Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  43. Transcript of Mildred Constantine interview with Anita Brenner, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. On Mexican art influence in San Francisco, see Belisario R.Contreras, Tradition and Innovation in New Deal Art (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 1983); Laurance P. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989); Anthony W. Lee, Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco’s Public Murals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Patricia Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism: American Painting of the 1930s (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1983); Francis V. O’Connor, “The Influence of Diego Rivera on the Art of the United States During the 1930s and After,” in Diego Rivera: A Retrospective (Detroit: Founders Society, Detroit Institute of Arts, 1986).

  44. Quoted in Terence Pitts, Photography in the American Grain: Discovering a Native American Aesthetic, 1923–1941 (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, 1988), 13.

  45. This was a common nickname for the three; see Helen Langa, Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 61.

  46. Diego Rivera to Albert Bender, August 25, 1926, Bender Papers, Archives of American Art.

  47. Lee, Painting on the Left, 42–43.

  48. MD Diary; Hurlburt, Mexican Muralists, 99.

  49. Quoted in Lee, Painting on the Left, 64.

  50. CD to MM, November 13, 1976.

  51. The State Department had been particularly angered by his participation in the Mexican Hands Off Nicaragua Committee, which displayed a U.S. flag captured by General Sandino in 1928.

  52. Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 116–118.

  53. Hagerty, Desert Dreams, 169.

  54. Patrick Marnham, Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 232.

  55. There are contrasting recollections about whose studio Kahlo actually used.

  56. Herrera, Frida, 120–21, 282; Isabel Alcántara and Sandra Egnolff, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (Munich: Prestel, 1999); Eloesser’s papers are in the Hoover Institution at Stanford and in the Stanford University Medical Center.

  57. Lee, Painting on the Left, 47 ff.

  58. They might also have crossed paths with Robinson and Una Jeffers, Leopold Stokowski and his Mexican composer friend, Carlos Chávez. Flannery Burke, From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008).

  59. In recounting this decades later, Lange said that at the time she couldn’t have conceived of photographing outside alone, but this was a false memory, since she already knew outdoor work by photographers like Anne Brigman, Arnold Genthe, Clarence White, Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, and Imogen Cunningham.

  60. Maynard’s friend Antonio Mirabal offered to share what he had with them, an extraordinary offer of fellowship: “ ‘If it gets too tough come back and I’ll share with you.’ ” MD diary.

  61. MD diary.

  Scene 2

  1. Nat Herz, “Dorothea Lange in Perspective: A Reappraisal of the FSA and an Interview,” Infinity 12, no. 4 (1963): 10.

  2. Riess, 149.

  3. Martin Lange to Paul S. Taylor, undated letter (written well after Dorothea Lange’s death), JDC.

  4. Herz, “Dorothea Lange in Perspective,” 10.

  5. Riess, 144.

  6. Herz, “Dorothea Lange in Perspective,” 10.

  7. Doud, DL.

  6. Leaving the Children, Leaving the Studio

  1. Riess, 140.

  2. Riess, 141.

  3. Lewis Ferbrache, interview with Bernard Zakheim, 1964, AAA.

  4. Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, California Art (Los Angeles: Dustin Publications, 1998); Belisario R. Contreras, Tradition and Innovation in New Deal Art (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 1983), 29–30.

  5. Lange and Dixon had to consider applying for relief until his painting of the unemployed, Shapes of Fear, was purchased by the Ranger Fund for the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. Maynard got $1,000 of the $1,500 sale price. Then his Navajoland also sold for $1,500, so they could relax for a while. The painting Shapes of Fear is now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

  6. MD diary.

  7. TH interview with RP and CG, August 26, 1975.

  8. Anna Sommer, San Francisco News, February 11, 1932.

  9. Dorothea Lange et al., The Thunderbird Remembered: Maynard Dixon, The Man and the Artist (Los Angeles: Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, 1994), 56.

  10. Lange’s contemporary and friend, photographer Nell Dorr, for example, left her children with relatives in Florida in order to work in New York. Naomi Rosenblum, History of Women Photographers (New York: Abbeville Press, 1994), 173. Ben and Bernarda Shahn would leave their children with others so that she could accompany him when he was on the road photographing. HM interview with Louise Rosskam, July 30, 1999. Even the wealthy might do this: Ernest Bloch’s daughter Suzanne was sent to live with one of Lange’s elite client families, the Sterns. Box 1, Elise Stern Haas Family Papers, Bancroft mss. 92/810c.

  11. Elizabeth Rose, A Mother’s Job: The History of Day Care, 1890–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially 167–68.

  12. Riess, 102.

  13. Lange et al., The Thunderbird Remembered, 56.

  14. One Lange scholar wrote that she lacked maternal instinct and that her father’s “desertion” had weakened her ability to bond—a judgment based on the assumption that devotion to one’s children and to an art or craft are mutually exclusive. Pierre Borhan, Dorothea Lange: The Heart and Mind of a Photographer (New York: Little, Brown, 2002), 20.

  15. Riess, 147.

  16. Lange’s previous biographer, Milton Meltzer, wrote that she had retaliated with affairs of her own. Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 125. (Meltzer told me that he could not remember where he learned this.) Robert Coles repeats the infidelity claim in his essay in Dorothea Lange, Photographs of a Lifetime (Millerton, New York: Aperture, 1982), 12. None of the many people I interviewed could confirm the claim.

  17. Riess, 123.

  18. Author’s interviews with John Dixon, February 2003.

  19. Lange seems to have conflated two different foster-care locations in her recollection thirty years later.

  20. Recollections about the 1932 vacation are from Lange et al., The Thunderbird Remembered, 59; TH interview with RP and CG; Dan Dixon’s email to the author, March 4, 2008.

  21. Riess, 148.

  22. Naomi Rosenblum, “Modernist Eye Responsive Heart: The Work of Dorothea Lange,” in Dorothea Lange: The Human Face (Paris: NBC Editions, 1998), 14.

  23. She destroyed these photographs, as she often did with work that did not meet her standards.

  24. Riess, 148.

  25. Doud, DL.

  26. Quotations from FDR’s speeches can be found at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrcommonwealth.html and http://newdeal.feri.org/speeches/1932c.htm.

  27. Sally Stein, “The President’s Two Bodies: Stagings and Restagings of FDR and the New Deal Body Politics,” American Art, Spring 2004, 35. The July 1931 interview appeared in Liberty, a middlebrow general-interest magazine that featured interviews with celebrities and excerpts from famous authors.

  28. Quoted in Karin Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 23.

  29. Doud, John Collier, Jr.

  30. Its founder, Australian immigrant Lois Jordan, had been led by a vision of Jesus Christ to feed unemployed sailors on the San Francisco waterfront. She developed a multiservice center, providing showers, barbers, even some medical care, and was feeding 2,000 a day when Lange passed by the enterprise. Mother Lois Jordan, The Work of the White Angel Jungle (San Francisco: self-published pamphlet, 1935)
, and miscellaneous newspaper clippings.

  31. She made it under uncomfortable conditions: “When I took [the picture] I was very timid about it since I was working with a 4 x 5 Autographic. It makes you very conspicuous. I took three shots, then I got out of there.” Quoted in Nat Herz, “Dorothea Lange in Perspective: A Reappraisal of the FSA and an Interview,” Infinity 12, no. 4 (1963): 10. The Autographic was a Kodak sold from 1928 to 1933, called a vanity camera because it came in colors and had a satin-lined case. It used roll film and it allowed the photographer to write notations directly on the film with a stylus.

  32. Martin Lange to PST, undated but written well after Dorothea Lange’s death, JDC.

  33. Nat Herz, “Dorothea Lange in Perspective,” 9.

  34. TH interview with Sturtevant; Meltzer, Dorothea Lange, 71.

  35. Herz, “Dorothea Lange in Perspective,” 10.

  36. Laura Wexler, “Techniques of the Imagery Nation: Engendering Family Photography,” in Race and the Production of Modern American Nationalism, ed. Reynolds J. Scott-Childress (New York: Garland, 1999), 99.

  37. But the group was loose enough that membership was not clear, and the photographers and scholars disagree about who was in and who out. On f/64, see Anne Hammond, “Ansel Adams and Objectivism: Making a Photograph with Group f/64,” History of Photography 22, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 169–78; Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams. A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996); Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988); John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Jean S. Tucker, Group f/64 (St. Louis: University of Missouri Press, 1978); George Craven, The Group f/64 Controversy: An Introduction to the Henry F. Swift Memorial Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Art, (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1963).

  38. Sally Stein, “Starting from Pictorialism: Notable Continuities in the Modernization of California Photography,” in Capturing Light: Masterpieces of California Photography, 1850 to the Present, ed. Drew Heath Johnson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); Hammond, “Ansel Adams and Objectivism,” 169–78; Richard Lorenz, Imogen Cunningham: Ideas Without End (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993), 33–34.

  39. Camera Craft, passim; Adams, An Autobiography, 112; Imogen Cunningham, interview by Edna Tartaul Daniel, typescript, Bancroft, 143.

  40. S. Satterwhite, “Dialogue: Willard Van Dyke,” Photograph 1, no. 4 (1977); Martha A. Sandweiss, “The Way to Realism: 1930–40,” in Decade by Decade: Twentieth-Century American Photography from the Collection of the Center for Creative Photography, ed. James Enyeart (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 35n.

  41. Christian A. Peterson, Pictorialism in America (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1983), 55; Michael G. Wilson and Dennis Reed, Pictorialism in California: Photographs, 1900–1940 (Malibu, California: J. Paul Getty Museum and Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1994); Doug Harvey, “The Other Coast: West Meets East in ‘The Modern West,’ ” exhibit review, Los Angeles Weekly, March 28, 2007.

  42. Sara Halprin, Seema’s Show : A Life on the Left (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 87.

  43. Once, some roosters had been rescued from an Easter display and given to Weston. One of the birds had a Raggedy Ann doll “and he would screw that doll up and down the front lawn.” It took a meeting of the town council in Carmel to make Edward get rid of the rooster. James Alinder, “The Preston Holder Story,” Exposure 13, no. 1 (1975): 45.

  44. Alinder, “The Preston Holder Story,” 5.

  45. TH interview with AA, September 15, 1976, OM.

  46. Donald T. Hagerty, Desert Dreams: The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1998), 191.

  7. A New Deal for Artists

  1. Martin Lange to John Dixon or PST, undated but written after Lange’s death, OM.

  2. Linda Gordon, “Harry Hopkins Brings Relief,” in Days of Destiny, ed. James McPherson and Alan Brinkley (New York: DK Publishing, 2001).

  3. MD diary.

  4. The New Deal’s PWA helped build the $78 million Bay Bridge and the $35 million Golden Gate Bridge. Richard Lowitt, The New Deal and the West (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 174.

  5. Donald J. Hagerty, Desert Dreams: The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1998), 171–73.

  6. HM interview with Alan Temko, June 27, 2000; HM interviews with Margot and Donald Fanger, January 24 and April 16, 1999.

  7. William H. Mullins, The Depression and the Urban West Coast, 1929–1933 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

  8. Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005), 113; quotation, 111.

  9. Joel F. Handler and Yeheskel Hasenfeld, We the Poor People: Work, Poverty, and Welfare (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

  10. U.S. Works Progress Administration, Final Report on the WPA Program 1935–1943 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1946).

  11. Daniel Geary, “Carey McWilliams and Antifascism, 1934–1943,” Journal of American History 90, no. 3; Carey McWilliams, “Fascism in American Law,” American Mercury 32 (1934); quotation in John Terry, “The Terror in San Jose,” The Nation, August 8, 1934, 161–62.

  12. Geary, “Carey McWilliams and Antifascism, 1934–1943.” Targeting “pink” Hollywood, these attacks resemble today’s conservative attacks on liberal and “immoral” Hollywood.

  13. Carey McWilliams, “Hollywood Plays with Fascism,” The Nation, May 29, 1935, 623–24.

  14. See, for example, the 1936 American Artists’ Congress proceedings, in the David Alfaro Siqueiros Papers, GRI; Matthew Baigell and Julie Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Facism (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Hilton Kramer, “The Big Red Paintpot,” New York Times, April 27, 1986. Few progressives and intellectuals at this time perceived the Soviet Union as totalitarian.

  15. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997); Linda Nochlin, “The Realist Criminal,” Art in America, September/October and November/December 1973; Heinz Ickstadt, introduction to The Thirties: Politics and Culture in a Time of Broken Dreams, ed. Rob Kroes and Brian Lee (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1987); Andrew Hemingway, “Fictional Unities: ‘Antifascism’ and ‘Antifascist Art’ in 30s America,” Oxford Art Journal 14, no. 1 (1991): 107–17.

  16. Jane De Hart Matthews, “Arts and the People: The New Deal Quest for a Cultural Democracy,” Journal of American History 62, no. 2 (1975): 324.

  17. Adams feared that the New Deal would begin to regulate photography. Sally Stein, “On Location: The Placement (and Replacement) of California in 1930s Photography,” in Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000, ed. Stephanie Barron et al. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 195, n. 19.

  18. The Communist party grew rapidly in Depression California, from 438 members in 1926 to 1,800 in 1934. Robert W. Cherny, Richard Griswold del Castillo, and Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Competing Visions: A History of California (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 250.

  19. Riess, 151.

  20. Shirley Staschen Triest, A life on the First Waves of Radical Bohemianism in San Francisco, University of California/Berkeley Regional Oral History Office.

  21. Mary McChesney interview with Hansel Hagel, October 8, 1964, AAA; Dolores Flamiano, “Meaning, Memory and Misogyny: LIFE Photographer Hansel Mieth’s Monkey Portrait,” Afterimage, September/October 2005; Sally Stein, “Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel,” in Amy Rule and Nancy Solomon, Original Sources: Art and Archives at the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 2002), 127–31; Mieth interview in John Loengard, Life Photographers: What They Saw (New York: Little, Brown, 1998).

  22. Marlene Park and Gerald E. Markowitz, New Deal for Art (Hamilton, New York: Gallery Associatio
n of New York State, 1977), xii, 2; Florence Loeb Kellogg, “Art Becomes Public Works,” Survey Graphic 23, no. 6 (1934): 279; Jonathan Harris, Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of Identity in New Deal America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 113; Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973), 176; Forrest A. Walker, The Civil Works Administration: An Experiment in Federal Work Relief, 1933–1934 (New York: Garland, 1979), 96, 100.

  “Few living American artists over the age of forty did not do something or other” for at least one of the four government art agencies,” writes Erica Beckh in “Government Art in the Roosevelt Era: An Appraisal of Federal Art Patronage in the Light of Present Needs,” Art Journal 20, no. 1 (Autumn 1960): 5. The WPA payroll included Nelson Algren, Thomas Hart Benton, John Cheever, Willem de Kooning, Katherine Dunham, Ralph Ellison, Arshile Gorky, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacob Lawrence, Reginald Marsh, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Patchen, Jackson Pollock, Kenneth Rexroth, Mark Rothko, Muriel Rukeyser, Isaac, Moses, and Raphael Soyer, Joseph Stella, Studs Terkel, Margaret Walker, and Richard Wright, to name but a few.

  23. Terence R. Pitts, introduction to Sonya Noskowiak Archive (Tucson: University of Arizona, 1982), 5.

  24. Ferbrache interview with Zakheim; Masha Zakheim Jewett, Coit Tower San Francisco: Its History and Art (San Francisco: Volcano Press, 1983).

  25. Zakheim Jewett, Coit Tower San Francisco, 32; Ferbrache interview with Zakheim.

  26. MD diary.

  27. Christopher DeNoon, “Social Messages: Graphic Artists of the WPA,” Magazine of International Design 33 (1986): 56–59; undated, Maynard Dixon Papers, AAA, reel 822.

  28. Anthony W. Lee, Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco’s Public Murals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 135.

  29. Zakheim Jewett, Coit Tower San Francisco, 47–54.

  30. Steven M. Gelber, “Working to Prosperity: California’s New Deal Murals,” California History 58 (Summer 1979): 106.

  31. Hagerty, Desert Dreams, 196–200; Grant Wallace, “Maynard Dixon Biography and Works,” California Art Research, WPA Monograph, WPA Project 2874, vol. 8. Dixon received $450 for this work, although he believed its value was more than $3,000.