GLR November-December 2024

M ARTHA E. S TONE Muses of the Boudoir

ESTHER PRESSOIR A Modern Woman’s Painter by Suzanne M. Scanlan Lund Humphries. 154 pages, $44.99 S archives, she made an exciting find: a heretofore unrecognized RISD graduate who had earned her living from her art, exhib ited her work throughout her life, and was, Scanlan discovered, a lesbian. The result is her illustrated biography Esther Pres soir: A Modern Woman’s Painter . Pressoir (1902–1986) was born into a working-class French Canadian family in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, where her artis tic ability was recognized from her earliest years. Her father’s employment in the textile industry enabled Pressoir to attend RISD, from which she graduated with a degree in painting and drawing in 1923. Known for her sparkling wit, both in person and in her correspondence, as well as for being “complicated and free-thinking,” in Scanlan’s words, Pressoir had no end of friends. She spent summers painting in Provincetown, though research on that part of her life—like other aspects of her private life—remains sketchy at best. Later in the 1920s, she attended the Art Students League in Manhattan, and on a dare went off to Europe for seven months (usually accompanied by a woman friend who may have been a lover), bicycling across northwestern France and southern Italy, making almost daily trips to American Express offices to send work home and collect art supplies that she’d arranged to have sent. The work sent home included her journals, filled with sketches and narrative, which were carefully saved by family members. (On her death, her studio was notable for being “packed to the gills” with her work.) She worked incessantly, depicting street life, beach scenes, men drinking in saloons, eld erly ladies gossiping, as can be seen in full-color plates in the book. She seems never to have gotten into any major difficul ties or harrowing situations, other than constant bicycle break downs (she cycled in skirts and heels). On her return from Europe, she married a man named Fred erick Payne, but they quickly divorced. After she settled in New York, Pressoir had several female muses. One of the most in triguing, and about whom little is known, was a woman named Florita, who lived in Harlem and may have been a dancer. She is featured in many of Pressoir’s works and, like so many of the women Pressoir portrayed, is shown nude or semi-nude, dress ing or undressing, or taking a bath. There is a 1930 watercolor of Florita’s head in which she’s shown with a modern hairstyle, heavy green beads encircling an elongated neck, and an enig matic smile. But in many instances, Pressoir’s women were not conventionally beautiful. Many of her works are scattered in private collections, but UZANNE M. SCANLAN, a professor at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), was searching for a topic she could develop into a book. While digging into the RISD

the RISD Museum has a growing collection, and a large num ber of her works are held at the Ingeborg Gallery in Northfield, Massachusetts. “Straddling representation and abstraction,” in Scanlan’s words, Pressoir made a secure living in her later years as a spot illustrator for The New Yorker . Esther Pressoir is both an engrossing biography, with its roots in serious research, and a beautifully illustrated art book. It showcases the many modes in which Pressoir worked: li thography, etchings, linocuts, scratchboard, watercolors, oils, and more. In her later years, she made ceramics and silver jew elry. Her sense of humor is evident in a 1945 ceramic bowl ti tled Abduction of Europa by Zeus , on which she’s painted an insouciant blonde nude who could have come out of the pages of Playboy magazine, lolling atop a bull. Esther Pressoir, Self-portrait, Bathing , 1935. Courtesy Lund Humphries.

The Presence of the Past

M ICHAEL Q UINN

MY BODY IS PAPER Stories and Poems by Gil Cuadros City Lights Publishers. 176 pages, $17.95 G poems explores being gay, Chicano, and living with AIDS in Los Angeles. Today, a growing interest in Cuadros’ writing has led to the discovery of previously unpublished prose and poems that touch on those same themes. His literary executor and a dedicated group of editors have compiled these pieces into an outstanding new collection, My Body Is Paper . Although long dormant, the work teems with life. The characters juggle jobs and relationships while negotiat ing a maddening healthcare system and the side effects of var IL CUADROS CEMENTED his reputation as a writer shortly before his death, at 34, with 1994’s CityofGod . This groundbreaking collection of short stories and

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