Seductress (26 page)

As might be guessed from the strength of male resistance, the opposite is true. The female artist is a natural love queen, one of the most potent seductresses on earth. Rather than at cross purposes, art and amour work synergistically, especially in women. The goddess, the first creatrix, knocked men out with her thaumaturgic magic.

Through the enchantments of music, song, dance, pictures, poetry, and theater, she took possession of her subjects and invested them with her holy eros. Her artist-priestesses were in the sacred sex trade, deploying their craft for aphrodisiacal ends—mystical union with the almighty life force. Hence the sexual charge of great artworks and the numerous erotic theories of aesthetic pleasure. Art, in brief, is too hot for women to handle; men cannot withstand a concentrated assault by an accomplished mistress of spells.

Some women have always known this. Less celebrated than the casualties, siren-artists exploited their legacy as sexual
sorcières
and scored in love
and
art. Rarely did they have youth, beauty, and deep cleavages to recommend them, but they ravished men through their creative diablerie. One musician lived with four adorers in a ménage à cinq; another danced her way from slavery to queendom; another assembled a seraglio of the best twentieth-century minds through her literary fascinations. All rose, with perfect synchrony, to the top of their professions. And they represent only a small sample; history and everyday life teem with
sorcières.

 

It goes back, in all probability, to the cave where archaeologists believe Stone Age peoples worshiped the cosmic life principle in the form of a goddess. In these womblike sanctuaries they staged ecstatic rites in order to merge with the deity and appropriate her powers. Mimicking the creator, they made art. They filled caves with magical wall murals and talismanic statuettes and circle danced, drummed, and sang themselves into mystical transports. It was total theater—complete with animal masks, eerie lighting, and consciousness-altering drugs—in a sacrament of transfiguration. Through the rapturous medium of art, they were remade in the goddess’s image and imbued with her generative spark and divine lust. Several scholars think women were at the “center of [this] magic,” the shamans of artistic delirium, including poetry and “the stories that have come down to us as myth, legend and fairy tale.”

Women, it’s conjectured, were the original artists of the cave murals. If so, they have a direct descendant in the painter Grace Hartigan, one of the pioneer abstract expressionists and foremost American artists. Like the earliest shaman-creators, she paints with a sacral intent, vibrant “magic[al]” canvases designed to call down the almighty life force.

“I believe,” she says, “I’m making life,” by which she means eros in no uncertain terms. Her work is juicy, voluptuous, and prodigal, steaming with sexuality. Art and sex are as inseparable to her as they were for cave worshipers. “A powerful sexual woman is a powerful creator,” she proclaims.

She knows whereof she speaks. Grace was one powerful seductress. Critic John Myers recalls that “men’s nostrils seemed to flare” when she entered a room. Tall, big-boned, blond, and full-figured in the
Playboy
mode, she was the sexual H-bomb of the fifties’ avant-garde. In an era of feminine domestic subjection and Girl Scout purity, Grace commandeered men and ran with her libido. She seduced and subdued the whole macho tribe of abstract expressionists, who treated women like “cattle,” according to Lee Krasner. “Macho?” Grace laughs. “They were pussycats.”

Men were to Grace’s art what women were to Modigliani’s. They fired her jets. Throughout her distinguished artistic career, as she evolved with the protean versatility of another Picasso, lovers nurtured, encouraged, inspired, and promoted her. Even today at over eighty and sexually inactive by choice, she’s fueled by men and eros. She shares her Baltimore loft with a young, supportive artist and his family, cultivates a following of male disciples, and says that “all the desire and passion are still inside.”

The latest canvases in her packed studio are the most erotic and innovative to date—colossal Venuses with arms outflung in orgasmic ecstasy. But goddesses and
sorcières
have always filled her paintings. On the wall of her living room, a postmodern Aladdin’s cave of kitsch, dolls, hanging dragons, and recherché antiques, hangs one of her earliest abstracts:
Secuda Esa Bruja,
mistranslated “The Witch Is Flying.” It actually means “the witch is a shaker-upper.”

Grace Hartigan was a shaker-upper and norm smasher from the day she was born. The eldest child in a middle-class New Jersey family, she bucked the tide throughout childhood and cultivated being “difficult and different.” With a siren’s instinctive dread of feminine enculturation, she repudiated her conventional mother and identified with her father, who told her she could be anything she wanted. She learned what she wanted in a Damascus epiphany. One day she saw a gypsy encampment in the neighborhood and found her calling: to run away with the gypsies in their satin skirts to a more colorful destiny.

It took awhile. After a lackluster high school career, she made one of the faux escapes so common to seductresses. At seventeen she married the first boy who read poetry to her and fled with him to California. When he left to serve in World War II, she returned home with a small son. Ironically she then achieved her true breakaway. Working as a draftsman in a war plant, she enrolled in an after-hours sketch class with artist Isaac Muse and discovered her vocation. He ignited her latent artistic abilities and introduced her to her body. “After sex with Ike,” she recalls, “I was aching from head to foot. So
that’s
what it’s about!”

Three years later she left both Isaac and her husband and child for the heady Manhattan art scene, the revolutionary epicenter of abstract expressionism. She’d found her more colorful destiny. “Going to New York,” she says, “was running off with the gypsies.” She “lived like the men”—Jackson Pollock, Milton Avery, Philip Guston and company—and forged a distinctive, sock-it-to-me style of her own. She used allover composition, bold diagonal thrusts, hot acid colors, and street life bricolage with leap-off-the-canvas, signature bravura. The Kootz Gallery picked her up for its landmark exhibit “New Talent,” and her career went into high gear.

So did her sex life. With the same unzipped authority she showed in art, she whisked up the men of her choice. She came on like a master
sorcière,
wandering nude through lovers’ studios and alchemizing life into a “happening.” A party thrower par excellence, she staged famous fetes such as the kite-making bash that ended in a wild carnival in Central Park amid shredded paper and splintered battens. She danced, caroused, and talked the talk nonstop—an art-speaking, Rilke-quoting proto-Bette Midler.

She crackled with sex, élan, and sass, and her packaging was pure hubba-hubba. Faithful to her gypsy proclivities, she dressed for flash appeal. She wore designer starewear, adorned with tulle-festooned hats and fancy fur coats. Once when she made one of her grand entrances at the Cedar Bar (the avant-garde hangout) in a satin-trimmed black mink, a local artist said she looked as if she had “the keys to Madrid in [her] pocket.”

Clearly she had the men there. After a brief second marriage to a self-styled cowboy painter, she cleaned up romantically. She lived temporarily with the pinup boy of the avant-garde Alfred Leslie and reeled in other artists like photographer Walter Silver, sculptor Giorgio Spaventa, and painter Franz Kline. In all these liaisons the muse-creator dyad worked both ways. She and Franz critiqued each other’s work, Georgio sculpted her as
Walking Woman,
and Walter, who photographed her in matador drag, prompted one of Grace’s most renowned paintings,
The Persian Jacket.

The same year
Life
magazine proclaimed her the “most celebrated of the young American women painters,” she took up with with Bridgehampton gallery owner Robert Keene, who became husband number three in 1959. Throughout the Keene courtship, however, the flings continued. Besides trysts with Franz Kline, Grace had a torrid affair with a swarthy nightclub baron and an intense “lavender marriage” with homosexual poet Frank O’Hara. For years the pair were inseparable and created together, writing and painting tributes back and forth. But neither the O’Hara alliance nor the Bridgehampton marriage was destined to last. As soon as Grace encountered Winston Price, she left her “meatloaf husband” and New York behind.

Winston, a brilliant Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, had fallen in love with Grace through her paintings, and their meeting in 1960 was a
coup de foudre.
Realizing that she’d found the “man of [her] life,” she cut all ties to her past (for which Frank never forgave her) and committed herself to a “total marriage.”

Under Winston’s adoring aegis in Baltimore, her work flourished. He gave her the security, support, and perfect understanding of every artist’s dream. Although her work lost favor during the pop decades of the sixties and seventies, it attained new levels of depth and daring. She painted powerful female presences and experimented wildly: with split-screen compositions, watercolor collages, stained canvases, wet-into-wet technique, and jigsawed coloring book studies.

When Winston contracted terminal encephalitis in the seventies and Grace’s bearings slipped, she reached back to the mythic, lifesaving origins of art. At her lowest ebb, she painted the transcendent
I Remember Lascaux,
a re-creation of the cave walls with a menagerie of enchanted animals conjured into a state of triumphant, eternal repose.

Around the same time she embarked on her last affair—a seven-year liaison with a “marvelous” Greek lover. Like all of Grace’s amours, passionate sex coexisted with creative reciprocity. While he infused her paintings with new sensuality and Grecian themes, she awoke his dormant artistic talent. “Known for bolstering the man’s ego,” she fired his self-faith and transformed him into a sculptor of small wire birds. After Winston’s death in 1981, she had two insignificant passades, then rechanneled her libidinous energies full spate into art. “It didn’t suit her sexuality,” she explains, not to be at the top of her game.

Over the next two decades she launched a concentrated artistic exploration of eros. These ranged from the sinister
Bacchus
(owned by Mick Jagger) and
Madonna Inn
to a portrait gallery of erotic heroines: vamps, Venuses, movie stars, and a “Manhattan” self-portrait. Even the recent goddesses, by her own admission, look like her. “When I envision a sexually powerful woman,” she confesses, “it’s myself.”

Grace and Helen Frankenthaler, another pioneer abstract expressionist, once fantasized what they’d give up their art careers to become. Helen said a Rockette; Grace, a glamour puss, who finds a film god with his opera cape flung over the puddle when she steps out of a stretch limo.

Grace didn’t have to choose. She got both: the life of a diamond-dazzle seductress and a major artist. She seemed to know instinctively that the two belonged together and paid no attention to the love vs. art propaganda. “Sure, I had that conditioning,” she chortles in a smoky basso, “but you say, ‘What are you talking about?’ ”

With Grace, you’re talking about a
femme artiste
who “had it all” the traditional way, the prehistoric way, when painters were goddess avatars and conduits of divine eros. As one of her lovers put it when she showed him the door, “When I think of you, I think of life.”

 

Not coincidentally, cave chambers filled with the most artwork were the most resonant; music rang through the dark caverns at the early religious rites. To the hypnotic rhythms of flutes, drums, whistles, rasps, and rattles made of clay and animal bones, preliterate man tranced himself into divine ecstasy, into mystical union with the Mother of All Being. He was possessed by her powers, holy sexuality included. This explains the deep libidinal pull of music still—the groin hit of Beethoven’s
Kreutzer Sonata
or gutbucket blues and the erotic frenzies of rock concerts.

Instead of the first groupies, however, women may have been “the first musicians, and perhaps for some time the only ones.” Certainly they made up the sacred orchestras of ancient Sumer. The sex goddess Inanna brought “the resounding musical instrument” to civilization, and her priestesses incarnated the goddess and conjured her cosmic eros with their drums, cymbals, harps, pipes, and sistrums at her ceremonies.

In early-twentieth-century London a “little dark magician” reclaimed the prehistoric role of priestess-musician with spectacular results. Violet Gordon Woodhouse had a love life that Lewis Carroll might have imagined on Viagra. At the crest of Edwardian high prudery, this great musician lived openly with four men under the same roof. A bizarre, impish figure with no “features” or bustline and an Oz-inspired wardrobe of fishbowl earrings and feathered turbans, she fascinated her quartet of “superhusbands” into a lifelong ménage à cinq and never met a man or woman she couldn’t seduce.

Little known today, she was considered one of “the greatest pianists of the world” and ranked in harpsichord and clavichord playing with Casals on the cello, Tertis on the violin, and Segovia on the guitar. The luminaries of her time, from Picasso to Bartók, idolized her, and even the queen made a pilgrimage to her home.

Long before women held career management seminars, Violet figured it out. Artists, regardless of gender, need freedom, praise, and wives. From infancy, she displayed an iron determination to get just that—no questions asked. Born the middle of seven children to the nouveau riche Gwynne family, she nudged her way past her brothers and sisters to the position of favorite.

Affectionately nicknamed Bobo, she learned to eke anything from her autocratic father through charm: exemption from compulsory sports on their Folkington estate and lessons with the resident governess. In classic siren fashion, she circumvented formal education and followed her bliss—in this case, music. An acknowledged prodigy by seven, she studied with the finest master teachers and set her sights on a concert career, an unthinkable ambition for a turn-of-the-century lady.