Queer Places:
57 E 59th St, New York, NY 10022
61 W 37th St, New York, NY 10018
Christodora House, 143 Avenue B, New York, NY 10009
Mae Ethel Klinck Myers (August 23, 1881 - May 24, 1960) better known
as Ethel Myers was a New York Realist artist and sculptor strongly
influenced in her work by the goals of the
Ashcan School and its leader and famous teacher,
Robert Henri. Her earliest subjects for pictures involved her capturing
the life of the Lower East Side as well as journeying to slums in other cities
such as Boston. Her greatest fame came some years later, after her marriage to
New York artist
Jerome Myers, when she became known for her figurative bronze statuettes
and figurines "with a quite uncommon sense of humor, and with more than this,
a feeling for form and movement that gives them life and conviction."[1][2]
"Her three powerfully expressed sculptured figurines impress this reviewer
with the fact that she is worthy of a place alongside of Daumier, Meunier and
Mahonri Young."[3]
Mae Ethel Klinck (first named Lillian Cochran) was born in Brooklyn, New
York in 1881. Her 20-year-old mother was already seriously ill at the time of
her birth and died when Ethel was 4 years old. Ethel's father was already dead
and so she became an orphan. She was later adopted by Michael and Alfiata
Klinck, an affluent couple who renamed her Mae Ethel Klinck.[4]
After the death of her husband, Alfiata and her daughter, moved between
Brooklyn and Orange, N.J. which helped provide Ethel with a strong early
education in both public and private schools. It was also her adoptive mother
who encouraged Ethel to train on the piano in hopes of her becoming a concert
pianist.
Ethel found her piano studies drudgery. "I decided I wanted to be a
painter. I never had any other idea. So in my second year in the Newark high
school I left and went to the National Academy in New York City, then on
Twenty-Third Street. They sent me to
Walter Satterlee, whose studio was in the old YMCA building across the
street. After several months I took the examination at the Academy and failed.
They sent word to me that if I would try again I would get in — but I said no
— I have gone to the Chase School. There I became monitor of a class, and
afterward became assistant director and teacher with John Douglas Connah,
director. It was there that I was instrumental in getting
Robert Henri in the school. It had then become the New York School of Art
at Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street."[5]
Ethel studied at the Chase School (William
Merritt Chase) and the New York School of Art from 1898 to 1904. A pet
pupil of Chase, she also took the opportunity of studying with Henri, who
would have a strong influence on her early art career. Among the others she
attended classes with were
Edward Hopper,
Guy Pène du Bois,
Gifford Beal, and
Joseph Stella. She also became personally acquainted with the painters
George
Luks,
John Sloan,
William Glackens,
Arthur B. Davies,
Ernest Lawson and
Elmer Livingston MacRae.[6]
Ethel first met her future husband, artist
Jerome Myers, in 1904.[8]
After going to see Jerome's pictures at the
Macbeth Gallery on a number of occasions, she started saving his newspaper
clippings for a period of two years. His drawings and paintings of the lower
East Side had been getting favorable reviews and he was widely respected by
critics and artists alike, particularly
Robert Henri, for the honesty and humanity of his realistic view of the
immigrant populations crowded into that ghetto. It was Henri who had said,"Art
cannot be separated from life...the artists who produce the most satisfactory
art are in my mind those who are absorbed in the civilization in which they
are living."[9]"The
poor were my people...through whom dignity of life is manifest."[10]
Ethel arranged to meet
Jerome Myers in his studio and afterwards they visited each other a number
of times in their two studios, his on East 59th Street in New York City and
hers in the old Connelly Mansion, built by
Tammany Hall money, overlooking the Hudson River. "Marriage was the last
thing in my mind," Ethel wrote, "but in three months Jerome proposed to me. He
said he didn't have any money and maybe never would have, but if I would take
a chance with him he would love to marry me. I looked at him in astonishment
and said, But I am engaged to be married. He calmly said, Well, think it over
for a week and let me know. He had never been to my house and knew nothing
about me. I thought it over for a week and decided I would marry him."
[5]
Jerome Myers and Ethel Klinck were married in a small church ceremony in
October 1905. They began marriage in his studio on 59th Street.[8]
Ethel's adoptive mother had already told her daughter she did not approve
of her marriage to Jerome because he was a poor man and an artist, preferring
Ethel's earlier engagement to a businessman. She subsequently cut Ethel off
from the considerable inheritance that she had been promised.
A year after their marriage on October 21, 1906, Ethel gave birth to a
daughter,
Virginia Myers, after an extremely difficult labor. Soon after the baby
arrived, Ethel did receive a note from her adoptive mother, who it appears was
still willing to have her daughter receive her full inheritance, even after
disowning her because of the man she had married. Her one condition was, "If I
would leave Jerome and the baby and come back and live with her, she would
give me everything. I never answered."[5]
Ethel soon made a career decision to move away from doing pictures of the
Lower East Side and instead turned to an innovative approach in creating
small, realistic sculptures. After the birth of her daughter, Ethel chose to
give up painting in order to free up much-needed studio space for her artist
husband. Her shift in medium also avoided the inevitable comparisons that
would be made between the work of a married couple working in the same medium
and similar subjects.
A figurative sculptor and art activist in New York City, Ethel Myers is
known for her caricature bronzes of city people, many of them in humorous
poses. She exhibited nine of them in the 1913
Armory
Show that introduced modernist art to America, and according to art
historian Charlotte Rubinstein: "It is now clear that Myers was one of the
most creative of the Americans who exhibited at the Armory Show." (169).
However, she married painter Jerome Myers, and subjegated her career to his,
which meant she did not receive her deserved recognition during her lifetime."
[11]
Around 1909, when she was three years old, Ethel's daughter Virginia
revealed herself to be possessed of strong artistic talent as well. One day,
as Ethel was playing the piano, she looked up to see Virginia naturally
dancing to the rhythm and the emotional feeling of the music. This was a time
when the impact of
Isadora Duncan's dancing had totally captured the imagination of the
artistic community of New York, as well as much of the rest of the world, and
Ethel took note of Virginia's gift for spontaneous and instinctive movements.
She encouraged her daughter to perform, both privately and publicly. Virginia
starred in an Edison-produced film, Dream Dances of Virginia Myers,
when she was five years old, doing 20 minutes of her own improvised solo
dances as the first half of a "split-reeler." The film was to spread her fame
to all of America, far beyond the limits of just her acclaim in New York City.
In 1913, her talent was celebrated in an article in Vogue Magazine
titled "When Virginia Dances," in which she was called "a child of the
century."[18]
What started out as private performances in the Myers small studio for
friends and art collectors ("millionaires sitting in tears on ironing boards"[5]),
Virginia's performances soon demanded better and larger locations. In spite of
having limited financial resources to draw from, Ethel took on all management
and organization of Virginia's blossoming career. She organized a series of
recitals throughout New York City, booking theatres, handling contracts, and
coordinating costumes, set design, musicians, publicity, and the printing of
tickets and programs.
As a result, Virginia became known as a "child wonder" of the dance, and
people come from all over to see her, including the Parkhursts from England.
Ridgely Torrence and
Percy MacKaye both wrote poetry about her.[5]"
Over the years, Ethel and Jerome organized seventeen recitals in theaters in
New York City with many articles written about Virginia's dancing genius. When
she was 16, the law at last permitted her to appear as a star dancing on the
main stage at Carnegie Hall. Her first solo appearance there with orchestra
was in April 1923, and the second in December of 1923.
In spite of Ethel's personal success at the 1913 Armory show, and the
enormous publicity surrounding all that took place, the event itself did not
end up shining a spotlight on the work of American art and artists as Jerome
Myers had originally hoped. Instead, the focus and reaction centered around
the work of European modernists.
Jerome had been working solidly for a year on planning and getting the
American side of the show ready without being paid at all. As Ethel said,
"After the Armory show we were dead broke so I gave a studio exhibition of
Jerome’s work, offered everything for half price because we were going to
Europe." The reason was that she and Jerome, as well as many others in the New
York art community knew that the impact of the Armory Show was going to have a
very negative effect on the fate of many American artists when they tried to
place their work with dealers. It would once again be European imports, or
works influenced by them, that the dealers would be most interested in
offering to their customers.
Roger Fry, the English artist and writer and curator of paintings at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, had bought a number of Jerome's drawings for
his private collection. He urged Jerome to go to London, where Fry believed he
would find a rich market for his work.[19]
Thus, the three members of the Myers family, together with two steamer trunks
filled with paintings and other art works, left for London in 1914. The New
York Times reported in their column, "What Well-Known New York Artists Are
Doing These Hot Days," with this item: "Europe has lured Jerome Myers from his
haunts in the metropolis, and this summer he will portray other character
types in London, Paris, and other continental cities, which doubtless will be
displayed in New York next season." The date was June 28, 1914. One month
later to the day would mark the start of the First World War.
After arriving in London to leave with their dealer some of the art they
brought with them, the Myers family traveled directly to Paris, paid six
months rent for a small apartment in the Left Bank, bought furniture for it,
and moved in ready to start, hopefully, an exciting new chapter in their life.
For a week or so it looked like things were going well with their life there
and Jerome was already working. Also they had been making arrangements with a
theater in Paris for their 8-year-old daughter. Virginia Myers, to do a solo
evening of her own dances that had won critical acclaim in numerous New York
performances. Unfortunately the outbreak of war shattered their plans. The
American Embassy strongly advised Jerome and Ethel to leave Paris at once.
They had no choice but to immediately pack up and abandon their leased
apartment and the furniture they had bought for it. So with two taxi cabs
packed with steamer trunks, unfinished paintings, wet laundry and almost no
money, the Myers family set off on what was to be a frightening and exhausting
journey to struggle their way back to America.[20]
Jerome, Ethel and their 8-year-old daughter, Virginia, were all in a state
of exhaustion and near starvation due to the lack of food and the overcrowded
wartime conditions they faced traveling all day and night on the deck of the
ship taking them back to America. Their joy at the sight of the Statue of
Liberty in New York harbor must have been not unlike the emotions felt by many
earlier arriving immigrants, who later would become the subjects of so many of
Jerome's Lower East Side pictures. Still for Jerome and Ethel their strong
hope that going to Europe would allow for a change in their fortune turned out
to be as much a failure as the turn in fortunes that Jerome believed the
Armory Show would be in helping to create a far greater recognition of
American artists.
It was about at this point, with things so difficult, that Ethel decided
she really needed to help support her family by bringing in additional sources
of new income. Her eyes turned toward the garment industry. It still didn't
mean she would turn away from her art entirely. And it also didn't mean she
had lost her sense of humor. As the Ashcan artist that she was, she found ever
more ways to express herself as she observed the passing parade of New York
life.
Ethel Myers believed strongly in the importance of her husband's artistic
career, and never hesitated in putting her own artwork to the side to pursue
entrepreneurial activities that would help her family weather economic
difficulty. These activities included design and teaching. Her life as a
businesswoman would cover a period of about 25 years, from 1915 until Jerome's
death in 1940.
On her family's return to New York, Ethel recalled: "We lived in many
places, some uptown, some downtown. Always making sketches and having
exhibitions, but no home. Finally we took two rooms on West Thirty-Seventh
Street in the Garment District, the top floor. The back studio hall room was
Jerome’s studio and the third floor front hall room was where we three ate and
slept. At this point I decided to be a designer of clothes. I took five
dollars and bought lace and designed a blouse. Went up to the Fifth Avenue
shop and sold the design. From then on I was in business."[5]
"The year before the Armory show. Jerome back in Carnegie. I took an apartment
on East 58th Street. Went in business designing and had three girls. Worked
for Fifth Avenue trade."[5]
"Mrs. Myers was a designer of women’s clothes and hats, maintaining a shop in
New York City from 1920 to 1940 and designing clothes for noted celebrities of
society, stage, and opera and for manufacturers."[1]
Following her husband's death in 1940, Ethel devoted her time principally
to furthering his artistic reputation. She lectured on Jerome's work
throughout the United States, under the auspices of the American Federation of
Art during 1941-43. She also maintained the Jerome Myers Memorial Gallery in
New York City for a number of years.
From 1949 until her retirement in 1959 she was Art Director of the Fine
Arts and Ceramics Department at
Christodora House in New York City.[1]
Ethel Myers was connected to Marjorie Organ.
My published books:
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