Caresse Crosby Read online

  Before the war, Washington was an inhospitable place for artists and art lovers. The city had no neighborhood or street life pulling artists and their patrons to cafés or coffee houses. The bookstore owned by James Whyte just north of Dupont Circle was the one modest venue for local artists to display their works.

  Marc Moyens, an exiled compatriot of the wartime underground and friend of Parisian artists—later a prominent D.C. art dealer—said at the time: “Washington was a village. Cows were grazing on Georgia Avenue.” With few exceptions, the art pioneers were like Caresse, enlightened outsiders; they came to the capital for a variety of reasons—the war effort, a spouse’s job, or escape from the Axis powers.

  Caresse joined the weary group of apartment hunters lounging on chairs or leaning against the walls in the outer office of Hagner and Company, Real Estate. Many of the applicants appeared to have come directly from Union Station with their wives and families. A receptionist was trying to field requests for nonexistent apartment and house rentals. When Caresse confessed that she was looking for space for an art gallery, the receptionist announced, “There are no houses, no apartments, no rooms to rent. And certainly not an art gallery!”

  Caresse repeated her request to Mr. Hagner—a friend of a friend in the Virginia hunt country—but his answer was, “Don’t you know there’s a war on, young lady?”

  “That is just why,” she explained. “Refugee artists from Europe, without a country, need a place to show their work. Can’t you find something for me?”

  Hagner flipped through his file and jotted down three addresses. “Go to it, young lady!”

  The first address called for a trek to a loft in the Maryland suburb of Silver Spring. Caresse checked that one off her list. The second—916 G Place, in the heart of the city—was made to order, an antebellum gingerbread house in a quiet cul-de-sac. There was an iron hitching post near the front steps and a bow window, and the door was open. Caresse made up her mind, the moment she stepped inside, to take it. She could imagine de Chiricos over the fireplace, a Max Ernst on either side. Then she heard footsteps. Hagner had given the address to another client!

  To Caresse’s surprise, two male voices could be heard from the stairwell.

  “You can’t afford it, David,” said a firm, cultivated voice Caresse didn’t recognize.

  “But, Dan,” a familiar Midwestern accent replied, “I can live here and rent out the rest. It’s exactly right. I’ve got to take a chance.”

  “With no furniture? You’re mad!”

  Caresse heard footsteps on the stair. David Porter, the young Chicago artist, stepped into the room.

  “What are you doing here, Mrs. Crosby?” Porter asked. “What a surprise!”

  “I’ve come from Mr. Hagner’s real estate agency.” Caresse stood her ground firmly in the center of the long front room. “I’m going to rent this place for an art gallery,” she said. “You gave me the idea. Did Mr. Hagner send you, too?”

  Porter replied truthfully, “We just happened to see the sign in the window, and the door was wide open. But I was inside first.”

  “With four stories and two of them magnificent exhibition rooms, why not divide the house?” the curator suggested.

  Why not? Caresse thought, I have the furniture, and Porter has the strength to move it. She loved to say “Yes!” and she said “Yes!” on the spot. She and Porter pledged their partnership with a handshake. Later, she signed the lease and agreed to pay half the rent—in 1941, only $55 per month—for so much space. Porter brought his sleeping bag and moved in immediately. Caresse soon moved over from Georgetown and removed the beds, bureaus, mirrors, and rugs of Hampton Manor from the musty storage warehouse.

  She researched the history of G Place, a restricted area chained off for privacy—an anachronism in the heart of the city. General and Mrs. Grant had lived across the street in the 1860s, and the General’s horse had once been hitched to the posts outside. In the 1970s, some of the buildings fell victim to a wrecker’s ball, but during World War II, so-called “cave dwellers”—native Washingtonians of Southern descent—still lived at G Place and came out of their adjoining houses to inspect the new Yankee neighbors. It was too soon to pass judgment, but “good mornings” were exchanged.

  Caresse’s nesting instinct created a home wherever she chose to light, and Porter rushed back from the War Production Board each evening to transform the walls with paint. A G.I. carpenter was hired to moonlight, putting up shelves and racks, and a crew of two—a house painter and a floor sander—helped on odd nights and weekends. All winter, she and Porter worked to transform the deteriorating old house into working gallery space. All the while their relationship warmed into more than a business partnership. Evenings after their labors, they fell into Caresse’s four-poster bed in an exhausted heap.

  In her 40s, she was still an indefatigable lover, a caring woman, always with more than enough love to share. Long after their liaison ended, Porter remembered her as the most seductive—if indeed the most volatile—woman in his life. His creative powers reached a peak with her.

  The winter chill soon passed, and spring turned into summer—not the best time for a gallery to open in the nation’s capital. Before World War II and widespread air-conditioning, heat and humidity in Washington—like India—warranted “hardship post” pay for the British Foreign Service. It was the custom for women and children to flee the city, leaving behind the summer bachelors. In June, Caresse departed for Long Island to become the very elegant resident manager of the Old Post House, born again as the Southampton Inn. Porter was left behind to mind the shop, but not without diversions. He wrote to her:

  Dear Baby:

  I wish you had been here last night. The old G Place was a good place to be. Inez Stark Boulton came to dinner, looking very beautiful in a grey turban with four bunches of violets attached. Gretchen [Powel], like everybody, is quite fascinated with her, and it appears we are going to a garden dinner tonight . . . Inez is going to be very helpful to us, also Pietro Lazzari and his wife. . . . Inez used one of her lipsticks to tone one of our new pictures and we had a swell talk—all about Margaret Fuller and K. Mansfield. Pietro’s wife is going to type letters for us, and I ordered stationery. We are going to try to get some murals for Pietro to do, to pay for his forthcoming “keed.” He is very apt at doing silver point portraits . . . a fine creative person.

  Do you still love me? Say yes. ’Cause we will have a cozy winter and ’cause the fireplace doesn’t work I shall have to keep you—and keep you warm. How is Matta?

  Love, David

  Matta Echaurren, the Basque painter first discovered in Paris by Caresse, fled from France to take up residence at the Inn that summer. She planned to show his work at the G Place Gallery. Pietro Lazzari, an Italian Futurist painter, and his American wife, Evelyn, also would become frequent visitors to G Place. Lazzari delighted in telling people that he went to school on the streets of Rome, that he swam under the bridges of the Tiber to study the statues from below. He lived for some years in New York before coming to Washington, like so many others, to take a war-related job in government. At the Gallery, he gained a wide reputation for his paintings and the bronze sculptures he called “polychrome concrete.”

  When Caresse returned from Southampton, she began to plan with Porter the opening exhibition for late fall. A November 7 press release announced “the first modern art gallery in this city” to Washingtonians. On one floor, Porter would display the work of prominent American artists in “Home Sweet Home, USA.” On another floor, Caresse would show the “Summer Work” of leading Surrealist painters—Matta, Max Ernst, Tanguy, and Wilfredo Lam. Ernst and his wife, Dorothea Tanning (an artist of first rank in her own right), had just arrived from Arizona, and Tanguy’s latest canvases were shipped down from his Connecticut farmhouse. At a time when Surrealist art was little known and unappreciated, Caresse continued her crusade to bring
it to the attention of a wider audience.

  Invitations went out to Cabinet members, members of Congress, and cultural attachés at the embassies, and as a long shot, to Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House. Although the First Lady was unable to attend, she sent Caresse an encouraging response. The first vernissage was a resounding success. Pete and Gretchen Powel came, and among other old friends, Selden Rodman, a poet and writer in town on a “classified” mission. Architect Eero Saarinen and his wife, Lily, also a painter, were there to partake of the rare feast Caresse provided along with Raul Cárdenas’s wine, despite wartime shortages.

  After the opening, the G Place Gallery kept the hours of two until eight o’clock daily, including Sunday, so that Washingtonians engaged in the grim business of war could enjoy, after hours, fine contemporary art. “The exhibitions we mustered, the openings we staged, the artists we launched, were proof of our audacity and energy—we had no funds at all,” Caresse later recalled. Porter contributed his slim salary of $75 per week. Her income from investments never averaged more than $500 per quarter. Despite such meager resources, they continued to provide gourmet dishes—one guest remembered squid, washed down with cheap white wine but deliciously prepared—divided miraculously like the loaves and the fishes for the many who came to look. Few stayed to buy.

  To those who attended the openings, Caresse followed up by mail with plans for the new gallery and a plea for their help:

  We want to bring the Museum of Modern Art’s new Romantic Painting in America to Washington, but this also is beyond our means; so we hope you will take part in our future by contributing ten dollars or more and become one of the Members of the G Place Gallery which should—with your help—offer Washingtonians a so-called Museum of Modern Art comparable to such enterprises in other cities. Lectures by visiting artists, special movies once a month, and limited editions of prints will be arranged gratis for our Members.

  Although many of the plans never materialized, Caresse continued to stage openings at two-week intervals. The second, an early de Chirico show, was part of the “Art of This Century” shipment that friend Peggy Guggenheim sent from New York. Giorgio de Chirico, founder of the scuola metafísica, later joined the Dadaist movement, but his early works were closer to 19th-century romantic fantasy. No lesser a critic than Guillaume Apollinaire described de Chirico’s work as immortal: “. . . [he is] the most astonishing painter of his generation.” It was a well-publicized and very popular opening, Porter reported to Caresse the morning after the preview, which she was too ill to attend:

  Yesterday was a social and artistic triumph, with guests like Alla Kent in superb triumphant form, and your North Pole Explorer boy friend in complete touch with the surreal world of Chirico!!! Laughlin with a cold and pining for Siren Kent, appeared. I wanted to tell everybody you had gone off (on the strength of a rumor) to bring Giorgio back in time for the varnish, but Gretchen thought it would be so much more glamorous to be just a little bit ill with fever just over par.

  The photographs by Powel run all the way up to the second floor landing. I thought it might be cute to have them go around the bathroom walls, but at the last minute—at one minute to four—we re-routed them down again, so when you come in your eye travels like a dizzy Chirico railroad track up and down and around and around. The biographical material got here just in time. Even Gretchen appeared satisfied with what I wrote. She wore a long black dress and stayed in the kitchen much of the time until darkness set in to form a proper background for her costume. Then with Grace Neas (one of the Home Sweet Home artists) who was made up by a make-up gal, the two of them kind of filled in for you.

  I’ve been sleeping alone and getting up early. I miss all your hairpins and binders and stockings in my bed.

  The next show was “Portraits by Buffie Johnson.” The Washington Times-Herald reported: “. . . in private life, Mrs. John Latham, a bewitching young person whose portraits have been acclaimed by art connoisseurs and directors of national galleries. Her exhibition . . . has attracted art lovers from all walks of life.” Johnson was photographed in the Gallery before a 17th-century toile tapestry, sketching a provocative likeness of Caresse languishing under a phosphorescent sea with seaweed draped around her shoulders and seahorses and cockleshells floating about. In the lower right corner, Johnson had scrawled a line from T.S. Eliot: “Till human voices wake us and we drown.” Caresse admitted that it was uncanny how close Johnson had come to portraying her psyche. The years had not erased the memory of the near-drowning accident of her East Island childhood.

  In May, the Gallery featured Surrealists again, focusing on a theme of André Breton, “A Day in Spring.” Women were invited to wear their brightest, most extravagant Easter hats, for which the Gallery gained much-needed notice in the Society sections of local newspapers. Better still, the Gallery was beginning to gain national recognition in publications such as Art Digest: “Washington is in for some vivid presentations. Little doubt such a gallery will be welcome in the Capital City, which has been unexplainably barren in centers of modern art.” Henry Miller’s vivid watercolors—the result of the long, hot summer at Hampton Manor—closed the first season, after which Caresse escaped to the Southampton Inn again. Porter kept in touch after a business trip to New York:

  Dear Baby:

  New York dealers were very hospitable and even the Museum of Modern Art had already heard we had moved into G Place. I can’t imagine who told them . . . they couldn’t give me any money ’cause their purchase fund was exhausted. . . . The Romantic Painting show is going to encompass the whole country. . . .

  Now, pardner Baby. The Nierndorf Gallery is sending about ten paintings for our G Place Gallery branch in Southampton. Five of them are small colored block-prints by Vasily Kandinsky, One is a beautiful Paul Klee, . . . and one by Mr. Chieu, who is a brother of Madam Chang Kai Check (sp.) [sic]. Julien [Levy] was in the country. Alfred Steiglitz was more wonderful. I have a new photograph of him—and am going to write an article about him.

  Now for you and for me and the night mist. I feel like writing you a poem and if I find the quiet I shall . . .

  In late fall, Porter wrote of the increased media attention the G Place Gallery was receiving:

  Life wants photos . . . They said they probably will send their own people down to do the exhibition in color. Miss Varga saw your glamourous photo in Vogue, so I think that’s what did it. Our show is beautiful. I got an inspiration for a new title: “New Names in American Art.” Wonderful?

  Such a sweet and darling love letter. I am feeling happy all over in the thought of it. I was good in New York and good here, so far at least.

  Loads of love from a cold bedroom.

  In February, Selden Rodman noted in his diary: “Canada Lee came down from New York last weekend.” Porter and Caresse were presenting Lee in a reading from Rodman’s The Revolutionists, a three-act play about Toussaint L’Ouverture, the black emperor of Haiti at the time of the French Revolution. Rodman noted that some fifty people came to the G Place Gallery, and the evening was a great success: “I read some of it with him [Lee] and between us, we covered the whole action. Whether the secondary purpose—to raise some money for a New York production—was achieved is hard to say. The Haitian Ambassador and his wife, M. and Mme. Liautaud, came, and several other Negroes. For Jim Crow Washington, this was something new; the great problem was to entertain Canada three meals a day for three days without making him over-conscious that we were avoiding restaurants.”

  It was Caresse’s custom to go out to eat with her friends after openings to favorite restaurants of the time—the Salle du Bois, the Occidental (“preferred by Presidents”), or to O’Donnells or one of the seafood restaurants on the Potomac. There was also the Trianon on 17th Street, just above Pennsylvania Avenue, an intimate place with red-checked tablecloths and Joseph, the jovial old headwaiter from Luxembourg who always dressed formally in white tie and tailcoat. Hen
ry Miller especially loved the Trianon, though Caresse’s guests from the Pentagon considered it too Bohemian for their tastes. Canada Lee, one of the foremost actors in America, could not join Caresse and her friends at the Trianon or any of the other “white” restaurants. When Canada was with them, they could go only to the Bengazi, an African place.

  Determined to break down racial barriers, in June Caresse introduced at the G Place Gallery, “New Names in American Art,” painting and sculpture of black servicemen on duty in Washington. Among the exhibitors was a young sergeant, Romare Bearden, born in the rural South and reared on the streets of Harlem, who developed a unique style of photo-montage and paste-up collage. He later displayed gouaches in a show called “The Passion of Christ”:

  The motive-force of my paintings [consists of] certain incidents . . . I have read . . . in Mark and Matthew. In an explosive world . . . what faiths or systems will emerge in the future I cannot guess—I do believe they can be enriched by a consideration of the great ethical and humanitarian contribution of . . . Christ.

  Still later, Bearden’s work was exhibited in the Manhattan gallery of Samuel Koontz, who also discovered Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell. Bearden was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and became one of the best-known and best-loved of black American artists, due to Caresse’s patronage.

  Despite the outstanding success of the G Place Gallery, Caresse and Porter dissolved their partnership in fall 1944. The reason remains unrecorded, though one could surmise that Porter succumbed to another “Baby” while Caresse was away. Or perhaps, as Selden Rodman recorded in his diary, they parted because Caresse alleged that Porter defrauded one of the black artists of some $700.

  On September 14, she spelled out their new relationship:

  Dear David: