Susan’s Portrait - Reader Input Sought

Thoughts on the painter Marcia Marcus, my parents, and all that I didn't and still don't know.

Mimi Weisbord. Title? c. 1957. Gouache and ink on paper. 10.25 x 7.50 in. ©2024. 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.

I came across this painting while digging through works on paper salvaged from my mother, Mimi Weisbord’s, flat files. It’s not like her other work, and I suspect she made it while studying at the Brooklyn Museum Art School between ‘57 and ‘58. But I can’t be sure.

The girl looked familiar, so I snapped a photo and put it away where it lay in the back of my mind and did its work. This is what it’s like to have all of this material—to sift it and sort it, creating mental reference points that eventually find connections with letters, photos, and artwork until a story unfolds—or, in this case, at least a subject.

I didn’t know my mother’s sister as a young girl, but I know her children, and there is something of Becky in the eyes and the shape of the face. I considered how young my Aunt Susan must have been in 1958. In my mother’s first letter home from Rome, she mentions Susan waving up at her and my father as the Queen Mary backs away from port to begin its journey across the Atlantic. Seven years younger than Mimi, Susan was just fifteen or sixteen then.

Their older brother Marvin still lives near Philly with my Aunt Dorothy, where he reserves his energy most days for playing jazz piano. I emailed him this portrait, recalling that my grandparents made a trip to Japan in the 1950s, which could explain why Susan is in a kimono. “I think so,” he responded. Dorothy, whom he copied, wrote simply, “Susan.” Then, my cousin Becky emailed that she had pictures of her mother in a kimono.

Mystery solved.

But there was something about the work itself, the attention to patterns, the flatness, the tones. I’m not an art critic. I don’t even have any formal art education. Everything I’ve learned has come through osmosis and a recent need to know.

Whose influence does this painting suggest?

Without forethought, I blurted, “It’s Marcia Marcus.”

“I was going to say the same thing,” reacted Kim, my spouse and partner in this excavation.

Marcia Marcus. Frieze: The Porch, 1964. Oil and collage on canvas. 77 x 177 in. Family Collection, ARS/NY

I’m late to learn how friendly my parents once were with Marcia Marcus. Until recently, I didn’t even know my mother ever knew her. As I was growing up, Marcia was in my father's (Lennart Anderson’s) life, an admirer, but I didn’t understand she was a painter, too. Once, in the ‘70s, she asked him to help her move. He took time away from his studio to do it. That and the way she sent him a tie for his birthday (mailed in a regular security envelope) gave me the impression she must be a distant cousin because isn’t that what relatives do? Send gifts for your birthday and maybe ask for a big favor?

My most vivid memory is waiting for the fireworks on Marcia’s high-rise balcony on July 4th, 1976. The display was delayed, and I was bored out of my mind with the adults packed inside, smoking and drinking, and talking. Marcia’s apartment had no turpentine smell. How could she be an artist?

Marcia was scrupulous about cleaning her painting table, her daughter Kate has since explained.

So, I was more than a little embarrassed to learn that Marcia Marcus is a hugely accomplished painter with work in dozens of collections, including the Whitney, the Smithsonian, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In letters, I’ve found she was close with both my parents in the early years of their marriage. I should have known she was an artist. Not knowing says something—maybe about my father (the Great Artist among his friends), and erasure (of women artists), and my need to tune out among all the warring loyalties after my parents split.

Finally, I did know when I came across an article my mother wrote in 1977 for Women Artists News. Mimi covered a panel of “Women Artists of the ‘Fifties,” and there is Marcia along with Ann Arnold, Louise Bourgeois, Gretna Campbell, Marisol, and Pat Passlof (another of my father’s friends).

Now I understand that Marcia was vastly more embedded in the art scene of the fabled ‘50s than Lennart and Mimi ever were. She photographed Willem de Kooning; she took refuge in Marisol’s apartment when hers caught fire. She went to all the parties. She threw them.

Mucking around in my mother’s things and emailing Marcia’s daughters, I see their relationship more clearly now. The month before my parents left for my father’s Rome Prize, they took their honeymoon in Provincetown, where Marcia was painting in a dune shack and where the Lower East Side emptied each summer. Of course, Lennart helped Marcia move. Of course, she mailed him ties. “Paint is thicker than water,” the NY artists of the '40s and ‘50s famously used to say. Back in those days, Lennart’s studio apartment — rented for its skylights — was on E 4th. Marcia lived on E 6th.

But none of this answers the question of Marcia’s influence on Mimi’s portrait of Susan.

The problem is that Susan’s portrait predates the work by Marcia it most reflects (her daughter Kate confirms). And I doubt very much that Marcia ever saw it. Aside from my mother’s print, Woman in Black, Mimi did not, to my knowledge, show her work in the ‘50s. And there is no body of work like it in her oeuvre, though a certain flatness remains (Degas and the Halévys).

I’m out of my depth, but I’m hopeful you’ll leave a comment if you see another influence or know something I’m missing. Maybe it’s just an accident. The Brooklyn Museum Art School was a commercial art program. My mother was already interested in textile designs and patterns. In ‘56 she was in NYC for the summer with a commercial art internship of some kind, says my aunt (also an artist) who lived with her then on Riverside Drive. This could be the influence of fashion. Both Marcia and Mimi were stylish women. Still, it needles me. I see more. I want more. Maybe it’s because I’ve been learning about Marcia that I see this at all.

Marcia’s work is enthralling. She painted huge works that often incorporated collage and were sometimes gilded (no one else was doing that then). Learning about her has been an education like none other: both personal and art historical.

My father is remembered for having studied with Edwin Dickinson and painting in his tradition.

Marcia also studied with Dickinson. Indeed, she first met Lennart in Dickinson’s class at the Art Students League.

My father is known for winning the Rome Prize with Dickinson’s recommendation.

Dickinson also recommended Marcia for the Rome Prize (I find in her letters).

My father is lauded for sticking to his guns as a figurative artist in the 50s when the New York art world had defined itself with abstract expressionism.

Marcia, too, never wavered from figurative painting.

When I first visited the Edwin Dickinson website, I nearly lost my balance. His influence on my father was so evident it was disorienting—even the way he dressed.

Marcia studied with Dickinson and adored him (I find in her letters), yet went her own way.

More on Marcia next time. There’s a picture—a brilliant mixed-media work—that has taken me a year to come to terms with.

Finally, yes, I do think my father was a Great Artist. But championing him is not my task here. Dad taught me to root for the underdog. He saw himself as the underdog. But he was never the underdog in my life. And somewhere up there, he knows it.