By Jessica Rosen, Curatorial Assistant
This collection spotlight is the first in a series that highlights the voice of the important art critic and art historian Elizabeth McCausland
(American, 1899–1965), whose career plays a central role in the exhibition Embracing the Parallax: Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland. While McCausland was one of the most forward-thinking critics of her time, today her name has been all but forgotten. McCausland’s correspondence with and writing about artists whose work is in the collection of The Heckscher Museum demonstrates her significant role in the twentieth-century art world and beyond. Embracing the Parallax celebrates the prolific collaboration between McCausland and her romantic and intellectual partner, photographer Berenice Abbott (American, 1898–1991), with a focus on their celebrated photobook, Changing New York (1939).
Elizabeth McCausland and American modernist Arthur Dove (1880–1946) had a close friendship, supporting each other in both their personal and professional lives. McCausland wrote glowing reviews of Dove’s work, and Dove endorsed McCausland as an important voice in the art world. In the following article, I trace their fierce professional championing of each other, as well as their tender moments of friendship.
The Heckscher Collection is the proud repository of almost 50 works by Dove, as well as many of his tools: brushes, pigments, and books from his personal library. The Heckscher also carefully maintains the nearby Dove/Torr Cottage, where Dove lived with his wife, painter Helen Torr (American, 1886–1967), from 1938 until his death in 1946.
In December 1937 McCausland published an essay called “Dove: Man and Painter,” arguing that Dove’s personal and artistic life were intertwined, as “a man’s work is an extension of his body.” Her article covered Dove’s time in Geneva, New York settling his family’s estate, declaring that “the history of Dove and the Dove family in Geneva is an American saga.” McCausland wrote: “This has been Dove’s life, to shelter precariously in old houseboats and barges on the Hudson, or Halesite Harbor, on a farm near Westport, in the Ketewomoke Yacht Club. Yet no man gives a greater sense of having grown out of the earth. To many critics this very quality makes the greatest appeal: the paintings feel of the soil, of old houses, barns, cows and calves and barnyard cats and dogs, trees, plowed furrows, sun drawing water from the earth, waves, birds in flight, rotting piers, barges, boathouses, steam shovels scooping chunks of rock and sand, a tractor ready for the unplowed field.” (Read the full article.)
McCausland’s words capture the “having grown out of the earth” spirit of many of Dove’s artworks in the Heckscher collection, including, for example, Sea Gulls (1938), which Dove painted in Geneva, as well as Centerport Series #20A (1940) and Untitled Centerport #2 (1941), which he created once he moved what is now the Dove/Torr Cottage on Long Island.
Just as McCausland advocated for Dove, Dove advocated for McCausland. For example, on June 26, 1934, he wrote to the editor of the Springfield Republican, the newspaper McCausland worked for, “were I an editor I should feel that I had a rarer find in Miss McCausland than any of the N.Y. papers could boast of….This is just meant to call your attention to her value to you and the rest of the world.” A year later, in 1935, Dove wrote a letter of recommendation for McCausland to The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, stating, “I have rarely seen such energy and such devotion to the truth in America. She has printed with her own hands and published her own truly written poems. She knows the creative soul in this America and spends her life fighting for it.”
Outside their professional careers, the two were very close friends. With mutual love and respect for each other, McCausland and Dove lamented about daily life, shared inside jokes, and complained about illnesses and lack of funds. For example, when Dove and Torr were considering moving to the Cottage, Abbott wrote to Dove in June 1938, “Elizabeth told me about the Long Island idea; I hope you can go through with it. I want you close for biscuits. Love from us both.” Dove often ended his letters to McCausland with declarations of love, such as on April 24, 1934, when Dove wrote, “I am just so glad to be born on the time plane with you and we both send love enough to knock Mars out of his socket in space. Always Dove.”
Dove and Torr did indeed go through with “the Long Island idea,” and they remained close to Abbott and McCausland, who lived a mere fifty miles away in a loft building in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. McCausland and Dove continued to champion each other throughout their lives. Nearly a decade after Dove’s death, McCausland even wrote a proposal to author a critical biography of her friend, highlighting him as a “pioneer of modern art.” While this biography never came to fruition, McCausland’s critical voice advocated for Dove and his work and helped to cement his place as a leading figure in the history of American modernism.
To read more of their correspondence, which has been digitized by the Archives of American Art in multiple folders, follow the links here and here. You can also view McCausland’s book proposal for Dove’s biography.
Embracing the Parallax: Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland is sponsored by Susan Van Scoy, Ph.D., Brian Katz & Olshan Frome Wolosky LLP. This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
