Monumental Dreams: The Life and Sculpture of Ann Norton

8. A Turning Point

70 8 A Turning Point According to John Lapsley, when Ann left New York, she had fifty cents in her pocket, a battered suitcase that wouldn’t close until Lapsley supplied some rope, and little else. When she arrived in Florida, she was almost forty years old and had been working as a sculptor for most of her adult life. What, at this time, did she have to show for it? Not a lot. She had started very well. As early as 1930 she had exhibited her Negro Head at the Museum of Modern Art. Three years later, while at Cooper Union, she won a silver medal for advanced modeling. The other women students that year won medals for decorative design, pictorial design, fashion illustration, and interior architecture. In other words, Ann was already setting herself apart from most of her colleagues’ more “feminine” artistic pursuits. In a book published in 1934, Art in America in Modern Times by Holger Cahill and Alfred H. Barr, Ann Weaver was one of twenty women singled out for mention as “doing very good work.” She exhibited a limestone doorstop (later entitled Lady with a Bird) in a group show of young Americans at the Jacques Seligmann Galleries in 1934. She showed a mahogany Plant Form at the Clay Club Galleries in 1939. In February 1940, a cubist-inspired piece of hers entitled Design for a Memorial Monument, made of Tennessee marble, was accepted for an exhibition at the National Sculpture Society in New York. (The President of the society was Paul Manship.) A year later this marble memorial was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art. She also completed the commission from Dr. McSweeney for the St. Francis garden figure. A Turning Point · 71 Several of these pieces were photographed by Soichi Sunami (1885– 1971), an important Japanese-born photographer who worked in the MOMA archives and was the friend and photographer of many preeminent artists of the time, including Brancusi and Calder. Sunami's attention was flattering for Ann and showed that she was at least on the periphery of the New York modernists’ inner circle. But although she exhibited at the highest-quality venues, these shows were few and far between, and her modest output failed to engender financial rewards or personal fame. In fact, she suspected as much, conceding, perhaps somewhat disingenuously , to Mrs. Burgess in her letter of application to the Norton School that she could have shown more. “I could have exhibited a great deal more often but I have so far concentrated my time and energy on the quality of the work rather than on publicity.” What was her sculpture like? Like a lot of different things, really. A layperson looking at her body of work would have seen a mixture of styles, materials, and subjects. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Robert Hunter, director of the Norton Gallery of Art, and Ann’s later friend, defended her output. “Many artists achieve an acceptable (and successful) style and stick to it. Ann [Weaver], however, continued to develop all of her life, her progress supported by her essentially sculptural approach as opposed to modeling.” Woman with a Bird, 1933. This limestone sculpture, originally called a doorstop, was later given its present title. Photo by Soichi Sunami. 72 · Part II. The Art World in Turmoil: New York, 1930–1942 Part of the problem was that she was constantly in a tug-of-war between social realism and abstraction. Some of the work she was doing in New York at the time was realistic, in the Hovannes manner, although by the late 1930s, as she may have realized, social realism was going out of style. Lapsley and Gillis, entrenched social realist painters, were to discover that lifelike scenes of working-class life were regarded by the modernists as sentimental and retrograde, and the two artists came to change the direction of their work to some extent in their later years. Along with her realistic work, Ann was clearly moving toward the abstract . The Lady With a Bird, made in limestone in 1933, definitely had a primitive quality—indeed, its earlier description as a doorstop reflects its blocky appearance. Her Memorial Monument is an organic, Brancusi-like image typical of the 1930s. In the judgment of William U. Eiland, director of the Georgia Museum of Art, who wrote a brief biography of Ann Norton in 1989 that was...