Mimi on the Wall at the Lennart Anderson Retrospective
If I can get her there in time
Two Houses. Two Painters. Two Parents. 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. Sign up here:
Portrait of Mimi was painted in 1964 and hung on the wall of my maternal grandparents’ condo while I was growing up. I hadn’t seen this picture in decades when I discovered it in my late mother’s painting racks. My mother took possession of it when my grandmother died, and her things were divided. She’d insisted the paintings by my father were hers and outside of the estate’s valuation. She told me this with an energy that I didn’t understand until years later as I plumbed memory along with her possessions. She’d wanted to be sure her children would inherit work of his. (There’s more to it than that, but I’m protecting the backbone of my unpublished memoir.)
Since that was her intention, I should have felt welcome to dig in her painting closet in Soho on that hot July day a year after her (pandemic) death. But she was always so protective of her studio and especially that closet; instead, I felt a transgressive thrill mixed with fear, feelings that wrestled with the sea of the loft: its layered reefs, undertows, fault lines of family history, and most of all, its tidal pull. Again and again, I was swept to my mother’s couch to stare at the patterns of stamped tin on the ceiling rather than sift and sort her lifetime of possessions.
Yet digging delivered significant rewards. I’d forgotten Portrait of Mimi when I pulled it from her racks. I gasped to find it there.
The painting had been buried by divorce, yet it resists that history. Here is evidence of a patience she’d once had for him, and of a respect they’d once held for each other.
As a child, I would have thought this little picture unfinished. Now, I love how her finely wrought head contrasts with the blurred, blocky abstraction of her seated figure. That abstraction draws us to her face, where the paint coalesces to find her waiting for the picture to come together.
With the portrait painted in this way, he’d have known when he captured her, rocking back to appraise his work. Her blocky figure brings that moment with her head into relief for me. I can hear the high, happy noise he’d make in the back of his throat in such moments, mouth open, leaning in for final touches that may have rendered her expression. The picture probably stayed on the easel for some time in the studio. He’d have shared it with visitors before it went to Graham Galleries for a show.
What else I see:
Mimi posing pregnant with my brother.
Mimi transitioning from muse to mother.
1964 was also the year my father completed Nude.
My first memory of Nude is when I confronted it hanging on a wall at the Brooklyn Museum when I was a child in the 70s. He’d brought me with him but was elsewhere when I rounded a corner and found my mother on the wall, exuding a kind of elegant eroticism that held me a moment in a mix of confusions.
I wanted to ask him something, but I didn’t know what it was. He circled back, agitated, ready to go. Yet we were there because this was on the wall. I’m sure of that; it was a quiet moment to check out the exhibition that had brought this picture out of storage in the museum.
Now I wonder, did he want me to see it? Was I just along for the ride? Did he anticipate my astonishment? That I might look at him wide-eyed?
A retrospective of his work opens in Chicago at the end of this month. These events seem to invite me to wrestle with his work and moments with him like this one.
I followed him out of the museum, as confused by his discomfort as I was thrilled by the painting and an emerging awareness of his mastery. This was my mother. And not my mother. She was not yet a mother. She was also luminous and outside of time.
I had no words for any of it. I’m digging this moment now to find what it was about. What I’m certain is that I was then waking to something I’d not known had existed between them, a window to a history I’d missed. I’d seen something different about my parents that thrilled me, that predated me, that led to me.
Portrait of Mimi is currently in Montreal, where I left it to be cleaned, restored, and reframed. The framer’s mother recently died, however, so he is behind. I hope to collect it next weekend and swap it for the painting my mother did of Lennart in 1958, which needs cleaning. If Portrait of Mimi is ready, it is headed to Chicago for the fifth stop of Lennart Anderson: A Retrospective and it will be on view for the first time since the 1960s. This is also an opportunity to see Jupiter and Antiope.
The opening is Thursday, March 27th, 2025, from 5:30 - 7:30 pm, at the John David Mooney Foundation.
Let me know if I’ll see you there.
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"wrestled with the sea of the loft: its layered reefs, undertows, fault lines of family history, and most of all, its tidal pull. Again and again, I was swept to my mother’s couch to stare at the patterns of stamped tin on the ceiling rather than sift and sort her lifetime of possessions." !!!
Astounding piece. I love reading about Mimi through your eyes.
So good on so many levels— the paintings, the memories, the storytelling. 🙏