Frances nodded amicably, though she felt that if you’ve seen one tiger, you’ve seen them all. “I’ve done a lot of cats,” said Frances, “but this is my first tiger.”
The lady watched for a minute, then went up to the cage and called softly to the tiger, “Mary,” and again, “Ma-ry.”
“The tiger immediately got up and came over to the bars,” said Frances. “It rubbed up against them, and purred! Did you ever hear a tiger purr? Like a vacuum cleaner!”
The lady whispered lovingly to the tiger, then, turning to Frances, she said, “We were in the circus together, but we all have to retire sometime, and she was put here in the zoo.” She laughed quietly. “They don’t want me to put my hand out and stroke her. Children might get the idea they can, too, and their parents would have heart attacks.”
Frances stopped sketching, touched by feelings of sorrow at the passing of a relationship that must have been so close.
The lady turned back to the cage with a sad smile. “I come back here every few days to see her.”
“I sat there,” said Frances, “and cried, the tears falling on my sketch pad, blurring the image of Mary, the tiger.”
Many of the zoo sketches were developed further in the studio of the Art Students League, where John Hovannes, one of her instructors, would pronounce his criticism. “He talks incessantly,” said Frances, “but then again he has a lot to talk about.” Looking at one of her renditions, he said, “Your transition to freer expression will be slow because of your former training at OCA.” Well, thought Frances, so much for you, OCA, my terribly staid and academic alma mater. But Frances was fortunate in having as her instructors two of the country’s most outstanding artists: William Zorach, recognized as the dean of American sculptors; and John Hovannes, a sculptor of striking originality and imagination.
Hovannes’s strength lay in his ability to “stretch one’s thinking.”
He challenged his students by giving them tasks that exceeded their abilities. He demanded new thinking, individuality, experimentation. “He was a master carver,” said Frances. “I took classes with him in the morning. He was Armenian, and he was wonderful. He talked a lot, and I learned a tremendous amount from him. He was very dapper, very short; he had black, black eyes and black hair. And he never shut up.”
William Zorach came originally from Lithuania. He was born Zorach Samovich, but when his family immigrated to the United States in 1891, his father changed Samovich to Finkelstein. When Zorach Finkelstein started school, his teacher arbitrarily changed Zorach to William, and eventually, when the boy became a man, he changed his name to William Zorach, a labyrinthine exercise that must have kept later genealogy students on their toes.
Zorach grew up in a rough area of Cleveland. “Those were the days of a saloon on every corner,” he said. “And livery stables. Kids would jump from the upper windows into soft manure piles.”
He studied art in Paris, where he met his future wife, Marguerite Thompson, a refined young lady of a wealthy American family and extremely genteel upbringing, who had probably never seen a manure pile, would never have uttered the word manure, and had certainly never jumped into a pile of it.
“Zorach was very cool at first,” said Frances, “until he realized I was serious about sculpture. There were many students who were wealthy and came part-time, then they’d go and play golf, so he was very cool toward me at first.” Frances remembered him as often harsh; poor work or indifferent effort earned his contempt.
Frances felt that conditions in the studio were very good. Zorach’s views, on the other hand, were not quite so positive. “I found the basement studio at the League very inadequate in earlier days,” he said. “It was full of pipes of all sizes going everywhere, and the ceiling was very low. It was wonderful training in how to work under the most adverse conditions.”
The classroom in which the students worked was approximately thirty metres long by fifteen metres wide. “Often we had fifteen people working there,” Frances remembered. “Doesn’t sound like many people, but if everyone was working on a piece, they took up a lot of room.” There was a stage for models right in the middle of the room, and the students would be ranged around it. There was a division which separated the working area from the storage of materials, like plaster, equipment, and a great clay bin. The students would scoop out the clay they needed, do their work, then at day’s end, cover the work with oilcloth to keep it moist. “Can you believe it? Oilcloth! That was a big problem; it was so stiff. Like trying to fold a steel plate.”
Zorach once, on his daily round, paused beside Frances. He glanced over her shoulder, and frowned at the small figure on which Frances had been working. It sat, motionless, almost apologetic, on the stand in front of her. It, too, seemed to wait apprehensively for Zorach’s opinion. He continued to frown. “The figure,” he said finally, “is good.” Frances felt a brief flicker of pleasure. “But,” he added, “no punch; it lacks the impact of interpretation.”
What does that mean? she thought in panic. Impact? Interpretation? She gritted her teeth. She looked at the figure. In agony she saw it had no interpretation at all, none. None! Not a shred of … of … impact. She tore it down in disgust and began again.
She developed a second figure, and anxiously awaited Zorach’s criticism. And got it. Taking a tool, he made subtle additions to one side, deletions to another, describing and advising as he worked. Frances sighed. “Now it’s more or less a Zorach sculpture. Not quite sure what to do with it now.” She gazed at it sadly; the figure gazed back at her. She sighed again. “Still lacks punch.”
Despite the negative critiques and the equally negative-leaning results, Frances’s tenuous optimism fought back. “I really feel I’m making definite progress in these classes,” even though she found the students a frigid group. This would pass quickly; Frances had a natural ability to make friends easily. With time, her address book would become one of the most extensive in North America, a multi-volume work that would rival the telephone book. Yet, paradoxically, her years were filled with frequent periods of desperate loneliness, alone in an empty house, prey to depression and inexplicable despair.
But the joy she found in sculpture inevitably brought the pendulum back. “I am making progress. I know I am.” Though she saw the coolness of her fellow students, and her pitifully small circle of friends, at the same time she knew her friends would soon expand in number.
Then the pendulum would swing back again. It’s an early mid-October evening, and outside the school all is noise and movement. Groups hurry by; some are students from her studio. One of them waves quickly, “Hi, Frances,” and continues on without an invitation to join them. She walks toward Fifth Avenue. She feels isolated, as if the city were empty, a ghost town. In the cool dusk Frances turns at last and walks home alone. “And when I get there the house is still. No one home but me.”
Good criticism, and the not-so-good, and sometimes the frankly negative, were a regular part of Frances’s day. Yet she was haunted by thoughts of failure. Failure? Negative thinking? If you had seen Frances you would have been surprised. “Surely,” you would have said, “you are talking of someone else.” Just look at her. She is leaning backward, not quite in challenge, rather as if secure in the correctness of her position on the subject in question. Her feet are slightly apart, planted firmly; her head is back, her smile confident. Why, she’s the very picture of self-assurance. You sense immediately that this woman knows what she’s talking about, and knows that you know she knows, too. The cynic will say this is classic insecurity: the bluff that hides a lack of belief in herself. And maybe the cynic is right; he’s been right before. And yet, she radiates a no-nonsense attitude; she’s frank, but not offensive. No deviousness here. Rather, naïveté. And because of this, in the course of her life many will take advantage of her.
Negative criticism of her work often generated self-doubt. She thought back to the previous summer