Thelma Wood

Thelma Ellen Wood (born July 3, 1901 in Kansas , † December 10, 1970 in Monroe , Connecticut ) was an American Silverpoint artist and sculptor .

Life

Thelma Wood was a wealthy daughter and grew up in St. Louis . In 1921 she went to Paris to study sculpture and to escape the puritanical morals in America - there she had a brief affair with the bisexual poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and the photographer Berenice Abbott . Wood frequented the artistic circles of Surrealism , Realism and Dadaism , drank a lot of alcohol and - so it is assumed - also experimented with marijuana .

In the same year Thelma met the writer Djuna Barnes, also an emigrated American, to know and love. For the next ten years, Wood and Barnes remained a couple, whose dramas of jealousy and excessive alcoholism made a topic of conversation in half of Paris. In addition to this relationship, however, both women had other love affairs with men and women. In 1928 Wood fell in love with Henriette McCrea Metcalf (1888-1981) and moved with her to the bohemian neighborhood of Greenwich Village in New York City . Since the painful separation from Thelma, Barnes lived on the English country estate of the patron Peggy Guggenheim ; there she wrote the novel Nightwood and set a literary monument to her ex-lover with the fictional character Robin Vote .

The relationship with Henriette McCrea Metcalf ended after sixteen years; then Thelma Wood entered into a partnership with the real estate agent and antique dealer Margarete Behrens (1908–1986). In the 1960s, doctors diagnosed her with breast cancer , of which she died on December 10, 1970 at Danbury Hospital . Her ashes were buried in Bridgeport .

Worth mentioning

• Thelma Wood, feeling misrepresented in the novel Nightwood , claimed until her death that the publication of the book would have ruined her life.
• Janet Flanner described Thelma Wood as follows in one of her letters: She is an outstanding figure - six feet tall, dark-haired, often with conspicuous silver rings on her arm and large rings in her ears .

literature

• Philipp Herring: Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes. Penguin Books, New York 1995, ISBN 0-14-017842-2
• Andrea Weiss: Paris was a woman. The women from the Left Bank. Djuna Barnes, Janet Flanner, Gertrude Stein & Co. reissued. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2006, ISBN 978-3-499-24224-3
• Kyra Stromberg : Djuna Barnes. Life and work of an extravagant. Verlag Klaus Wagenbach , Berlin 1989 (reissued in 1999), ISBN 3-8031-3546-X

Web links

• Thelma Wood (English)
• Thelma Ellen Wood (English)