Schindlers-Westons-Kasheravoff-Cage and Their Avant-Garde Relationships
- March 19th, 2012
- By John Crosse
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This article is in essence a chapter of a book in progress on the familial relationships between the Schindler and Weston families and their bohemian social circles between 1920 through 1938. For now I plan to end the book in 1938 when Weston married Charis Wilson and built his home in Carmel Highlands and the Schindlers divorced and began living separate lives under the same roof in their iconic RMS-designed Kings Road House. My working title for the book is The Schindlers and the Westons: An Avant-Garde Friendship, 1920-1938. Their fascinatingly interwoven lives and relationships remained avant-garde to the end. As always, I welcome your feedback on any of my pieces.
This chapter of the Schindler-Weston connections centers around the intertwined relationships of Pauline, Edward Weston, Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Cole Weston, Nellie Cornish, Maurice Browne, Ellen Van Volkenburg, Ellen Janson and their circles. As the introductory image to this article I have chosen the below 1920 tongue-in-cheek photograph taken at the time of Edward Weston’s first meeting with artist Roi Partridge and his wife Imogen Cunningham, an early Seattle friend of Cornish, whose importance to the story will emerge later. This history-packed image was taken on the occasion of Edward Weston’s visit to San Francisco to see off his Dutch emigre friend Johan Hagemeyer who would soon leave for an extended trip to Europe to avoid being arrested for his outspoken radical views. (Artful Lives: Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles, by Beth Gates Warren, Getty Publications, 2011, p. 187).
The image’s centerpiece, Anne Brigman was looked up to at the time as being the only photographer on the West Coast accepted into Alfred Stieglitz‘s Photo-Secession Movement and featured in his influential Camera Work magazine. Roi Partridge was a noted etcher and wife Imogen Cunningham an emerging photographer of note who would later be part of Group f/64 with Ansel Adams, Weston, Willard Van Dyke, Sonya Noskowiak et al.. Their son Rondal Partridge later became a well-regarded art and architectural photographer as did Roger Sturtevant. Dorothea Lange would also gain fame as a chronicler of the Great Depression. Pauline Schindler often featured the work of Sturtevant, Hagemeyer and Weston on the cover of The Carmelite and reviewed exhibitions of their work along with Cunninghams’s and Partridge’s during her 1928-29 reign as publisher and editor-in-chief. Lange’s 1935 portrait of Pauline (see below) was taken around the time John Cage broke off his affair with her to marry erstwhile Edward Weston lover Xenia Kashevaroff.
by Kathryn Smith, Rizzoli, 1992, pp. 21-23).
Construction finally began on the Barnsdall House in 1920. (See above). By then heavily involved with the supervision of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Wright directed Schindler, recently married to Pauline, to move from Taliesin to Los Angeles to oversee construction. A couple months after the above article on the Oil Queen’s home, Browne and Van Volkenburg were establishing the new theater department at the Cornish School.
“Nellie C. Cornish was the wittiest and untidiest woman in North America. Violent yapping preceded her entrance into a room; when she sat down a torrent of Pekinese cascaded over her. She had the soul of a master-pianist and hands unable to do her bidding on the keyboard, so she had gathered round her the best music-teachers whom she could find and opened a music school in Seattle. Students flocked. Often the most gifted had little money; she gave them scholarships. Sometimes they had none; she housed and fed them. Consistently she overpaid her teachers. Some students lacked rhythm, so she added a dance department. More students flocked. Some still lacked rhythm, so she tried to add a drama-department but could find no director who satisfied her needs. When the Chicago Little Theatre closed, she had paid Nellie Van and me the high compliment of offering us the position jointly.” (Too Late to Lament by Maurice Browne, Gollancz, 1955, p. 263).
Cornish hired both famous and unknown artists for her faculty including abstract-expressionist painter Mark Tobey and dancers Adolph Bolm and Martha Graham (see above) who became an internationally renowned dancer and choreographer. She recruited Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg to establish a drama school, and gave avant-garde composer John Cage his start. Weston’s son Cole would enroll at the Cornish School in 1937, soon to be followed by Pauline’s ex-lover John Cage and wife Xenia Kashevaroff (see below), former lover of Edward Weston. Cage, who successfully sought out employment by Cornish as a music teacher, would remain at the school with Xenia throughout the 1938-39 academic years.
“Then to my wonderment I found that, though among them were exercises and immaturities, half-dozen held magic unequaled by the lyric verse of any American woman-writer known to me save Edna Millay. Nor were those half-dozen ‘lucky flukes’; internal evidence showed that their author was a skilled and careful craftswoman, who knew precisely what she was doing. Like a pasteboard figure in an Oscar Wilde fairy tale falling in love with the ghost of a Babylonian princess I dashed in search of the music-teacher’s niece. What could be more innocent than a love-affair with a poem?” (Browne, p. 276).
Likely with Browne’s introduction, Janson was soon a regular contributor to his Chicago friend Harriet Monroe‘s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in which his work first appeared in 1915. (See above). She appeared in Contemporary Verse, American Mercury, The Measure, North American Review and numerous other literary journals and was also anthologized by Braithwaite. Pauline likewise regularly featured Janson’s poems in The Carmelite as well as her, Maurice and their love-child’s ongoing activities even after their separation and divorce. (See below for example). She and Janson would also later collaborate as associate editors on Gavin Arthur’s short-lived Dune Forum. (See my PGS and The Oceano Dunes and the Westons). Ironically, Janson and Pauline’s husband would eventually become lovers after which she would have him design and build her a house in 1947 where he convalesced after his second heart attack before his 1953 death. Coincidentally, RMS and Pauline also knew Ellen Janson from her early 1920s involvement with one of the members of Aline Barnsdall’s experimental theater group. (Sheine, note 27, p. 283).
(McCoy, p. 39).
Browne had a falling out with Cornish after only one season. He and ‘Nellie Van’ moved on to San Francisco in 1922 where they became involved with Charles Erskine Scott Wood and Sara Bard Field in the planning of another Little Theatre and drama school to be established under their directorship. When she took over as publisher and editor of The Carmelite in 1928, Pauline would enlist Wood and Field as contributing editors along with their mutual friends Lincoln Steffens and his wife Ella Winter. (See below for example).
Originally a prominent lawyer from Los Angeles, Kuster was formerly married to Una Lindsay Call before she met and fell in love with Robinson Jeffers who would soon thereafter begin his informal reign as Carmel’s poet laureate. The Kuster’s scandalous breakup was reported as a “queer love triangle” in a series of articles appearing in 1912-13 in the Los Angeles Times. (See for example, “Parents Wash Hands of It; “His Own Affair,” says Poet Jeffers’s Mother; Mrs. Kuster Defended as the Scapegoat of Clique,” Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1913, p. II-1). (For much more on Jeffers see my Edward Weston and Mabel Dodge Luhan Remember D. H. Lawrence).
“[Kuster] proposed to build a playhouse in Carmel; it would have a full sky-dome, the first in the country. The three of us spent months pulling his plans to pieces; the Theatre of the Golden Bough was to be the best equipped and most beautiful in America. It was. Kuster invited us to open it with a play written by me, to run a summer-school there, and to direct it afterwards as an art-theatre.” (Browne, p. 271).
Having totally relocated his business activities from Los Angeles by 1924, Kuster’s theater was built as part of his shopping development known as the Court of the Golden Bough on Ocean Avenue in Carmel’s business district completed at the same time. (See above). He had previously commissioned Lee Gottfried to construct his personally-designed Norman-style residence next door to the five-acre spread of Robinson Jeffers and his former wife Una on Carmel Point. (See below).
Just after the earlier Golden Bough group photo was taken, Browne left Van Volkenburg to stay with Ellen Janson in Halcyon while she gave birth to their love-child. Janson’s aunt Borghild, who also lived there, found them a tiny house through John Varian, head of the Halcyon Theosophist Temple who becomes important later in this article. Browne wrote, “members of his congregation denounced him for encouraging sin. He threatened them with excommunication; they called us ‘The Holy Family’.” (Browne, p. 278-9).
Browne and Janson used their Halcyon love-nest as a base while traveling up and down the California coast camping under the stars. Browne soon divorced Van Volkenberg, married Janson to satisfy her disapproving mother, and moved into a new “redwood shack” built for Ellen by her parents near her aunt’s house. (Browne, p. 282). Browne wrote of their child’s conception,
“He was gotten, willfully, at noon of a still burning August day on one of those beaches; we both knew that he would be a male. His mother and I, living in a dream world, believed that once he was surely conceived she could go happily forth into the world alone, carrying him, and I return to my work with Nellie Van.” (Browne, pp. 278-9).
The restless Browne continued his vagabond ways and moved his center of operations to Los Angeles after his and Kuster’s successful 1924 summer season in Carmel. (See above). Browne and/or Van Volkenburg occasionally passed through Los Angeles in 1922-3 at which time the Schindlers likely reconnected with them. Upon settling in Los Angeles Browne produced the occasional play (see above) and for the next two years taught at USC. Hearing that he was in the city, former students came back one by one to work with him. (Browne, p. 286). Appalled by Browne’s squalid surroundings at USC, frequent Edward Weston portrait subject as early as 1916, Ruth St. Denis allowed him free use of her building and office while she was gone on a world tour. (Browne, p. 287).
As one of the movers and shakers of the planning effort, Pauline organized an event at Kings Road to help promote the cause. She arranged for Browne to lecture on Hermann Keyserling, likely on the occasion of the recent publication of his The Travel Diary of a Philosopher. (Author’s note: Edward Weston often referenced Keyserling’s diary in his Daybooks). Possibly accompanied by Ellen Janson to the soiree, Browne recollected, “And Pauline Schindler, brilliant, warm-hearted, bitter-tongued, who was trying to create a salon amid Hollywood’s cultural slagheap, invited me to her home to lecture on Keyserling.” (Browne, p. 287). Pauline excitedly wrote her mother of the salon, “[the party]…is going to be huge. We have never had more than a hundred guests before … But this will be overflowing.” (PGS letter to her mother, [n.d.] circa October, 1925. Cited in Sweeney, p. 96).
“A great banquet was planned in my honour; every theatrical celebrity whom I knew in America and Europe was invited to attend as a guest of honour; an astonishingly large number sent messages of goodwill; some even accepted. The realtor danced round Ruth St. Denis’ office: “With these names behind us the theatre is as good as built.” It was all so splendiferous that I telegraphed Nellie Van to come to the banquet; she sat beside me; the speeches made us feel that we had not lived in vain. Finally our evening came to its end. As I was leaving, the chairwoman of the Publicity Committee unostentatiously handed me an envelope. ”A cheque on account,” I thought, “how charming:” and thanked her warmly. When I got home I opened the envelope. It contained the bill for printing, postage, stationery, telephone, telegrams, table decorations and dinner for the guests of honour. Grinning wrily, Nellie Van returned to Seattle. My students and I gave performances anywhere-schoolrooms, tents, barns -where a ten-dollar note could be earned toward paying that bill: dollar by dollar we paid it to the last cent. Then I spat savagely and straight into the streets of Los Angeles and, worn out by the interminable conflicts within myself, the interminable struggle to establish a theatre which mattered, the interminable inability to pay for it, said goodbye to my theatric dreams.” (Browne, p. 288).
Besides frequently publishing Ellen Janson’s poetry during her editorship of The Carmelite, Pauline also faithfully kept tabs on her family’s comings and goings. For example she included a brief article reporting on Ellen and four-year old Maurice, Jr. passing through town and the whereabouts of Maurice, Sr. who was currently producing a play of George Bernard Shaw’s in London. Pauline wrote of Browne,
“In Carmel he remains a memory and an influence, for Morris Ankrum, George Ball, and many others here busy with the stage have had their first dramatic training under the direction of this intense and passionate artist.” (Schindler, Pauline, ”Maurice Browne in a Second Edition,” The Carmelite, July 11, 1928, p. 2)
Not long after Browne returned to England, Pauline had had enough of RMS’s unfaithfulness and left Kings Road in late August of 1927 with son Mark for Carmel by way of Ojai and Halcyon. (PGS). Offered the use of Ellen Janson’s house for the winter of 1927-8, she stayed only briefly before heading north in October. As she had done in Los Angeles, Pauline rapidly assimilated into the Carmel arts community. She soon began contributing an unsigned column, “The Black Sheep”, to the Carmel Pine Cone. Appearing 11 times between November 1927 and March 1928, she described it as a “new critical department which does not promise to behave itself too well,” but that it would be, “young, fearless, honest, and vital.” She focused mainly on music reviews, local issues and events.
Through her association with the Pine Cone Pauline became involved with Carmel’s new progressive weekly The Carmelite edited by Stephen A. Reynolds, for whom she penned the columns “Stage and Screen” and “With the Women” and other articles under her byline in early 1928. Pauline’s April 25th “With the Women” column for example, reported on the annual P.T.A. conference in Salinas, the recent activities of Anne Martin, regional director of the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom founded by her Hull-House employer and mentor Jane Addams, and a meeting of 35 alumnae of her alma mater, Smith College, at Point Lobos.
Reynolds initially announced the weekly as, “a periodical which will without fear or favor give voice and light on both sides of a mooted question affecting the artistic or practical in village life.” Reynolds, at odds with the entrenched positions of the Carmel Pine Cone, used his new vehicle as a way to publish politically-charged editorial jibes beginning in February 1928. Pauline quickly advanced to editorial assistant and and was anticipating becoming managing editor by mid-April. (Sweeney, p. 105). In a May 7, 1928 letter to her father she wrote of The Carmelite as being, “a liberal-radical weekly, in whose pages the visiting or resident intelligentsia, from Lincoln Steffens to Robinson Jeffers, all had a word.” After only 16 weeks at the helm, Reynold’s turned over The Carmelite to Pauline after the May 30 issue.
Pauline properly introduced Weston to Carmel’s bohemian community at a reception for the Kedroff Quartet following much heralded their performance. (See Above). Weston’s Daybook entry reads,
“To the Kedroff Quartet: the most exquisite vocal music I have heard. The folk-songs were especially thrilling, and the Strauss Waltz! … After, I went with Pauline to a reception for the Quartet, and there met Carmel “society,” everyone that I should meet I suppose! I have certainly been flatteringly presented to Carmel with many newspaper columns [by Pauline in The Carmelite] of flowery praise. Once could easily become “a big toad in a little puddle” here. Not my intention!” (Daybooks, March 16, 1929, pp. 112-3).
Weston soon began an affair with Johan’s former assistant Sonya Noskowiak which quickly blossomed into a full-blown relationship. She moved into his studio and in return for household chores, surrogate mother duty for his visiting sons, and darkroom assistance, Edward gave her a camera and began to teach her the fundamentals of photography. Sonya proved to be a natural and was quickly accepted by Edward and his coterie, including son Brett, another disciple Willard Van Dyke, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, and a few others when they formed Group f/64 and had their inaugural exhibition at San Francisco’s M. H. de Young Museum in 1932.
Nellie Cornish returns to the story with a visit to Carmel and Weston’s studio in the summer of 1930. It seems likely that she had been informed of Weston’s work by their mutual longtime friend Imogen Cunningham. Possibly combining business with pleasure, Cornish could have been scouting for music, art and drama teachers in the talent-rich Monterey Peninsula. Weston wrote of the meeting, “Yesterday I sold my old “Circus Tent,” – then later my favorite new pepper, – its first sale, to Miss Cornish, who has a school – I think of music – in Seattle.” (Daybooks, August 17, 1930, p. 182). This meeting laid the groundwork for Cole’s matriculation at the Cornish School in the fall of 1937 where he would cross paths with Xenia Kashevaroff (see below) and John Cage who joined the faculty the following year.
“Maybe Sonya is having the adventure. I hope so; then my conscience might be eased. But am I not expressing that thing one is supposed to have, – a conscience? Actually, I have never felt guilt over my philandering; only a desire not to be discovered for her sake; not yet at least. And I could feel quite as guilty toward L., from whose arms I went to H. in L. A. To be sure it was unpremeditated, and we had both reached a delightful intoxication but that does not absolve me from the guilt I should feel,-and don’t! Yes, and before going south I made love to both S. and X.! Am I then so weak that I fall for every petticoat? Am I so oversexed that I cannot restrain myself? Neither question can be dismissed with a “yes.” First, I can go long periods with no desire, no need; then I see the light in a woman’s eyes which calls me, and can find no good reason – if I like her – not to respond. I have never deliberately gone out of my way to make a conquest, to merely satisfy sex needs. It amounts to this; that I was meant to fill a need in many a woman’s life, as in turn each one stimulates me, fertilizes my work. And I love them all in turn, at least it’s more than lust I feel, for the months, weeks, or days we are together. Maybe I flatter myself, but so I feel. So what will you answer to this, Sonya?- (Daybooks, January 18, 1933, p. 267).
A Monterey Peninsula intellectual-social circle developed in the early 1930s which included Xenia, her sister Sasha and husband Jack Calvin, her sister Natalya and husband Ritchie Lovejoy, Ed Ricketts, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck and wife Carol, and noted mythologist, writer and lecturer Joseph Campbell. Steinbeck (see below) married Carol Henning and moved to Pacific Grove in 1930 where he also quickly befriended kindred spirit Ricketts. Joseph Campbell moved next door to Ricketts in Pacific Grove in 1932. Campbell quickly had an affair with Steinbeck’s wife Carol which essentially ended their friendship. After leaving his position as a writing instructor at Stanford in 1929, Jack and Sasha, whom he met on a research trip to Juneau, moved to Carmel and began collaborating with Ricketts on his groundbreaking Between Pacific Tides. (See above and below).
Artist-writer Lovejoy met Natalya after he came to Carmel to visit his former teacher at Stanford and eventually became Calvin’s brother-in-law. Ritchie was in Pauline Schindler’s social circle as he was listed in attendance with her at a party in honor of Weston’s recent move to Carmel hosted by fellow photographer Roger Sturtevant (see opening group photo) and his wife. The article read,
“Mr. and Mrs. Roger Sturtevant entertained a number of friends Saturday evening at their home in Carmel. Mr. Edward Weston, the noted photographer, showed a number of his recent camera studies, following which the guests danced until a late hour. Those present included Mr. and Mrs. Hans Ankersmit, Miss Nancy Clark, Miss Tommi Thomson, Miss Tilly Polak, Mrs. Tilly Polak, Mrs. Pauline Schindler, George Norhland, Eddie O’Brien, Kelley Clark, Jack Calvin, Richard Lovejoy, Clay Otto, and many others.” (“The Village News-Reel: Sturtevants Entertain at Interesting Evening.” The Carmel Pine Cone 15:5 (1 February 1929): 14).
Lovejoy eagerly joined in on the collaboration on Ricketts’ book providing over 100 illustrations to the final publication. Thus, the three Kashevaroff sisters were romantically involved with the principals in the book’s publication. The culmination of years of field research and collaboration with his friends, Rickett’s masterpiece is still widely regarded as a classic work in marine ecology and is now in its fifth edition.
Having studied art briefly at Reed College in Portland, Xenia became a disciple of Weston’s close friend Henrietta Shore back in Carmel in the fall of 1932. Shore and Weston met in Los Angeles 1927 through mutual friend Peter Krasnow which by association brought her into the Schindler’s Kings Road circle. Pauline featured her work on the cover of The Carmelite in the summer of 1928 in conjunction with an exhibition of her work at the Hagemeyer Studio. (See above).
“How I am going to take proper care of three women remains to be seen. I place my difficulties in the hands of the good Pagan Gods. The coming into my life of – was dramatically sudden. I had always felt that it would happen sometime; I have been drawn to her for three years, – since she was a child – albeit a mature one – of sixteen. And she was attracted to me, that was evident. I sensed her virginal desire for experience, and wanted to initiate her, but at the time there were – or I thought so – too many difficulties. Then she went away, returning after a year or so, – with experience. [Ed Ricketts?]. Seeing the light in her eyes, I soon found a way to be with her alone. There was no resistance to the first kiss. But still there were difficulties, – or again I thought so; Carmel is so small a place! Matters drifted along, with only an occasional surreptitious embrace, – until Saturday night (2:25) when – slightly tight – “bingy” she called her condition – took the initiative and came to me. I had just returned to the studio, tired from a sitting of Robin [Jeffers], had turned back my bedcovers, when a tap-tap came on my door. I turned on the lights and quickly turned them off, seeing who stood there, and sensing at once, why. She was delightfully the child, though a very poised one, in explaining her call. She was delicately apologetic for coming to me, yet direct and frank; – not the least brazen. She knew what she wanted, and what I wanted – but she knew my difficulties and so cleared the way. I assured – that having acquired knowledge through experience it was obviously a duty – and a pleasant one to hand on to her all that I knew! So we wasted no more time in talk. I am not exaggerating when I say, that she had the most beautiful breasts I have ever seen or touched; breasts such as Renoir painted, swelling without the slightest sag,- high, ample, firm. - stayed the night. We slept but little. She moved me profoundly. A dear child, with a desire to learn, no inhibitions and much passion.” (DB, February 26, 1933, p. 272).
The following spring, the precocious Xenia’s work (see below for example) was exhibited at San Francisco’s de Young Museum alongside drawings and lithographs by Shore, photography by Edward and Brett Weston, Margrethe Mather, and many Group f/64 members including Sonya Noskowiak, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham and Ansel Adams, and an architectural exhibition of work by Rudolph Michael Schindler (likely including Weston photos of his Lovell Beach House). (“Art and Artists: Architect Holding Exhibit at Museum… A gallery of modern photographs…” Berkeley Daily Gazette (13 April 1933): 7.)
“Sunday night (April 16) we held a party to be remembered, a rare gathering which brought together congenial persons who like to play, be gay; not one of them was a false note, each contributing to the fun, and spontaneously. Came: Fernando Felix, who plays the guitar and sings – Mexican songs of course Nacho Bravo, who dances the rumba, – these two here with the newly-established Mexican consulate; Wilna Hervey and Nan Mason (see below), who played and sang in their delightful way; and then the group who have been gathering recently for dancing and vino, – Xenia, Francis, Elaine, Nan and Ed [Ricketts]; finally, there was Michael Schindler here for a few days. We had plenty of good vino, white and red, Fernando’s singing was memorable, Xenia sang in Russian, Sonya in Spanish and Polish, I improvised, danced a Kreutzberg and a “Spring” number, also I danced with Wilna who is almost a foot taller than I am, and must weigh 350! It was a party without one dull moment, ending dramatically when, with a knock at the front door about 1:00, the night watchman complained of too much noise! His nearest “beat” is a block away.” (DB, April 18, 1933, p. 273).
“The most important event of the summer was a visit from Jean Charlot who spent several weeks with us, bringing with him Zomah Day, a strange little sprite of whom we became quite fond. As to Jean, I found that we are as close together, in friendship and in work as before, though seven years had separated us since Mexican days.” (DB, September 14, 1933, p. 275).
“I was asked to do it by Armitage – kind of a last minute job. She really looked like that. She didn’t like it much. I met her first when she went to Mexico. She had asked permission to do my portrait and that of Orozco – so I reciprocated. I did an article on her. She was a very good painter.” (Andrews, p. 112).
“Jean Charlot, visiting Mexican painter, narrowly [sic] escaped death at Point Lobos one day last week when a rock gave way with him on the side of a steep cliff. He fell some distance down the side followed by a shower of rocks but fortunately escaped with minor cuts and bruises. Charlot was going to the help of Henrietta Shore, local artist, who had been lost for some hours and was unable to get back up the cliff to join the rest of the party which included Zoma [sic] Day and Sonya Noskowiak and Edward Weston. Miss Day brought help from the gate who helped Miss Shore and Charlot to safety. The party went to Point Lobos to work; Miss Noskowiak and Mr. Weston with cameras and Miss Shore and Mr. Charlot to sketch.” (“Visiting Artist Has Narrow Escape in Fall,” Carmel Sun, August 31, 1933).
“I had two delightful adventures in Los Angeles; one a renewal with X., a memorable night; another with a most passionate, and pathetically repressed virgin. [Zomah?] This adventure started just before I left never reached fulfillment. I feel that if the time had been propitious, and with more time, the story would have been different. X. on the other hand is most delightfully unmoral, pagan, – a grand person to love.” (DB, April 20, 1934, p. 282).
Oceano and close friends with Ella Young and Gavin Arthur, would, along with Ellen Janson and Pauline Schindler, participate in the publishing of the short-lived Dune Forum in 1933-4. (Ansel Adams: Divine Performance, p. 16).
“Dearest,
You didn’t come. As far as the music is concerned, you didn’t miss anything. Today after last night I feel ill, as though the world were diseased. Incapable and trembling because there is nothing. A flat zero. The sooner the world forgets Stravinsky the better. If he gave the primordial, as you say, I swear it was a cheap imitation. My questions is this: Is this a completely lost generation?
Forgive me. But what a vacancy he has made. I will say this for Stravinsky: possibly but unfortunately, some of his works, the ballets, will act as easy transitions for Lawrences’s big baby. Oh, you see how black I am. But how can you love a world that is filling itself with hollowness? Someone in the Shape of God must come and Save. This is a weak answer.
I spoke with Danz in the intermission. I said, But this is nothing. And he excitedly replied in my book I said so as though that made it right and proper. And Ramiel said, you shouldn’t have expected anything. Why shouldn’t I have? Those two belong back a ways. We need strong life which is superhuman and through conscious necessity growing.
I have a letter from Xenia. She is alone and has been ill. She says she wishes I were there. I told Ramiel about Xenia some time ago. So that last night Brett said to me, How is Alaska coming? I was very confused and said what do you mean, Xenia? He said, yes, I’m interested. I couldn’t reply, and stuttered like an idiot and my head whirling, why should he be interested and why should he look so sadly and kindly and patiently and add Are you serious? That whole little world with its complexities of never always sleeping together knows.
Brett was with Dolores Istarbi. She is a quiet Spanish girl, very beautiful. She told me she was going to get a wall-washing job or something equivalent. Like me. I looked at her and thought that would be very unsuitable and told her so. She said, find someone to keep me. That ought to be easy. And she replied that the field is over-crowded. She is living with Brett now and apparently looking for work during the day.I am not patient enough.
Oh, Pauline, I know what good is, and I’m not good. To be with you would be too easy now. It would be an escape from something I must meet — this muddle. I want to conquer and then come to you. You see how evil and proud I am. The only conquest is through humility and I am not humble now. I think of you all the time. I had a ticket for you last night and didn’t offer it to anyone until the last minute.
John
[Postscript] I have another new feeling of you. You flutter. I saw two butterflies over my head against the sky.I was sure you were coming last night. I love you all the time.”
In 1926 Denny and Watrous founded the Carmel Music Society. In November of the same year (see above) Dene appeared in Los Angeles with avant-garde composers Henry Cowell (featured in the July 3, 1929 issue of The Carmelite) and Dane Rudhyar (one of Pauline’s contributing editors) at the New Music Society with Pauline undoubtedly in attendance. She made other Los Angeles appearances over the next few years. In 1928 the official partnership, Denny-Watrous Management, was launched. In the same year they leased the Theatre of the Golden Bough from Edward Kuster and in twelve months produced a dozen concerts and eighteen plays routinely reviewed by Pauline in The Carmelite , including Ferenc Molnar’s “Liliom,” Eugene O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones” and Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts”, all recently presented for the first time in English in New York. They then opened the Denny-Watrous Gallery, Carmel’s first art gallery, using the space to present plays and concerts, as well as art. Here was the first known American performance of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue.” http://www.carmelresidents.org/News0303.html
Cage’s first piano teacher was Richard Buhlig, a noted avant-garde composer who was almost a weekly feature in The Carmelite, and he also studied with Henry Cowell, another particular favorite of Pauline’s. When Cage wrote a solo for clarinet, Cowell arranged to have it played at a small concert in San Francisco. Cage hitchhiked to San Francisco, and when the musician said it was too difficult for him to play, Cage played his piece on the piano for the audience.
Weston mentions meeting Nellie Cornish, and selling her his favorite new pepper on August 17, 1930.
Moving to Carmel with no money and no job, he lived on wild mushrooms for his first week before taking a job washing dishes in the Blueberry Tea Room. The food was welcome but the work boring, so he left for New York to study with Adolph Weiss.
“In Carmel, Lincoln Steffens and Ella Winter seemed equally convinced that unless every intelligent person throws himself body and soul into the Communist Cause we will soon have a Fascist Terror in this country that will put both Mussolini and Hitler into the shade…”
and references composer John Cage’s first visit to Moy Mell and includes his “Counterpoint” to Roderick White’s critique on “Modern Music.” Poetry by John Varian was published posthumously. This may have been about the time Pauline’s relationship with Pat O’Hara temporarily ended and her affair with John Cage began. Cage stayed at Kings Road at the end of 1933 and staged concerts there which might have been where they met. (Sweeney, p. 110 and Sun-Hines, p. 325).
Cage attended the February issue editorial meeting at Moy Mell and possibly began the affair with Pauline shortly thereafter. Cage visited Pauline in Ojai on several occasions in early 1935 and dedicated his 1934 “Composition for Three Voices” to her. Their affair is documented in the letters at the following link. (http://www.ex-tempore.org/ExTempore96/cage96.html) The letters indicate a couple references to Pat [O'Hara] thus John was likely aware that Pauline may have been seeing him concurrently. They also discuss mutual composer friends such as Henry Cowell, Richard Buhlig, Schoenberg, Edgar Vardse and others.
The first letter references his February visit to Moy Mell and was written on the back of his “Counterpoint” typescript written for the February issue. It reads:
“Dear Pauline:
Gavin gave me Roderick White’s article and asked me to answer it and it somehow gave an impetus with the attached result. Hazel [Dreis] and Edward [Weston (on his first visit to the Dunes)] have not yet returned and Mary [McMeen, acting secretary to Dune Forum], Don [Sample, Cage's companion], and I are having dinner tonite at the Dunes with Gavin [Arthur]. Probably by tomorrow we will leave [for Carmel] as Don is very anxious to get settled. Dr. Gerber was over last nite and proved very stimulating. Henry Okuda made sukiyaki. The pump stopped working according to Don, W.C.’s up the Western Coast cease functioning as we approach.
Love to you and Mark.
John.
How’s Mozart? Don sends his love too and thinks of you often”
Pauline also included in this issue estranged husband RMS’s seminal and oft-cited three-page piece, “Space Architecture” which defined his architectural design philosophy. He wrote that the modern architect would be “dealing with a new medium as rich and unlimited in possibilities of expression as any of other media of art: color, sound, mass etc. This gives us a new understanding of the task of modern architecture. Its experiments serve to develop a new language, a vocabulary and syntax of space.” After reading many of PGS’s other writings I speculate that she may have had a hand in editing this article.
My husband and I had been very deeply interested in dramatic art, which was just beginning to develop all over the country. We were fortunate to have in San Francisco, at the time that we resolved to see if we could do something about starting a school, Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg Browne, who usually went by just her maiden name, Ellen Van Volkenburg. They had taught in the Cornish school and previous to that had established a little theater in Chicago which became really world famous. It produced some of the most remarkable plays that had been given up to that time in the country, foreign plays and very choice plays written by European authors. They had become known as the father and mother of the little theater movement. From the time they established that it was so successful that little theater movements began to spring up here and there.
It seemed to us that San Francisco—being a large city and with a chance of drawing students for the school from as many corners as the Cornish school had done—that we should really use the great experience of the Brownes and others who were in our region to establish a school that not only would teach actors and the idea of drama but that would encourage the writing of drama and those enterprises connected with the stage such as painting sets, and electrical equipment, and costume-making. In other words, it was to be literally a school of the arts of the theater, because we considered every part of what went into the performance of a successful drama an art, and the person doing it as an artist who had to adjust to the whole dramatic form.
Fry
Field
There was very little activity. There was a little theater over here in Berkeley, of which Everett Glass was director, and later was, I think, pushed out of what he could do very well by Sam Hume. But there was very little, you might say, wide activity, and certainly nothing on the scope of this school, so my husband and I both set about trying to raise funds to back this school. We found very great difficulty in approaching the wealthy. They almost all would tell us that they had other commitments and they seemed not at all to see its possibilities. This was just previous to the Great Depression; we had a little more certainly than we had later, and we resolved that we would take it out of our capital to prove to the people of San Francisco, for at least two years if necessary, that such a school was possible.
Now there were, within the region, some famous people in the drama. Hedwiga Reicher was one. She was the daughter of the great [Emanuel] Reicher of Germany, who had done some very remarkable dramatic work. He had brought his beautiful daughter— she was extremely beautiful—over to play the [Gerhart] Hauptmann plays in New York (he [Hauptmann] wrote a number of most significant plays whose titles I can give you later). One of them was called The Weavers and was a play that was built around the terrific upheaval that industrial changes brought to England [Silesia]. It was played very successfully in New York. But Mr. Reicher died and Hedwiga drifted out to the Coast, getting one opportunity after another. The manager who was going to back her in some big productions in New York went down on the Titanic, and all her prospects for a further career went down with him. And so she came to the Coast and was teaching drama, or at least had organized a little dramatic school over here on this side of the bay in, I think, Oakland. I had met her in New York when she was the rage of New York. She had come over, as I say, a very beautiful girl, with this famous father, and my husband and I went to a luncheon in New York at which we met her and had been fascinated by her. So when we heard she was out on the Coast we enlisted her services and those of Irving Pichel, who was rising in fame as an actor in this region, and also of Rudolph Schaeffer, who still has a school of design in San Francisco. He must be quite an old man now; I haven’t seen him in years, though I get all his announcements faithfully. He has a rather important school of design which I think is backed by a lot of very wealthy women in San Francisco.
Of course the leading spirits were the Brownes. Who else have you [listed] besides those I’ve named?
Imogen Cunningham did not sever her ties to Seattle when she moved south. In 1935, she produced the photographs for the Cornish School catalog.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/08/03/carmel_forest_theater.DTL#ixzz1oe9GF3iU
Cage arranges Blue Four exhibition at Cornish.
Cage buys a painting from Scheyer on installment plan.
Fall 1933-mid-April 1934. Through Richard Bühlig met Henry Cowell (1897-1965) and studied dissonant counterpoint and composition with him for a season (Cowell, H. 1952).
http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=9042
Beginning in 1922, the year the Schindlers moved into their radical new home on Kings Road in West Hollywood and the Lovells started attending their salons, RMS designed three projects for the Lovells, a mountain cabin, a farmhouse and the Beach House in Newport Beach which was completed in 1926 and photographed by Weston the following year. By 1924, RMS had also essentially replaced Wright as Barnsdall’s personal architect and by 1928 had replaced Wright as the Freeman’s architect. By this time the naturopath and Los Angeles Times ‘Care of the Body’ columnist Philip Lovell was also Edward Weston’s doctor of choice. The Lovells and Weston were habitues of the frequent salons and parties at both the Schindler’s Kings Road House and the Freeman House.
, UCSB, p. 88). It has been speculated by some that Schindler was having an affair with Leah and/or Harriet which could have contributed to Pauline’s 1927 departure from Kings Road and might have come into play in Philip Lovell’s decision to award Neutra the Physical Culture Center and Health House commissions. (See my Selected Publications of Esther McCoy for much more discourse on the Lovell Health House Commission).
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, p. 140. See also my 
,” p. 192).
due to their amazing content chronicling the intertwined lives of the L.A.’s early Bohemian, avant-garde artists, architects and intelligentsia. Today while trying to track down where the original unexpurgated manuscripts might reside I ran across the below Edward Weston reminiscence written on the occasion of learning of the January 5, 1942 death of his former lover Tina Modotti with whom he traveled to Mexico with between 1923 and 1926. (See below).
by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. Bulfinch, 1989, p. 14.
, p. 124.
, edited by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Editorial RM, 2010, p. 403).
by Sullivan and edited by Claude F. Bragdon, Scarab Fraternity Press, 1934, frontispiece. From my collection.
by Roxanne Kuter Williamson, p. 32.
-designed skyscrapers and later regaled his students with tales of Chicago and Sullivan’s work.
by Louis Sullivan).
, 
and other published work. (
which he had recently spent five months revising and editing into book format. The “Chats” was originally conceived as fifty-two separate articles that appeared weekly in the Interstate Architect and Builderfrom February 16, 1901 to February 8, 1902. (See review below). It was an extended dialogue between a student and the master who leads him through a kind of spiritual and psychological confrontation with nature before introducing him to social and building analysis – Sullivan’s preferred method of architectural instruction.
by Esther McCoy, Arts + Architecture Press, Santa Monica, CA, 1979, p. 44-5)
in 1926-7. He also likely practiced his English by poring over the “Chats” while absorbing Sullivan’s teachings and fantasizing about returning the manuscript to him in person, a dream that was not to be realized until 1924.
by Richard Neutra, p. 181).
by Thomas S. Hines, University of California Press, 1994, p. 51).
edited by Joseph A. Wilkes and Robert T. Packard, Wiley, 1989, p. 714).
, p. 122).
by Louis Sullivan, Scarab Fraternity Press, 1934. (From my collection).
,’ I have endeavored to set a monument to Louis H. Sullivan, a fine and great man.” (See above). Indeed, Neutra included numerous Sullivan projects in his second book published in 1930. California Arts & Architecture published 
by Louis H. Sullivan, edited by Elizabeth Athey, Wittenborn, 1947.
is truly a masterpiece of architectural research.
by Andrew Sarris, Museum of Modern Art, 1966, frontispiece.
by Susan Delson, University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
by Dione Neutra, p. 144). (For much more detail on this see my “
by Will South, George Stern Fine Arts, 2000, p. 45, hereinafter Buff.
, p. 38). (For more on the Westons and Buff see 
, p. 438. (From my collection).
, p. 45).
edited by isabel Wunche, p. 163-4). 
, by David Stuart Ryan, p. 44).
, and Bruno Taut’s 
, not to mention his own book 
, p. 158).
, p. 82.
“ in Vienna while visiting relatives during the world tour in the summer of 1930. He also secured the commission to design a house for the Viennese Werkbund Siedlung project likely around the time Ludwig Mies van der Rohe hired him to teach a fall class at the Bauhaus during his tour. This house was designed after returning to Los Angeles in 1931 and was completed in 1932. (
, p. 156).
, pp. 30-31, 39 and 214).
, he sponsored a joint exhibition of paintings by Kollorsz and sculpture by Ballbusch at the Plaza Art Center. 
by John Baxter, p. 162). 
. 
by Ione Robinson, p. 22.
by Margaret Hooks, p. 195-6).
by William Harrison Richardson, 
in New York, traveled throughout Europe and exhibited at the Alma Reed’s Delphic Studios, the Weyhe Galleries, and the New York Art Center. She heard Siqueiros speak on numerous occasions in Mexico City in 1931 and visited him in Taxco in January 1932 at which time he painted her portrait. (See above). She also attended the January 25th opening of Siqueiros’ first one-man show at Mexico City’s Casino Espanol organized through the largess of his friends, the Spanish Ambassador Alvarez del Valle, Anita Brenner, Sergei Eisenstein and others. 
by Philip Stein, p. 72-3 and 
by Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, introduction by Arthur Millier, Pomona College Gallery, 1972, p. [34]). 
by Willy Boesiger, Editions Girsberger, Zurich, 1950, p. 20.
by Martin L. Friedman, p. 43)
by Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, 
,
by William F. Nolan, p. 97.
. Known as “The Oil King” in the countless newspaper articles chronicling his exploits, the well-connected Frank A. Garbutt became the first Vice-President of the 
by Griffith Borgeson, pp. 17-18).
by 
by William A. Meyers, p. 71).
by Harold Osmer and Phil Harms
