Mabel Dodge Luhan

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Mabel Dodge Luhan
photographed by Carl van Vechten , 1934

Mabel Evans Dodge star Luhan, born Mabel Ganson (born February 26, 1879 in Buffalo , New York , † August 13, 1962 in Taos , New Mexico ) was a wealthy American society, art patron and writer. Luhan is primarily associated with the artist colony she founded in Taos.

Live and act

Early years

Mabel Ganson was the only daughter of Charles and Sara (Cook) Ganson. The Gansons were a wealthy Buffalo family, both grandparents made their fortunes from banking. Mabel's father was a lawyer who was prone to fluctuating moods, pathological jealousy, and violent outbursts of anger. His disposition to weak nerves made it impossible for him to practice his legal profession or any other activity. When he wasn't busy yelling at his wife, he would sit in his study for hours and do nothing. Mabel had a loveless childhood: the father's whole affection was for his beloved dogs, but not for the daughter. "To him I was something that sometimes made noises in the house and was told to get out of the way," she recalled. Her mother Sara, on the other hand, was strong and determined, but cold-hearted and self-centered. Bored with the endless routine of Victorian social life and in constant need of an outlet for her excess energy, Sara eventually became indifferent to her husband and child. Mabel's need for emotional and intellectual support was not met in conventional education at the Saint Margaret School of Girls or at Miss Graham's School in New York . After all, her parents prepared her for the social life of the American upper class and raised her to be a dapper, charming, and obedient young wife.

In 1900, at the age of 21, she married Carl Evans, the son of a well-off family of shipowners. Carl's interest in Mabel was limited to being in a relationship with a woman of his social class. The marriage had a son two years later, to whom the young mother showed the same lovelessness that she herself had experienced in childhood. Shortly after the child was born, Carl Evans died in a hunting accident, and Mabel suffered her first of many more nervous breakdowns, which is why her family sent her to Europe on convalescent leave in 1904. On her trip, she met and fell in love with Edwin Dodge, a wealthy Boston architecture student. Edwin and Mabel married in Paris and moved to Florence in 1905 .

The Villa Curonia in Florence

From 1905 to 1912 the two lived in the Villa Curonia near Florence, a huge palazzo- like property from the Medici period. Soon bored and depressed from another loveless married life, Mabel surrendered to the fine arts and herself and transformed the villa into a renaissance total work of art with a lot of money, energy and creativity . The eloquent American was quick as a socialite Florence who knew how famous, influential, colorful and wealthy guests of the international glitterati to gather at their table. For example, Gertrude Stein , her older brother Leo , Alice B. Toklas , the French novelist André Gide , the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche or the Italian theater actress Eleonora Duse as well as an Indian Swami were among her illustrious guests. Mabel, mostly dressed in Renaissance costumes, enjoyed the role of the muse , who, unable or unwilling to create something of her own, at least served her guests as a source of inspiration.

Mabel led an active bisexual and promiscuous love life at this young age . She described her numerous affairs with young women in her autobiography Intimate Memories , published in 1933 .

An unhappy love affair with her chauffeur led to two suicide attempts: the first time she ate figs with broken glass, the second attempt she made with laudanum .

The New York Salon in Greenwich Village

Mabel Dodge Luhan had a long-term love affair with journalist John "Jack" Reed

Bored with her life in Florence and heavily influenced by Gertrude and Leo Stein's philosophy that the individual could overcome the negative effects of inheritance and the environment and create himself anew, Mabel returned to New York in 1912. She had long since withdrawn from her husband Edwin - they divorced in 1916 - and so she moved into her own apartment at 23 Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village , where she soon set up a literary salon that she opened one evening a week. A wide variety of bohemians , intellectuals and social reformers of the avant-garde counterculture soon joined these evenings , such as the homosexual painter Charles Demuth , the anarchist women's rights activists Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger , the radical union boss "Big Bill" Haywood , the communist journalists John Silas "Jack" Reed and Lincoln Steffens , the right author Walter Lippmann and the photographer and writer Carl van Vechten . Van Vechten designed the character of "Edith Dale" in his novel Peter Whiffle based on Mable Dodge's model .

For three years, Mabel offered a forum for the "Movers and Shakers" , the people who made a difference in the American literary landscape and who were primarily critical of bourgeois values ​​such as capitalism and who were revolutionary. The salon became a centerpiece of the Greenwich Village avant-garde. Mabel, who had an intuitive feeling for gathering polarizing guests in her circle, established herself as a generous mediator, patron and “mistress” of the intellectual greats of her age. Firmly convinced that she had to free America from the limitations of the Victorian past, she generously supported various feminist - emancipatory movements such as the Women 's Peace Party , the Women' s Birth Control League and the Heterodoxy Club .

In February 1913, Mabel Dodge helped host the seminal art exhibition Armory Show . On this occasion she published the pamphlet Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia by Gertrude Stein and distributed it during the exhibition, which brought her the attention of the audience. In the same month she also supported the striking New Jersey textile workers at the Paterson Silk Pageant, a parade held in Madison Square Garden , in which numerous artists from Greenwich Village took part.

In addition to her salon activities, Mabel began writing columns as an essayist for various Hearst Corporation publications . She preferred to deal with Sigmund Freud's findings on psychoanalysis and with Virginia Woolf in self-reflection .

Despite her independence and her openly lived free love , she was unable to free herself from the belief, indoctrinated from childhood, that women have to define themselves through men in order to achieve something; she saw the huge gap between the emancipated image she projected outward and the fact that she was emotionally and intellectually dependent on men.

At the end of June 1913, Mabel traveled to Europe with the radical journalist John "Jack" Reed. During the trip, the two fell in love. In Paris they met Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso . Together they traveled on to Villa Curonia , where Arthur Rubinstein joined them. The first time there was quite happy for Mabel and Jack, but the tension between the two grew because Jack was increasingly unable to cope with the isolated, affluent life, which Mabel took as a rejection.

In September 1913, the two returned to New York and Jack moved in with Mabel on Fifth Avenue.

Provincetown

Carl van Vechten: The Pier Theater of the Provincetown Players

During a camping holiday in the Provincetown / Cape Cod , Massachusetts dunes , the tension between the two became unbearable and Jack left Mabel in November of that year. Mabel later followed Jack to El Paso , Texas , where he reported on the Mexican Revolution and cemented his reputation as a journalist.

The years from 1914 to 1916 marked the beginning of a relationship that has continued to the present day among New York bohemians, intellectuals and artists with Provincetown. In 1915 Mabel returned there with her latest discovery, the painter Maurice Sterne .

In Princetown, Jack Reed joined the left-wing political theater group Provincetown Players , and a rivalry arose between Mabel and theater co-founder Mary Heaton Vorse , a political activist and suffragette .

In January 1916 Jack proposed marriage to her, but she refused. The end of the grueling relationship eventually ended with another suicide attempt by Mabel and her departure from New York.

Taos

The Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, photograph from 1990

Maurice Sterne would eventually become Mabel's third husband in 1916. In 1918 they moved with the anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons to Taos, New Mexico, to found an artists' colony. On the advice of Antonio "Tony" Luhan, a Pueblo Indian who was to become Mabel's fourth and last husband in 1923, she bought 12 acres of land. The marriage to Maurice Sterne, however, did not last long: Tony Luhan had set up a teepee in front of Mabel's house and began to drum every night until she finally heard him and came to him. The horned Maurice got a shotgun to drive Tony off the property, but he couldn't handle the gun, so he cursed Mabel until she finally chased him away. Until the divorce four years later, she still supported Maurice Sterne with monthly donations.

In 1922 the writer DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda (von Richthofen) accepted an invitation from Mabel Dodge Sterne. Lawrence soon had a dangerous affair with his hostess, which he was to write about in one of his stories. Mabel later published her memories of this visit in the autobiographical work Lorenzo in Taos (1932). From the 1930s on, she set about writing down her impressions, experiences and thoughts in four volumes - for example in her autobiography Intimate Memories (1933) and in the book Winter in Taos (1935). It also produced numerous unpublished writings, most of which are now owned by Yale University .

Mabel Dodge Luhan died at her home in Taos in 1962. She was buried in Kit Carson Cemetery in Taos.

Significance and aftermath

Ansel Adams: Church, Taos Pueblo , 1942
The Mabel Dodge Luhan House as an Inn today

Concealed by her turbulent social life, the importance of Mabel Dodge Luhan for American cultural history has long been underestimated. With her artist colony, Luhan built a bridge between the artistic avant-garde of civilized modernity and the cultures of the American natives , the indigenous people. With the vision of an integration of the Anglo-American, Indian and Hispanic cultures, she wanted to create a “center of spiritual modernity”. For this supposedly altruistic purpose, she gathered numerous well-known authors such as DH Lawrence, Mary Hunter Austin , Willa Cather and Thornton Wilder ; visual artists such as Andrew Dasburg , Marsden Hartley , John Marin and Georgia O'Keeffe or the landscape photographer Ansel Adams around them. However, the idealization of primitivism by a rich white Anglo-American woman also aroused critical voices.

The Mabel Dodge Luhan House

The Mabel Dodge Luhan House is a local flavor of Taos. Today it is used as a historic inn and as a conference venue for numerous cultural workshops. The property is one of the US National Historic Landmarks . Dennis Hopper is said to have written the script for Easy Rider there. The author Natalie Goldberg often gives writing seminars in the house.

literature

Writings by Mabel Dodge Luhan (selection)

  • 1932: Lorenzo in Taos . Reprint: Sunstone Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-86534-594-2
  • 1933: Intimate Memories . Reprint: West Richard, 1985, ISBN 0-8492-1638-9
  • 1935: Winter in Taos . Reprint: Sunstone Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-86534-593-5
  • 1937: Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality . New York, Reprint: University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 1997, ISBN 0-8263-0971-2
  • 1947: Taos and its artists . Duel, Sloan and Pearce

Secondary literature

Web links

Commons : Mabel Dodge Luhan  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual references and sources

  1. ↑ a b c d Thomson Gale: Encyclopedia of World Biography on Mabel Dodge Luhan. BookRags.com, 2006, accessed May 13, 2008 .
  2. ↑ a b c Mabel Dodge Luhan Biography. (No longer available online.) Online 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica and the English Cambridge Encyclopedia, archived from the original on August 31, 2007 ; accessed on May 12, 2008 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / encyclopedia.jrank.org
  3. ^ Salons ( Memento from December 9, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Janet Byrne: A Genius for Living: A biography of Frieda Lawrence . Bloomsbury 1995, ISBN 0-7475-1284-1
  5. ^ Gayle Graham Yates: Review: Two "New Women" of Old Wealth, Their Loves, Power, and Ambivalence . In: JSTOR, The Johns Hopkins University Press (Ed.): American Quarterly . tape 39 , no. 4 , 1987, JSTOR : 10.2307 / 2713132 (English, winter 1987).
  6. ^ Christine Stansell: American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century . Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Co, 2000, ISBN 0-8050-4847-2
  7. ↑ Katja Fauth: "Edge of Taos Desert": Mabel Dodge Luhan as a bridge between cultures. In: Lecture series of FrauenKulturStudien: The boundless space: Women's movements from the perspective of the humanities. Philosophical Faculty of the HHUD, archived from the original on March 25, 2002 ; Retrieved October 11, 2012 .
personal data
SURNAME Luhan, Mabel Dodge
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Luhan, Mabel Evans Dodge Stars (full name); Ganson, Mabel (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American patron of the arts
DATE OF BIRTH February 26, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Buffalo , New York
DATE OF DEATH August 13, 1962
Place of death Taos (New Mexico) , New Mexico