Anyone Know Katya and Bernard?
This is what it's like to live with my mother's things ...
Two Houses is a newsletter of stories about art, feminism, grief, and Time excavated from the Soho loft where I grew up. Posts are free and illustrated with the work of my long-divorced parents, the painters Mimi Weisbord and Lennart Anderson.
LATELY, I’ve been piecing together my mother’s journey back to oil painting after she left my father. It’s part of my preoccupation since inheriting her artwork while my father’s first posthumous retrospective travels around the country. I’m stitching together fragments of memory and conversation with notes found in journals, articles, letters, photos, art, and artifacts. I’m writing about my life with my parents and the life they had together that I never knew.
If you are unfamiliar with this excavation, my mother — the painter Mimi Weisbord — died in 2020 at the height of the pandemic in New York City. For more than a year, her loft was frozen in time as my partner, Kim, and I waited for a vaccine. In 2021, we returned to dig out her loft in the Soho artist co-op where she lived and painted for 40 years. Often, she’d warned us, “Stay out of my studio!” It took months to feel permitted to touch her things.
Since “diving into the wreck” of her loft, I’ve sought answers to questions I didn’t know I had — about divorce, art, marriage, grief, and living across eras as American painters — filling gaps in knowledge formed by barriers their divorce had erected.
Living people also inform this journey, women mostly in their 80s: Phyllis Tower, my mother’s roommate from Mimi’s first apartment in New York City; Gail Graves, once married to Michael, from their years at the American Academy in Rome; Dotty Attie, the feminist painter (Mimi’s cousin); members of her women’s consciousness-raising group from the early 70s, including Fran McCullough (Sylvia Plath’s editor); poet-greats, stalwarts of the women’s movement: Joan Larkin, Honor Moore.
(And, maybe, dear reader, you?)
And then there are the letters I’ve found from painters that enrich my understanding of who my parents were together and their era, letters penned by Pat Passlof, Lois Dodd, Marcia Marcus, Philip Pearlstein, Edwin Dickinson …
The post below shares a small piece of my mother’s history and how it gathers from the flotsam, jetsom, and buried treasure from the loft. Thanks to my parents, my posts are often gorgeous and may be surprising. Many know my father’s work. Few know my mother’s.
MIMI stopped painting with oils sometime in the 1960s and began again in the mid-70s (from what I can tell). Of course, she had my brother and me during this time, but her reasons were more complicated, and she did not stop drawing and painting altogether. She continued with watercolor, a medium that Lennart left alone.
This is the laundry room on the top floor of our brownstone in Park Slope, painted about 1970.
After her marriage ended, she laments to her shrink in her journal, “The art world is Lennart’s.” That year was 1973.
In 1957, she’d had a Max Beckmann fellowship to attend the Brooklyn Museum Art School. I don’t think I knew that as a young person. After my parents separated, she moved closer to that museum and sent me there for Sunday art classes, but she never mentioned this was where she’d studied. Now she’s a part of the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection … as Nude, painted by Lennart.
It’s a gorgeous painting.
My parents split up during the women’s movement of the 70s when my mother was producing feminist arts programming for WBAI-FM. As co-director of the Drama and Literature department, she invited poets and other writers to read their work on the air (Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich … ). Literature was not Lennart’s wheelhouse; she carved out her own creative spaces.
Yet, in her journal from 1973, she notes there is an easel — a gift “from Katya and Bernard” — in the corner of our new apartment, staring at her. I don’t remember a Katya or a Bernard. (Do you?)
I imagine her in bed as that easel looms. She was often in bed when I came home from school to that little apartment where we moved two blocks from Dad. She told me, late in life, that she’d had agoraphobia. I know she also had asthma, and I know from reading her journals that moving out was not an easy decision, but she was trying to get well.
When she lost her job at WBAI, she put that easel from Katya and Bernard to good use, painting cityscapes out my bedroom window at our new apartment. It’s wonderful for me to have these Brooklyn rooftops now. I live in Vermont and still have the view from my childhood window that faced Manhattan.
Years earlier, at the University of Illinois, Mimi studied with Richard Diebenkorn, who introduced her to Edward Hopper (evident in this work). I took home a very large book on Hopper from the loft, though it’s too big to lift easily. (It occurs to me that she could not possibly have had the strength to lift many volumes of her art book collection in the later years of her life.)
In 2022, we donated most of my mother’s art book collection to Materials for the Arts, a program of the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs. Books and a vast accumulation of art supplies and other of her collections went to their warehouse for use by NYC public schools and more city arts programs. She would have been thrilled to know this. And it made it much easier for me to let go of her things. Easels, of course, were a part of those truckloads of materials, and on the backside of one easel — their donations director mentioned off-hand — was a note:
“With love from Katya and Bernard.”
This floored me.
My mother was a collector of many things: books, dreams, paintbrushes, past lives, pressed leaves, fragments of wallpaper, and even notes on easels. The note was fifty years old! In her studio and elsewhere, everything accumulated to become an extension of her person and a record of her life.
This morning, I took Kim to the airport. When I came home, I sat down next to a set of tiny art catalogs we’d salvaged. These are paperbacks from Paris, mostly dated 1958, the year my parents made their way across the Atlantic and then stopped in London and Paris before settling for three years at the American Academy in Rome. (Lennart had won the Prix.) They’re titled Van Gogh, Holbein, Matisse, Degas, Dufy, Leger, Chagall, and G Braque. In her letters preserved by my grandparents, she is ecstatic to find affordable paperbacks in Paris.
One of these catalogs is not from this time, however. In the one that I randomly put my hand on this morning, the one titled G Braque — with beautiful still lifes and landscapes flooded with rich colors — I find this inscription:
“On Christmas 1975 For Mimi dearest!!! This little book Contains so much Art and Beauty!!!…. love Katya”
I don’t remember ever meeting Katya or Bernard. But I’d like to thank them for these gifts to my mother. They mattered.
In her journal from 1973, when she laments about the art world being Lennart’s, her shrink responds, “Who gave it to him? You’ve painted since you were a child.” It’s a question I know she carefully considered. She told me about it more than once, eyes wide.
In 1976, Mimi had her first one-woman show at the Prince Street Gallery. The opening was a celebration I did not, at age eight, fully comprehend. Both my parents were artists; both would, of course, have shows. I didn’t know she’d had to gather herself to get out of bed and paint again.
At the opening, we had a huge spread of food from The Big Cheese in Brooklyn. The neighborhood galleries coordinated their openings; artists and others drifted from one plate-glass storefront to the next, sipping wine. I remember my mother radiantly happy, arranging the stuffed grape leaves. I remember it seemed like everyone came to the cobblestoned corner of Prince and Green. And I remember that on the walls, she’d mounted paintings of rooftops, pictures of my dollhouse, and charcoal drawings of these themes.
Each — I now realize — first held by that easel and by that friendship.
Thank you, Katya and Bernard.
I love this, and it feels like a real labour of love. After my grandfather died, my father wrote a biography of him based on his letters and journals, and I came to know him in a way I never had in life. It's wonderful to see you honouring your mother this way.
This is wonderful, Eliza, the way you are illuminating your late parents' live and art.
I hope some day you find out who Katya and Bernard were. What a thoughtful gift, that easel.
'In her journal from 1973, when she laments about the art world being Lennart’s, her shrink responds, “Who gave it to him? You’ve painted since you were a child.” ' That must have been such a home truth for your mother. I'm so glad Mimi took up her brushes again. Both your parents were amazing artists.