Enchanted Prose

Magic, art, nostalgia, and inspiration from a hot Australian interior designer and decorator, with applications elsewhere in life (Brisbane, Queensland and Melbourne, Victoria, present-day): Like the wide-changing impact of the sixties counterculture movements, the pandemic is certain to usher in personal/social/worldly changes yet to come, but one consequence is already happening: a trend in the design and decoration of the interior spaces we’ve spent more time inside of than we ever could have imagined. It’s called the Grandmillenial style. In Australia, Anna Spiro is the “queen of this aesthetic.” 

This unique coffee-table sized book covered in one of Spiro’s hand-printed fabric designs is what drew me to Anna Spiro: A Life in Pattern. A selection from Anna Spiro Textiles she founded in 2016 after founding Anna Spiro Designs. The pattern is from her Flower Collection – flowers and nature some of the Absolutely Beautiful Things she loves. The italics refer to the title of her 2014 book.

Spiro also loves colors, patterns, textures, shapes, surfaces, art, antiques, wallpapers, collectibles, and bright, bold contemporary designs, which she incorporates by “mismatching” and “layering” the old with the new, giving rooms a stunning freshness you’d never dream of pulling off. On walls, rugs, sofas, chairs, ottomans, tables, lampshades, bed coverings (like her Grandma Quilt collection), so many her own creations, brimming with gusto, warmth, life, joy.

The links below to both her design and textile websites show how she reinterprets a room, meshing with a client’s personality, preferences, atmosphere desired. Nothing is generic. Everything surprises. See: https://www.annaspirodesign.com.au/projects/, https://www.annaspirotextiles.com.au/textile-library-page, https://www.annaspirotextiles.com.au/copy-of-textile-library-page.

Closer to home, the Today Show explains the Grandmillenial style in the video below as “yin and yang,” a Chinese philosophy of bringing harmony to your life by combining the “contradictory elements” Spiro spells out in clear, crisp, lively prose befitting her design style:

Anna Spiro could have easily invented the term and style, but an editor at House Beautiful magazine beat her too to it. See: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/three-formerly-unpopular-decor-styles-are-merging-into-one-big-design-trend.

At first glance, you may think this dazzling compilation of 250 illustrations – mostly sharp photographs taken at unusual angles displayed on colorful pages often with geometric designs, and sketches on unusual page surfaces by two members of Spiro’s enthusiastic team – is meant to flip through. The intention, though, is to make you stay on a page long enough to reflect on what she’d done and how you could refresh spaces you’ve become tired of and/or up for trying something new.

Described as a “monograph,” A Life in Pattern comprehensively lays out how an original artistic mind thinks, creates, and works. It’s her portfolio, her calling card. A jaw-dropping show of a personalized style and approach for bringing comfort and happiness into our daily living. A visual, emotional, and literary expression of nostalgia for the days when we were young and life seemed happier, simpler when we were in our grandmother’s house, if lucky enough to have that kind of gentle, unconditional love.

The visual and literary messages also represent a philosophy of life. Don’t be afraid to be bold and different. Be your own person and be confident about who you are and who you choose to be. Pay attention to the details, to the things that are meaningful and make you happy. Carefully plan so what you create is not a hodgepodge or sends you adrift. The prose equally carefully thought out to illuminate but not overwhelm.

Spiro advises finding something that ties a room together. Color is how she does it. It extends to fashion, she says. Being a fashion designer was what she thought she’d become. She carries that with her in her clothes that make a statement as to her distinctive, eclectic tastes, so you’ll see photographs of her in arty, bohemian, chic wardrobe combinations. She’s someone to admire for embracing who she is.

Blue in every shade imaginable is the color Spiro chooses to harmonize interiors because blue reminds her of the sea. Australia is a country and a continent surrounded by 22,826 miles of coastline and 10,000 beaches. Hawaii has also inspired the blue theme, as seen in geometric patterns in her first commercial project that put her on the global map: The Halcyon House, a boutique hotel in New South Wales on Cabarita Beach.

All her designs are in gorgeous colors. A palette of greens evoking Australia’s amazing, abundant, and diverse species of vegetation and trees. Corals evoking the Great Barrier Reef. Yellows, the glorious sunlight. A rainbow of colors on every page and rooms, which makes the book fun, pleasurable, and playful. 

To get to know how Spiro weaves her magic for a client, I suggest a fictional one, Nora Porteous – the protagonist of a beloved 1978 Australian novel by Jessica Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River. It won Australia’s highest literary honor, the Miles Franklin Award. Kudos to the sixty-year-old Brisbane Writers Festival for commissioning Spiro in 2019 to create Nora’s room, combining literature and design as a springboard for creating atmospheric settings, fictional and real.

I was thrilled to have found a used copy of the 1978 book, badly yellowed, paper-thin, but for once I didn’t care about condition, only gaining insight into how Spiro perceived seventy-seven-year-old Nora. (A recent copy in the image on the right.) Her story is that she travels 600 miles by train to come back to her native childhood home in Brisbane she hasn’t seen since she was ten and never expected to. She’s not physically well but her mind is expansive. Like her refined prose, she’s an ideal client for Spiro having waited most of her life for a place of her own she feels she belongs. She too is artistic, loves colors, flowers, the ocean, and made things like lampshades and “embroidered cushion covers.” Her favorite colors are “magenta blue” and “magnetic gold.” Divorced at thirty from a miserly, selfish man, she sought female friendships. The reader understands that her best medicine would be a room she’ll feel comfortable, content, and at home in. Thanks to a Festival assistant, you can see Nora’s Corner (images courtesy of Brisbane Writers Festival):

Feel the excitement and relaxation Nora’s Corner generated: https://www.facebook.com/becmactv/videos/2364262490288290/.

Another project in the book is one of her own. A “cottage” with two hexagonal shaped connecting structures on Stradbroke Island in Brisbane. “Toned down” to blend with the beachy vibe. You can see these rooms on The Design Files, a popular Australian site featuring creative and inspiring people and places: https://thedesignfiles.net/2022/01/homes-anna-spiro-north-stradbroke-island-minjerribah/.

Turning the thick, glossy pages in wild and soothing colors (like sea mist), designs, patterns, and surfaces (like cane, rattan, sisal), you won’t even need Spiro to tell you she doesn’t do “boring.”

“All modern interior design books owe their existence to a pioneering guide that was all the rage in 1897,” says Mitchell Owens writing on The Legacy of Edith Wharton’s “The Decoration of Houses”. Who knew the “first woman to win the Nobel Prize” (in 1920 for The Age of Innocence) would be the one to argue for interior design and decorating to be a “branch of architecture”? More than a century later, Spiro proves Wharton right.

In a twist on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of Your Own, Anna Spiro asks us how to make your home your own? What “treasured objects” would you miss like “old friends?” What inspiration can you derive from an open-minded, eclectic, life-affirming approach towards inner spaces for other aspects of your life?

Lorraine

The Chinese-American family restaurant as a microcosm of the clash between Chinese and Western cultural values (Haven, Wisconsin, present-day): A compelling reason to read really good fiction is to enlighten us about cultures different than our own. Which makes Lan Samantha Chang’s stirring and thought-provoking new novel The Family Chao a must read.

Using a Chinese-Americanized family run restaurant as the focal point for expanding our understanding of the differences between Eastern and Western cultural values is a brilliant concept, brilliantly rendered.

Razor-sharp, cynical, non-stop intense, it’s easy to see why Chang is the “first woman and first Asian woman” to lead America’s most prestigious and oldest creative writing program, the Iowa Writing Workshops.

“The story of Chinese-American cuisine is “one of the most extraordinary ones of hardship, adaptation, and entrepreneurship,” says Peter Kim, Executive Director of the Museum of Food and Drink in Brooklyn, NY in the video below: 

The Fine Chao Chinese-American restaurant, located in one of the heartland states (Wisconsin) where the author is from, tells a similar story of “working inhumane hours,” and adapting Chinese specialties to American tastes by entrepreneurs who immigrated to America for a better life (“life strategy”). Leo Chao and Winnie have been running the neighborhood restaurant for thirty-five years, serving an “enclave” of Chinese immigrants and all who love “good food.” Except: dictatorial Big Chao with a grab-what-you-can-and-desire mentality, which Chang wonderfully expresses as “graspingness,” treated his wife as a servant until one day she flees. When we meet her she’s already living at the Spiritual House seeking Tranquility, escaping a “shouting house” sorely lacking peacefulness.

It’ll become clear that two of their three sons have also not adapted contentedly: Dagou in Mandarin (William in English), the eldest at thirty-three, failed to make it big in the Big Apple so for the past six years he’s been helping run the restaurant. Obsessed with proving to his cruel father that his culinary skills exceed the promise Leo made to split the business 50/50 should he triumph, he’s a bundle of “hectic insanity.”

Ming, the middle son, also left for New York but he’s the “accomplished one” measured by money. Money viewed by both brothers as setting them free. Ming, though, believes his greatest accomplishment is “detaching from the family.” As the son subjected to haunting bullying since middle school, he’s the most angst-ridden. As the most intellectual, it’s his cultural analysis and philosophical voice, sadly poetic, that penetrates the most. “Lost home, lost country, lost years, lost ancestors, lost memories, lost hopes, lost lives.”

James, the youngest, is the “good son” who has adapted best. Naïve, a freshman at college living away from home, he’s yet to appreciate the depth of the psychological damage on his brothers and mother, paining us when he asks, “Why did she leave us?” He can’t get over how Ming has managed to emotionally detach himself, likening him to a birder “hiding in the blind.” Instead, the reader can’t get over how James seems fairly normal.

Dagou takes up the most oxygen in the room and doesn’t hide his emotions spewing profanity. And yet it’s Ming who keeps it all in we also worry about.

A prophetic sentence on page four clues us in to trouble ahead when we’re told diners said the pleasing food was prepared by “bad people.” The setting is charged from the get-go so when we’re told on page 79 “there’s a sense of alteration in the air . . . something is about to happen,” it confirms what we’ve felt all along.

This complicated family mystery will keep you wondering through the end. Cleverly divided into Part I They See Themselves and Part II The World Sees Them, we see them vividly in dramatic scenes that feel as if we’ve dropped by for a delicious meal and invited to the kitchen where we’re eavesdroppers and voyeurs deciding whether the judgement wielded is fair and to what extent racism factored in. Swift, authentic dialogue adds to the fiction feeling very real.

Symbolism is everywhere. Starting with the Mandarin translation of the brothers’ names: Dagou means Big Dog; Ming, Second Dog; and James, Third Dog. The family has a dog, Alf, constantly running away. Dogs are everywhere at the Spiritual House, where they’re symbols of Luck. Dogs represent loyalty and devotion to humans when they’re treated well. In this sense, they convey the Chinese cultural value of honoring and obeying ones parents. Dogs also convey an “our mine” ownership that suffocates humans, and sadly not all dogs are treated well. Which makes another Chinese meaning of Dagou – “to beat the dog” – awfully prophetic.

“Filial piety is arguably China’s most important moral tenet.” The Chinese written word for familial loyalty is 孝. The novel raises questions as to when filial duty crosses the line into exploitation. How far should a family go when faced with the oppression of a cruel, out-of-bounds father?

To make sure we see the brothers as distinct individuals rather than generic stereotypes, Chang reminds us of a popular children’s picture book, The Five Brothers, published in 1938 in which all the brothers look alike and have “freakish abilities.” To think the book is considered a classic, ingraining Chinese stereotypes so early in childhood should make us cringe.

Should because the surge in anti-Chinese discrimination and hate crimes has risen alarmingly, but systemic racism in America towards Chinese immigrants goes far back to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 that lasted until 1943.

The tragic irony of the “Western catalogue of dehumanizations” towards Chinese-Americans is reflected at the Spiritual House. A serene oasis created from a non-descript place by Buddhist nuns, whose religion seeks attainment of wisdom and compassion. They also believe in the Confucian philosophy of moral ideals for individuals and society at large. Winnie has “double spirituality” because she’s both a “devout Christian” and a “devout Buddhist.” A devotee of the teachings of the “head nun,” Gu Ling Zhu Chi, elderly so rarely seen. We see her when the brothers visit their mother. A reader of ancient I Ching cards and palms, she makes a prophecy for Dagou he should have embraced.

The novel’s release on February 1 is also meaningful. The date is the Chinese Lunar New Year. Another important day matching the story’s timeline is Christmas Day, the busiest time of the year for Chinese-American restaurants. The novel opens a few days before with Ming and James traveling home, separately, for Dagou’s The Greatest Christmas Party Ever! he’s passionately planning that year to dazzle Leo. Frenzied, bordering on madness, Dagou has gone extravagantly overboard, spending a fortune. Money he doesn’t have. Where does it come from?

Much more is going on between the family and characters outside of it. Many involve relationships with young women, white and Chinese-American, adding another perspective to view cultural identity and cultural values. An older Chinese orphan who’s been working in the kitchen for a long time ups the suspense as no one knows anything about her since she speaks an unintelligible form of Mandarin. Ming is drawn to her as he’s the only one who knows Mandarin.

Dagou has invited a slew of people to his Christmas gala. Stop by because something is definitely about to happen.

Lorraine

Displaced, lost childhoods and influences in adulthood (Europe and US; 1925 – 1960): Today’s post is on January 27^th because it’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Established by the UN in 2005, their 2022 global theme is “Memory, Dignity and Justice”. Memory is a running theme throughout both of these stellar books:

Innocent Witnesses shines a piercing lens on six European Jewish childhoods lived through the Holocaust and on the author’s, who grew up in Washington, DC, lost Polish family in the Holocaust, and was deeply affected by the suffering until the end of her life. Marilyn Yalom wrote this book while battling cancer.

In A Matter of Death and Life, you’ll be moved by how profoundly loved, loving, and life-affirming Yalom’s life was (she died in 2019). She had an extensive network of “colleagues and friends” – six whose mini-memoirs make up the heart of the book. Two she translated from the French as she was a French professor at Stanford University for thirty years. During her junior year in college, she spent time in France witnessing the Nazi’s destruction. (Yalom was also a pioneering feminist and nonfiction author of landmark books.)

In her personal introduction, Meg Waite Clayton, bestselling author of several novels set during WWII, says Marilyn Yalom was a “bringer-together-of-people.” That’s what she’s done in Innocent Witnesses. It’s the commonalities of their memories – unrelenting hunger, “brutal winters,” air raids, “carpets of bombs” – as they paid witness to the tremendous risks, sacrifices, and bravery of their mothers to protect them that stand out.

These memories and commentaries (Yalom offers hers in “A Sheltered Vision and the French Connection,” the Epilogue, and “When Memory Speaks”) inform our reading of Distant Fathers, especially from an intense psychological perspective.

Time and place now vary. Two places, Latvia and Italy. Time is structured in three parts – childhood, adolescence, and adulthood – yet they don’t necessarily come to us chronologically. They float, dream-like, “stream-of-consciousness.” That’s intentional so we sense Marina Jarre’s “disorientation and displacement – the feeling of not belonging,” explains Ann Goldstein in her insightful Translator’s Note. (Best known for translating Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan Novels; also The Complete Works of Primo Levi, who survived the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp). Jarre, she also says, is an “unreliable narrator,” certainly compared to the innocent witnesses whose memories feel fixed in their souls.

Reliable or not, we’re drawn to both books.

The six children lived during the atrocious time of Hitler’s war in different places: France, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, England, and Hungary. We may not know their names – Alain Briottet, Philippe Martial, Winfried Weiss, Stina Katchadourian, Susan Groag Bell, and Robert “Bob” Berger – but we learn that what they remembered endured influencing who they became.

Given the resiliency of their suffering under the most extreme physical conditions and emotional duress, the innocent witnesses inspire us. Jarre’s prose affects us differently. Exquisitely sad. Intellectually powerful, yet she’s a jumble of emotions and contradictions. Her prose is clear and lyrical when she writes about the natural world, but when she writes about herself and her relationships with important people in her life – her mother, father, maternal grandmother, and husband – she’s painfully distant so we keep trying to figure her out. Because she was still searching. (She died in 2016.)

We want to understand one of the undiscovered “great Italian writers of the second half of the twentieth century,” says Italian writer Marta Barone in her aptly titled introduction, “A Stubborn Distance.” Translating this book is the first in a larger effort to give Jarre “a rightful place in Italian literature.”

Barone confirms Jarre was “a great and lingering mystery.” For instance: Was she haunted by the death of her Russian Jewish father killed by the Nazis in her homeland in Riga, Latvia? She hardly knows him, regrets her “silence” with him, but she doesn’t even mention the “extermination of the Jews of Riga” (25,000), It’s Goldstein who does. 

Jarre lived in Riga for the first ten years of her life. She didn’t learn of her father’s death until after her mother left him, when she was living in her maternal grandmother’s house in the village of Torre Pellice in the Waldensian valleys of the Piedmont region of Italy near Turin for the next ten. Instead of the massacre of Jews, this French-speaking region is steeped in ancient Protestant “persecutions and battles of distant fathers,” Barone explains. The most famous the 1655 Piedmont Easter Massacre.

No one can really know why the innocent witnesses were resilient and Jarre’s distance kept her from thriving – the psychological question that fascinated me. I think Ben Yalom’s (one of the author’s sons) assessment in the Afterword that “love and empathy are deeply entwined” in all the stories provides the answer. Jarre’s life was also uprooted during wartime but there’s very little, if any, love and empathy.

What’s clear is she liked almost no one. Jealous of her younger sister Sisi who gets whatever “praise” is doled out by her mother, yet recognizes Sisi was the only one loyal to her. Her mother was constantly away working, so in the identity-searching years of adolescence she seems to have been raised by a governess, sometimes two, not her grandmother, but doesn’t even mention their names. Mother and grandmother severely lack the “warmth and love” Ben eloquently writes about. Her emotional detachment is glaring.

Jarre had the physical trappings the innocent witnesses were deprived of, but lacked love. Her mother didn’t go to extraordinary lengths to protect her like the others did. Jarre is so torn up, an innocent victim who turned inward and blamed herself for her fears, contradictions, insecurities. At times, she’s acutely self-aware; at other times she gravitates between feeling inferior and superior. She’s out of sync with how we read her, notably when she says she’s “serenely solitary.” Except for the natural world, she never comes across as serene. Solitary, indeed, in whatever space she’s in.

Religion occupies many of Jarre’s thoughts – her connection to G-d. There’s no legacy of her father’s Jewish roots. Raised Lutheran, her grandmother devoutly so. Since the outside world is so confusing and disturbing to her, it makes sense she’s drawn to religious rituals. Order to brace the dislocation. Language a piece of that as she spoke German in Latvia not Latvian, had to learn Italian, and picked up French spoken in her grandmother’s house. She speaks of a “repugnance” towards Hitler, perhaps because of her father, but this doesn’t surface until much later, in 1943 when Hitler occupied Italy and Fascism fell. Her mother once an early fascist. Since she’s so wrapped up in seeking – but never getting – her mother’s love, it’s hard to tell which oppressive ideology is more repugnant. At this life stage, “rage” tragically defines her. “When had I ever been happy?” We wonder too.

Distant Fathers is described as a “singular autobiography” (on the back cover) and a memoir (on the front cover). Both are right. As an autobiography, it encompasses the arc of her life; a memoir doesn’t. An autobiography should be fact-based, but her memories are muddled. It’s her elusive, discordant emotions that make Marina Jarre a singular and mysterious character whose prose captivates.

Both books show that what’s remembered, observed, sensed, reflected on, and dreamed of illuminate how trauma influences lives. For good and bad.

Lorraine

Seeking justice to prove and reclaim 18^th century art masterpieces stolen by the Nazis – a true art detective story (France, Germany; 2014 – 2019): Had it not been for a chance encounter and a whispered word, Paris’ Baer de Perignon would not be picturing her great-great grandfather’s “imaginary museum.” Nor absorbing us into her impassioned, all-encompassing, deep dive into researching ten of Jules Strauss’ paintings, an “early collector of Impressionist art”:

“If I close my eyes, I see walls hung with paintings. Portraits of lords and ladies of the eighteenth century court rub shoulders with Degas’ dancers, Monet’s glowing landscapes, Sisley’s snow-covered gardens.”

The Vanished Collection is a fascinating inside look at one family’s “paradise lost” because of a madman’s obsession and looting of 600,000 paintings during WWII, with 100,000 paintings yet recovered. A hidden maze of a “small underworld of the art world intermediaries and scavengers.” The theft of Jewish art is yet another aspect of Hitler’s atrocities, profoundly emotional, stealing “paintings of happiness” – the only possessions left connecting a family to its ancestors.

Reading like an engrossing international art detective procedural without any method other than following every lead, this complex quest sought to dig up the truth about ten of Jules’ masterworks her great-great grandmother Marie-Louise claimed were stolen by Hitler’s regime. “When it comes to art, only one thing counts: the pursuit of truth,” Jules Strauss wrote in 1931. A “hunt for the truth” that plunged Baer de Perignon into the “abyss of the past, where everything is opaque and complicated.”

Although Baer de Perignon co-wrote the screenplay for a documentary on the Nuremberg Trials and teaches writing workshops in Paris using art to elicit emotions, she tells us she knows “nothing about art history or painting.” Not anymore after what she goes through.

Genealogy plays a role in this daunting puzzle, which raised questions as to how Jules and Marie-Louise managed to stay alive, speculating trading art for survival. A helpful family tree going back four generations prefaces the narrative.

How did this journey start? By accident, when the author bumped into her “elegant” cousin Andrew born in England she hadn’t seen in twenty years at a concert by a Brazilian composer and guitarist (and political activist) both are fans of, Caetano Veloso. The song mentioned is Cucurrucucú Paloma, a melancholy ballad of memories and loss that evokes the mood of the memoir except for splashes of excitement when Baer de Perignon stumbles onto something. Veloso’s music is sentimental:

Although the author’s ancestors were Jewish, she was raised Catholic. Her father, gone twenty years, converted to Catholicism when war broke out and married a Catholic woman. Until she went down this art detective tunnel she hadn’t thought about her Jewish roots, particularly because no one talked about the war.

Meeting Andrew is not the whole meant-to-be story of how the author became emotionally invested in what happened to her great-great grandparents and their precious art. Words matter! When Andrew whispered into her ear about a “shady” Strauss auction the word led her into the art world’s essential work: provenance research, pouring through a mass of documents in archives and reaching out to art historians, dealers, gallerists, other provenance researchers, and drawing on family and friends to enlighten and fill in the blanks. Proving with “hard facts” the ownership of art is dense, intimidating, messy, disorienting, chilling, painstaking, exhausting, heartbreaking – and fascinating work. A few days after meeting Andrew, he sent the list of ten paintings that were the focus of her research. Including, I believe, these four:

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It’s logical to start by talking to your relatives to see what they know. Andrew’s father, Michel Strauss, Jules and Marie-Louise’s son, was a legendary figure having headed Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art department at its London headquarters for forty years. Retired, eighty, and still living in London, initially she feels intimated by who he is, later discovering he was as discrete as his father, so she doesn’t approach him first. Michel comes alive so discovering he passed away in October 2021 adds another level of loss to this moving story.

Baer de Perignon began by asking her father’s sister, Aunt Nadine, also eighty. She lives close to her, has lived in the same Paris apartment for sixty years presumably seeing a lot, and she’s close to this dear soul but her memory needs jogging and her niece is sensitive to bringing up painful memories.

Baer de Perignon is the mother of three young children. For a while, she finds herself dropping them off at school and then taking the train to a suburb outside of Paris, La Courneuve, to the Looted Art Archives at the Musée des Cultures Légumières Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Archives Center. Twice a day, she passes Drancy, the site of the main concentration camp in France where 70,000 Jews were slaughtered. (Total of 26 camps in France.)

She also searched the archives of “the world’s largest museum in the world” – the Louvre – where she meets and befriends Emmanuelle Polack, whose father was an influential French art dealer whose collection was also looted by the Nazis, Paul Rosenberg. Polack’s influential too as she identified ten paintings in the Louvre the Nazis stole. Polack travels with Baer de Perignon to help her conduct research at the La Courneuve archives, reminding her that “research takes time.” When the author ventures to the German Federal Archives the process is even more tedious, since she doesn’t speak German, nothing is digitized, and the old handwriting is written in a nearly unintelligible “Gothic-style.” The archives in the Musée d’Orsay, once a palace in Paris, were also consulted. All in such imposing buildings, they elicit a sense of hopelessness given their grandeur and so few researching. The most “painfully slow and arduous” among them all are government roadblocks and museums not wanting to let go of their masterworks.

Along the way you’ll learn more Nazi history than you knew before. A striking example is a French resistance heroine most of us never heard of: Rose Valland. She worked at the Jeu de Paume art gallery Hitler turned into a massive warehouse, secretly recording everything stolen. What comes as a surprise is how key Valland was to the discovery of an enormous cache of Nazi art looted that you may have seen in the movie, perhaps read the book, Monuments Men. The Monuments Men Foundation is committed to the restitution of what should rightfully be returned to families. Not surprising is the wealth of information in the Rose Valland archives.

Two other persons of note who helped: Patrick Modiano, the French writer whose novels are set during the Occupation. He lives near the author and they’re friends. In 2014, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”

Award-winning translator Natasha Lehrer also deserves mention since she brought this remarkable story of one family’s paradise lost to us.

Lorraine

Poetry in Art and Prose (Pennsylvania, Toronto, upstate New York, European cities; 1854 to 1921): I loved everything about this beautiful book that encourages us not to lose sight of our gifts.

“I’m a viewer captivated by a painted voice,” says Molly Peacock who spent ten-years studying and rediscovering a pioneering 19^th century female American-Canadian artist she felt connected to. Flower Diary: In Which Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door is gorgeously written, illustrated, and groundbreaking as no one has written a biography on Mary Hiester Reid – MHR as she signed her work.

“We don’t always need words to convey the vitality of a life. An image can do the work,” Molly Peacock says and proves. Although MHR left behind 300 still life paintings of flowers (“objects and emotions”) and later landscapes when the women’s suffrage movement emerged, she essentially left no written diaries. Which is why she was warned against writing the book.

Over 400 pages, Peacock demonstrates she’s not afraid of creative challenges and found plenty to write about. “Why try only one thing?” she asks on her artistically pleasing website. True to her words, she also answers by describing herself as a poet (see https://poets.org/poet/molly-peacock for her poetry collections, books, leadership), art biographer, memoirist, “art activist” (co-founder of Poetry in Motion on NYC subways and buses), “student of creativity,” and “word person.”

True to her words, her new female artist biography (follows Paper Garden: An Artist Begins her Life’s Work at 72) is not just one thing. It immerses our literary, visual, creative, emotional, and feminist senses.

You may never have heard of MHR but when Peacock calls her “a foremother of Georgia O’Keefe” she gets our attention. As does her marvelous poetic voice.

To give you a sense of the art infused in the book, below are three color reproductions. Printed on thick glossy paper, the Canadian publisher known for not publishing just one thing is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

True to her words, Molly Peacock segues from the main narrative to sharing parallels in her life with an artist from the past in sections titled Interludes. Printed on green-colored pages, brief as they may be (one to three pages) they move us. Most reflect on the story of her long love and marriage to “famed James Joyce Scholar” Michael Groden, distinguished university professor emeritus at Western University Canada who devoted forty years of scholarship to the Irish novelist. In dedicating the book to him we know how their love story sadly ends as he passed away in 2021 after a forty-year battle with melanoma (!), the same year this book came out. The inscription doesn’t spoil the Interludes. Instead, poignantly elevates the empathy theme.

Genre-wise, Flower Diary also encompasses art history spanning the Aesthetic movement, Impressionism, and the Arts and Crafts movement. As art criticism, Peacock’s descriptions of Mary’s flowers as “sensuous billowing roses,” “negligee-soft” petals, “the ache of tones,” “dreamy, psychological flowers” that are “constrained and free” open our eyes to an art form that conveys more than we may have thought. Against dark backgrounds, the shades or tones of the pink, yellow, and orange flowers jump off the page as the light catches them. The book also documents the importance of fellowship and friendships with other women artists when a culture prescribes how they should live their lives. How art connects, not just then but now. Aesthetically, MHR’s style is referred to as both Tonalism, “an approach that takes its impulses from music, or tones,” and Empathism as it “rarely fails to express the full range of emotions.” Collectively, a multi-layered reading experience to get lost in. 

Fascinating are the connections between a 19^th century female artist and a 21^st century one. MHR was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, studied art in Philadelphia, made Toronto, Ontario, Canada her home, and summered in upstate New York with trailblazing artists like the legendary designer Candace Wheeler. Award-winning Peacock was born in upstate New York (Buffalo), lived in NYC and elsewhere in the US, and also made her home in Toronto, Canada. “I paced her ground.”

Another connection: author and subject are both childless. MHR not by choice, the author by choice.

However, the quality and depth of love between their two marriages is starkly different other than both spouses lifted up their wife’s art. For very different reasons.

George A. Reid was Mary’s art teacher, so she knew he’d overshadow her which he did. He became a leading Canadian painter of realistic Canadian society (economic, social, rural life), and highly influential in the establishment of Canada’s art museums. Perennially preoccupied, insensitive, and emotionally unfaithful, whereas Michael Groden is seen as wonderfully attentive, comforting, and loving. “Love is a medium, like air (like paint itself), a full, caring environment for body and for spirit,” the author who experienced that joy exclaims.

What kind of marriage did MHR have? A complicated, enigmatic one. Orphaned at a young age with her sister becoming a nun in Spain, she was “revolutionary” when she struck out on her own in Victorian society and in a marriage of two painters in which George didn’t restrict Mary’s art. He married her because of it. “Simply by painting, she affirmed what he knew was his essential self.” He a “paradoxical combination of gruff and gregarious”; she “a combination of somber and amused.” Together, a “shared core of ambition and artistry.” He left his mark loudly; she “quietly” with “gentle fortitude.”

Mary was George’s model for some of his paintings. There’s a disturbing one in the book where he paints her holding an infant. Unable to bear a child, Peacock explores whether she felt stigmatized like the era did? What about their physicality? Married thirty-six years, was it ever sensuous like their art? Below (not included in the book) George paints a lighter touch and appreciation for Mary:

While we can’t begin to imagine how Peacock finished the book while Michael Groden’s life was nearing the end, at one low point she looks to her subject’s “inner strength” to lift her up. “Internal stamina that must connect to a conviction that something inside of you will perish if you don’t protect your gift.”

How and when do you know what your purpose in life is? That you have a special gift that you must protect or you will perish? 

If you’re still wondering why we should care about MHR, this Canadian broadcast contributes to answering that:

MHR and Peacock also love to travel. Mary going to greater lengths to do so, “crossing oceans five times,” finding inspiration and escape in Paris, London, Madrid, and Venice. Creativity and belongingness is also cultivated in the Catskill Mountains of New York where Mary found kinship and George a new calling: architecture.

Intriguing is Mary’s painting some of the vessels she strategically arranged her flowers in with Asian motifs, inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e prints. “The Japanese word ukiyo conveys the notion of the fleeting nature of life.” An iconic floating one is The Great Wave by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, who influenced James Whistler (also Van Gogh) who influenced MHR.

Mary also painted the interior of her homes, where she managed to carve out a space for her studio evoking Virginia Woolf’s a woman-needs-a-space-of-her-own. “Almost impossible-to-balance” as she juggled many roles. She too, not just one thing.

Lorraine