Kraushaar Galleries and Mozartiana
Esther Williams, Art and Music
In the 1930s, Williams’ art was represented by the Grace Horne Gallery in Boston. After increasing financial difficulties in that relationship, she switched in 1940 to Kraushaar Galleries in New York, working with that gallery for over a decade and developing a close relationship with Antoinette Kraushaar, gallery director and niece of the gallery’s founder. Williams had well-regarded exhibits with Kraushaar in 1941, 1944, and 1947, and it was at the first of these that she showed the Hillstrom Collection painting Mozartiana. This painting is in some ways characteristic of much of what Williams aimed for in her art, since it combines her interest in flowers and the piano with her devotion to music, in particular that of Mozart. The flowers in Mozartiana are purple, red and pink anemones, which, according to the artist’s niece Julia Robinson, were a favorite of both Williams and her mother. And Mozart, as has been demonstrated, was a favorite composer of the artist, as was the piano her favored instrument.
Mozartiana can be understood as the artist’s memorial to the brief life of Mozart. Anemones are associated symbolically with transience, and relate to the mythological story of Adonis, upon whose death the Goddess Venus, who loved him, caused the flowers to grow up from his spilled blood. The rich hues of anemones are associated with the color of blood, and Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, commented on the short-lived nature of the anemone bloom, which explains why the flower’s name is derived from the Greek word for “wind”—since the wind is as transient as the flower. In Christian symbolism, the anemone is frequently shown at the scene of Christ’s Crucifixion. Thus, Williams’ placement of a vase of anemones on a piano on which can be seen Mozart’s music—in the pale green covers of the publisher C. F. Peters, instantly recognizable to any piano student—is a commemoration by the artist of the composer. Her title for the painting underscores this, since she added to Mozart’s name the suffix iana, which is used to indicate commemoration. And the personal quality of the painting is further emphasized in the fact that the piano depicted appears to have been Williams’ own piano (as she stated in her letter to Laura Penny, “I paint what interests me in the life around me.”). An upright piano visible in a painting Williams made of her studio appears to be identical with the instrument shown in Mozartiana, and Williams’ step-son Peter McKinney and her niece Julia Robinson confirm that one of the pianos she owned was such an upright.
Mozartiana was cited for praise in a February 2, 1941 New York Times review of Williams’ Kraushaar exhibition that year. The review also mentioned and illustrated a pair of paintings jointly titled Two-Piano Concert. These provide an interesting aside and an indication of some of the thought that went into the artist’s works. They were discussed in correspondence between Williams and an admirer named Peregrine White. White asked in letter of March 1941 if she could obtain photographs of the two paintings, regretting that she did not have the funds to purchase the actual works. She mentioned that she was an enthusiastic amateur pianist who was particularly interested in two-piano music, and noted that the performers depicted in Williams’ paintings reminded her of Bartlett and Robertson, referring to the well-known popular British two-piano duo of that time, Ethel Bartlett (1896-1978) and her husband Rae Robertson (1893-1956). Bartlett and Robertson toured extensively in Europe and America starting in the late 1920s, and are sometimes credited with beginning the popularity of two-piano performances. The figures in Williams’ paintings do, in fact, resemble the distinctive appearance of the duo, who arranged and published two-piano works, and for whom several prominent composers, such as Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), wrote pieces. Williams was herself an avid duo-piano participant, as attested in a letter of December 1948, in which she described playing her two pianos with Parker Bailey (1902-1982), a composer and transcriber of duo-piano works who had studied at Yale University. Two subsequent letters from Peregrine White to Williams seem to indicate Williams’ agreement with the identity of the figures as Barlett and Robertson and shed further light as well (unfortunately, the artist’s part of the correspondence is lost or unlocated). White described the pianists in the paintings as “constantly concluding but never quite concluding the Mozart sonata,” which may indicate that Williams had specified that it was a Mozart work being performed in her depictions. White also noted that the images “do indeed carry an echo of music with them,” which likely indicates that Williams had expressed her intent that her images of the duo should have something inherently musical about them—that they would not be just depictions of musicians, but that the paintings would in some way themselves be a form of music.
Such an idea also seems to be indicated in the 1941 New York Times review:
The artist’s lively brushwork reflects, both in subjects and surface, very real musical interest which carries over into a certain intrinsic quality in the work, a kind of exuberant lyricism. This applies even more to some of the still-lifes than to some of the musical subjects proper—the earlier “Mozartiana” with its rich anemones, the “Still-life with Drum” and the deep-toned “Fruit and Vegetables.”
The Times reviewer found in Williams’ work—and not just in the subject matter but also in the very way she painted—a kind of music. Such an idea deserves further attention, and another of Williams’ letters sheds additional light. In January 1949, she described to her mother a concert by the renowned classical guitarist Andrés Segovia (1893-1987). A few days following this performance, Williams was at work on a painting inspired by Segovia, which she showed to her close friend and fellow music enthusiast Giovanna Lawford, a sculptor. Williams noted in her letter that Lawford “thinks I have the feel of him playing,” indicating that the painting captured something of Segovia’s musical performance, and was not merely a depiction of the man. In her music-related works, Williams was evidently attempting not just the depiction of a musical subject, and not just a true impression of a musician in performance. Instead, she wished to convey in the language available to her as a visual artist—the handling of her brush, her composition, her style—something distinctly musical: the “exuberant lyricism” of the New York Times reviewer.