Introduction
BY MIRA SCHOR
One fine summer afternoon in 1961, the artist and writer Edith Schloss sets out alone, without appointment or introduction, on a pilgrimage to visit the painter Giorgio Morandi in the mountain village in the north of Italy where he has a summer home. On the way, she stops to pick wildflowers along the dusty roadside, when she becomes aware that someone is looking at her through a spyglass from the upstairs window of a house above her.
It is, of course, Morandi, who then welcomes her into his home. One senses that he has espied through his glass not just a lovely woman but also a keenly observant spirit akin to his own, one taking as intense a delight in nature as she does with everything she sees in his home. Schloss’s driving interest in art and her quality of openness and detailed attention to what comes her way underlie The Loft Generation, her memoirs of her years in the New York art world in the 1940s and 1950s and of the many important artists, writers, poets, and composers she knew well in the five decades she was active in the arts in America and Italy.
The Abstract Expressionist era and the New York art world after World War II to the 1960s are among the more thoroughly discussed, analyzed, documented, and canonized periods in art history. The number of meticulously researched major museum exhibition catalogues, biographies of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, histories, critical analyses, as well as memoirs by the art critic Irving Sandler and collected writings by artists of the period such as Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Jack Tworkov, and Mark Rothko, would make it seem like a time from which there is nothing left to excavate. And yet in The Loft Generation, Schloss opens doors to some of the most iconic spaces of this history and brings her reader inside in a way that is perhaps the closest to the experience of what it would have been like to be there, as observed by a very perceptive, intelligent person with incredible recall, gifted with an excellent visual, literary, and narrative memory.
Schloss takes us into these legendary studios that we have heard so much about, that we really wish we could have been in ourselves: what did the furniture look like, what did the room smell like, what did each person look like, what were their concerns, what were their flaws—though any such revelations, which are after all what many crave in such memoirs, are always matched by respect and admiration. She writes about a community of artists and how important art emerges not only from the work of solitary geniuses but also from the way such “geniuses” work within a fertile, competitive, interdisciplinary community. Beyond crucial portraits of individuals and their living and working spaces, this community is the subject of The Loft Generation.
It bears repeating that the history of this period has been largely about male artists and that the canon formation has been accomplished mainly by male writers, whether the artists themselves or the critics, theorists, and art historians surrounding them in what was at the time a relatively small art scene. There was a lot of jostling to be a hero as well as to be the first one to recognize that hero. Only in recent years has attention begun to be paid in a more serious way to the women artists of the time.
The few women who figured in these histories, such as Lee Krasner or Elaine de Kooning, had to struggle to be seen as artists in their own right, not merely in relation to the famous men they were married to. Schloss, who by all accounts did not specifically align herself with the feminist movement in the 1970s, nevertheless brings a specificity of focus on the significance of the women artists of the New York School that is in its own way a feminist statement. This is declared in the prologue to the memoirs, a “letter” to Elaine de Kooning, which begins, surprisingly, “Dear Elaine, In the beginning I didn’t even like you.” This prologue, which is in fact a declaration of love and friendship written in sorrow after news of Elaine’s death—crowning her “The Queen of the Lofts,” “the figurehead that steadily led the New York art fleet sailing into the wind”—still has an astonishing ability to surprise. On our way into a book where we expect we will meet Bill de Kooning, even today we do not expect something that is in effect an impediment to our progress into such a fetishized male domain. It says, no, there were other people there who had tremendous importance.
These memoirs teem with a large cast of sharply observed characters from the interlocking art worlds where she lived, in New York and later in Rome, including Willem de Kooning, Edwin Denby, Rudy Burckhardt, Fairfield Porter, John Cage, Frank O’Hara, Tom Hess, Larry Rivers, Giorgio Morandi, Meret Oppenheim, Francesca Woodman, Cy Twombly, and many others of note and fame, but also artists like her best friends Helen DeMott and Lucia Vernarelli, collectively dubbed with Schloss “the Chelsea Girls” by Denby long before Warhol used that as a title.
The glossary of names that Jacob Burckhardt has compiled is a very useful addition to the book because it emphasizes the way in which a true portrait of any art world, or set of interlocking art worlds, includes so many people who contributed to it. Most histories of famous periods in art or of famous artists present a world where only a few actors play at the front of the stage and the rest of the cast are glancingly mentioned or are nameless extras whose reminiscences are folded into a synthetic account by an author who was not a participant. In fact, and with no disrespect meant, in such histories Schloss might herself be one of those nameless extras—indeed she was one of the hundreds of people interviewed by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan for their 2004 biography de Kooning: An American Master. Yet she was a perceptive and active agent among interlinked worlds, bringing great intelligence and activism to her participation and to her memoirs.
These memoirs have a cinematic feel, with a basically forward-moving chronological approach in the New York chapters, at first dominated by Willem de Kooning and Edwin Denby, then, as happens in life, spiraling outward and into the social world of art in New York as it continued to expand—not just for her, but in itself, welcoming new generations—and finally yielding to a more impressionistic artist-by-artist focus toward the end. Her cinematographic style also includes flashbacks that enrich our understanding of a character, and she goes in for tight close-ups, where one face, such as that of John Cage, fills the screen. Sharp dialogue and visual detail enriched by informed interpretation—these are the hallmarks of her writing.
Copyright © 2021 by the Estate of Edith Schloss
Editorial work copyright © 2021 by Mary Venturini
copyright © 2021 by Jacob Burckhardt
Introduction copyright © 2021 by Mira Schor
