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.