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Tag Archives: painting

More Than a Muse: Leonora in the Morning Light

17 Monday Apr 2023

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1940, artists' vision, book review, escape, feminism, France, historical fiction, Leonora Carrington, literary fiction, love affair, Max Ernst, Michaela Carter, modern art, painting, poetical prose, Surrealists, World War II

Review: Leonora in the Morning Light, by Michaela Carter
S&S, 2021. 393 pp. $27

In 1937, twenty-year-old Leonora Carrington, would-be artist, meets the Surrealist painter Max Ernst in London. One eye blink later, they’re attracted; the average zoo possesses less animal pheromone than these two.

Defying her industrialist father, who disowns her, Leonora follows Ernst to Paris, where she tries to paint, sometimes succeeding, and to avoid her lover’s second wife, who assaults her physically in public.

Despite the pheromones, the lovers are a mismatch. Ernst is forty-six, more than twice her age, and probably couldn’t spell fidelity, never mind live up to it. Nobody around him does. His friends, the likes of Lee Miller, Man Ray, and Paul Éluard, swap sexual partners as if that game couldn’t hurt anybody who has an artistic soul, which makes Leonora fear she lacks one. Head over heels in love, she wants Max to divorce his wife and marry her. Good luck.

I’ll confess that this novel confuses me. I was expecting a story about one woman’s growth as an artist, which would no doubt entail her search for her own style and her fight for recognition in a field dominated by men who’d never accept a woman as anything but bedmate or muse. Indeed, Carter writes in her author’s note, “This is not the story of the Great Man’s Woman. This is the story of the Great Woman.”

Carrington’s 1963-64 painting, The Magical World of the Mayans, at the National Anthropology Museum, Mexico City. Carrington spent most of her life in Mexico. (Courtesy Ioppear via Flickr and Wikimedia Commons)

I wonder. Leonora in the Morning Light vacillates between the feminist/artist theme and Max Ernst’s star power, and since the novel focuses more on their love affair than Carrington’s artistic education, it might not have been a fair fight to begin with.

Perhaps that results, in part, from Ernst’s fame, as evidenced by the emphasis in the jacket flap copy and the pointless prologue, set in 1977, which tries to show how Carrington merits our attention regardless of her erstwhile lover. Moreover, half the book has little or nothing to do with art, recounting the principals’ belated flight from France in June 1940 after the German invasion.

To be fair, before the war, you do see Carrington at work and, even more often, dreaming compelling images that she tries to paint. Also, Ernst does guide her to find her artistic vision and praises her grasp of the surreal—though she feels, with some reason, that he’s stingy that way, when generosity would have cost little. Still, it’s plain that their affair influences her life as an artist.

However, it takes about a hundred pages for Leonora to start painting as if she means it. And Ernst, despite the magnetic attraction, is poison for her, which to me makes him repellent. Selfish, hungry for the limelight, unable to commit himself to her yet complaining when she’s not there when he needs her, he’s holding her back, and she can’t break away.

After they’ve moved to southern France, a home and studio she’s largely created and paid for, nothing will make him leave, even the war. The Germans won’t bother us, he insists, though he knows Hitler has personally branded him a “degenerate” and had his works burned. Besides, the light is so good for painting. She can leave if she wants, but he’s staying, and he won’t discuss it.

What Leonora in the Morning Light does accomplish, though, is to create a remarkably clear picture of artists and how they live, work, and think. Max’s Ernst’s first demonstration for her:

He rubbed the side of the pencil over the paper. . . .It was like dreams, she thought, how they live all day in your body, in the bones of your wrists and elbows, in the spongy tissues of your liver and your lungs. Your logical mind is oblivious to them, and only when you let go and give in to sleep do these dreams dare to show their faces, the way animals at the zoo come out at dawn and dusk, when the light itself is a kind of refuge.

Carter’s a poet, and the language throughout is unerring, whether to set a scene in a Parisian café, artists frolicking at an English cottage, or the desperate escapes after the invasion. I believe everything the characters say and do, which feels utterly natural, without any wink-wink, nudge-nudge because of their fame. Their flaws as well as their genius come through.

If you read Leonora in the Morning Light, be warned that there’s a rape scene. Leonora also has a psychotic break, in which she becomes delusional, involving long, excruciating (and tedious) sequences of images and bizarre events. This didn’t surprise me, because her gift for the surreal is so deep as to suggest fragile internal boundaries between self and exterior, reality and fantasy. Sooner or later, she’ll crack.

What did surprise me was the degree to which she recovers. After her attack, she does draw back from certain subjects and images she fears might push her back over the edge, but you sense she’ll be all right in the long run. I wonder how we can know that.

An intense, unusual novel, this, perhaps best approached as a peek into an artist’s soul.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Degas and Cassatt: I Always Loved You

02 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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art, book review, Edgar Degas, feminism, historical fiction, Impressionism, literary fiction, Mary Cassatt, nineteenth century, painting, Paris, Robin Oliveira, sexism

Review: I Always Loved You, by Robin Oliveira
Viking, 2014. 343 pp. $28

In 1877, the painter Mary Cassatt has reached a crossroads. The official Paris salon has just rejected her work, yet again, leading her to question whether her dream of being a painter is an egoistic fantasy. Back in Pennsylvania, her father thinks so, and since he’s supporting her life in Europe, he also thinks that gives him the right to tell his daughter–now in her early thirties–that it’s time to give up her foolishness and settle down to what a woman’s supposed to do. Not that she disagrees, entirely; Mary loves children and would like to have a husband and family, all other things being equal.

Mary Cassatt, The Boating Party, 1893-94, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy National Gallery, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Mary Cassatt, The Boating Party, 1893-94, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy National Gallery, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

But they’re not equal. With few exceptions, notably Berthe Morisot, Édouard Manet’s sister-in-law, a vivid character here, women don’t paint. They adorn canvases, share artists’ beds, offer admiration, and otherwise stay out of the way. Mary, as a foreigner, a real talent, and a woman unwilling to walk ten paces behind anyone, poses a threat to the fraternity of French painters, as a professional and a prospective marriage partner.

At this critical juncture, when the personal and artistic paths seem blocked, Cassatt meets an artist she’s long admired, Edgar Degas. Right away, he tells her that she can paint but is wasting herself trying to ape accepted styles rather than find her own. To be successful, she must serve her obsession, whatever great theme drives her to put brush to canvas. These words electrify her, as does his rigorous devotion to his art, and since he despises social convention, he takes her more seriously as a fellow professional than many of their contemporaries.

However, the social conventions Degas despises include sensitivity toward others, generosity, courtesy, kindness, keeping promises, or pulling together toward a common goal. He also has no love for anything or anyone other than himself and his art. Cassatt couldn’t be more different, so you know that whatever these two artists mean to one another, it will be a bumpy ride.

Then again, this is Paris, and the characters who populate this novel are artists–vain, gifted, self-doubting, jealous, often careless of others’ feelings. Oliveira excels at portraying this atmosphere, in which only the thick-skinned survive, and half the battle is knowing when not to put skin on the line. Consider this social gathering:

Soon after, the men abandoned their plates for the candlelit corner next to the piano, where a few rested their elbows on its ebony skin and the rest sprawled in armchairs, twirling their delicate flutes of amber champagne, which they held by their stems. No one spoke, but they eyed one another as if waiting for a starting gun, boredom and anticipation warring on their spectral faces as the flickering candlelight painted shadows on the wall. Someone lit a cigar. Mary moved to join them, but Berthe motioned to her to sit beside her on a brocade loveseat away from the men.

This tableau is like a painting, which could be titled Just Before the Verbal Fireworks. In what follows, Mary subtly bests Émile Zola, one way she proves that she belongs. But her struggle is never-ending, because that’s the artist’s lot, whether within herself, her profession, or society at large. I have to think the author is talking about writers too when she has Degas and Cassatt wrestle constantly with the “unbidden terror”: whether their work is as good as they think and hope it is, and whether the right touch will suddenly desert them, if it hasn’t already.

The stakes increase for Cassatt when her father decides to move the family back to Paris (they had lived there in Mary’s youth). Though Robert Cassatt is no longer telling her to pack up her easel and come home to Pennsylvania, he’s an impossible man, and he’s there all the time. Demanding, selfish, self-absorbed, and dedicated to the proposition that if something doesn’t make money, it’s not worth doing, he’s poison for his long-suffering daughter, who expends much energy standing up to him.

That she’s had to deal with him all her life makes her a match for Degas, whose faults loom large in these pages. Thanks to Oliveira’s fully rounded portrayal, I understand him. But I don’t like him one bit, and you have to wonder why Cassatt still bothers with him long after he’s burned her, and others, many times. There are other excellent artists within her circle, and she must have met many kinder, more sensitive men. Why, then, her fascination with a selfish boor?

As an art lover, though, I admit my biases. Degas’s work has always seemed repetitive to me–ballerinas and bathers–and it’s hard to get around his rabid anti-Semitism, though, to be fair, Paul Cézanne and Auguste Renoir shared that prejudice. On the other hand, having seen too few of Cassatt’s paintings, I’d always thought of her as a minor artist, until I visited the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., a year ago. She’s very much the real deal–Degas was right about that–and I Always Loved You does her justice.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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