My Strange Inheritance - Lennart Anderson’s Jupiter and Antiope
The painting is on view at steven harvey fine art projects in New York through October 5th, 2024
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.
From the steven harvey fine art projects webpage:1
“Lennart Anderson (1928-2015) was described by The New York Times as one of the most ‘prominent and admired painters to translate figurative art into a modern idiom.’”
(When I shared that draft obituary with my mother, she said, “That’s right. That’s just what he’d intended.”)
“The image of Jupiter (Zeus) and Antiope is a well-used subject, a tradition which Anderson both emulates and complicates in his re-workings of the scene.”
He left this huge painting to me and my brother, a masterwork to sell later.
“In historical depictions of the pairing, Antiope lounges asleep across the foreground, nude or draped in revealing swathes of fabric, while Jupiter is a lurking, animalistic presence peering around trees or poised over the unconscious woman.”
The painting is beautiful. And it makes me wildly uncomfortable.
“Anderson’s interpretation, however, places Jupiter lying in repose opposite of Antiope in the frame.”
The painting has something to do with the passing of Barbara, his second wife, who died of cancer (he once glancingly mentioned, unaware he had my full attention).
“[Jupiter] is some distance away, his steady gaze hinting at the potential for violence but not yet enacting it.”
Jupiter‘s pose is also brooding. The painting seems layered with a complicated grief. My father brooded for two years after Barbara’s death. His index finger curled in a pinch with his thumb to his lips as he stared at his studio floor.
“Anderson has said that he paints ‘how things fall together and separate out.’
Their relationship had been on-again-off-again since I was five, and my parents parted. They married only once I left for college.
“The figures in this staging are simultaneously drawn together and held apart, […]”
After the ceremony, they stood on the stoop in Brooklyn with their wedding guests to pose. I watched from the sidewalk. My brother and I are absent from the wedding photos.
“[Here is] a dynamic tension that invokes the relationship between painter and model with Jupiter as stand-in for the artist and Antiope as his subject.”
A day or so later, he brought us with them to his little cabin in Maine. In hindsight, an incendiary plan. Barbara erupted. I was then eighteen.
“This series of paintings and drawings references not only the history of a particular motif [...]”
She did not want to be reminded he’d ever had another family before theirs, he told me when I was in my thirties. He mentioned it lightly on the phone as though I’d always known.
“[The painting also references] the history of the figure model and female nude in European painting.”
At each of his weddings, he’d married his muse. I was surprised to learn this was true of my mother’s, too. But his brides didn’t stay still under his brushes. They wanted more, and they wanted families.
“A student of art history, Anderson embodies the exquisitely described values in observational painting, citing the influence of figures such as Piero della Francesca, Diego Velasquez, Edgar Degas and Claude Poussin.”
Jupiter grieves and hides in plain sight. He is a satyr, half goat, half god, dark, earthly, carnal, while Antiope is otherworldly, luminous, mortal.
“Lennart Anderson is the recipient of the Prix de Rome, Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.”
The tableau works on my father’s canvas, I think, where his muse is forever unconscious. Where Jupiter broods, aware of his power. Where Antiope is a Nude for all time, beautiful, vulnerable, captured sublime.
“His work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Fralin Museum of Art; the Palmer Museum of Art; and the Delaware Art Museum.”
But I’m still working out what this inheritance means. It’s me now, Dad, who broods from the trees.
Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects. (n.d.). Jupiter and Antiope | steven harvey fine art projects. Retrieved September 15, 2024, from https://shfap.com/events/jupiter-and-antiope/
"At each of his weddings, he’d married his muse. I was surprised to learn this was true of my mother’s, too. But his brides didn’t stay still under his brushes. They wanted more, and they wanted families."
I like the way you structured this essay and your slant as a child witness makes it even more compeling.
Gorgeous writing. The painting is complex on many levels. I’m so interested in the idea of our parents leaving us breadcrumbs of knowledge about themselves. It takes a brave person like you to collect them.