Art of a Jewish Woman (23 page)

“How he worried about me. When he was a year and a half, if I disappeared for one second from his sight, he would fly from one room to another, looking in all the closets, nooks and crannies, calling out ‘Mamma, Mamma! Where are you?’ Once he found me in the bathroom crying.

“He needed total acceptance. At five, he would say to me, ‘Accept me, Mama. Love me the way I am.’ The Holocaust invaded our safe little household in St. Louis. And because of the intensity of my feelings during those years, my son felt part of me was walled off, he couldn’t talk with me, he couldn’t understand, and I couldn’t tell him. He felt that my attitude reflected on him. He couldn’t separate himself from my tears.

“I couldn’t speak to my little American boys about my predicament, about the tragic part of my life, the roaming and the searching for a safe place. I just couldn’t touch my deep pain and tell my innocent boys about it. I didn’t want to give them the mentality of victims, the sad eyes that were the lot of so many children of Survivors. It was not material for me to share. It was too deep a pain, inexpressible except in tears. I raised them with such dedication and protectiveness, and I could not talk about this to them. So they did not know … the … horror.”

The Art World

St. Louis, Missouri had given Felice a home and a father for her children, a peaceful refuge in the heart of America that made it possible for her to stop her wandering. With the exception of her mother-in-law, the people welcomed her, even delighted in her presence. She had the appeal of an exotic, beautiful, educated damsel in distress. St. Louis was a relaxed city with enough diversity, innovation, and artistic and intellectual stimulation that she did not become complacent. Although there was a social hierarchy and exclusion, it was not suffocating.

Had Felice landed in a more rigidly socially stratified community, she and Edward might have been isolated in their immediate group. Had Felice stayed in New Haven she would have been in an adjunct of New York, and if she had settled in New York she might have become lost in the immensity and profusion of everything there. She may have stayed a little fish. But St. Louis was the perfect platform--as it was for writers contemporary to her like Martha Gelhorn, Emily Hahn, Erma Rombauer, and Tennessee Williams--to spring her onto a bigger stage.

Early in the 1950s—exactly when and how are unclear because the stories vary a little—Felice became a collector of abstract expressionist art. Over 20 years she put together what may have been the most complete private collection of the movement’s work in St. Louis, Missouri, if not the entire American Midwest. There were other major collectors in St. Louis, such as
St. Louis Post Dispatch
publisher Joseph Pulitzer, whose family endowed the Pulitzer Prize. There was also Buster May of the May Company department stores, and Richard Weil whose family owned the Stix, Baer and Fuller department store. But their large collections surveyed many eras and styles and didn’t achieve the focused distinction of Felice’s.

The reputation of her collection and its setting on the massive limestone wall and birch paneling of the Litzsinger Road home, with its walls of floor-to-ceiling glass doors that brought the outdoors inside like a companion to the paintings, spread far beyond the Midwest. Art critics, museum curators, dealers, and visitors came from Europe and New York, and a few times a year tour groups of art lovers arrived under the auspices of the St. Louis Art Museum and other museums and art societies from the Midwest and South.

The collection included works by Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem DeKooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Philip Guston, men whose paintings became icons of that era of painting. Felice discovered their work and made her purchases before they achieved their fame, which explains how she was able to afford the paintings. Felice and Edward were comfortably off from the 1950s on, but not unusually wealthy. Their luxury was in their art and their home, not the automobiles, jewelry, servants, stables, second homes, and country club memberships that were the frequent accoutrements of St. Louis society’s wealthy, who had financial resources that far surpassed the Massies’. Felice made her purchases long before the buying public bid up the art to unimagined figures at auctions. Sometimes she found a masterpiece she loved that was going begging when she saw it in a gallery or artist’s studio. She became friends of several of the artists, and in their friendship several pressed their paintings on her as gifts.

The New York abstract expressionists were her headliners, but she also loved the modern French sculptor Jean Arp’s creations because, she said, “They have the vitality and life of nature; they grow from within; they create themselves.” She brought two of his bronzes—“The Bud” and “To Be Lost in the Forest”—into the spacious living room. Their sensuously rounded lines, their curvaceous abstraction, humanized Pollock’s fierce energy and Kline’s creative excitement.

“Pollock’s drips strain against the canvas’ border. He doesn’t want to obey any limits,” she proclaimed. “One can see the soft rectangles of sunset colors in Rothko’s composition. They glow with internal life, luminescent with hope and longing.” Barnett Newman’s precise black lines on a white background were a calm, intellectual antidote.

That is how I would hear my mother talking about her collection if I happened to be home when visitors were there. The words, ideas, descriptions, history, immediate sensations the art evoked, and anecdotes poured from her too fast to fully grasp, yet so powerful I wished I could replay them later so I could think more about them. I was less and less home. In 1959 I left for college, my brother left three years later, and Felice’s artworks were her new babies. The collection grew and grew.

For example, Felice hung the work of Fred Becker and Bill Fett, who spent parts of their careers in St. Louis; Stanley Boxer, a New Yorker; and the British artist Stanley Hayter, who founded Atelier 17 to advance the art and technique of printmaking. These men were primarily distinguished as teachers in the avant-garde movement. Hayter’s “Little Warrior” filled a wall, its rainbow-colored, jumbled lines like superimposed stills of a quivering archer notching an arrow onto his bow, pulling the arrow back, and unleashing it. Two of Stanley Boxer’s thickly brushed yet gentle “colorfield” abstractions hung in the home. Bill Fett loved rural Mexico and made its sky and rounded hills live on canvas with soft blues, purples, greens, and earth tones. Sometimes, in another mood, Fett drew from the tradition of Mexican muralists and caught the struggle of laborers in a painterly abstract mosaic of angular figures and hand tools. Fred Becker’s work joined technical engraving proficiency, influenced by Hayter, with experimental, deeply etched lines and vivid color.

A canvas by the Chilean surrealist Roberto Matta served as a greeting in the front hall. Three feet by four feet, its pastel-hued globes and globules floated in a gray nebula pierced with white shards and dark thunderheads—a vision of the sky and heavens. All these artists exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City or had their work represented in its permanent collection.

Felice’s greatest passion was for the “action artists”—Pollock, DeKooning, and Kline. My mother described how Pollock swaggered over his canvasses, peered intently down on them, pouring spools of color directly from cans or dripped paint delicately from his brushes. Her Pollock was green, black and white. DeKooning and Kline stood at their large canvasses, sometimes on ladders and scaffolds, and applied paint in big broad swaths. In Kline’s “Steeplechase” crosshatches of blacks on white below, the actual size of a steeplechase barrier, and a kinetic storm of black above clearly conveyed the furious energy of a horse and rider jumping. In the “Forest of Zogbohn,” DeKooning’s thick horizontal and diagonal strokes of bright marigold yellow, dashes of green and blue, all on a sandy beige background, re-created his experience of driving to visit a friend on a dirt road beneath a canopy of trees, the sun breaking through.

“Scudera,” completed in 1961, was Franz Kline’s masterpiece and final painting. It rose 10 feet or so to the left of our fireplace. Felice told how she and Edward came to acquire “Scudera.” Kline had invited her to his studio in 1961, at the time when the just-finished painting was leaning against a wall. At first they talked art, undoubtedly on her part effortlessly with fluidity, vocabulary, history, and passion, they way I witnessed her the few times I went to a gallery with her. The rawness of the action painters and their triumph in making abstract expressionism the first major style in Western art to originate outside Europe deeply moved her. While she talked, Kline smoked cigarettes and coughed steadily.

After awhile he began to talk about his health. At fifty-one he was short of breath and had been having pains in his chest. It was hard for Felice and Franz to move a stepladder away from in front of “Scudera” because he was weak. The energy in Kline’s work gave the illusion of rapidly applied paint, but in fact, the artist told Felice, the energy in it came from his slow, painstaking work and concentration, and he didn’t know if he had the strength to continue. She told him that her husband was a cardiologist and happened to be at a meeting in New York and asked whether Kline would be interested in his coming to the studio to examine him and give advice about what kind of help he needed. Kline agreed, and Edward arrived.

He had his own stethoscope with him, as always in the pocket of his sport or suit coat. He proceeded to listen carefully to the painter’s heart and chest, feel the strength of his pulse, and observe the pallor of his skin. He implored him to stop smoking and tried to help him find care with a cardiologist. Edward understood that the magnificent painting would be Kline’s last monumental work, and he and Felice wanted to purchase it. The painter died the following year of heart disease.

A
New York Times
review of the 1997 Franz Kline retrospective at Alan Stone Gallery in New York describes the painting: “It’s such a lovely thing, with its rough, off-kilter box of black paint floating in a field of noble blue through which a ghost of rose-red pulses and flickers like a heart…This combination of elements old and new achieves a gentle apotheosis in the show’s final painting, ‘Scudera’.”
²³
Felice always spoke of the painting’s “lyricism, its romanticism, its movement.” She called the dash of rose red near the top where it
flickers like a heart
Kline’s “vital gesture.”

Years later I asked Felice how she got interested in abstract expressionist art, and she replied, “I didn’t buy to be a known collector or to make money, but because I was crazy for the pictures.” The new movement registered on her, she said, in 1949 when she read a story in
Life Magazine
about Jackson Pollock dripping paint on canvas in his Long Island barn. The article called him America’s greatest living artist. She read about DeKooning’s first one-person show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York in 1948. Many people opposed the new art because it contradicted all the hallowed representational aesthetic values. There had been nothing like it before. But Felice did not close herself off to it; she let it draw her in and went toward it the same way she had followed her impulse many other times in her life, often in crises. This time it was for pure pleasure.

“I was finding something in America that I could relate to, something uniquely American that I wasn’t missing from my life in Europe,” Felice said. “I needed something new because the war had annihilated everything--European Jewish culture, what we believed in, society’s values.” She said
values
with a disgusted spitting gesture. “There was no nostalgia in abstract expressionist art because it had never existed before. It appeared on the scene just a few years after I arrived. It became my way of making myself at home in my new country without just assimilating myself into the comfortable existence that I saw around me.”

In her passion for abstract expressionism Felice was staying who she was while once again re-creating herself. Whereas critics were speaking of the movement as something that came as a break from the conformity of the post-War period, Felice knew nothing of this so-called conformity. She just saw it as America’s raw exuberance. Perhaps this was the intersection between the new art and Felice’s personality—its exuberance and abandon to the moment, albeit guarding a creative force, channeling impulses rather than leaving them in chaos. She felt there was a cleansing purity in the new art after the meanness and horrors of World War II. “Beauty will save the world,” she said. It took her away from the memories of her mother and brother.

When she first saw it, she said to herself that it was beautiful. “There were forms—not a table, not a human being, not a cow. Expressive, strong forms. They might remind me of a human being or something else, but they expressed without a specific meaning. Abstract art had meaning. It was visually challenging, intellectually challenging. It made one ask questions: Why are you attracted to it? Why does it have meaning for you?” In the 1950s, to know what attracted her to abstract expressionism she began to read art criticism and history in order to have a language for it. But reading wasn’t a substitute for the feeling for the art that came from within her.

She was spending more and more time on the Washington University campus in St. Louis, taking courses in Spanish literature and language and being introduced by her friend Marvin Bank to the faculty artists Bill Fett and Fred Becker, who were experimenting by going beyond modernism and constructivism’s emphasis on geometric design. She learned their painterly vocabulary—quickly, as she had learned so many other languages before—and gave deeper verbal voice to their nonfigurative art with her own translation of it into English. She had a facility like that of the dominating art critic of the era, Clement Greenberg
²⁴
(also of eastern Polish origin), of understanding the artists’ work and irrepressibly and admiringly giving a running commentary of what she saw in it when she was in their presence.