by Linda Gordon
5.7. JOHN COLLIER, JR., SAN FRANCISCO, 1930
Yet another teenager joined the household a few years later, Everett Ruess.28 To take his measure, consider that this young man, who disappeared at age twenty, was already a noted poet and sketch artist. His mother, Southern California artist Stella Knight Ruess, resembled Dorothea in many ways, including her bohemian values and adoration of Isadora Duncan. Husband and father Christopher Ruess was a Harvard graduate and Unitarian minister. From this background, Everett emerged not only talented but supremely self-confident. Dropping out of UCLA after one semester, he headed for the painter he most admired, arrived at Dixon’s studio, introduced himself, and showed Maynard his sketches. Like Maynard, Everett loved the wilderness, romanticized Indians, and enjoyed wandering on his own with watercolors and a writing tablet.
Maynard and Dorothea took him in and he spent about six months with them, intoxicated by the sparkling company of their friends. “The other day I had perhaps the best art lesson I ever had; a lesson in simplicity from Maynard Dixon,” he wrote his mother. “The main thing Maynard did was to make me see what is meaningless in a picture and have the strength to eliminate it. . . . This he showed me with little scraps of black and white paper, placed over my drawings. You should try it and follow up the suggestions it gives you.”29 Dorothea mothered and mentored him, taking him along on some of her photographing commissions. We don’t know what the boy would have accomplished, however, because of his youthful foolhardiness: In 1934, he set out alone to live off the land in the Utah desert for a year. Last seen at Escalante, he was never heard from again.30 For a long time, his family and friends assumed he would show up, and only slowly did they slide into grief. Dan and John loved having this big brother, and his disappearance frightened them.
CONSIE DIXON WAS becoming a fine writer, and in 1929, only nineteen years old, she got a job as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. Her increasing independence and self-esteem lessened friction with Dorothea. As if to fill the emotional space Consie vacated, however, Dorothea and Maynard began to argue more. One of Maynard’s biographers writes that “it became common knowledge among their friends that both had started having affairs.”31 Friends interviewed after their deaths were sure that Maynard had had other lovers, but they were less sure about Dorothea; no one, however, had evidence or could name names. In any case, infidelity was only one of the sources of tension. Maynard did not articulate his grievances. He held his emotions close, and never wrote or said anything negative about Dorothea. Everyone who knew her, however, observed how stress had escalated her irritability and controllingness, characteristics that amplified as she grew older. She functioned as what in the late twentieth century was called “superwoman”—trying to do everything, unable to relax.
About Dorothea’s grievances we know more: Maynard’s absences and remoteness, his scorn for her friends and customers, and his delight in shocking those he considered uptight or pompous. After Daniel was born, they moved from the “Little House” to a bigger place at 1607 Taylor Street, and this allowed Dorothea to invite guests to dinners that became her hallmark—simple food, well cooked, beautifully presented. The guests were often her client friends, valuable professional connections, and she wanted to maintain and develop those. Maynard had no tolerance for these people or for Dorothea’s motives. A populist of sorts, he harbored a great deal of resentment for the rich—he liked to announce that their shit smelled the same as anyone else’s. He needed the patronage of the wealthy as much as she did, but he could not contain his hostility to the rich and to those who toadied to them. Long a practical joker, he could not resist teasing, baiting, or scandalizing those he found pretentious or pious. Once, he took aside Imogen Cunningham’s four-year-old son, Rondal, taught him an obscene verse, and then sent him to recite it to the guests. At other times his jokes seem like fraternity stunts: He found some woman’s underpants on the street, “speared them with . . . his swordcane, triumphantly held them aloft, then marched into the dining room, and dropped them into the circle of shocked guests.”32 Another time, he took the society page of the Chronicle, which had photos of opening night at the opera, erased the clothes from one prominent woman to make her look naked, then put the paper on her porch.33 He was famous enough that the guests may have been tolerant. But Dorothea, cringing inside, was left to compensate, uncertain whether to ignore him, to laugh and make light of the situation, or to soothe him.
Dixon’s resentments seemed particularly focused on Jews, who formed a disproportionate share of Lange’s customers. In unguarded moments he spoke of Jews with pejorative stereotypes. Dorothea must have found this painful—her two best nonphotographer friends, Elizabeth Elkus and Edythe Katten, were Jews. Although Maynard was entirely unchurched—he liked the phrase “cold as Christian charity”—it does not require a religious identity to be anti-Semitic. His own dependence on rich Jews for commissions and sales only made him more resentful.34
Some tolerated Maynard’s barbs because “temperamental artist” was a recognized category, even titillating. At other times his insults cost him, his hostility to the extraordinary Albert Bender a case in point. The son of a Dublin rabbi, a small, rumpled man with a speech defect, always a “bachelor” (read: gay), Bender had arrived in San Francisco at age sixteen or seventeen and accumulated a fortune in the insurance business. He spent it all on art, uninterested in personal luxuries. He lived in a duplex with his cousin, artist Anne Bremer, who taught him about art and guided his early purchases. He became the insurance person for Chinatown businessmen, a trade he earned by defying the anti-Chinese racism so widespread in California and treating his clients with respect. It paid off: through these contacts he developed an outstanding collection of Asian art. Endearing and generous, he would buy dozens of tickets to a concert and give them away to those he thought couldn’t afford them, or discover lovely pieces of Chinese jade and give them spontaneously to friends he encountered. Dorothea liked him very much and learned from him: With Bender as guide, Chinatown became less fearfully exotic, so his company quite possibly contributed to the antiracism she would later display.35
Bender patronized many artists, and enjoyed spending time with them, often at Coppa’s central table. He provided photographers a service by insuring their cameras. He took chances on the unknown and the unconventional. Never a snob, he endowed a gallery for Roi Partridge at modest Mills College in Oakland, which, as a result, became a leading Bay Area showplace for modern art. Bender was the first of Ansel Adams’s several rich patrons, and Adams served for a time as his driver, introducing him into the network of photographers in San Francisco and Carmel, while Bender introduced Adams to the modern art scene.36
Bender was the first to purchase Lange’s work, thus marking it as art, but remained disinterested in Maynard’s work, considering him essentially a poster artist. This reversed the usual perception of Dorothea’s and Maynard’s work and contributed to Maynard’s bitterness, a bitterness that was also estranging him from many of his old friends.37 Not surprisingly, Maynard detested Bender, considering him one of the “art hypocrites,” but also maligning him from his double prejudices against Jews and gays: “effete,” “a lisping mincing Jewish homosexual.”38 Some considerable part of their group was gay or bisexual, including Dorothea’s assistant and protégé Roger Sturtevant, known as “beautiful boy.” Maynard aside, the heterosexual members of the artist crowd regarded homosexuals as just another type of eccentric and threw a protective cloak around them as necessary.39
Maynard found his own wealthy benefactor in Beatrice Judd Ryan. An adventurous Australian whose wealthy husband had died young, she could freely follow her attraction to San Francisco’s bohemia. She saw herself as a bridge between creative people and the art market, and between traditional and modern art. True to form, Dixon insulted her on their first meeting, suggesting that she was a sycophant, but he warmed to her when he realized that she had the resources and the intention to open a gallery. His talent f
or charming rich women remained, and theirs became a productive partnership. She sized him up well: “An extremely sensitive man, he camouflaged it with bursts of vulgarity or a sharp tongue—voicing deduction about people that was frequently incorrect.” He coached her about how to do a gallery the right way—what artists to invite, who should be on a board of sponsors—and she opened the Galerie Beaux Arts at 116 Maiden Lane. A cooperative venture—patrons who paid seventy-five dollars annually received a painting a year—it became the key location for modern art in San Francisco between 1925 and 1933, a vital alternative to the now-conservative art exhibits at the Bohemian Club, and the source of a good proportion of Dixon’s sales.40
HAD IT NOT been for the Depression, Dorothea and Maynard’s marriage might have stuck, because continued success might have mellowed him and relaxed her. Had it not been for the Depression, however, Americans would never have heard of Dorothea Lange. Because of the Depression and, more important, the social movements it evoked, she reinvented her photography. Her transformation, like the Depression itself, was fitful and gradual. The Depression did not announce itself with the 1929 stock market crash, nor did anyone expect that it would last over a decade, until public spending on a world war brought the economy back to life. It crept into people’s lives as an accumulation of bad and then worse news.
Economic depressions produce downward spirals in several ways. They worsen by their own logic: Investment declines produce layoffs, which reduce consumption, which further undercuts investment. Depressions also undercut charity’s and government’s ability to help. As unemployment grows and businesses shrink, tax revenues and charitable contributions dry up. During the Great Depression, states could not meet their payrolls, and therefore increased the ranks of the unemployed. Construction almost halted, auto sales dropped, public transportation lost customers, and layoffs were imposed; even the docks grew quiet, as there were fewer products to ship. By 1932, unemployment in San Francisco and Los Angeles reached 30 percent and department stores reported nearly a 40 percent decline in sales. By 1934, 20 percent of Californians were living on public relief.
The “economy,” long an abstract concept, became a visible human phenomenon. Railroad yards were crowded with hobos. “Bindlestiffs,” homeless transients carrying belonging in a blanket roll, trudged along the roads. Men in suits sold apples on the streets. Breadlines grew even longer. In Los Angeles, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson’s church fed forty thousand people a day. Farmworkers’ already-scanty wages dropped sharply.
Artists felt the economic crash particularly severely, because they lived on discretionary spending. The art market shrank to almost nothing. Even large museums froze purchasing and cut staffs, and therefore visiting hours. Maynard lowered his price to a fraction of his usual fee in a 1930 bid for a mural in Los Angeles’s Southwest Museum, but in the end the museum could not afford it. Disappointed, he sought solace, as usual, on his own in the wilderness, and headed for the Tehachapi Mountains, writing, “. . . growing feeling of oppression,—something ominous and unavoidable impending,—of being caught in slowly closing jaws of a vise, of complete helplessness in face of fate.”41 This left Dorothea alone with work and, of course, with children.
President Hoover tried outdated, inadequate, and even counterproductive measures. He raised tariffs by 52 percent, and tried to balance the budget by raising taxes, despite massive unemployment. To farmers he offered loans and government purchase of surplus, but of such small size that they did not even slow, let alone stop, the agricultural price collapse. He called on private charities to help, just as their donations shrank. At the end of his presidency he provided government financing for banks and insurance companies and some public-works jobs, too late and far too little. Above all, his administration called on the public to tighten their belts and exercise virtue. “People will work harder, live a more moral life,” said his treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon. “Enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”42 Those suffering economically found such moralizing insulting and nonsensical, and began to listen to political groups calling for major reform of the economic system.
Those listening included many in the San Francisco arts community. Their interest in socially engaged art grew from Mexican influence. The Mexican Revolution inspired an artistic renaissance, and murals in particular became nearly a social movement; young artists were painting and carving their revolutionary ideals on hundreds of public walls and squares. Diego Rivera had revived the difficult Renaissance technique of fresco and explicitly politicized his art, celebrating Mexico’s downtrodden but heroic peasants and workers defending their country’s soul against marauding capitalists, generals, and Yankee imperialists. Arts culture in Mexico City was intoxicating, and numerous U.S. artists visited to take it in.43 The Mexicans’ bold and intricately composed integration of folk design and images of working people into their murals fit a budding democratic consciousness among American artists. Even the apolitical Edward Weston was overcome with admiration for “the greatness of Mexican art. Much that I once valued now seems trivial . . . forced, affected, full of effort to be different, smart.”44
Among many American artists, los tres grandes—muralists Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—evoked an admiration that bordered on hero worship.45 Rivera attained celebrity status, a position to which his largeness of personality and body contributed. In California art circles, the Rivera craze included even conservative art patrons.
Dixon was a naysayer. Once the dominant California muralist, Dixon’s competitive resentment was fortified by animosity to the organized Left. He also pointed out, quite legitimately, that painters shedding subjugation to European standards were only transferring it to Mexico, instead of developing a style of their own. When artists Ralph Stackpole and Ray Boynton got Albert Bender and shipping magnate William Gerstle to offer Rivera fifteen hundred dollars to paint a mural at the California School of Fine Arts, Dixon gained some support.46 Rancor at hiring a foreigner during the Depression, when American artists so badly needed work, combined with establishment fury at the Communist content of his work. The San Francisco Labor Council joined the opposition on protectionist grounds. Mainstream art critics condemned Rivera’s work as disorganized, lowbrow and showy—one critic called him “the P.T. Barnum of Mexico”—a “mess of odds and ends” that “mean nothing.”47 Dixon, in a sharp break with his friends Stackpole and Boynton, condemned the Rivera “cult” as sycophancy, “Celebrity hounds todying [sic] to him.” The Dixon group, which included Frank Van Sloun and Otis Oldfield, also had a legitimate procedural grievance: The funders had conducted a sham competition for the job—Dixon had applied—when they knew it had already been committed to Rivera.48 But Dixon’s denunciation soon became explicitly political: “ ‘He is a professed Communist and has publicly caricatured American financial institutions.’ ”49 As Consie later put it, Dixon was a literal reactionary and identified with the old southern aristocracy; while he hated the rich, he “never said a kind word for the laboring classes except out of what he called ‘noblesse oblige.’”50 The opposition forced the withdrawal of the School of Fine Arts commission, but Rivera got the last word: an invitation to paint at the Luncheon Club at the Pacific Stock Exchange, for which he received four thousand dollars. When the U.S. government refused him a visa because of his communism, his sponsors had the political connections to get the decision reversed.51
Despite the opposition, it seemed that all San Francisco feted Rivera when he arrived, along with Frida Kahlo, in November 1930; everyone in the Bay Area art world wanted to meet them.52 A one-man show of his work opened at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. Rivera and Kahlo stayed in Ralph Stackpole’s studio, and Rivera worked there. Maynard and Dorothea socialized with them on several occasions, and Rivera gave Dorothea several drawings.53 Rivera’s style probably influenced Lange’s: the monumentalism of the proletarian and peasant figures, the symmetry of composition, the clarity of lin
e and volume. That Rivera combined artistic genius with passion for the oppressed and exploited was not lost on her either.
Frida Kahlo also influenced Dorothea. Today Kahlo appears a fine artist in her own right, her reputation intensified by her beauty, her folk wardrobe, and her tragic health history, and through iconization as a woman of suffering and transcendence of suffering. But in 1930 she was unknown, she was in physical pain, and Rivera promptly began an affair with his San Francisco model, tennis champion Helen Wills Moody.54 At this painful moment, Dorothea made a quick and intense connection with Frida: here was a disabled woman of great talent, charm, and political commitment, with a philandering artist husband. Like Dorothea, but twelve years younger, Kahlo had contracted polio as a child and emerged with a wizened lower leg, which she hid the same way Lange did—with long skirts. When she was eighteen, much worse befell her: A bus accident left her terribly, irrevocably injured. Dorothea offered Kahlo the use of her photography studio.55 More important, Dorothea gave her a lifelong gift, one whose value is impossible to overestimate: her doctor, Leo Eloesser.56 One of the cultural elite of San Francisco and a Lange client, Eloesser was a pioneer thoracic and bone surgeon at the Stanford Medical School, and Lange had consulted him. He was politically left-wing, a physician for Tom Mooney, later a medic for the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. It was Eloesser who correctly diagnosed Kahlo’s injuries, and in gratitude she painted his portrait at his San Francisco home. He remained her personal physician till her death in 1954.