Daily, The Archive, Early Bird Books, and The Calvert Journal. She is also a writer of fiction and poetry. 

You are ice and fire,

The touch of you burns my hands like snow.

You are cold and flame.

You are the crimson of amaryllis,

The silver of moon-touched magnolias.

When I am with you,

My heart is a frozen pond

Gleaming with agitated torches.

Amy Lowell (1874-1925) wrote this passionate poem, “Opal,” about the love of her life, actress Ada Dwyer Russell. Lowell wanted to dedicate her collections to her as well, but Dwyer, fearing the public exposure of their love affair, begged her not to. The only book Lowell was allowed to dedicate to her paramour was an analytical biography of the poet John Keats, published in 1925. This was considered a “safe” subject in Dwyer’s eyes, but Lowell, in her own lifetime, rarely showed much interest in anything deemed “safe.” 

What she was interested in was shaking her native America out of its stiff poetic rut, through her allegiance and advancement of Imagism, a movement that was considered shocking to mainstream audiences at the time. The poem above exhibits some of the key elements of Imagism, a branch of literary modernism: simple, straightforward language, unconventional presentation of verse, and meaningful images that the author deconstructs down to their essences. It was a direct opposition to the popular styles of Romantic and Victorian poetry, rejecting their rigid sets of rules surrounding rhyme, rhythm, and acceptable content (which tended to involve long narratives and broad, philosophical ideas). In Lowell’s work, a touch of homoeroticism added the personal flair that distinguished her in this particular subgenre. As she would be exulted as a poet, she herself exulted in women. Like her poetry, lesbianism was something Lowell was able to confidently incorporate into her identity against the oppression of the era she lived in. 

Amy Lowell was born in 1874 into a well-to-do, conventional Boston-based family. She had poor experiences with formal education. At school as a child, bullied for her brash personality and appearance—she was overweight all her life—she struggled to fully thrive and find her purpose. She missed out on going to college, as her family refused to pay tuition for her, believing that higher education was an unsuitable path for a young woman. Her ambitions thwarted, she became a self-taught scholar in protest; her British contemporary Virginia Woolf, equally frustrated with the lack of academic opportunities for intellectual women, would have approved. Lowell became an unstoppable bibliophile. Almost in preparation for her future career as a poet, she devoured every book in her family 7000-volume private library and frequently added to its stock by voracious book-collecting. Family money also allowed her to travel around Europe, exposing her to cultural landscapes not available to her in conservative turn-of-the-century America. Through these efforts, she assembled her own university-esque education. 

She was a late bloomer in her field of work. Although she began writing poetry as a pastime in her late twenties, she didn’t officially publish her first poem until the age of thirty-six. However, she made an impressive start, having her poem “A Fixed Idea” accepted by the prestigious Atlantic magazine in 1910. Two years later, in 1912, her first full collection of poetry came out, A Dome of Many-Colored Glass, and others would follow, including the intriguingly named Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds (1914) and Pictures of the Floating World (1919).  The biography of John Keats was perhaps her greatest venture into non-fiction criticism. Keats’ life and work was something of an obsession for Lowell; she argued that he was the forefather of Imagism, and her efforts to deconstruct him like one of her poetic subjects can be classified as psychoanalysis. Though Keats was long dead, he was the only man with whom Lowell would develop a close connection, besides the poet Ezra Pound, with whom she would have a falling out over his disapproval of her writing style and success. Men in general were never too fond of Lowell. Nowadays she would probably operate under the label of “butch lesbian.” She was a large, loud woman who liked to smoke cigars and voice her opinions, all repulsively “unfeminine” behavior at the time. But she didn’t like men either, so their rejection of her was undaunting. She had a loving partner in Russell, and was well-satisfied with her. There were also rumors of an affair with fellow queer writer Mercedes de Acosta, but this has never been proven. 

Just as Lowell made her debut into the world of poetry late, and sadly, international recognition would follow this pattern. She died in 1925, of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of 51. One year later, she would be awarded The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection What’s O’Clock (published in the last year of her life). She would then fade into obscurity in the literary circuit until the 1970s, where a renewed interest in women’s works—the feminist movement at the time was doing a mass archeological dig of lost female literature—resurrected her reputation. Readers can now easily access her masterly poems such as “Opal” online, an optimistic reminder of the enduring power of talented women’s art. Lowell was destined to be known and remembered. As she reportedly said herself, “God made me a businesswoman, and I made myself a poet.”

E.R. Zarevich is an English teacher and writer from Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Fascinated by women's literary history, her biographical articles on female writers have been published by Jstor Daily, The Archive, Early Bird Books, and The Calvert Journal. She is also a writer of fiction and poetry. 

The painter Charles Burchfield (1893-1962) spent most of his life working in the eastern Great Lakes region of the United States. He lived quietly, observing nature, marveling at the industry that built up around the countryside, and striving for a balance between the two in the vibrant, emotional watercolors he painted for fifty years. He worked in a kind of seclusion, and though he may be little remembered today, his art pushed the boundaries of modern landscape painting during what many would consider the golden age of American painting. 

Burchfield was born on a farm just outside of Cleveland in Salem, Ohio in 1893. As a child, Charles studied at the local Salem school and worked on his father's farm. He also had a keen interest in reading at a young age. His love of nature led him to the late nineteenth-century naturalists like David Henry Thoreau, and he began to sketch during his long solitary walks around the countryside. 

In 1912 he enrolled at the Cleveland School of Art. He studied under the influential Henry Keller who led a generation of Ohio painters to work in his preferred medium of watercolors, one Burchfield never gave up and used throughout his career in ways like none other. In Cleveland Burchfield learned of the artistic movements coming from Europe. He followed his time at school with a year of study in New York City where he met contemporary painters and experienced the influence of modern painting first hand.

After his year in New York City he returned to Salem. He brought back from New York a new aesthetic vocabulary that energized his paintings. He noted in his journal that the “town and countryside where I grew up were now transformed by the magic of an awakened art outlook.” His new work included a sense of rhythmic abstraction in composition perhaps best expressed in Bluebird and Cottonwoods (1917). 

He would not stay in Salem long. In 1918 Burchfield enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was assigned to the Camouflage Unit, where he helped to create paint designs for military equipment. He continued to develop his aesthetic sense throughout his service. Fellow artists serving in the same unit turned him on to the social realist school of writers. He absorbed the books of Upton Sinclair, Horatio Alger, and Stephen Crane and studied the work of contemporary painters like George Luks, Robert Henri, and Edward Hopper who would eventually become a personal friend. The very American aesthetic of picturing the working class and the world they lived in began to creep into his own work until eventually machines, building, and industry squeezed out the natural world.   

Even as he shifted his focus to the man-made world of buildings and machinery, his was not a cold, objective look at modernity like that of his friend Hopper. His emotional sensitivity was now imbued in the man-made world that crowded his paintings. February Thaw (The Thaw, January Thaw), a piece from early 1920 described by the artist as “ a composition made of various places around Salem, Ohio plus a lot of imagination” depicts a muddy lane on an early spring day. The ice is just pulling back from puddles of water that look menacing, the sagging buildings that line the street seem grumpy, not yet woke from their winter hunker to the warmth of the season. The pedestrians who appear as insignificant smudges still seem bundled against the lingering cold. Even the trees in this piece become almost architectural, in the foreground taking on Cubist formations while in the background they sag like ancient roman arches. 

In 1921 Burchfield moved to Buffalo, New York to begin a new job as a junior designer at a wallpaper factory. He married his hometown sweetheart Bertha Kenerich and in time they bought a small house and had five children. In Buffalo, he found better representation for his paintings which he worked on early in the morning and during his lunch breaks. Buffalo was a major industrial city at the time and the steel plants, lake ports, train sidings, and factories filled his work with bold, flattened colors, bordering on the abstract in some, on expressionism in others.

In 1928 Burchfield parted ways with Mowbray-Clark, the dealer who had represented him for ten years. The next year Frank Rehm Galleries in New York became his dealer and encouraged Burchfield to leave his job and paint full-time. It was under Rehm’s influence that he began repurposing his older work. By adding strips of paper to enlarge the size of existing paintings he expanded on his earlier celebrations of nature to include a different understanding of the natural world, one heavily influenced by twenty-odd years of focusing on man’s world.

His Dawn in Early Spring (1946-1966), a piece he worked on for twenty years, combines the three phases in which historians normally divide his work. His early work was an exploration and celebration of nature, full of mystery and vibrating with life. His industrial phase found him documenting the spread of man’s creations around him. And his golden era, those years when he came to terms with both worlds, binding them in landscapes where buildings seem to laugh and weep while flowers and trees vibrate with a natural ecstasy. 

In Dawn in Early Spring nature comes to life vibrantly, as the last ice of winter seems to almost drip from the painting. Flora erupts against the foreground in color and detail like pastries on a confectioner's sample tray. The watercolor is used almost like oil paint, applied lean to fat giving the painting a weight beyond its medium. Nature has won out, there are no man-made structures in the piece. Yet the saplings at its center arch toward the star pricked night in an aura of morning light creating a steeple with their buttressing limbs. The rising sun casts its first rays through the architectural passages of the bare tree limbs to warm the needles of the evergreens that encircle the center like witnesses to the miracle of another day and a new season.

In this final phase of his work, the forest is at peace again, Burchfield hasn’t come full circle but returned to his natural explorations and celebrations after twenty years of documenting the rise of industry with a changed perspective.

John McMahon is a freelance writer/former art world schmuck who now lives on a beach in Thailand.

When the 1936 novel Nightwood was published, its readers—and especially its reviewers—didn’t quite know what to make of it. The book already evoked controversy just by existing; lesbianism wasn’t a commonplace topic in American literature at the time, and Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 output The Well of Loneliness, the more prominent lesbian-themed work of fiction at the time, wasn’t exactly winning over fans among the conservative English either. But what constitutes Nightwood’s reputation as being such a bafflingly bizarre novel is its style as much as its content. A blend of traditional Gothic and metafictional modernism, the book was described by one amazed reviewer as “The Twilight of the Abnormal.” The active and unrestrained mind behind this avant-garde masterwork was Djuna Barnes (1892-1982), whose other claims to fame include The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), Ryder (1928), The Ladies Almanack (1928), and an exclusive interview with James Joyce for Vanity Fair in 1922 (an impressive achievement in professionalism, as she was reputedly very jealous of the success of his magnum opus Ulysses). But she is best known for Nightwood and is remembered fondly in the LGBTQ community for being a writer who dared. 

Barnes was born in 1892 on Storm King Mountain, a fitting name for a birthplace of such a literary giant. Her family was intellectually accomplished, but financially unstable and abusive, and Barnes would portray these experiences in her works with such disturbing accuracy that it would put her at odds with her family later in life. But nothing, not even family feelings, and especially not societal expectations for women, would stop her from working and creating on her own terms. In 1913, after moving to New York City with her mother and siblings, Barnes marched into the office of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and announced, with outstanding confidence and conviction: "I can draw and write, and you'd be a fool not to hire me.” She must have made an impression on the editor-in-chief. Before long she was the newspaper’s top reporter, and she was doing freelance work for other publications as well, hustling to pay the bills as her family’s main breadwinner. Her most notorious exploits for good stories include crawling into a gorilla’s cage, staging a mock rescue with local firefighters, being subjected to force-feeding (for an insider feature on the Suffragists), and listening to James Joyce prattle on about Ireland. She was also involved with the theater scene and performed and partied with the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village, where a handful of her one-act plays made their debut. Though her professional life thrived, her love life was messy. Barnes was bisexual and seemed drawn to lovers as troubled as she. A female lover of hers died of tuberculosis, while a male one, a future Nazi, dumped her for not being German and went on to become a close associate of Adolf Hitler. The great tragedy here is that neither of these would turn out to be her worst romantic experience. 

The inspiration behind Nightwood’s plot came from what was probably the most toxic bohemian relationship in Paris in the wild 1920s (an incredible feat in its own right). Barnes’s partner during her years in Paris as a foreign correspondent for McCall’s was Thelma Wood, a sculptor and silverpoint artist who was more interested in love affairs than in producing any everlasting masterpieces. A harrowed Djuna Barnes lost her own valuable work time stalking her unfaithful lover around the cafés and nightclubs of Paris. This cat-and-mouse chase and its subsequent heartbreak traumatized Barnes, but it made good book material. Barnes, in Nightwood, represents herself as Nora Blood. Nora’s inconstant lover, Robin Vote, is Wood. And Wood’s other lover, Henrietta Alice McCrea-Metcalf, appears as Jenny Petherbridge. T.S. Eliot, the first publisher of the book—he was an editor at Faber & Faber—made some heavy edits to the manuscript and released it to the unsuspecting public in 1936. It cemented Barnes’s prestige as a cutting-edge, modern novelist, but fame wasn’t enough to rescue her from falling into an irreversible state of alcoholism and drug addiction. 

Djuna Barnes lived out the last 43 years of her life in New York City. Though she became a recluse, and wanted to immerse herself in privacy and obscurity, her admirers had other ideas. The diarist Anaïs Nin wanted Barnes to collaborate with her on a magazine (Barnes said no). The Southern Gothic writer Carson McCullers stalked Barnes’s apartment building, hoping to meet her and befriend her (Barnes yelled at her to go away). The poet E.E. Cummings lived nearby and, in a neighborly fashion, regularly checked in on her, and tried to play nice, but Barnes was done with artistic friendships. However, history is not done with Djuna Barnes, and her legacy remains that of an experimental writer who never shied away from her queerness, nor did she allow popular opinion to dictate her creativity when it came to her fiction, plays, poetry, and journalism. Nightwood stands as her masterpiece, a testament to what a prolific mind is capable of without prejudice or constraint. 

E.R. Zarevich is an English teacher and writer from Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Fascinated by women's literary history, her biographical articles on female writers have been published by Jstor Daily, The Archive, Early Bird Books, and The Calvert Journal. She is also a writer of fiction and poetry. 

In 1919, one year after the end of World War I, and a year before women were granted the right to vote in the United States, 31-year-old Aline Murray Kilmer published her debut poetry collection, Candles that Burn. The collection was well-received and displayed the author’s keen sense that though gendered roles and dualities governed her life, neither negated nor subsumed nuance. While some of her early poems seem simplistic or verge on melodrama, closer analysis reveals striking complexities. While many of her lauded contemporaries approached issues like patriotism or love with a fierce one-sidedness and lack of depth, Kilmer’s poetry reveled in ambiguity; she thrilled in dichotomy. And though some argued that her small success was linked to her famous poet husband and his death in World War I, formal reviews of her work applauded her lyrical style and sardonic observations. In the concluding poem of Candles that Burn entitled “My Mother,” the speaker catches glimpses of her mother and grandmother reflected in her bedroom mirror throughout the day, yet it is what she sees at night that haunts the final line. When the tired parent rises to feed her baby this time, she is met instead with her dead child’s face peering out from the glass. This moment encapsulates a running theme in many of Kilmer’s works: the loss of legacy. Her child would never grow to one day reflect Kilmer, just as her poetry might fail to make a mark in the world. Looking back on her life, she had good reason to feel this way, even with a string of early successes.

Though she was arguably more talented than her famous and much-anthologized husband Joyce Kilmer, little remains beyond her poetry to gain insight into Kilmer’s life and feelings. Born into a literary family in 1888, Kilmer sold her first poem at the age of eleven to St. Nicholas magazine. By her mid-twenties, her poetry had been published in numerous well-regarded sources, including Harper’s, The Smart Set, and Good Housekeeping. And though she had established herself in the literary world before Candles that Burn’s debut, by the time of its publication, she was better known as Joyce Kilmer’s widow. What is known of Kilmer’s biography though reveals a string of calamities that became a springboard for her creativity. Two years before the publication of Candles that Burn, Kilmer’s fourth child, Rose, died from complications due to polio. Twelve days later, Kilmer gave birth to her fifth. She was 29 years old, and the year was 1917. America had declared war on Germany, and a month after their daughter’s death, Kilmer’s husband chose to leave a successful literary career to enlist with the 165th Infantry Regiment. Less than a year after Joyce set foot in France, Kilmer was a widow, and her four surviving children were fatherless.

Maybe partially due to this turn of events, Kilmer’s poetry explores an unusual tension regarding romantic love, lust, and betrayal that mirrors modern sensibilities. In her second collection, Vigils, she analyzes the uneven levels of affection inevitable in most relationships, and laments, seemingly in reference to her husband, Joyce, her inability to return the depth of his passion. She expresses guilt that she didn’t love him enough when he was alive, wonders if his death is a sort of punishment for her failings, and wishes that she had loved him as deeply as he had loved her. Though she repeatedly chastises herself for not cherishing him, in “Perversity” she acknowledges it simply wasn’t in her to do so. Intrigued by this pattern of loving those who do not love her, she concludes: “Only the God who made my wild heart knows/ Why this should be.” Kilmer then warns or perhaps teases those who adore her: “I’ll keep your love alive and wondering/ until you die.” In “Shards” Kilmer hints at indiscretion and, for the time, a shameful inability to commit, while in “Honey Witch” she admits that though she has played the part of a princess, she hides in towers and behind masks. She wonders if she is haunted, knows she is flawed, and admits that her “goodness was all lies.” Finally, she ends the collection with an early rejection of the male gaze when she decides not to love at all.

Kilmer’s work also veered from the mainstream with her transparent depiction of motherhood. She presents the role of caretaker as a blessing filled with annoyances and chides herself for not being more grateful for her surviving children. Kilmer challenges the concept of “mother” as both an expanding and retracting phenomenon and assesses the difficulties of parenthood with refreshing and scathing honesty. In “The Mother’s Helper” Kilmer examines the loss of identity as well as the monotony inherent in parenting. She begins with generic observations of how wonderful her children are as a set-up for the main point: her wish to surrender to her own desires. As she fulfills her domestic duties, she says:

But still every night as I sit at my sewing,

My mind turned adrift on its own pleasures going,

Underneath my wild thoughts is a steady prayer flowing:

St. Brigid, please keep

My babies asleep!

Kilmer went on to release three more poetry volumes, a collection of personal essays, and two children's books, and participated in lecture tours to support her family. She became the vice president of the Catholic Poetry Society of America, moved in literary circles, and enjoyed twenty-year friendships and correspondences with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Sara Teasdale and grammarian Eleanor Gould Packard. Throughout the 1920s, Kilmer was the subject of positive media mentions and reviews, and though she did not publish any collections after 1929, she received an impressive obituary in The New York Times when she died in 1941.

Kilmer’s poetry examined traditionally gendered “women’s issues,” and often found them unpalatable. She challenged conventions of her time and sometimes bordered on the irreverent, but somehow avoided scrutiny. This may have been because she dampened her message with religion and gaiety, or perhaps, like other women writers at the time, her observations were overlooked. One media reference offers a glimpse of the attitude even the most talented women writers faced in her era: Kilmer was included in Hemingway's misogynistic “satirical imitation of T.S. Eliot[’s],” work entitled "The Lady Poets with Footnotes." This short piece disparaged her skills, alongside other greats like Teasdale and Pulitzer-Prize winning writers Edna St. Vincent Millay and Zoë Akins. A quick perusal of her body of work, relevant over a century later, puts this characterization to rest.

Dedication to her craft reveals an evolution in skill from one collection to the next that complemented Aline Murray Kilmer’s deepening exploration and understanding of the human experience. When Freud’s theories were just appearing, she showed an uncanny ability to interrogate the subconscious and at times even skirted anti-patriotic stances. The futility and tragedy of war had destroyed her family, and unlike her husband and contemporaries, Kilmer refused to embrace the illusion of glory. The irony remains that the fate of Kilmer’s nuanced contributions to the literary canon mirrors that of her daughter’s ghostly visage in the looking glass. Both were luminous, both were fleeting. One could argue that this is because she was a woman or that many of the themes she portrayed were more traditionally gendered, but whatever the reason, and as is often the case in her writings, she seemed wryly aware of her poetry’s fate. Although today many of her poems can be found on the internet, Kilmer’s contribution has been ignored by scholars, and none of her books remain in print. A century after the publication of her first volume, Aline Murray Kilmer’s brief Wikipedia page introduces her with the fact that “today, her work is largely forgotten.”

In the summer of 2000, David Navone, an engineer in California, made one of the greatest discoveries in the history of lost films when he bought a trunk at a flea market and found six reels of anonymous old nitrate films locked inside. On examining the films, which had all shrunk from their original 35-millimeter size, he found the first, "In absolutely terrible condition with much of the film melted into globs.” The next reel was “in good condition, with no breaks or melted sections.” This reel contained the little-known but historically important 1912 film A Fool and His Money.  

A Fool and His Money is a ten-minute black-and-white silent narrative that is the first American film to have an entire cast of Black actors. Not only that, it was produced and directed by Alice Guy-Blaché, the first female filmmaker in the history of cinema. It's also considered one of the earliest race films–a genre produced in the United States between 1912 and the 1950s, aimed at primarily Black audiences.

Why was the first narrative film to feature an entirely Black cast lost? Time. Before the 1950s, films were shot mostly on nitrate-based film stock (which is chemically unstable, deteriorating, and very flammable). Because their successful preservation required a cool, dry, and fire-safe environment, and also being expensive to convert, about 90 percent of pictures made before World War I no longer exist. After his golden find, David Navone donated the reel to the American Film Institute (AFI), which restored it frame by frame. The film is now at the AFI's National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center. 

Alice Guy-Blaché, director and producer of A Fool and His Money, was a French pioneer filmmaker. From 1896 to 1906, she was the only female film director in the world. Her career began in 1896 when she wrote, directed, and produced La Fée aux Choux for the Gaumont Company. This film was such a success that Gaumont promoted her to production director. 

After eleven years of working in the French industry, she moved to the United States in 1910 and became the first woman to run a studio when, two years later, she built the $100,000 state-of-the-art Solax Film company in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

In her career, she oversaw the production of about 1,000 films, many of them short one-reelers, which was the standard. Her films often had a feminist undertone and challenged gender norms. Guy-Blaché also had strong opinions on race, immigration, and politics–themes that were all very prominent in her films. 

In 1912, when her White cast members refused to work alongside Black actors, terming it "an irreversible dishonor to be coupled with people of color," she continued filming with her Black cast and created A Fool and His Money. This is monumental because, at that time, White performers in blackface played Black characters. Guy-Blaché would have chosen to “darken” the faces of the White actors and this would have been perfectly acceptable. But she went against the flow and featured the first full cast of actual African-Americans in this film.

The fool in A Fool and His Money is Sam (James Russell), a young Black laborer rejected by Lindy, the woman he loves, because of his poverty. After finding a large sum of money on the sidewalk, he buys fine clothes, an automobile, and jewelry, hoping to win her back. Attracted by this newfound wealth, Lindy accepts Sam's proposal. 

Sam sends out invitations to a reception, on which occasion he plans to announce his engagement. During the function, he loses all his money in a rigged poker game staged by his romantic rival. When Lindy learns Sam has been swindled, she gives him the boot and transfers her affection to the man who won Sam’s money.

The first mention of A Fool and His Money is in a full-page ad that Alice Guy-Blaché's film company Solax took out in The Moving Picture World on September 21, 1912, and it simply said, “Darktown Aristocrats Released Friday, October 11th.” However, in the October 5, 1912 issue of The Moving Picture World, the film was announced differently:              

                                            A FOOL AND HIS MONEY

                              (The new title for Darktown Aristocrats)

                                  RELEASED FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11th

As one of the earliest race films in America, A Fool and His Money also represents a historical record of White attitudes about African-Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. It portrayed the Black man as irresponsible, gambling away his little money — money that he gained not through employment or hard work, but illegally. We also see Lindy’s middle-class family enjoying the privileges of wealth only because her father, described as a retired Pullman porter, worked long and hard for many years. The contrast hinting that an African-American man cannot handle sudden prosperity.

Commenting on this, Allison McMahan notes in her book Alice Guy Blaché, Lost Visionary of the Cinema that “the film is certainly racist, but it also reflects ‘the dream of assimilation’ associated with both immigrants and the Black middle class. For Guy-Blaché, assimilation meant taking on the stereotypes of the adopted culture. Guy-Blaché was a French immigrant to the United States, which did not prevent her from replicating racist stereotypes of the American culture.”

Ava DuVernay acknowledges that while A Fool and His Money may be flawed, it is historically important: "I think the film is definitely of its time. I can't say that it was entirely progressive. But at that time, it might have been regarded differently. Regardless of its intention, it was still important, because it had the black cinematic image, which was an image that, before, hadn't been seen in this way." 

A Fool and his Money remains historical on all fronts; it was the first to feature an all-Black cast and was directed by the world’s first female filmmaker. This attests to the incredible contributions that women and particularly unknown immigrants and people of color made to the early American film industry. Even the stereotypes in its storyline show how far back racism goes in American culture.

This film was first shown publicly on July 29, 2018, at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles, and has also been screened at many festivals. A Fool and His Money is currently available on a previously released Kino-Lorber Pioneer Women DVD set.

Edith Magak writes both fiction and nonfiction on African History, Culture and Art. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meeting of Minds UK, Africa in Dialogue, Brittle Paper, Lazy Women, Talenthouse, and Narratively.

William Grant Still has often been called the “Dean of African-American Composers.” He was the first black person to conduct a major American orchestra and have his work performed by one. Of his five symphonies, four ballets, eight operas, many other orchestral works, chamber pieces, art songs, and choral works, his Symphony No. 1 “Afro-American” won him notoriety and has sustained his fame to this day. The piece exemplified the composer’s vision of bringing black music, specifically blues, to the symphonic stage. However, shortly after composing the “Afro-American Symphony,” Still developed a more multicultural objective for his music. His much-less-known Symphony No. 4 “Autochthonous” showcases the multi-stylistic and broadly influenced musical identity he maintained the rest of his life. It is a central but underappreciated part of his legacy.

Still was born in Woodville, Mississippi on May 11, 1895. His ethnic background included African, Native American Indian, Spanish, Irish, and Scotch peoples. Still’s father died while he was an infant. His mother moved the family to Little Rock, Arkansas and remarried. His stepfather took him to see stage shows in Little Rock and bought opera recordings for their home phonograph. Still later recalled, “I knew then that I would be happy only if someday I could compose operatic music, and I have definitely leaned toward a lyric style for that reason.”1

Still studied science at Wilberforce University from 1911 to 1915, but preferring music, dropped out before finishing and moved to Memphis in 1916 to try his hand in the popular music industry. His goal was to be a professional classical musician, but that career was not open to black people at the time. He embraced popular music and aimed to benefit from it long-term.

In Memphis, he was captivated by the raw blues music he heard while working as an arranger for blues legend, W.C. Handy. “[Still] heard the Blues, not as something immoral and sexy, but as the yearnings of a lowly people, seeking a better life. Then and there he resolved that someday he would elevate the Blues so they could hold a dignified position in symphonic literature,” Still’s wife, Verna Arvey, wrote.2

Still studied music at Oberlin Conservatory in 1917 and 1919, and then moved to New York City, working for W.C. Handy again. Still’s career in commercial music blossomed for the next decade, yet he never abandoned his goal of becoming a classical composer. He studied composition formally with George Whitefield Chadwick of New England Conservatory during 1922 and with the French-American modernist Edgard Varèse from 1923-25.

Still’s classical compositions were first heard in 1925, and the momentous “Afro-American Symphony” came in 1930. For a year prior, he had been living and working in Los Angeles. The city appealed to him. Still found New York’s over-fondness for the European aesthetic to be at odds with his goal of writing classical but truly American music. Still moved to Los Angeles permanently in 1934 for its cultural diversity, opportunities in film music, and overall atmosphere.

In 1939, he married pianist and writer Verna Arvey, who was of Russian-Jewish decent. They had two children and she ardently promoted his music throughout their marriage. She once depicted Still as “prefer[ing] to live and work simply and quietly at his home in Southern California, where he fills each day with a varied assortment of chores. In the morning, music. In the afternoon, constructing useful objects for the home, tending the plants.”3

In Los Angeles the Still family lived in a segregated black neighborhood, yet their daughter, Judith Anne Still (co-editor of William Grant Still and the Fusion of Cultures in American Music), has said that the family had a racially diverse, supportive group of friends.

Still composed his Symphony No. 4 “Autochthonous” between July 22 and September 8, 1947 in his home in Los Angeles. The word ‘autochthonous’ refers to native origin. The composer meant it to highlight the American spirit represented within the piece.

The fourth symphony opens with a tenacious march with immediately recognizable blues character. The melody which follows exhibits his quintessential lyrical style. The melody is colored with interweaving woodwind notes and fervently propulsive harmony. The second movement begins with murky, dissonant chords, harkening to the tutelage of modernist Edgard Varèse. While Still rejected modernism as a compositional end in itself, he adopted dissonance as a beneficial resource. Before the end of the second movement, gladness shimmers, but the final sustained note is full of melancholy. The jazzy third movement is lighthearted, with snare drum and triangle setting a trotting pace. “Humorous and unmistakably typical of our country and its rhythms,” Still pronounced, according to David Ciucevich Jr. in his liner notes for Naxos’ 2009 recording of the symphony. A gleeful surge led by the trumpets and jaunty bass clarinet solos are also featured. The fourth and final movement is somber and sincere; “the warmth and the spiritual side of the American people—their love of mankind,” Still described, according to Ciucevich Jr. Longing and worry eventually give way to unrestrained chimes ringing out in triumph! Warmth and hope, resembling Still himself, are clearly impressed at the conclusion of the symphony.

The symphony was premiered by Victor Alessandro and the Oklahoma Symphony Orchestra on March 18, 1951. Only a single recording is available (Naxos, 2009), but thankfully the symphony has begun to appear on concert programs.

Judith Anne Still quotes her father in William Grant Still and the Fusion of Cultures in American Music: “If I have a wish to express, it would be that my music may serve a purpose larger than mere music. If it will help in some way to bring about better interracial understanding in America and in other countries, then I will feel that the work is justified.”

Andrew Symington is a freelance French horn player and teacher based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Andrew is the author of the blog, “New Symphony Listeners Guide.” The blog aims to draw people into the experience of diverse sounds and emotions found in symphonies of lesser popular stature than those in the standard orchestral repertoire.

In 1952, Irving Kriesberg, relatively fresh to the New York art scene, was one of 15 artists in curator Dorothy C. Miller’s survey of American contemporary art at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The show, aptly titled “15 Americans,” included a concise representation of American modern art’s most renowned figures, such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and William Baziotes, foundational representatives of the critically acclaimed Abstract Expressionist mode of painting.

Irving Kriesberg was born in Chicago in 1919, which made him, on average, thirteen years younger than the four aforementioned expressionists. At the age of nine he already had the desire to become an artist and filled sketchbooks with drawings of animals from the exhibits he saw at the Field Museum of Natural History. He took up cartooning for his high school’s publications and experienced his earliest artistic influences through comics such as his favorite strip, Krazy Kat.

Kriesberg’s enjoyment of graphic art was the reason he attended a private art school, directed by a popular genre painter and illustrator, Frederick Mizen. However, a short time studying with Mizen left Kriesberg yearning for something more experimental. He wanted to immerse himself in the innovative art and aesthetic theories of modernity, which was something that the Mizen curriculum lacked. One faculty member at the Mizen school who lit Kriesberg’s fire was the artist Irving Manoir. Kriesberg recalled that he and Manoir would have lengthy discussions regarding contemporary European and American painting. Manoir taught a more up-to-date artistic approach than what the Mizen school focused on, and eventually was asked by the administration to leave. After that there was nothing that the school offered Kriesberg and he also left to study on scholarship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kriesberg graduated in 1941 with a degree in fine art and a concentration in painting.

Realizing that he needed to be based in the heart of the avant-garde scene, Kriesberg moved to the Big Apple in 1945. He had spent the previous three years living, working, and studying in Mexico, where he immersed himself in a vital and influential art scene that was driven by socially engaged themes and accessible artwork in the form of public murals and widely disseminated prints. This is when Kriesberg realized art’s ability to communicate powerful sociocultural messages and envelop viewers in mythological and modern narratives.

Before his big break at MoMA, Kriesberg was working for Artkraft Strauus, designing animated billboards advertising Broadway shows in Times Square. This job referenced his prior interests in sequential imagery from comics, as well as his admiration of the awe-inspiring murals by Mexican modern artists. However, Kriesberg wanted more than anything to make it as a full-time fine artist and not have to take on commercial jobs to make ends meet. These jobs paid well, but also kept him out of the studio. “15 Americans” laid the foundation for Kriesberg to get all his ducks in a row as a professional artist. His introduction to the art scene happened on one of the biggest platforms, which made his previously relatively unknown paintings more recognizable thereafter. Initially, visitors to the show would not have been familiar with his work. His Red Sheep (1951) and Birds Alighting (1951), two paintings with loosely rendered representational elements which set him apart from the other painters in the show, hung in close vicinity to seminal Rothko and Pollock canvases. Unlike the more well known Abstract Expressionists, Kriesberg was considered to be a Figurative Expressionist. The Figurative Expressionists have not enjoyed the same esteem as their abstract peers.

The MoMA exhibition was an optimistic point in Kriesberg’s career. Not long after the show came down, he had his first New York gallery representation with prominent German-American art dealer Curt Valentin. However, his 1955 solo show at the Curt Valentin Gallery was a bittersweet occasion. On one hand, his work was getting the attention of the uptown art audience, which included museum professionals and collectors. On the other hand, it would be the last time he would show with Valentin, who passed away just a few months before the exhibition opened. Nonetheless, Valentin’s praise and promotion of Kriesberg’s work was significant to his art-world ascension. Kriesberg remained a part of the New York art scene until his death, and was represented by other fairly well established galleries, although his representational style made his work a challenge for both the art market and art historical narratives.

While Kriesberg was committed to the figure and its role in communicating symbolic iconography, he was less interested in giving his viewers a concrete narrative. In his statement written in the “15 Americans” catalogue, Kriesberg explains, “Technically my paintings are depictions with a fluid focal point. The objects in them are shown not as taken from a fixed point in space nor at a single instant of time.”

Kriesberg, like former Abstract Expressionists Philip Guston and George McNeil, who returned to the figure, utilized the confluence of figuration and abstraction to convey psychological and sociological concerns. However, unlike many of his contemporaries, Kriesberg explored ways in which to make his figurative expressions experiential using mechanical motion and relational physical vantage points.

The earliest examples are a combination of abstract and representational images on circular sheets of paper or canvas, which he called “Wheels.” These paintings are fitted with hardware that can be vertically mounted to a motor turning clockwise at a speed of 3 rpm or more. The “Wheels” depict contorted human, animal, and mystical forms against a ground of earthy colors.

The “Wheel” painting Profane Love or the Fall of Man (1946) conveys the Ancient Greek narrative of Zeus punishing the Titan god Prometheus for his extravagant generosity towards humanity. The imagery is drawn from the drama and sorrow within José Clemente Orozco's Prometheus (1930) mural. Both paintings express the horrors and indignities of the human condition. Within Kriesberg’s “Wheel” version, the Titan’s regenerative torture and humanity’s ongoing struggle for survival is made clear by the spinning painting’s suggestion of life’s cyclical nature.

Kriesberg followed up his “Wheels” with a variety of sequential and open-ended constructions featuring multiple panels which can be manually manipulated by rotating or flipping them to reveal a myriad of narratives. According to art critic David Cohen, this “radical, disjunctive aspect of Mr. Kriesberg's work could deem him a forerunner to minimal and conceptual art. His style, however, belonged increasingly to a very different camp: bestiaries and crucifixions looked to such contemporary European expressionists as Pierre Alechinsky and Graham Sutherland, as well, no doubt, to their forebears, Matthias Grünewald and The Book of Kells.”

Roslyn Diary (1967) is a prime example of Kriesberg’s blend of personal, multicultural, and timeless iconography within a manipulative multi-paneled construct. Physically, it contains fourteen panels hinged together that open to reveal three tableaus. It depicts a diptych resembling a plague of frogs when closed. The title comes from the village in New York where Kriesberg lived during the late 1950s through the mid 1960s. He had just returned from a year-long sojourn in India and was teaching at Yale University, where he taught many significant contemporary artists including Judith Bernstein.

Roslyn Diary is part painting, sculpture, book, and tabernacle, offering an Omnist outlook and an expression of social consciousness. The moveable painting’s bestiary and iconography highlights Kriesberg’s unique brand of animalia, art history, theosophy, and current events within a composition. Although the anarchic scene offers no defining story, the juxtaposition of quotidian and supernatural actions, along with archetypal symbols of crucifixion, serve as a contemplation on mortality. In a similar manner to the cyclical concept of Profane Love or the Fall of Man, Kriesberg is describing the act of creation and desecration through interactive tangibility and visual poetry.

One of Kriesberg’s biggest supporters was conceptual artist Allan Kaprow. In a 1964 essay published in Art International, Kaprow writes, “Irving Kriesberg literally makes creation his central theme. He directly describes generative action. Time for him is palpable and sequential, moment following moment. He ponders organic energy, seeing it as an event, embodied in hieratic transmutations from animal to human to inanimate nature. Back and forth, a simultaneously progressive and retrogressive Darwinism.”

The comparison of Kriesberg’s artistic process to Darwinism is astute, albeit in a more fantastical manner. From the get-go, Kriesberg painted animals, humans, and environments in flux. He gave his pantheon of creatures humanistic souls, an idea that was inspired by his stints in Mexico, India, and Japan. The fluidity of one image moving to another creates both a revelation and a mystery, which left his fellow artists and critics in awe. The spectacle of viewing Kriesberg’s paintings inspired art historian George Nelson Preston to declare him a “rare bird” who “has never consciously sought a counter aesthetic through purely painterly means. He has been a leader in innovation through eccentricity of composition and exposition of an internal mental dialect of polarities. The means by which this has been carried out are largely through the presentational motifs of proscenium, setting, and encounter.”

Kriesberg left the mortal world on November 11, 2009. He died peacefully in bed in his downtown New York City apartment. His painting Green Dormition with Cat (2004) is an apt scene that symbolizes this occasion. It depicts the dying Buddha surrounded by his animal friends, a dreamlike portrayal which clearly foreshadowed Kriesberg’s inevitable fate.

The Irving Kriesberg Estate Foundation was established in 2015 to preserve his work and present it to familiar and new audiences alike. I had the honor of knowing Irving Kriesberg during his final months, while I was studying for my Master’s in Art History. We had worked together on a loosely constructed career narrative and he became an invaluable mentor who pushed me to take risks and find my voice within my art historical research and writing. One of the final things he said to me after calling me into his room where he lay sanguinely in bed with a beret-like nightcap on his head, was “change the canon!”

Adam Zucker is a curator, writer, and educator from Queens, New York. His exhibitions featuring the work of both contemporary and historical artists have been on view in museums and galleries throughout the United States. He writes a blog called Artfully Learning, which critically examines the benefits of integrating contemporary art practices within pedagogical frameworks. Zucker is the archivist and manager for the Estate of Irving Kriesberg.