She packed her bag and left for the New Year’s weekend in New Rochelle.
In Manhattan, winter was moving slowly into spring. Frances’s days were filled with work and study, museums and galleries, and thanks to Mrs. Berkovitz’s daughter Sondra and her Broadway contacts, Frances’s evenings often saw her attending plays, Broadway musicals — the premiere of Fiddler On The Roof, for example — and concerts, like her friend Joan Rowland’s recital on the twenty-eighth of February. But mainly her days revolved around the school. The Art Students League was her world, where she felt she was growing and learning and succeeding.
Her hours at the school never seemed enough. She was doing more and more castings for her fellow students, and was producing new works of her own almost daily, which generated criticism. “Felt happy about my morning figure, but Hovannes frowned at one mean little angle. Careless; threw everything off.”
March 1, 1954: “Both works much better. Tore into afternoon figure and think it much improved. Good drawing this morning.” March 2: “Good figure. Hovannes? Said nothing. Must use more free expression.” March 3: “Worked on my Frieda sculpture. She’s one of the models. Zorach likes the figure very much.”
This almost continuous activity had its effect on her diet. “I was never a good cook, and frankly, I just didn’t have time for food. Could have made time, I suppose, but (shrugs) I simply wasn’t that interested.” And she paid the price. Most of March was spent “feeling absolutely lousy and faint … weary … feeling ill after breakfast …” Breakfast, generally, was pausing for a moment outside a restaurant and taking a deep breath. “Very nutritious. Great time-saver and you can’t beat the price.” These senseless eating habits contributed to an endless catalogue of various gastric illnesses. She seemed almost constantly to be getting sick, being sick, or recovering from something. Colds, stomach ailments, sore throats, flu, ulcers, muscular problems, and repeatedly bumping into, bouncing off, falling down on, tripping over, every hard object imaginable. And finally tennis elbow or carpal tunnel syndrome from sculpture, sculpture, sculpture.
“Simplify! Too complex!”
Zorach’s view in three words. Other instructors would stress it just as strongly: Don’t copy blindly. The subject should be a guide, to inspire your work. Exaggerate some aspects, eliminate others. Simplify. “The concept, the idea, is what is really creative,” said Zorach. “The rest is work. The real act of creation is in the design.” To attempt to recreate each and every detail of a subject was fatal, he said; the endless detail would hinder her impression of life, of vitality.
This was a view that Frances accepted. At this period in her training, she was prepared to follow Zorach’s ideas, but tended to be open also to other methods, treatments, and new ways of looking at art, even the avant-garde, even what some might call the absurd.
She attended a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art in mid-January of 1954. The subject was abstract and cubist art. “Abstract art,” said the cartoonist Al Capp, “is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.” But then Al Capp was a humorist and would be expected to say that. Frances, on the other hand, thought about it seriously. To appreciate abstract art, she thought, on her way back to the studio, I have to consider that a thing can have a beauty of its own without having a resemblance to anything I know.
Zorach, however, wasn’t buying any of that avant-garde, no-talent, “no resemblance to anything” bafflegab. “The non-objective art of today is a purely visual thing,” he said. “The importance it has is the importance you, yourself, give it. To read meaning into it is comparable to reading meaning into tea leaves.” Zorach was not the man to leave you in any doubt. Just in case you missed that last remark on art and tea leaves, he expressed his utter amazement at how the work of some artists can be taken seriously. “Today we encourage the most infantile efforts, and admire them.” He agreed that it was natural to enthuse over the daubs and splashes of a four-year-old, “but when a so-called artist does the same thing and exhibits it, to me it is retarded development.”
In spite of Zorach’s modest to favourable opinions on many of her compositions, Frances was always prone to self-criticism, little of it positive. “A good feeling,” said Zorach of one of her figures. Try not to go overboard, thought Frances with a grim smile of acknowledgement. She worried that the gains in one area were lost in another. “I used to get a good likeness,” she said, “but not a good drawing or sculpture. Now I get a good drawing and sculpture, but lose the essence of the subject.”
A number of visits from Ontario friends and relatives nevertheless lightened her mood. The arrival of Keith Collver, her cousin and childhood friend, still well-loved, brought wonderful memories, and they sat over drinks till the small hours of the morning, after which he poured her into a taxi.
Her father and mother came for a two-day check on their daughter, the inexplicable sculptor. She was happy, banished the negative thoughts of their past relationship, and felt quite the cosmopolitan, almost-professional artist as she showed them the Big Town, and drew their attention to points of interest with a casual familiarity.
When she saw them off at the station the next day, she found she only had twelve cents in her pocket. Entertaining friends and relatives in New York was an expensive business.
On the nineteenth of February, she sat alone in her room. Mrs. Berkovitz was out and the house was quiet. A feeling of retrospection settled over her. A time for soul-searching. She recalled that earlier that day Zorach had said that she still hadn’t “the punch of first impression,” no “rhythm or emphasis,” no “pulling together.” Well, she thought grimly, I will have it; I know I will, tomorrow, next week, next month. I will have it. I have to believe that. Her thoughts drifted back to the time of her father’s visit. Showing him the sights, telling of her days at the Art Students League, the things she learned, her enthusiasm, the compliments of the instructors; holding her treasures in her hands and offering them to her father, waiting for appreciation from the man who never gave it.
She heaved a sigh that was almost a sob. “For God’s sake, I’m almost thirty years old. I have to stop substituting superficial things for the real. It’s time I grew up,” she said to the quiet room, the empty house. “Time to start thinking for myself.”
Frances sat looking critically at the two compositions in front of her. “Hmm, fairly pleased with the afternoon figure.” Notwithstanding Zorach’s guarded “It is passable,” she felt the morning figure was “not so hot.” She had begun casting a fellow student’s figure and was also busy on her own, which Hovannes had said was “a good figure.” Nevertheless her constant dissatisfaction with her work, even in the face of approval, albeit grudging, continued to fester in the back of her mind: “I must buck up!”
Always the mood swings: “Both figures improving. I think. Zorach says I have a good start.” Then: “I’m working so slowly! Lack ambition, not sure of my composition.” Finally: “Composition blah.”
Then the sudden news: “Zorach said if I wanted to return next year, I could probably get a scholarship!” And the thought of what that could do to her painfully stretched budget brought an exciting ray of sunshine into her day.
Frances felt that her current sculpture, a torso of Melba, one of the models, was shaping up very well. Zorach praised it, with the qualification that it was too static. So much for criticism, thought Frances. Much more satisfying, from the standpoint of appreciation of her abilities, was the invitation to assist him in casting at his home studio in Brooklyn. In early March she spent a day there, working with him. “A wonderful place. Filled with lovely New England pine furniture, and animals!”
Toward the end of March, Zorach looked at the two figures on which Frances was working. “Technically, you are okay,” he said, and nodded briefly, a fleeting suggestion of approval, “but you have no imagination.” Thanks a lot, Bill, she thought, looking bleakly at the two works. “These are studies,” he said. “You have to get ideas.” All right, she thought grimly, enough studies; from now