A portrait gallery of the past is a powerful place. We are free to look with impunity, to stare without reprimand, to study, to judge. Period photographs may more accurately represent form and feature, but they are robbed of life by the technology that required holding the pose; unless the subjects held very still, the camera blurred. Portraits, on the other hand, can be full of life, not just by virtue of their subjects but by the spirit of the painter. Through some alchemy of the subject and the maker, those figures on the walls seem somehow more demonstrative. Sometimes they seem to look back.
Walking through a portrait gallery is like strolling an avenue populated by interesting people. Let’s call it a boulevard. They are elaborately dressed. Or simply dressed. They are engaged in their business, or looking at a kitten. Some of them are looking right at you, coy or glancing or haughty or shadowed. From behind the canvas they are trying to catch your eye.
And only one level behind them, out of sight but very much present, are the painters who made those portraits. They, too, are conscious of your eye. Think of them, too, say just beyond, between the back of the canvas and the gallery wall.
Clara Mairs had a fascinating life, especially for her time. But it’s not her life that enables the portrait to lean down from the wall and tap a passerby on the shoulder. Is it the painter, then, reaching out?
It might be something about the alchemy of two, created all those years ago in their time together. The pose, the gaze, the choice of colors, the mysterious vessels in the background. Between the brush of the artist and the receiving canvas lie a complex set of tiny decisions. Brushstrokes, each one consequential.
Still potent. Still vibrant.
Standing in the gallery, we cannot see the life histories of either the subjects or the portraitists, but how much depth and richness are added when we know a bit more! This is the allure of research.
Clara Mairs (1878-1963) is here pictured as an imperious grande dame, but the portraitist says she had “…great humor and was a Bohemian at heart…Inside she was a hoyden.” Writer Julie L’Enfant identifies Mairs as “an imposing and lively presence in Minnesota’s artistic community and a prolific painter, printmaker and maker of decorative arts.” Her life partner was the artist Clement Haupers, twenty-two years her junior and a pursuer of other relationships with both women and men. “They really flaunted their individuality,” said one writer, a possible understatement. Just after this portrait was completed in 1923, Mairs and Hauper decamped from Minnesota to Paris by train and ocean liner and train again. They studied art and lived in a cold-water flat in Montparnasse. The two are included in a photograph of an art studio there in that same eventful year; the group is flanked by someone holding a human skull and a nude model, discreetly turned away from the camera. She does appear to be wearing shoes. Cold studio floor? Late in the decade, back in Saint Paul, they lived on Ramsey Hill, described in the Pioneer Press as “a little Midwest Bohemia – St. Paul’s Greenwich Village.” The writer Meridel LeSueur lived across the street. Reportedly, Clem would dress up in a Panama hat and sports coat to drive Clara downtown. They were central and seminal to the arts scene in Minnesota, and exhibited regularly in New York and Chicago. All that time, this portrait was hanging. Somewhere.
Looking a bit past the Portrait of Clara Mairs, it is possible to glimpse the portraitist Frances Cranmer Greenman, shown here in her Self Portrait of 1923 (collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art). The Mia tag for this portrait sums it up. “In the 1920s, Greenman experimented with modern Expressionist elements, such as brash oranges, greens and purples – radical by Minneapolis standards, which is perhaps why she painted herself against what appears to be Paris.” The “brash” colors frame Clara, too. In her full-of-brio autobiography, Greenman says “It is hard to realize that I was considered a wild painter at the time.” She describes the people who commissioned her as “brave”. One of them was Elizabeth Quinlan, who founded one of the city’s most beautiful stores, Young-Quinlan. For a woman to become a professional artist, according to Tom Arneson, was “no easy feat, as there were few opportunities in the area for art education in those days and women faced additional barriers due to social expectations.” And yet she did.
One can suppose that she might have seemed too modern, the same way one can suppose that Mairs’ unconventional life might have stood out in the staid Midwest. Perhaps it was different in bohemian Ramsey Hill. Perhaps they were not interested in convention.
L’Enfant notes that these two Greenman paintings, Portrait of Clara Mairs and Self Portrait, emphasized “personal style and elegant bearing.” Were they commissioned? If so, by whom? I note that both were donated to the two museums by the same person.
Were they hung privately? Publicly? Mairs and Greenman would have been recognizable in society. Would members of the community have come to see these works? What did they think?
There is another Greenman portrait, of another artist friend, that is similar in size, in tone, and even in framing to the Mairs portrait. Portrait of Dewey Albinson is also in the M’s collection, although it is not currently hung. L’Enfant speculates that they make good pendants, although “no evidence has come to light that they were meant to be so.” The two were hung next to each other in a 2007 exhibit at the M. Was that the only time they were hung as a pair? In a photograph of that exhibit, they DO look like pendants.
And, since we’re looking hard, what are those things on the shelves behind Mairs? Is that a conch shell? I read that shells were a popular decorative item in the twenties. The literature says Clara made decorative arts throughout her life. Could that bit of green pottery be a piece of her own? Greenman said she painted a handkerchief into Mairs’ hand to indicate her “distinguished background”; why, then, is there a touch of red?
And what about that remarkable frame? Did Greenman make that, too?
Someone knows the answers to these questions. But what is the power that makes us curious? What is the ignition point between these works and the eye of the beholder?
When I am writing about people of the past, I sometimes feel a tap on my shoulder, as if the dead wanted their stories told, as if they wanted to speak, or to be heard. When I look at Portrait of Clara Mairs, I think I am hearing something. I am caught.
Even this touch of backstory greatly increases the pleasure of gazing at the paintings, now more than one hundred years old, still quite capable of grasping the imagination of the beholder.
Readers, I invite you to stop by the Minnesota Museum of American Art in downtown Saint Paul. Take a look at Portrait of Clara Mairs. Let me know what you think.
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This is the second of a series of related essays. For the first, https://www.pegguilfoyle.com/posts/new-caught-by-the-art/. I am indebted to Pioneer Modernists: Minnesota’s First Generation of Women Artists by Julie L’Enfant, to the wonderfully-named autobiography of Frances Cranmer Greenman, Higher Than The Sky, and to Tom Arneson of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, 350 Robert Street North, Saint Paul. Admission is free; galleries are open Thursday to Sunday.
Photos by the author.
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