Biala, Marsden Hartley, Ossip Zadkine, Valentine Prax and the 1938 Guggenheim Fellowship
L to R: Janice Biala, Marsden Hartley, Ossip Zadkine, and Valentine Prax. Copyright remains with respected entities.
Biala, Marsden Hartley, Ossip Zadkine, Valentine Prax and the 1938 Guggenheim Fellowship.
By Jason Andrew
Introductory text: In an unlikely comradery, this essay brings together the American painter Marsden Hartley and French painter Valentine Prax, the American-Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine and Janice Biala in her application to the 1938 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Biala with Ford at Villa Paul, c. 1936. Courtesy Estate of Janice Biala, New York
In 1938, Biala applied for a prestigious fellowship offered by the Guggenheim Foundation.[1] Having mounted several solo exhibitions both in New York and Paris, Biala was feeling confident and sought to apply, with the potential financial support aimed to help her continue to live, work, and travel in Europe.
In addition to listing her accomplishments, the application required references—individuals that could speak to the merits of her work. From her tiny three roomed cottage near Olivet College, Michigan, where her companion Ford Madox Ford was teaching literature, Biala wrote to three individuals to act as references: the painter Marsden Hartley, the sculptor Ossip Zadkine, and the painter Valentine Prax.
Writing to her friends, Biala made clear that the intention of her application was to support her on going work and travel in Europe. She was also felt that if awarded, the fellowship could help her standing in the art world. “There is a foundation called the Guggenheim in N.Y., which gives traveling bonuses to painters and others who have made a little mark and yet need boosting,” she wrote to Zadkine.
“I have been recommended to apply for one of these, for whether I’ve made a mark or not, I feel [a] great need for boosting […] They ask the applicants to give the names of people of distinction […] May I give your name as one? And it would be the greatest possible honor and pleasure if I could add that of Valentine Prax who was kind enough to say some kind words about my pictures when she saw them.”[2]
“Like Oliver Twist here, I am asking for more,” Biala wrote.
Letter from Biala to Zadkine, c.1938. Janice Biala Papers, 1903-2000. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Copy of which in Tworkov Family Archives, New York.
The prior year, Zadkine wrote an introductory note alongside a foreword by Theodore Dreiser and additional text by Reid Anderson for a small folded brochure that accompanied Biala’s 1937 exhibition at Georgette Passedoit Gallery:
“Painting is not a matter of exteriorizing oneself but one of a most subtle absorption of the surrounding world, with the view of recording it and not of rendering it, as one would think, better or more beautiful […] Biala’s painting is of such; and being enhanced by an enlightening, intuitive quality, it creates a still more remarkable event.”[3]
Valentine Prax was a French painter noted for her expressionist and cubist paintings. She grew up in French Algeria, North Africa, where she studied at the Ècole des Beaux-Arts in Algiers. In 1919, she moved to Paris and rented a studio in 35 rue Rousselet. She was alone, timid and poor, but she was in Paris. She soon met Ossip Zadkine and they married in the summer of 1920. Responding to Biala’s request Zadkine wrote, “I will answer in the best possible manner. The same I can tell you on behalf of Valentine.”[4]
The third person Biala asked to support her application was the painter Marsden Hartley. Biala likely became acquainted with Hartley through her relationship with Ford. Ford and Hartley can be connected as early as 1918 when The Little Review published Hartley’s essay “The Reader Critic: Divagations” along with essays by Ford, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and William Butler Yeats among others.[5]
Their acquaintance was likely enhanced in 1924 when Hartley arrived in Paris and Ford, a rising literary figure among the transatlantic intelligentsia, was hosting crowded salons in his Paris apartment and editing the influential monthly literary magazine The Transatlantic Review.
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) “After the Storm, Vinalhaven,” 1938-1939, 22 x 28 in (55.88 x 71.12 cm) Collection Bowdin College Museum of Art. Gift of Mrs. Charles Phillip Kuntz (1950.8)
Letter from Marsden Hartley to Janice Biala, October 15, 1938. Janice Biala Papers, 1903-2000. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Copy of which in Tworkov Family Archives, New York
By the Summer of 1938, Hartley had moved to Vinalhaven, Maine, the largest of the Fox Islands located fifteen miles off the coast and home to a tightknit fishing community. Hartley responded to Biala in a typed letter on October 15, 1938. It was written towards the end of a challenging time for him at Vinalhaven. Hartley, whose biography does not describe the life of a warm and gregarious man, found the Vinalhaven people “one-dimensional” and wrote that he had never suffered so miserably ‘in both the physical and spiritual sense.”[6]
As Barbara Haskell wrote in the 1980 publication accompanying Marden’s retrospective at The Whitney Museum of American Art:
“All his life, Hartley had been plagued by dichotomous needs: a longing for crowds and, when painting, a desire for solitude and stark stretches of landscape. When he was in cities, he yearned for seclusion, yet when he was removed from the urban pulse, he found the isolation dispiriting.”[7]
Hartley had received a Guggenheim Fellowship himself in 1931 to study in Mexico. In his response to Biala he offered more than just his support. He spelled out his opinion of the committee, which he thought “a most conservative one,” and also gave a critique of her painting. “I don’t know of course what your pictures are like now, but it is to be assumed that you have progressed,” he prodded.
“I must be fair to myself however when I say that it was [your] graphic drawings that gave me the most pleasure, as I felt it was the graphic interest in the paintings that carried them over, the colour seemed to me a little halting, that is the emotional aspect of the colour itself seemed a little withdrawn, as if you had not let yourself quite go in it, and that is for me the first and last consideration, for the sense of colour is like the voice, and the fuller and richer and warmer it is the better a painting will be.”[8]
“Great Trade Route: It was the last remains of the golden age,” c.1936
Ink on paper 8 x 10 1/2 in. (20.3 x 27.9 cm) Signed lower right: "Biala"; Inscribed in pencil verso upper left: "No. 8 / It was the last remains of the golden age / half page 125"; Stamped verso: 1381
Private collection
“Great Trade Route: Put ‘em up against a wall,” c.1936
Ink on paper 11 3/4 x 9 3/4 in. (30.5 x 24.8 cm) Inscribed in pencil verso upper left and lower right by Shelby Cox: "Janice Tworkov ‘Biala’"; Stamped verso: 1381
Private collection
The ‘graphic interest’ Hartley gravitated to was in direct reference to Biala’s Spring 1937 exhibition at Georgette Passedoit.[9] Among the eleven paintings on view where the twenty-four original drawings that illustrated Ford Madox Ford’s novel Great Trade Route. Marsden’s statement about color is especially revelatory.
Hartley elucidated his feelings:
“I do not know what it matters at all what I think about other people’s work, but I always respond when I can and in the degrees in which I can, and in your case, I wonder how much the Americans will care, as how much do they care about any of us, and if they really did care I wouldn’t be up against such problems as I am, an awful life, the life of the artist anyhow, and I am about fed up on the American idea of it. At least the French make a real issue of it, and the practice of painting is an honorable one, no matter how poor the painting is.”[10]
This closing passage from Hartley’s letter sheds light on his temperament and arguments as an artist. Biala likely drew some consolation from his words—facing battles she, no doubt, was already managing, and as a woman artist.
There is no evidence that Biala successfully submitted her application, and it is certain that she was not awarded a fellowship. Of the fifty-eight Guggenheim Fellows awarded in 1938, only six were women: Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) author; Janet de Coux (1904-1999) sculpture; Lu Duble (1896-1970) sculpture; Rosella Hartman (1895-1984) painting; Virginia Randolph Grace (1901-1994) archaeology; Mary Catherine Gunning Colum (1884-1957) literary critic and author.
[1] Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Not unaware of this grant opportunity, her older brother, Jack Tworkov, had applied in 1934 but his application wasn’t received in time to be considered, this would be the first and only time Biala would apply.
[2] Janice Biala to Zadkine, c.1938. Janice Biala Papers, 1903-2000. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Copy of which in Tworkov Family Archives, New York.
[3] Ossip Zadkine. Exhibition introductory note for Georgette Passedoit Gallery, New York, “Paintings and Drawings by Biala,” February 23–March 13, 1937. Original can be found in the Tworkov Family Archives, New York.
[4] Ossip Zadkine to Janice Biala, c.1938. Janice Biala Papers, 1903-2000. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Copy of which in Tworkov Family Archives, New York.
[5] “The Little Review” was an American avant-garde literary magazine founded in Chicago in 1914 by Margaret Anderson. It was known for its publication of experimental writing and art by prominent modernist authors, most notably the serialization of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” VIEW HARTLEY’S ESSAY
[6] Hartley to Hudson Walker, October 8, 1938. Hudson D. Walker papers, 1920-1982. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
[7] Barbara Haskell. Essay in Marsden Hartley (New York: The Whitney Museum of American Art; New York University Press, 1980) pp 114-115.
[8] Hartley to Biala. October 15, 1938. Janice Biala Papers, 1903-2000. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Copy of which in Tworkov Family Archives, New York.
[9] Incidentally, Hartley’s own exhibition at Stieglitz’s An American Place would open one month after Biala’s running April 20-May 17, 1937.
[10] Hartley to Biala, October 15, 1938. Janice Biala Papers, 1903-2000. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Copy of which in Tworkov Family Archives, New York.
