The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  Olsen wrote to Sexton, informing her of the submitted application: “Clumsy, ineffectual application, not knowing how to speak for myself, & all those spaces blank, degrees, position, education. TMAR [Tell Me a Riddle] all to really plead for me.” Full of “desperation,” she wrote that she was willing to leave her family and be in residence in Cambridge. As committed as she was to her children, she thought the solitude might be an advantage. Ever since her time at Stanford’s creative writing workshop, and even before, Olsen had managed to find people to vouch for her: instructors put her in touch with editors; editors put her in touch with agents. Each reassured the other that Olsen, elusive and unreliable, was nonetheless talented and worth the investment. She was a sympathetic figure, as well as “an attractive woman with a deep warm charm,” as one friend described her. At Stanford, she had been beloved by everyone; it was not hard for her to cultivate support. So perhaps when she wrote to Sexton, pleading her case, she anticipated that Sexton would do exactly what Sexton did: advocate for Olsen’s acceptance. Sexton too wanted to talk to someone whose life had been literature. And like Olsen, she understood the need for distance from one’s family.

  After a year at Radcliffe, surrounded by the educated elite, Sexton likely realized that her friend’s case would be a litmus test for the Institute. None of the first-year fellows had come from the working class, and none had needed the full financial support that someone like Olsen would require. Olsen was at once a perfect candidate and a problem.

  On the one hand, she was a case study in how a woman could be “simultaneously dedicated as a wife and mother, as well as an artist,” as one of Olsen’s recommenders put it. By this description, she was the kind of creative woman that the Institute wanted to help. On the other hand, Olsen lived out of state, she had produced very little throughout her life, and she lacked a formal education. It’s not clear that the Institute would have gone to the lengths it did—sending out an emissary to interview Olsen in San Francisco, entertaining the idea of a full-time fellowship position—without encouragement from one of its more famous fellows. Even after the interview, Olsen wasn’t sure that she would merit one of the few fellowships that would be distributed to newcomers. All she knew, in the late winter of 1962, was that she still had a novel in her. She could only hope for time to write it all down.

  * * *

  —

  Just what kind of worker is a writer? Olsen wrestled with that question throughout her career, beginning with her earliest reportage (recall her description of the work of writing in “The Strike”) and continuing with her later fiction and nonfiction. It was a question that writers and artists took seriously in the 1930s, when, thanks to President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, many of them became federal employees.

  A writer at work might look lackadaisical: she jots down words in a notebook; she stares into space. Pressing typewriter keys requires little physical force. But for an artist, the work is physical, laborious. A painter stretches canvases; a lithographer presses stones. The heavy lifting is literal.

  And then there is sculpting.

  Making sculpture—life-sized sculpture—is a long, draining, physically demanding process. It begins with a block of heavy clay. The sculptor starts by cutting and shaping it, dragging sharp tools through solid mass. Armatures bear some of the weight; human arms bear the rest. Once the image is shaped, the sculptor must smooth the clay surface (errors can be reproduced in the molding process), coat it with several layers of rubber over the course of several days, create a firm outer “jacket” out of a substance like plaster or resin, remove the outer jacket and the rubber to create a “mother mold,” and then pour in hot wax. This “wax positive,” as it’s called, then hardens into a version of the clay original. The wax positive needs work too—imperfections are corrected, rods are inserted (a process called spruing), and a ceramic shell is then made. All this before a sculpture can be cast in bronze. If it’s a large sculpture, then the artist must make individual molds, repeating this process multiple times, before piecing the sculpture together later in the process.

  This was the work Marianna Pineda, a mother of three with dark hair and a gentle demeanor, did every day in her home studio at 164 Rawson Road in Brookline.

  Pineda seemed to live a charmed life; a 1977 oral history finds her describing it as “lucky,” “marvelous,” “fantastic.” But her good humor and grace hid unruly feelings. Sculpture was therapeutic: “Carving is a great way to get rid of all your feelings that you’d like to crash around. You know, hit things!” She lifted clay onto stools and cut and carved and contoured. If she had a particularly heavy lift, she called her husband, Harold “Red” Tovish, who was sculpting out in the garage, to come help her. This was a notable event: neither let the other look at unfinished work, though each relied on the other for “critiques” of finished products. When called, Tovish would offer Pineda his physical assistance, then retreat to his garage, the shabbier work space, leaving his wife in the two-story, sun-filled home studio. The arrangement was fitting: though he received more critical attention, Tovish always considered Pineda the better artist. He made art for her eyes alone.

  Marianna Pineda

  at the Institute

  The two sculptors had met in New York City in 1942. Pineda, seventeen at the time, was on leave from Bennington College, where she studied sculpture, and working at the Museum of Modern Art in the children’s playroom. Born to a wealthy family in Illinois in 1925, Pineda had come to art at an early age. She spent weekends taking the El from Evanston, a town just north of Chicago, to the downtown, where she marveled at the holdings of the Art Institute of Chicago. She took art classes in Michigan and in Southern California, where her family moved permanently in 1938. It was during these years that she developed her fascination with the human form. Tovish, an orphaned working-class Jewish boy with a wry sense of humor, was already a working sculptor when they met; he’d fallen in love with the craft as a teenager, in an art class run by the Works Progress Administration. Pineda visited his studio, and Tovish, four years her senior, was struck by her beauty: her dark eyes, her broad smile, her gamine look that was somehow also very feminine. He assumed she had many suitors, but when he finally got up the courage to ask her on a date, he found that most would-be beaux, intimidated by her beauty, had left her alone; she spent most Saturday nights washing her hair.

  Tovish had already been drafted; the two had only a month to get to know each other before he went overseas. Both left New York in 1943—Tovish to fight the Germans, Pineda to study at the University of California at Berkeley, her second of four formal apprenticeships with master sculptors. It was at Berkeley that she changed her surname from her given name, Packard, in order to avoid confusion with the prominent muralist Emmy Lou Packard. She was inspired by the play Mariana Pineda, by Federico García Lorca, which told the life story of Mariana de Pineda y Muñoz, a nineteenth-century Spanish liberalist heroine. At some point during the three years he was away, Tovish broke off the relationship. “I felt we were too different in our background,” he later said. “She came from the upper middle-class, Quaker background, and I just thought we would never make it.” But not long after the breakup, they started writing to each other again, and Tovish thought, “Oh, the heck with all that.” He called up Pineda as soon as he was back in the States and proposed.

  Pineda and Tovish spent the early years of their marriage in New York. They lived first in Pineda’s apartment near Columbia, then moved to a house in the Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn, which they shared with friends. The two sculptors also shared a studio in Gowanus, where they kept bumping into each other and failed to make much art. This was the last time they ever shared a work space.

  Pineda had her first daughter, Margo, in 1946, when she was only twenty-one, and a second child, Aaron, soon after. Her male instructors had warned her that motherhood would end her sculpture career. “Oh,
it’s very nice what you’re doing now,” Pineda recalled their saying. “But soon you’ll be making babies and you’ll forget all about this art.” Her pregnancy was unplanned, though not unwanted. “They just happened,” she later said of her children. “And we were delighted. And I stopped working, literally, for about a year and a half. And I was miserable! And I realized I wouldn’t be a very good…anything, if I didn’t get back to work.”

  Risking their financial stability, but determined to advance both their careers, the Tovishes left for France in 1949 to work in the studio of the French-Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine. Paris proved to be her “great liberation,” as Pineda put it, just as it had been for Barbara Swan at roughly the same time. (It does not seem that their paths crossed in France.) Their older child went to nursery school, and they hired child care for Aaron as well as housekeeping. “I didn’t have to worry about shopping or cooking,” Pineda recalled. Working in Zadkine’s studio, Pineda began to turn pregnancy—an experience that her male professors had seen as a problem for an artist—into a source of art. The Sleepwalker, produced during that first year in France, is a figure at once apprehensive and adventurous. Obviously pregnant, the sculpted woman stands erect despite her swollen belly; her feet are spread hips width apart to support her uneven shape. Her face is upturned, and her hands clutch at the space above her. She seems as if she were about to rise up into some unknown air. Like Pineda, then a young mother, “she feels her way toward a new mode of being.”

  Women’s bodies—sensuous, mystical, powerful—became Pineda’s great subject. Though Tovish was the more vocal of the two (his nickname, Red, referred to his political views), Pineda was in some ways the more political artist. In the 1950s, to portray the female body experiencing sexual pleasure was itself countercultural—but this is what Pineda did in the lead sculpture Lovers, then again in the carved wood piece An Effigy for Young Lovers. Effigy appeared in 1953, the same year as Alfred C. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, a report that shocked the nation by revealing that women had orgasms and affairs.

  By the time the Tovishes landed in Brookline, in 1957—the same year Kumin and Sexton met in Holmes’s workshop—they had lived in Paris, Minneapolis, and upstate New York, where Tovish had secured a teaching job. Florence had been their last stop before Boston: when Tovish had needed a break from teaching, the family had moved to Florence for three years, from 1954 to 1957. In 1957, the Boston Museum School had recruited both Tovishes to teaching positions, but Pineda hadn’t wanted to teach (she tried to avoid it throughout her career; when she did eventually take a teaching gig, her students criticized her for being a perfectionist and overly harsh). Tovish accepted the job, and the family moved to Tappan Street in Brookline.

  After they had lived in the Midwest and Europe, metro Boston felt expensive, but then, thanks to the effort of their gallerist, Hyman “Hy” Swetzoff, their work started to sell. In April 1957, he sold Pineda’s Mother and Child, one of her many works on this theme, to private collectors for $300 (roughly $2,600 today). A bronze version of The Sleepwalker, her breakthrough sculpture, eventually sold in 1960 for $2,000 ($16,600 today). Swetzoff took a third of each payment, a standard commission for the time, and Pineda took home the rest. In the years that followed, she won sculpture prizes from the Art Institute of Chicago, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Portland, Maine Museum. She was now a working artist and, as the papers noted, a “Brookline mother of three.” Nina, her youngest, was born in 1958.

  One of her prizewinning sculptures, Prelude, encapsulates what was so elegant and revolutionary about Pineda’s work. The piece depicts a woman about to go into labor. The figure lies back on her hips, with her swollen stomach protruding from the cloth wrapped around her hips. Tension is evident: her hands grip the floor behind her, and her body writhes in what must be pain. But her face, turned upward, looks almost rapturous. The piece is expressive, intense, and yet, somehow, dignified. Earthier than a Madonna, Prelude makes pregnancy appear human and also cosmically important.

  Pineda had managed to do what her instructors had told her was impossible: raise children and make art simultaneously. This was in part because she was a hard worker—she was productive throughout her career—and in part because she benefited from various forms of material and emotional support. Her mother, a wealthy Quaker who was a progressive (she was a civil rights activist long before the movement went mainstream), had encouraged her daughter’s artistic endeavors from a young age, and she sent much-needed money when the Tovishes were broke. Tovish, admiring of his wife’s talent and aware of what we would now call his male privilege, ensured that Pineda had everything she needed to work. The couple also hired household help. Their neighborhood was safe, and the children ran free, but Pineda took comfort knowing that there was someone looking out for them while she worked.

  Still, there was something a bit isolating about Brookline, with its mansions and parks and quiet streets. This wasn’t cosmopolitan Paris, nor a midwestern university town. Artistic companionship was important to Pineda and Tovish, even though they relied primarily on each other. Both artists had exacting standards for themselves and distrusted easy praise. They yearned not for the fame of Pollock or Picasso but for recognition from their artistic community.

  Pineda felt a specific sense of loneliness. “It was a very lonely business just being a housewife,” she later recalled. “I remember feeling totally isolated in my kitchen…There wasn’t a sense that you’d get together with other women to form a group and you’d take care of the kids together or take turns, you know, none of that. It was—you were really supposed to do it all yourself. And it was rough.” She longed for female friends who were also artists. She didn’t want to sit in the kitchen and gossip about the neighbors; she wanted to talk about work.

  Pineda knew one female artist who also lived in Brookline and had a daughter who was the same age as her youngest child. Her friend was Barbara Swan Fink.

  It’s not surprising that these two women knew each other: the Boston art scene was small enough that artists with little in common encountered and reencountered each other at lectures and gallery openings and parties. But it is nonetheless striking that two women with such similar aesthetic preoccupations lived such similar lives. Both had found ways to continue working through the busiest years of child rearing by making that very activity the subject of their art. They were both iconoclastic, though their styles diverged. Swan’s paintings and sketches were expressionist, surreal, thick with texture and feeling. Entire personalities emerged in her faces. Pineda favored smooth, clean lines and anonymous figures; her bodies twisted into positions of devotion and repose. Her work was solid, grounded, a bit earthy. While Swan had dispensed with traditional, mystified images of motherhood by channeling the dark and the strange, Pineda had made motherhood look sublimely natural.

  One wonders if they talked about their works in progress as they picked up their daughters from nursery school or clinked champagne glasses at a gallery opening. One wonders, too, if Swan mentioned to Pineda that she’d been participating in a little experiment across the river in Cambridge. Swan would have told her about the money, surely, and maybe too about a few of the more colorful characters: the twitchy literary scholars, the shy historians, the dark-haired poets who swept into rooms as if they were riding the air. For so long, Pineda had relied on one fellow artist: the man with whom she traveled and raised children and divided up household funds. She might have been intrigued by the idea of seeing and discussing the work of other artists and equally curious about how other women, much like her, had navigated the competing demands of children and craft.

  Pineda decided to apply. She wanted the money and the prestige—she appreciated any recognition of her professional excellence—and she was curious to know other women who were doing interesting work in her community. She also liked the idea of being in a community that comprised both scholars and artists. Bot
h Tovishes were well-read and politically engaged—Pineda thanks to her mother, and Tovish due to his participation in the WPA. Once in Boston, they tapped into Cambridge’s intellectual scene; they were friends with both Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. Pineda wasn’t a firebrand, but she had an appetite for intellectual and political debates. She wanted to mingle with the highly accomplished female scholars who had merited Radcliffe’s money and time.

  In October 1961, Pineda requested the application blanks and filled out the first page. She listed her age (thirty-six), her children (ages fourteen, twelve, and three), the academies where she’d studied, and the prizes she’d won. When the application asked her to discuss her proposed project, she paused. Self-promotion had never been her strong suit. Both she and her husband believed that good work should be its own advertisement; they balked at chances to sing their own praises, and they looked askance at those who did so easily. They were both reluctant to show work before it was perfect. Once, the Tovishes received an invitation to show their work in a “new-talent show” at the Museum of Modern Art, but they refused, thinking they weren’t ready. “Maybe that was a mistake,” Pineda later reflected.

  But being a working artist means, every so often, transforming oneself into a winning bauble, something that a rich person might buy. When necessary, Pineda would sell herself as best as she could. “It is difficult to describe what I propose to do without becoming needlessly technical,” she began. “I hope it will suffice to say that I hope to complete several good-sized sculptures.” She described her obstacles in the same opaque way: since she and her family had returned from abroad, where domestic labor was cheap, “my output has lowered considerably.” Pineda was far more privileged than someone like Olsen—she was not working a day job, she had household help, she had the occasional gift from her mother—and yet she still needed the Institute’s assistance. It was hard to make life-sized sculptures, she explained: few art schools taught the craft, and the decline in “architectural patronage” meant that there was less money available for the necessary materials; Pineda could easily spend $500 (over $4,000 today) on materials alone. (This historical aside was the closest she would come to making—and justifying—her own demand for Radcliffe’s funds.) She concluded her project description: “I have hopes some day of doing work which will find its place out of door or in public settings and a modest practical approach to this grandiose goal would appear to be a mastery, first, of life-size scale. I intend to work in clay for bronze casting and to carve wood and stone.”