TOUCHING THE ART

Examining an artist’s legacy.

In this searching meditation on art, Sycamore, the author of three novels and three books of nonfiction, reflects on family, identity, race, and trauma. Central to her memoir is her grandmother, Gladys Goldstein, a painter who was a deep and lasting influence on Sycamore’s life. Gladys was a woman of contradictions and strong opinions, a feminist who nevertheless “didn’t think much of other women artists,” comparing herself to men, “since men were the only real artists.” Although her best friend was the gay artist Keith Martin, her feelings about queerness were contradictory as well. “When I was a kid,” writes the author, “Gladys encouraged everything that made me different—my sensitivity, creativity, softness, femininity, introspection. She was an abstract artist, and she wanted to set me free, that’s what it felt like.” However, that early encouragement later shifted dramatically. When Sycamore decided to quit college, Gladys was adamantly opposed, and once her writing “became noticeably queer, sexually and politically saturated,” Gladys “called it vulgar.” When Sycamore was a child, she recalls, “Gladys offered me the tools to imagine myself outside of normalcy. And yet, once I came into my own self, she wanted to put me back in that stifling space.” The author felt betrayed by Gladys and the rest of her family, who refused to believe that she had been sexually abused by her father. In her effort to understand Gladys, Sycamore looked closely at her creations, visited museums where her work is hung, and moved to Baltimore, where Gladys grew up when the city was “ghettoized,” with demarcations for Blacks and whites, Jews and gentiles. What did Gladys think, Sycamore wonders, “about the legacy of Jewish complicity in structural racism”? Billie Holiday, Frank O’Hara, Elaine de Kooning, and Grace Hartigan, among others, figure in Sycamore’s wide-ranging explorations. “Everything was art,” she writes, “this is what I learned from Gladys.”

Frank, intimate reflections on art, life, and their often complex intersections.