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59 7 Career Challenges During Ann’s New York years, she visited Selma regularly over the summer months. If Newport was becoming the center of her new intellectual life, Selma remained the emotional core of her identity. One of the issues their mother was struggling with back in Selma was the behavior of Ann’s younger sister Rose (born fifteen years after Ann), who was showing signs of rebelliousness as she became a teenager. In 1935, William, with Ann at his side, wrote a letter to their mother from Paris urging her to send Rose to boarding school. William even offered to help pay for the school, saying he could easily advance his mother $400 (almost $4,000 in today’s money). How did William have this money? It probably came from his aunt Rose, who adored him and slipped him funds whenever he needed it. (In her diary, she confesses that she fears she “loves him too much.”) Ann was not so lucky. There is no evidence that Rose sent her niece anything at all. And Ann would never have asked for it. It is difficult to gauge the extent of Ann’s poverty while she lived in New York. She moved from rental to rental, constantly changing addresses, mostly finding studios with other struggling artists. But apart from trips to Selma and Newport, whatever money there was went to pay for her very expensive carving and casting work, leaving crumbs to eat. There was some money in Selma—her mother owned real estate in town, and of course Aunt Rose was doing fine with Clara’s legacy. But William was clearly worried about Ann, and said once he would have force-fed her in New York if he had to. A family friend in Courtland 60 · Part II. The Art World in Turmoil: New York, 1930–1942 remembered that he sometimes ate peanut butter and crackers as an economy in order to send his sister money. It seems that Ann was creating a small drama here. It was important for her to be seen as a “starving artist,” rather than as a member of the southern gentry. She wanted to live as her fellow artists lived, and that was on the poverty line. Her identity as an artist depended on it. Her family could probably have helped her much more, if she had only asked them. The troubles at home with Ann’s younger sister were not the only issues that kept Selma in the forefront of Ann’s mind. The two men she was probably closest to in New York were John Lapsley and Crawford Gillis, both born in Selma. Crawford Gillis was born in 1914—nine years younger than Ann, like Ade—but they grew close when he moved to New York to enroll in the National Academy of Design in 1935. The other member of this trio (as Ann herself referred to them) was John Lapsley, born in Selma in 1915, a year after Gillis. Lapsley was also an alumnus of the National Academy of Design. Ann Weaver, John Lapsley, and Crawford Gillis became inseparable in New York during the first few years of the 1930s, but their careers soon diverged. Lapsley returned to the South in 1936 to attend BirminghamSouthern College, where he continued to study art. He became increasingly interested in mural painting, as did Gillis. Both men were very conscious of their southern roots and took the toxic situation in the reconstructed South as their subject matter, exploring both social inequality and racist persecution. By 1938, both men had left New York for Alabama, where they joined the New South School and Gallery, which was founded in 1938 and based in Montgomery. The New South School was formed to summon artists and writers back to the South, which its members saw as isolated from the country’s cultural life and which they wanted to bring into the world at large. The school became , briefly, a showcase for the Social Realist painters of the South, with Charles Shannon one of the founder-members. Lapsley worked with him on murals. As well as nurturing socially conscious southern artists, the New South School was instrumental in exhibiting the work of black artists such as William Traylor (now highly regarded by collectors as a leading “outsider” artist), a radical decision in those segregated days. But the members of the school disagreed on policy and were divided by personal ambition, so the organization was short-lived. After...

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