This Fantastic Struggle: The Life & Art of Esther Phillips (c Miles 2002)
Serialization -- "She Needed to Paint" CHAPTER 1
24 w 20th St. NY City
November 21, 1937
Dear Merle:
Your recent letter reveals that you have finally lost faith in mankind and outward courtesy and promises. Such disillusionment is sometimes very helpful. In the past you no doubt counted on the seeming willingness of certain individuals in high places who showed interest in your talents and abilities but in reality were more concerned with themselves.
I have had a shocking experience this week. I happened to pass the neighborhood where I remembered (from the address you gave some time ago) Esther Phillips lived. I decided to call on her and mention you. But she was not in her room. In fact I wasn't sure she lived there at all because there was no trace of her name anywhere in the house. After inquiring of several persons I was directed to the renting office and there met the landlord, a congenial gentleman by name of Strunsky. And this man told me a story of terrible suffering endured by this artist Phillips. It was hard to believe the stark tragedy of trying to exist on nothing. I left my name and address saying I would like to see Miss Phillips and help in some way if I can. A few days later she wrote me and after a visit soon afterward I learned that it was all too sadly true. Esther Phillips is in a serious situation. She is without funds and little prospects of selling her work. And one must eat to live. I would have liked to help her but as it happens I have been sinking in debt day by day because of demands of an increase in legal support. In other words I have been borrowing my way as I go along trying to make ends meet. It is all very disheartening, I assure you. I have taken her to a place to eat and would give her whatever small sum I can afford, but that, as you know, will not solve the problem. She needs work immediately if she is to exist. I am trying to contact people who might give her a job, but she admits that her capabilities are limited and besides she is in a terribly upset condition, very high strung and that makes matters worse. I hope help comes in time, it's certainly such a pity such things are going on in a land of plenty.
By all means I advise you to stick to the Project while it lasts. As long as it gives you the necessities of life it means something. I often wish that I was earning much less than I do and be free and clear of an insufferable relationship long regretted. As it is, life is just a huge farce.
Esther Phillips asked me to convey her apologies for not answering your letter. Her nervous state of mind prevents clear concentration and the will to write. She knows you will understand.
As for myself there is little I can say, other than what I have already mentioned. Seeing others suffer causes me to believe that my misery is not intolerable. Yet my life is not what it should be.
How are things with you getting on? Any improvement?
Hope to hear from you soon.
As ever your friend,
Harold [Winters]
PITTSBURGH
Chapter One
"She Needed To Paint"
Esther Phillips was born June 12, 1902, in an eastern village of the former Soviet Union. Her father, David Phillipovsky--his name shortened once in the United States--worked a farm. He was a Talmudic scholar, a Russian Jew dissatisfied with the way of life laid out for himself and his family. He was prevented from owning property, and only with the help of a village Gentile friend could he open a small inn and be licensed to sell liquor.(Note 2) His wife, Nettie Kahn, bore three children in Russia; Esther was the third of two girls and a boy. After the family settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it grew by an additional boy and three more girls.
At the beginning of the century, there was imminent conflict between Russia and Japan. Being drafted prompted David's his decision to bring his family to America. He evaded his government's order by emigrating in 1905 via New York City. Esther thus became a citizen of the United States by virtue of her father's naturalization. However, getting documentation to verify this caused a significant delay in her getting on the Works Progress Administration's Art Project in the late 1930s in New York City.
Nettie already had a brother in the States, and David had four; they helped the two struggling parents adjust to life outside Russia. Having visited the States a few years earlier, David decided against settling in New York City. He took his family instead to Pittsburgh, in southwestern Pennsylvania, moving into a tiny row house on Wick Street, in a section of the city known as the Hill District. Jutting impressively from the eastern end of the downtown of Pittsburgh, “The Hill” had begun to be populated en masse in the 1880's by Central and Eastern Europeans, many of Jewish descent. It was the first stop upon arrival to the city of European immigrants, and of African-Americans upon emancipation.
Due to his own striving, and with his brother's encouragement, David Phillipovsky and family no longer had to live under the oppression of the homeland. They were now settling into a life in Pittsburgh, this highly industrialized city of iron and steel. Pittsburgh had its share of problems--labor, heavy dirt and smog from the coke furnaces, and certainly a plenitude of slums--home to a large segment of the labor force. Esther's father began as a salesman. For a time, he sold clothing door-to-door with help from a loan given him by his brother-in-law, James. He was able to support his family throughout the years by being a resourceful salesman, and his hard work allowed the family to move into the middle class. Much later he invested in real estate in the historic Mexican War Streets section of Pittsburgh's North Side. (3)
The Phillips family quickly became acclimated to life in the new country, and Esther's parents surely felt themselves members of the thriving Jewish community in the Hill District. On Center Avenue in the Hill was the Irene Kaufmann Settlement, an educational and social gathering point for Jewish Pittsburghers. The I.K.S., as it was commonly known, sponsored many cultural events and aimed to raise the standard of life in the community. This community center had a division known as the Neighborhood Art School, and young Esther was one of a very small number of students to make consistent use of the facility for painting and drawing. Structured classes met after school and during evening hours. The instruction was "reinforced by the desire to preserve in artistic production the student's unique imagination." A later promotional pamphlet provided a history of the philosophies and practices governing the art school: "The student, disciplined by fundamentals, is given complete freedom of expression pictorially. There is no definite course outlined, but each is watched closely and is led to a fuller realization of his ideas. The student is free to make use of the most important mediums. Instruction is given in drawing, modelling and creative painting."(4)
The Neighborhood Art School was a good place for the young Esther to spend much of her childhood time, as she was dissuaded from such activity at home, where she often drew on the backs and sides of letters she found around the house. According to her younger sister, Dorothy, the sibling who was always closest to her, "She was always making pictures and running around with them." She would also draw in the margins of her school papers--starting with the Miller Grade School in the Lower Hill. "She would scribble and doodle away anywhere she found pencils and papers, and on the walls. . . ."(5) Esther herself, towards her life's end, shared reflections with a niece, Dorothy's daughter Millie Silverstein. Esther told of feeling isolated within the family, of an unaffectionate mother with whom she didn't get along and who "chased her with a broom," and of younger brother, Barney, who constantly kicked her.( 6) Likely Esther's constant picture-making antics contributed at least in small measure to some of the responses from family.
Certainly nothing stands out as much about her childhood as the influence of her time spent within the Irene Kaufmann Settlement. It was not just a retreat from what was the start of an unhappy home situation. Esther gained much technically at the Neighborhood Art School. She was given a small room at the community center, a studio also used at the time by Samuel Rosenberg, who became a beloved Pittsburgh painter. Rosenberg was both friend and teacher, peer and mentor, to Esther.
The Art School strove to "liberaliz[e] the individual who attends by giving breadth to his interests, and in [the] cultivating [of] highest emotions and noblest desires, to implant in the growing generation a yearning for beauty, and to awaken in students their particular potentialities." Then, to "cultivate these . . . in an orderly fashion to the highest degree so that students' ultimate aim in life shall be beauty in their respective fields of endeavor." (7) So it was at this Neighborhood Art School that Esther first got a taste of the liberating force of what was making itself known as her one desire--painting. She spent a good deal of her time outside of school equally outside the home, pursuing her love of art, because she felt misunderstood from mother, brothers, and sisters. She found refuge and sense of community with fellow artists at a young age. From Sam Rosenberg, whom young Pittsburgh artists much respected, Esther received superb early tutelage and motivation.
It seems Esther did care for her father, with whom she shared bits of closeness. Like her, he had an affinity for cats. He was attentive to the needs of strays, luring them with saucers of milk and food scraps. "Well, they're hungry," (8) he remarked to family--a retort not so much plaintive as practical. These creatures surfaced throughout Esther's life in her paintings, and in the early 1940's, she lived with one whose challenged existence was curiously not unlike her own. The family never embraced any of these creatures enough to bring them indoors, but throughout Esther's growing up, cats filled the yards wherever the family lived, and this was especially the case in the small backyard and alley behind their home at 5531 Jackson Street. The family would later move to this Highland Park section of Pittsburgh around 1920, after Esther enters the Carnegie Institute of Technology.
It was in the Jackson Street house that Esther had title to one of the two attic rooms. Soon to be the bohemian, she found the garret appealing to her. She tore bed sheets to use as rags to clean her brushes, much to the ire of her mother. "Esther would say she didn't have anything else to use. Oh, my mother would raise hell about it! She would always be hemming the sheets." There was little besides art on Esther's mind. "From childhood on she was different. She wanted to draw and to paint and buy materials . . . and she ate her meals whenever she felt like it." Indeed Esther did not get too involved with family matters growing up, but the family's animosity over her art work fueled this distance. Dorothy later surmised that "she may have been a bit mad at my parents, because they didn't encourage her in her art more. But they had seven children. . . . " (9)
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Before Esther would have an attic studio to call her own, though, bringing her painting activities and her artist’s habits closer to disapproving eyes at home, she spent her teen years getting to know a little better the world of art that existed beyond her own brush. Come 1916, though the Neighborhood Art School would stay on Center Avenue on the Hill, within the IKS, some other Jewish community activities began to be held at the YMHA, which had just relocated to a new home on the corner of Jumonville Street and Fifth Avenue.
Fourteen-year-old Esther would have been acquainted with this center, still close to her home, in a section of the city known as Soho, a neighborhood at the southern slope of the Hill District, overlooking the Monongahela River and across to Pittsburgh's Southside. A little further east of Soho was Oakland, which was fast becoming the educational and cultural center of Pittsburgh. The Carnegie Library opened in 1895, followed shortly thereafter by the Carnegie Music Hall and the Museums of Art and Natural History, and the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Groundbreaking began on the University of Pittsburgh circa 1915.
The library and the art museum were just a trolley ride through Soho, uphill and around the bend of Fifth Avenue. Esther's art education outside of the Neighborhood Art School continued at these two places, where she studied the major artists. She took particular liking to Pisan and Derain. (10) Recent changes in the American art world also awakened her senses. The real shake-up had just begun with the New York Armory Show of 1913, which brought European and new American modern art to a public still trying to get used to the many changes wrought a few years earlier by artists of the Ash Can School, and just before that the post-Impressionists.
At the start of the new century, art in America was still ruled by traditionalists--realist painters approved by that staid founding body of American art, the National Academy of Design. Membership "was essential to an artist's prestige in that era." (11) Even when Impressionism made its way into American painting, and the dark realist canvasses typical of the traditionalists turned muted, with misty tones, often "drenched in one pervasive color," (12) the studies--often of genteel women and children, in fashionable interiors or in comfortable street corner scenes--were still conservative in nature, and backed by the Academy.
The Ash Can artists, though, were a group of painters and sculptors in New York, all believing in a freedom of expression that the National Academy just did not seem to promote, though their works still had realistic content matter. Their "raw, realistic views of lower-class city life" (13) were both emblematic of, and influenced by, this muckraking era at the end of the century's first decade. They did not seek the refined subjects chosen by impressionists, who avoided dirty urban street scenes. Because the Ash Can artists themselves “began to sponsor independent exhibitions," independent-thinking American artists could finally "begin to show their work through courageous dealers, instead of being limited to the conservative, juried salons, which frequently rejected their paintings." (14)
A major Parisian show in 1908 presented the works of Andre Derain and Matisse to a world public, which also helped the avant-garde cause. Thus until the 1913 Armory Show, the Ash Can artists and the post-Impressionists had been the avant-garde, causing controversy by their attention to social causes and “new looking” art. The 1913 Armory show introduced the country, surely as well as the young but artistically aware Esther, to the scandalously different works of Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Marcel Duchampe, the great experimenter. A move toward abstractionism--taking the easily identifiable “subject” out of a piece of art--had begun, and a scant few American collectors now began to accumulate such work.
Always very self-directed, Esther saw to her own art education after daytime hours spent in high school. She sought out knowledge about painting techniques, as well as information about those who were charting the new artistic territory. Dorothy remembered Esther painting a great deal at this time, as well as also playing the piano a bit, an instrument she had access to at the I.K.S. Their father, who was "terribly interested in education," wanted each of his children to finish high school. (15) But though her brothers would take college preparatory classes, in 1919 Esther graduated with a concentration in business from Ralston Preparatory High School, at 15th and Penn Avenue on the Lower Hill. This would prepare her a place in the technical job market when she left school, a customary preparation at the time for many young women.
When of age, all of the Phillips children were expected to work to contribute to the household, a practice common to many American immigrant families. Often these contributions were a necessity to put food on the table, but in the Phillips family, they helped insure the boys' attendance at the University of Pittsburgh. (Later, their studies paid off, as Dorothy stated, evidently echoing family pride, "My older brother became a well-known criminal lawyer. And my younger brother was a Ph.D. chemist at Pitt. He was well-known there, a brilliant young man." (16) As for Esther, her parents expected marriage. She, of course, had entirely different things on her mind. She had begun to study the French artists on her own and dreamed of a trip to Paris for an art education. (17) But her situation was unlike that of Mary Cassatt, the famed Pittsburgh-born artist whose family affluence and encouragement enabled her to study at that European seat of artistic liberation. Cassatt, like scores of other fortunates, didn’t quite have to display symptoms of the fierce determination that drove Esther to follow her art. She and so many more less-privileged artists had to struggle to attain technical proficiency, then produce outstanding work, yet hardly be acknowledged.
Esther couldn't go to Paris, but she stubbornly resisted her family's attempts to train and domesticate her, as she enrolled in Carnegie Institute of Technology's College of Fine Arts in the autumn of 1919. She didn't have to submit a portfolio through admissions, as she was considered for the time being (and would remain so) an "unclassified" student, because of her part-time status. Her Permanent Record has the family's address still as Wick Street, on The Hill, and has as her birth date June 12, 1901. (18) She likely gave this date because it was required, for some reason, that "men candidates must not be less than seventeen and women eighteen years of age." (19)
The College’s Introduction to Course Descriptions of the time put forth “Suggestions Concerning the Choice of a Course in Art”:
The man who does not enjoy the thing he must do daily, who is not engaged in work he would rather do than anything else in the world, never accomplishes the best results of which he is capable. He fails to reach his own highest development and does not render his best service. He is not happy. This is particularly true in the arts where enthusiasm counts so much and good work is not done unless the man throws his whole self into it . . . An artist is one who instinctively feels and perceives the spirit and significance of things and who expresses them in beautiful forms . . . [He] must be willing to dedicate himself to his profession and make any sacrifices of time and energy and personal comforts that may be involved. (20)
Esther was thus enrolled in the Painting and Illustration Department in the College of Fine Arts, where she began to study illustration and design, still life and portraiture, and a general history of art and design. She took figure drawing and composition classes, and courses in cast figures and color. Anatomy lectures were just made available to women art students in 1914, due to standards long entrenched at the National Academy of Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. The availability and quality of women's artistic training certainly lagged behind men's. Following a tradition set forth by the Europeans, womenhad not been allowed until the 1840s; they were not able to draw from the male nude at the National until 1877, and that was in a segregated class. (21) Some of Esther's classes at Carnegie Institute of Technology were still segregated in 1920.
Esther later told a confidante about this college time. He stated of her admission, "Because of the financial situation at home, it was necessary . . . to work her way through college." Esther would recall having worked hard, that "her health was not very good and that she was always a little nervous." (22) Friends and family would remember Esther working short-lived odd jobs outside her art to try to make money. At one point she took a job as a bookkeeper--but she ended up doodling in the margins and lost the position. The tuition fee for 1919 at Carnegie Institute of Technology was $25 a quarter, or $20 a quarter for evening students, which Esther was much of the time. Art supplies, always costly, added approximately $100 a quarter to the cost of tuition. Paying for those paint materials was a challenge Esther, like all artists, would constantly face throughout her life. While she was still a young woman living in her third-floor garret, she looked to supply her art before all else.
Fellow artist Mary Shaw Marohnic had known Esther since grade school, and had attended “Carnegie Tech” at about the same time. She remembered Esther's minimal way of life as a young adult, especially her poor eating habits, something attested to by many friends. Esther often visited Mary at her home in Crafton, in the South Hills of Pittsburgh. She would walk many miles to share new paintings with her friend, then stay for a meal and a hot bath. Especially after leaving her parent's Jackson Street residence later in the mid 1920s, Esther often turned up on friends' porches, "to set up her easel and paints whenever she could be assured an offer of a good meal." (23)
Esther may not have been successful in working to earn money, but Marohnic remembered her as "extremely diligent in her work--working a great deal all the time on her art." Esther's friend recollected that Carnegie Tech's art department was quite fine during the 1920s and that it included many "bold women artists as students." Students studied the German painters, which were on exhibit at the Carnegie Art Museum. "Esther could give a good criticism. She was well-educated at Tech and other places. She had the best teachers in the world there." Mary even stressed their tutelage beyond mere academics: "I think the Fine Art Department helped almost everybody that went there to cope in the outer world, or whatever you want to call it--the outer zoo." (24)
Esther's marks in college ranged from below average in the history of costume, in French, and anatomy to very good in art composition and still-life painting courses. Her ability to do still-life paintings became evident in the interiors she did early in her career. She struggled to earn money for her tuition and art supplies, but the college likely provided some financial help. Students could offset their expenses through work on various creative projects in the art department, or by assisting instructors. It is more likely, considering that Esther's academic record left a bit to be desired, that her financial assistance came through the former, upon completion of painting projects within the department. The way Esther tells it, later in life, is that a faculty member of Carnegie Tech paid her way her third year--an unsubstantiated and unlikely, yet amusing, version of her financial aid.
Esther played hooky, sometimes cutting morning academic classes to take outside jobs, and attending only in the afternoon. She was put on probation numerous times for this, as detailed in her "Permanent Record." She told her niece that she quit school when the Carnegie Museum commissioned her to paint a mural in their cafeteria, which sits below the adjoining Carnegie Library. (25) This is quite possible, although no documentation or physical evidence survives to that effect to this day. Carnegie Tech's College of Fine Arts officially dropped Esther in June 1922, after she had attended three school years. Though extremely interested in and persistent with her painting, Esther was not quite the diligent student.
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NOTES
Note for Introductory Correspondence: Harold J. Winters to Merle Hoyleman, November 21, 1937, New York, NY. From the collected papers of Merle Hoyleman, housed at A-1 Self-Storage, North Oakland, Pittsburgh, PA.
Chapter 1. “SHE NEEDED TO PAINT”
1. Esther Phillips’ sister Dorothy Rosenthal, conversations with Ken Chute, fall 1984, Pittsburgh, PA. (Hereafter cited as Rosenthal conversations.)
2. Megan Shay, “Passion for Paint: The Life of Esther Phillips,” Pittsburgh History, vol. 74, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 119.
3. Ibid.
4. Irene Kaufmann Settlement Art School informational pamphlet, December 1933: 4. Jewish Archives of the Western Pennsylvania Historical Society, Pittsburgh, PA. (Hereafter cited as IKS pamphlet.)
5. Rosenthal conversations.
6. Esther Phillips, series of meetings with niece Millie Silverstein, 1980, New York, NY. Millie took extensive notes of the visits with her aunt; at times it appears she quoted Esther directly. These were forwarded to Ken Chute, who enhanced them with notations of his own conversations with Millie; all was then forwarded to author in 1991 (Hereafter cited as Millie’s notes.)
7. IKS pamphlet, 1.
8. Esther’s father David Phillips, as quoted by Dorothy Rosenthal in conversations with Chute.
9. Rosenthal conversations.
10. Millie’s notes.
11. Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists from Early Indian Times to the Present (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co. and NY.: Avon Books, 1982), 40.
12. Ibid., 157.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 165.
15. Rosenthal conversations.
16. Ibid.
17. Shay, “Passion for Paint,” 119.
18. “Permanent Record of Student Esther Phillips,” Carnegie Institute of Technology College of Fine Arts, date of entrance September 29, 1919. Stored in the Registrar’s Office of present-day Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
19. “Division of the Arts, School of Painting and Decoration,” informational publication of the Carnegie Institute of Technology College of Fine Arts, academic year 1919-20. Records Office archives of the College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
20. E. R. Bossange, “Suggestions Concerning the Choice of a Course in Art,” publication of the Carnegie Institute of Technology College of Fine Arts, academic year 1919-1920. Records Office archives of the College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
21. Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists , 40.
22. Dr. J. Barasch, “Abstract of Commitment,” October 28, 1942, in the psychiatric records of Esther Phillips, patient at Harlem Valley State Hospital, Wingdale, NY. Record depository now at Hudson River Psychiatric Center, Poughkeepsie, NY. (Hereafter depository for this and other records cited simply as Institution Records.)
23. Marohnic’s remembrances and Dorothy Rosenthal quoted, both in Shay, 119.
24. Mary Shaw Marohnic interview with author, June 1993, at the Marian Manor Nursing Home, Pittsburgh, PA. (Hereafter cited as Shaw Marohnic interview.)
25. Or, Esther could have been referring to the cafeteria on campus at the college, Carnegie Institute of Technology. This was in Langley Laboratory, erected in 1918, a space actually used throughout the years, before being demolished in 1959, as an art studio. Historical information from Phillip Rothsted, janitor at Carnegie Tech, phone interview with author, spring 1992, Pittsburgh, PA. Also Ann Curran, “Not Heaven On Earth: A Short History Of Skibo.” Carnegie Mellon Magazine, vol. 17, no. 2 (Winter 1998), 29.
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