FLORA: AN ARTIST’S LIFE REVEALED
This photo would begin a quest. Taken circa 1927, acclaimed Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti sits on the left, a plaster bust of him at the center. The bust's sculptor sits on the right. But who was she? What was her story?
Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, faculty at the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin, were involved in planning the Women of Venice exhibit for the Swiss Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Upon seeing the photo and learning the female sculptor's identity was unknown, the two art scholars decided to endeavor to lift her from shadows of history. Thus began a labyrinthine search that started in Denver and led to Switzerland, Paris, back to Denver, and eventually California.
Hubbard and Birchler began by searching photographs and reviewing "Mayo's notes and letters; school and art academy records; travel, lodger and ship passenger logbook; census records, as well as references to Mayo written by her contemporaries." (1) Having never been aware of this phase of his mother's life, the discovery of Flora's life in Paris would profoundly impact her son.
Flora Luella Lewis was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1898. Her wealthy parents, Aaron Dennison Lewis and Luella E. Brand Lewis, owned the A.T. Lewis and Son Dry Goods Company and the A.T. Lewis and Son Department Store in Denver. Flora entered high-school at Denver's Wolcott School, where she was active in theater, running, and swimming. She completed her senior year at Sweet Briar College, a private women's college in Sweet Briar, Virginia.
At the age of 19, Flora married Dudley D. Mayo Jr., one of her father's employees. Gregory Volk writes: "She married the man her father favored (although she emphatically did not love him)." Three years later, Flora gave birth to her first child Joan. After six years, the marriage fractured, and Flora and Dudley divorced. The entry in Chronology included in Hubbard and Birchler's book Flora: Alberto Giacometti is blunt:
"Flora losses custody rights of her daughter, Joan. She will never see her daughter again. Flora's family agrees to pay Flora a monthly allowance."
Divorced and disconnected from her daughter, "the young free woman" moved to New York, and later Paris, to become an artist. Many young female aspiring artists were drawn to Paris' art academies:
"Paris' free academies were full of them – Giacometti described to his mother, as a joke, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière as 'the boarding school for young American girls.' Synonymous with freedom, teeming with artists from all over the world, Paris offered then a unique concentration of art schools and studios."
Flora arrived in Paris in April 1925 and soon enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. The Académie met Flora's aspirations:
"The Grande Chaumière was one of those well-known free academies that accepted women, and where, for the price of a ticket, one could learn to draw from living models."
"Mayo was one the many courageous, adventurous female art students who studied alongside their male peers at art academies, resisting social expectations and persevering in an art world riddled with significant bias against a woman's artistic talent and professional ambitions."
Flora and Alberto Giacometti on the right.
Flora met Alberto Giacometti during her first year at the Académie, and soon the two classmates became lovers. However, within a year, they had moved from lovers to friends. Living in the same apartment building on Rue Hippolyte Maindron, Flora, on the floor above Giacometti's, each used their apartment as a studio. Despite the end of their romantic relationship, they continued to be friends and remained supportive of each other. Around the time Mayo was creating the bust of Giacometti, Giacometti created a modern sculpture of her. In 1928, Flora's mother Luella, visited her daughter in Paris and traveled in Brittany, France. However, the Great Depression would soon take an increasing toll on Flora and her family. From Hubbard and Birchler's Chronology:
1930 – "Flora's father, due to the stock market crash of 1929, significantly reduces the monthly payments to his daughter. Over the next year, his payments become increasingly smaller in sum and unpredictable in arrival."
1933 - "Flora's father cancels all payments to his daughter. Flora received charity assistance from the Traveler's Aid Society for a return passage home."
Flora met Alberto Giacometti during her first year at the Académie, and soon the two classmates became lovers. However, within a year, they had moved from lovers to friends. Living in the same apartment building on With Flora's aspirations for a career in art deflated, and without funds to preserve her works, she destroyed them all. (The Giacometti bust on display at Denver's Contemporary Art Museum is a reproduction.) In 1935, Flora returned to Denver, where she gave birth to a son named David. They moved to Los Angeles a couple of years later, where Flora was employed in "various manufacturing and retail jobs." World War II found her working in the radar and aircraft industry "making machine parts on a lathe." From 1940 to 1941, David lived with another family in Los Angeles. He would then live at St. John Bosco School for Boys in Bellflower for six years.
Time passed, and the year 1961 found Flora returning to Paris. The trip was partly funded by David, who remained unaware of his mother's life in Paris over 30 years ago. Flora again enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and a couple of years later would invite Alberto Giacometti and his wife to dinner. It would be Flora and Giacometti's last visit. Alberto died in 1966, and Flora died six years later at the Westmoreland Sanitorium in Los Angeles.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
At the end of a series of galleries at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, I entered a dimly lit room and turned right to find a small darkened theater. Fifteen or so museum visitors, sitting or standing, were gazing at a large screen. An actress, who in appearance and sensibility resembled Flora, seemed to flow on the screen as she worked in her studio. Her son David navigated in and out of the clips. Now in his mid-'80s, his face revealed varied emotions as the veil on his mother's life was lifted, a touching and poignant closure.
Notes
Reference 1 - Flora: Alberto Giacometti
Visit the Flora exhibit from September 20, 2019 to April 5, 2020 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver.
PaleoTerran is back
After a 3-year hiatus, posting resumes on PaleoTerran. Launched in 2010, PaleoTerran magazine has shared posts in multiple topic areas, including CULTURE, HEALTH, ORIGINS, OUTDOORS, SPACE, and TERRA. A new topic will be added. QUEST will cover the life and contributions of biochemist and biophysicist Joan Oró in his pursuit of life's origin.
To quickly browse content within a specific area, select the topic listed under the title of a related post.
Learn more about PaleoTerran on the ABOUT page. Feel free to comment on the individual posts. To reach out to me, visit the CONTACT page.
Thanks for visiting. I welcome your feedback!
John Oró
"... a place of moral leadership."
"An astonishingly fragile film"
Dr. Piers Sellers knows the Earth’s atmosphere. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in ecological science and a doctorate in biometeorology in England, Dr. Sellers studied the interaction between the Earth’s biosphere and atmosphere at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Dr. Sellers then became an astronaut and flew in three shuttle missions to the International Space Station stationed in the thin atmospheric layers 180 – 190 miles above Earth.
With 80% of the atmosphere within 10 miles of the Earth’s surface, traveling a mere 60 miles an hour, we would drive through this rich layer in 10 minutes. As Dr. Sellers observed in Leonardo DiCaprio’s recent film Before the Flood, “an astonishingly thin layer” nourishes us.
A River, Canyon, or Beach
Quote by Bruce Hill in Tools for Grassroots Activists published by Patagonia, 2016.
Denveright: A Community Planning for Process for Denver’s Next 15 Years
Denveright is a community-driven process for shaping Denver’s future over the next 15 years. The first public session was held this morning at McNichols Civic Center Building in Denver.
Open to the public, the Denveright sessions seek strong community involvement. Planning focuses on four key areas: land use, mobility, parks, and recreational resources.
Paleo Terran content will remain online while focus shifts
Dear Readers,
Paleo Terran has been dormant for seven months while I have focused on a new news site called CyberMed News and Twitter feeds @JohnOroMD and @Sustain_CO. Please follow any of these links of interest to you.
I hope to resume posting on PaleoTerran.com in the future.
Best regards,
John Oró
What does Quay Valley have to do with Hyperloop transportation?
Image credit: Hyperloop Transportation Technologies
The WSJ published an excellent article on the competition to develop hyperloop transport systems that were stimulated by Elon Musk in his “Hyperloop Alpha” proposal posted by SpaceX on Aug. 12, 2013. Among the nuggets in the article is a description of a futuristic city planned for a site located in-between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Alexander Chee of the WSJ writes:
"In his Santa Monica conference room, Quay Hays of GROW Holdings is laying out the plan for Quay Valley, the city he hopes will be a model for California’s future. It sounds, at first, like any other affluent California community: retail space, resort hotels, a winery, a spa. Where Quay Valley stands out is its plan to be solar-powered with extremely low water use. With a town of 26,000 networked smart homes and apartments built green from the ground up, Hays hopes to give 75,000 residents the eco-friendly lifestyle that critics of clean energy say is impossible. “There have been advances in green design and smart growth over the years, and the idea was, put all these things together in one place,” says Hays, a former publisher and film executive whose first job was booking punk and new wave acts for the Greek Theatre in the 1980s. His first attempt to launch Quay Valley was thwarted by litigation over water rights and the financial crisis of 2008; the new plan is to break ground on the site, a 7,200-acre expanse halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, sometime in 2016. When that happens, the world will be watching, and not just for the promised sustainability—Quay Valley also plans to feature the world’s first working Hyperloop, built by Hyperloop Transportation Technologies at an estimated cost of $100 million to $150 million."
Learn more at The Race to Create Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Heats Up
Sunday Image: The glorious Orion Nebula
In my early teens, the Orion Nebula was the first nebula I observed using my small backyard refractor telescope. I recall faint swirls of color that were different than anything else I had seen in the heavens.
Over the years, and mainly since 1994, when Corrective Optics were applied to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, our cosmos' images have markedly improved.
In 2004 and 2005, using the Advanced Camera for Surveys, Hubble was able to peer further into Orion Nebula and see the "cavern of roiling dust and gas where thousands of stars are forming." According to the Hubble Site, "Astronomers used 520 Hubble images, taken in five colors, to make this picture. They also added ground-based photos to fill out the nebula."
What we now see is a gorgeous mix of over 3,000 stars mixed with protoplanetary disks - birthing solar systems just at the edge of resolution in this mosaic image. Just as fascinating, at the upper left is a nebula within a nebula, what astronomers describe a "miniature Orion Nebula because only one star is sculpting the landscape."
We meet the Orion Nebula, the closest birthplace of stars and planets through this remarkable image. At the speed of light, it would take 1,500 light-years before we would arrive.
Edited 8/17/2020
Related Posts
Photos: The 2015 Denver Challenge Cup at The Commons on Champa
THE GLOBAL INCUBATOR AND VENTURE FUND 1776, HOSTED THE 2015 DENVER CHALLENGE CUP AT THE COMMONS ON CHAMPA IN DENVER ON NOVEMBER 24, 2015. THE GOAL OF THE 1776 CHALLENGE CUP IS TO “DISCOVER THE MOST PROMISING, HIGHLY SCALABLE STARTUPS THAT ARE POISED TO SOLVE THE MAJOR CHALLENGES OF OUR TIME.”
Winners of the Denver Local round then move up to the Regional competition and each of the winners in the 9 Regional Challenge Cups - along with a few wild cards – are invited to participate in the Global Finals to be held June 2016 in Washington, D.C.
Paleo Pumpkin Brownies
Image credit: fitfoodiefinds.com
"These brownies are legit the most amazing dessert I’ve ever made…and I’ve made a lot of dessert. Linley and I tested these babies 4 times before getting it JUST right. I based the recipe off of Davida’s Avocado Brownies, but there’s no avocados involved. When I was in Toronto a few months ago (I can’t believe it’s already been a few months since I as in the TO), I had the pleasure of eating her Avo Brownies first hand and huzzzzzah….they were delicious!"
Read more at Grain-Free Pumpkin Brownies
Sunday Image: Grand Canyon
Grand Canyon viewed from the South Rim. Photo by John McLaughlin.
Sunday: Pluto as Art
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, launched in 2006, obtained exquisite photos of Pluto during its July 2015 flyby. Below are a few selected areas from a recently published high-resolution image of this distant world.
Pope Francis at UN: Harm to the environment is harm to humanity
Photo by Mike Segar/Reuters
"First, it must be stated that a true “right of the environment” does exist, for two reasons. First, because we human beings are part of the environment. We live in communion with it, since the environment itself entails ethical limits which human activity must acknowledge and respect. Man, for all his remarkable gifts, which “are signs of a uniqueness which transcends the spheres of physics and biology” (Laudato Si’, 81), is at the same time a part of these spheres. He possesses a body shaped by physical, chemical and biological elements, and can only survive and develop if the ecological environment is favorable. Any harm done to the environment, therefore, is harm done to humanity."
Sunday Image: Daybreak above Adams Falls
Image: John McGlaughlin