So here we had a knowing, brilliant, wild-child of, then 15, who encountered for a visiting instructor a handsome, self-proclaimed genius in Woodstock’s own Arnold Blanch. Arnold took an interest in Pele and introduced her to his wife Lucile, a painter the youngster tacitly recognizes as the superior talent. Now, the Blanches happened to have studios in the same building as Diego and Frida Rivera (as she was then known.) And while Diego was working on his mural for the stock exchange and Arnold was infusing European influences into American canvasses, Frida, Lucile and young Pele were chain-smoking cigarettes and laughing their heads off. Kahlo instructed them, for instance, “paint the bloodiest thing you can think of!” One began such a drawing before passing it the next who makes a contribution and passes it to the third…round the circle the collective work goes, louder and more raucous the laughter grows, until…returning home, Diego smiled wickedly at the ladies’ efforts, snatching up their extraordinary effort for his own private collection. Other times the three separately fulfilled Frida’s instructions, comparing final results. By such means a 15 year old Pele, completed her first minor masterpiece on the subject of “Maternity.”
Effortlessly holding her own in such heady circles it was quickly decided Pele should accompany the Blanches to their artist-colony retreat of Woodstock for the upcoming summer. Here, Pele particularly admired the work of Kuniyoshi. Come autumn her parents traveled east to find respectable quarters for their daughter in New York City and her studies with “the Blanches’ master,” Kenneth Hayes Miller, at the Arts Students, began. Enrolled at “The League” Pele first encountered lithography, that medium (brought to undreamt of heights by Woodstock’s artistic discoverer, Bolton Brown) through which, for a few short years anyway, she would cross-breed influences with uncanny knowing without ever losing the narrative thrust of illustration or the street-smarts of cartoon. At the end of her juggernaut of a youth she would “have it both ways” and with her father’s vow still ringing in her ears (“No kid of mine is going to be a commercial artist!”) Pele deLappe turned the tables on ad-man illustration to “bite the hand that feeds” commercialism, effortlessly melding “illustrative” and “fine” art with her own darkly political, all-but-unrecognized mastery.
Tellingly, when Pele presents K. H. Miller with an early lithographic effort, he effuses, “That’s fine! But of course you’ll just end up having babies.” Before these words prove prophetic, however, coincidence would steer her through an all-but unprecedented coming of age.
Pele enjoyed the company of Miller’s daughter, Louise, and the two of them passed tea and cookies among visitors stopping in on “Miller’s night,” at the maestro’s studio on 14th Street. One such evening the great American scene painter, Reginald Marsh shows up. Upon meeting Pele he invites her to view his own studio just up the street, and Marsh soon proved to be, as Pele would write, “the great artist of my dreams…Here was my kind of painting at last. Lively drawing, lusty figures in earthy situations — burlesque shows, Coney Island, the Bowery, dance marathons and freak shows. ‘Would you like to go sketching with me at the Irving Burlesque? It’s a great source,’ Reg said. Would I! I seized the chance to hang out with this man… sometimes acting like one of his subjects, a busty, sexy girl.”
What herewith transpired was a mentor/protegé relationship so intense that upon re-encountering Pele twenty years later, Marsh delighted to inform her that one of the unsigned Coney Island paintings she completed at 16, recently sold at a major auction attributed to none other than himself.
Additionally, that first year in New York she met Ash-Can School great John Sloan, joined the John Reed Club along with William Gropper and befriended “gentle, sad-eyed Raphael Soyer,” — both to become major artists of their day. Pele also introduced herself to an old friend of her father, poet and editor of The New Masses, James Rorty, who, sensing a journalist in-the-making, sent Pele off to interview the great Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen. (In fact, it was a second career as journalist, which would eventually pull deLappe out of a tail-spin in later life involving husbands, children, illness, her ever-growing commitment to “The Movement,” and that slippery All-American dollar.)
Back in Woodstock a second summer, Pele moved into a cabin of her own behind the Blanches on Maverick Road, a rabble of radicals for new friends in the heart of Hervey White’s ungoverned and ungovernable commune. Here Pele followed the local tradition of “bringing signed lithos to dinner parties instead of flowers.” We have one such house-gift to Maverick writer, Henry Morton Robinson and wife “Gertie,” (signed “To Rondo and Gertrude”) in WAAM’s collection. Oddly unexciting as a piece of art, the models of deLappe’s “picnic” nevertheless provided an early clue as both Doris Lee and Lucile Blanch displayed a marked interest in one of their husbands, as the other seems to innocently “return from fishing.”
Compare this to one of Pele’s previous summer’s efforts, “Woodstock artists picnic,” an astonishing work not only for its raucous, chock-full composition, but for a hilarious, semi-erotic theme. The figure “hard” to left, is clearly excited by someone in the enticing throng, complete with at least a one lesbian and several “straight” couples. In the foreground, right, lounge a man and woman, both clearly amused at the “wardrobe malfunction” in the newcomer’s pants. Now while it’s true that plenty of Woodstock’s notoriously lecherous painters traded erotic compositions among themselves, no “lady painter” (certainly not one of 15!) ever so brazenly objectified the palpable lust of Woodstock in this period. The fact that, though a gallon of wine sits half-finished yet no glasses of any kind are to found within the crush…remains an inaccuracy of reportage we’ll allow to youth.
Part II will appear next week.
Editor’s note: Tad Wise sends his thanks to WAAM’s director Josephine Bloodgood and WAAM Archivist Emily Jones who located the 1932 mentions of Pele’s “Fitting Room” from that year’s July show, including the review penned by her grandfather Wendell Jones for Woodstock’s paper of the day, The Overlook.
