Still Life With Yellow Flowers

Every picture tells a story ...

Mimi Weisbord. Untitled. c. 1956. Oil on canvas. 20 in. x 14 in. ©Estate of Mimi Weisbord

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.

After my mother died, I found this still life in the back of her painting closet. Its canvas is stretched with nails not staples, so I reached for it right away, eager for the oldest of her work. I love its attack, composition, and Fifties feel. But it was the vase that hooked me. I’d known that vase from my father’s house while growing up. I didn't know how old it was. Or that it had started out my mother’s. 

When I was ten, my father, Lennart Anderson, suggested he might sell our brownstone in Park Slope and move to a loft in Soho. At the time, my mother was making habitable a raw space on Lafayette Street between Prince and Spring. Moving to Soho was a hip thing to do as an artist in the late 70s, and I was miserable about it. There were no children there, none of my friends, no park or toy store. It was bleak, with empty gallery storefronts and garbage from the retreating textile industry. 

My father’s sudden interest in Soho felt weirdly competitive, a side of him I saw again when I told him she was learning trompe l'oeil and he began marbelizing his bedroom. These interests were perplexing. My parents had split apart years before; they could not stand to see or talk to one another. And they warred over money. Also, my father taught painting at Brooklyn College and had been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters while my mother was treading water on child support and alimony. 

I tried to take matters into my own hands by scrawling a contract to get him to agree he wouldn’t do this terrible thing, at least not while I was growing up. But he wouldn’t sign until I added a $100 penalty clause. He was serious, and he didn’t pretend otherwise. 

I stuck that poorly spelled effort in this blue ceramic vase that rested on a shelf on the brownstone’s top floor next to his painting studio. My parents had renovated that floor, adding shelving and vaulted skylights for northern light, ideal for painters. 

Anxiously, I told my mother he was looking at lofts. It was risky to talk to her about what he was up to; I could never be sure of her reactions. In this case, she let out a short, breathy laugh and delivered blandly, “I wouldn’t worry about it. He’ll never leave that studio.”

Her confidence was startling. Memories of my parents together had, even then, faded to practically nothing. They had so little to do with each other. How could she even know this? 

Still, I believed her, though, on the top floor of my father’s brownstone, I’d sometimes visit that vase with its smooth glaze and little cross-hatched pattern. I’d turn it over and over in my hands. 

In a letter she wrote home from Rome in 1958, shortly after marrying Lennart, my mother mentions working on a still life, the best she’s yet done, that’s “on the order of the yellow flowers in the basement.” If this painting was stored in her parents’ basement, it's likely from her college years and predates her even knowing Lennart. 

For me, time folds on this canvas, with layers pushing backward and forward. If I’d seen this picture as a child, I might have asked her why she left that vase behind when she left the brownstone. (She took practically everything else, even the beds.) Looking at it now, I recall his threat to move buried in that blue vase and her confidence that I needn’t worry.  

I see the time before them, too, their early marriage and her thrill at an emerging sense of mastery. I also see the tight, dark space I lived between them after their marriage blew apart, and I recall a weird sense of awe at how they seemed to come together at his end. 

She was right. He didn’t move. He never left that studio. He even asked to die there.