“Sure a Strong Devil”: Mabel Frazer, A. B. Wright, and the University of Utah Art Department's 1937 Sexual Misconduct Case
2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/26428652.90.3.02
ISSN2642-8652
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Gender and Feminism Studies
ResumoOn May 22, 1937, Mabel Pearl Frazer, an assistant professor of art at the University of Utah, filed an official complaint with the university president regarding a pattern of sexual misconduct toward women students exhibited by her colleague and department chair, Alma Brockerman (“A. B.”) Wright. Frazer's letter to President George Thomas begins with the reminder of a prior conversation they had regarding this matter, stating: “I told you in substance that for three years reports had been coming to me that I felt it in my duty to pass on to you . . . that two of these girls, Miss Williams and Miss Bartlett, had personally told me their own stories, but that the others had come to me through third persons.”1 She went on to detail the allegations against Wright that students had shared with her and other women faculty members, which included sexual harassment, retaliating behavior for resisting sexual advances, and even sexual assault.While Mabel Frazer's report generated enough concern to convene a hearing by university administrators, both the investigation and the hearing were surprisingly brief. The day after this meeting, a letter was issued absolving Wright “from all charges, allegations, inferences, or anything that was deleterious to his reputation and character.”2 The punishment of Frazer, though, for leveling these accusations was swift and harsh. President Thomas censured her for filing the report, forcing Frazer to disavow her statements and to issue an apology to Wright or face dire consequences. He sternly warned: “The Art Department is more important than the art teachers and, if you continue to pursue the policies of the past, your retirement must, of necessity, follow.”3 For the remainder of her tenure at the University of Utah (she retired in 1953), Mabel Frazer would pay a heavy price for serving as her students’ advocate. She was not granted a rank promotion for well over a decade after this incident, and despite the fact that she was the senior faculty member in the department, Frazer never held a leadership role in it.Although this event has entered the annals of local lore, it has been mentioned only in passing, and approached with a glibness more in keeping with supermarket tabloids than historical writing. In such historical retellings, the “eccentric” and “frugal spinster” Mabel Frazer wrongfully maligns the charismatic, debonair A. B. Wright, who was once seen as one of Utah's most important artists.4 Wright, the so-called “bad boy of Utah art”—a descriptor that glorifies his problematic reputation and behavior—has elicited a kind of admiration in these writers, whereas Frazer is met with exasperation, dismissal, and even scorn.5 Past discussants of the Wright affair have neither delved into the extant primary sources that illuminate its complexities nor approached it with the degree of gravity warranted by the nature of these allegations.Making extensive use of primary source material, including official university reports, correspondence, student yearbooks, class catalogs, newspaper articles, government records, family histories, and artworks, this article will demonstrate that claims of A. B. Wright's sexual improprieties against women students at the University of Utah had substance and that Mabel Frazer's role as whistleblower had undeniable professional consequences for her. It will demonstrate the systemic sexism under which Frazer and her female students and colleagues had to operate, where male perspectives were privileged, male positions were protected, and male power maintained. Indeed, the Wright affair throws into sharp relief the governing politics of gender within the university and reveals just how fraught the experience of gaining an art education and developing a career as an art professional in late 1930s Utah could be for women. Importantly, both Frazer and Wright were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and its cultural hegemony serves as a critical overlay in the developments of the Wright affair; for while patriarchal authority has always been a cornerstone of the religion, the era witnessed a retrenchment of the progressivism that had characterized LDS women's activities in the public sphere in the previous few decades.6 In fine, the University of Utah Art Department's 1937 sexual misconduct affair can be read as a case study that is representative of cultural norms surrounding sexual harassment of women within American academic and ecclesiastical communities at this time.Without a doubt, Mabel Frazer (1887–1981) was not a conformist. Displaying a keen interest in art at a young age, she made the most of her resources in her hometown of Beaver, Utah, and went on to become one of the first students to graduate from the University of Utah with an art degree.7 Teaching stints at local secondary schools financed the continuation of her studies in New York, where Frazer trained at the New York Evening School of Industrial Art, Beaux–Arts Institute, and Art Students League. In 1920, she was hired at her alma mater; Frazer reports that she was recruited for this position after LDS church apostle John A. Widtsoe and his wife discovered her copying a Rembrandt in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.8 For the next three decades, she was a mainstay in the University of Utah's Department of Art, teaching a wide array of courses in studio, design, and art history.9Refusing to comply with the expectations of Mormon spinsterhood, which meant possessing an unassuming demeanor, being dependent upon others, and showing deference to patriarchal authority, Frazer lived on her own terms. She took solo trips across the Southwest, as well as to Egypt, the Yucatan Peninsula, the British Isles, and Europe, and she became an active participant in Utah politics. In addition to leading an independent life as a single Mormon woman, other aspects of Frazer's personality went against the grain of gendered cultural expectations. Frazer's sister, Madeleine F. Waldis, recounted that when Mabel was on her deathbed, she apologetically told her nurse: “I really have a lot of love in my heart, but I also have a lot of damn-it-to-hell.”10 This “damn-it-to-hell” attitude became a key element of Frazer's reputation, and Utah art aficionados and historians, including Glen Warchol, Tom Alder, and Jeff Nye, have continued to cast her as a difficult old-maid type, emphasizing her idiosyncratic behaviors and demanding personality.11 Though viewed negatively by her critics, these traits, which were perhaps developed in response to the chauvinistic treatment she had experienced personally and professionally, also enabled her to speak out against the systemic sexism around her.Despite being heavily involved in the mid-century Utah arts community—serving as vice president of the Utah Art Institute, chair of the Utah Chapter of the American Artists’ Congress, and chair of the art section for the Utah Educational Association—and exhibiting widely throughout the state, Frazer stood outside the inner circle of the Utah art elite.12 She was at odds with several of its leading figures, including the most powerful of them all, Alice Merrill Horne, whom Frazer characterized as one of her “most bitter enemies.”13 In contrast, A. B. Wright (1875–1952) was considered one of the luminaries of Utah art, possessing all the necessary bona fides for the moniker of “great artist” and the networks for achieving his lofty professional aims. Wright was even born and raised in the right neighborhood: he was a member of the influential Twentieth Ward in Salt Lake City, which counted the well-known Utah artists Mahonri Young, Lee Greene Richards, and Jack Sears among its congregants.14 In his youth, Wright took lessons from the state's top artists, J. T. Harwood and George Martin Ottinger, and was a key figure in the elite Society of Utah Artists (an organization that excluded women from membership).15 Wright was also part of the second generation of Utah artists who had studied in Paris, and he could boast of having artwork accepted at the prestigious French Salon.Furthermore, Wright was granted important commissions, including murals for several LDS temples and the Utah State Capitol building. Local newspapers championed his travel abroad, traced the changes in his artistic philosophy, and praised his accomplishments.16 Writers frequently commented upon Wright's accomplishments in boxing and fencing, suggesting that being a “man's man” was a central component to his public persona (fig. 1).17 In 1929, Horne nominated Wright for the top ten greatest living Utahns; at that time, he was the head of the art department at LDS University (LDS Business College) and his career was garnering laudatory articles in the local papers.18 Only one year after joining its faculty, he was named the head of the University of Utah art department.Frazer's very act of making claims of immoral behavior against Wright—a well-known congregant of the Twentieth Ward, LDS temple muralist, and member of the church's priesthood organization—was transgressive, due to the nature of the accusations and the status of the accused. To be sure, Frazer was an intensely devout Mormon. She penned numerous essays on art and religion for women's church publications, and she was a key figure in the woman-led Gospel of Beauty movement in the LDS church, which espoused the power of art to bring people to Christ.19 She also created devotional art; she likely considered Christ Among the Nephites (1954), a work commissioned by the bishop of the Thirty-Third Ward for their chapel and now part of the Springville Museum of Art's collection, to be her greatest artwork.20 The only thing that superseded art in Frazer's life was her religious devotion.21 Yet despite these testaments to her faithfulness, as a woman Frazer would not have possessed anywhere near the same kind of religious standing as A. B. Wright within the local Mormon community.It is clear that her students at the University of Utah held Frazer in high regard. Known as a dedicated mentor, Frazer supported exhibitions of student artwork, held meetings of the student art guild in her home, and was lauded for her generosity in advising students.22 They also saw her as honorable and trustworthy. Waldis records: Her students were inspired by her teachings. As one young man expressed it: “Mabel gave us so much more than training in art, she taught us the real meaning of life, and we were all greatly enriched through our association with her.” No one ever questioned her integrity. Her word was gold; her promises made to be kept. “She gave so much to her students,” commented another. But in no way dared they infringe on her time with petty grievances. She seemed to be instinctively aware of their needs and was always ready to advise or counsel them.23When Frazer retired in 1953, newspaper notices declared that “students flocked to her classes,” and described her as a “beloved teacher.”24 Over the course of her career, Frazer displayed a remarkable degree of commitment to her students.25Their admiration notwithstanding, Frazer was at a disadvantage within the ingrained sexism that governed academia. Advocating for her students took courage. Previous chroniclers of Frazer's report of Wright's sexual improprieties in 1937 have argued that it was made out of malice and vengeance, because in 1932 she was not promoted to the head of the department and thus began a campaign to ruin Wright's life and career.26 But surely Frazer recognized that making such claims would pose serious risks to her reputation both in the art community and at the university. Furthermore, if her lack of promotion motivated her actions, it would not have made sense for her to wait five years to fabricate or bring these allegations to light. Frazer's own words, as rehearsed in the opening lines of this essay, provide a more likely motivation: the reports from students became so troubling that she felt compelled to file an official complaint. Despite the risks to her career, Frazer took seriously the accusations regarding Wright's behavior toward students in the art program.Frazer's May 1937 report of Wright's sexual misconduct to university president George Thomas set in motion a series of correspondence. After meeting in person, Thomas asked Frazer to prepare an official written statement delineating the details of confidences shared by students.27 In it, Frazer declared that over the last few years a number of students had come to her to share their concerns about Wright's behavior, rehearsing specific incidents of his misconduct. Frazer's report mainly focused on two current students: Marjorie Williams and Alice Bartlett. Williams had first encountered Wright as a fifteen-year-old freshman at the LDS University, where he was teaching. Wright had asked the young woman to pose for a portrait, and Williams, flattered by the request, had agreed to sit for him. While there, as Frazer wrote, “instead of painting he forced his attentions on her, she resisted, and finally, too late to get much done, he did commence a canvas. She posed in a fancy costume and when it came time to change to her street clothes there was more trouble before she finally got him to leave the room so she could.”28 Williams “thought she had convinced him she was not that sort of girl, [and] she returned for a second sitting.” Again, Williams experienced the same thing, and thereafter she refused to pose for Wright.Wright's frustrated advances had negative implications for Marjorie Williams when she went on to a year of undergraduate work at the University of Utah. While there, Williams wanted to take a course in interior design, but to do so had to take a prerequisite life-drawing class from her former professor, who now headed the university's art department. Two female students told Frazer that, in his life-drawing class, Wright “made it very unpleasant” for Williams and gave her a “D” course grade. Williams later corroborated the details to Frazer. Frazer was catalyzed into action when another student, a Mr. Cannon, implored her for help, claiming he was very “worried over Marjory [sic] Williams’ very desperate state of mind. . . . He told me that she was talking of suicide.” At this point, Frazer approached Myrtle Austin, the Dean of Women at the University of Utah, and shared the allegations and her concern for Williams's well-being.29The other student named in Mabel Frazer's report, Alice Bartlett, was a native of Roosevelt, Utah, whom Frazer described as “hard working, kindly, most willing to help everybody, quite young, a country girl in much need of social training—brilliant in art, but flounders in talking.”30 Bartlett had paid for school via the New Deal National Youth Administration (NYA) program, which provided student aid through work study. Bartlett worked as an assistant to Wright and was placed in charge of his NYA group. Frazer recalled that she “first got a hint of [Bartlett's] situation last fall when one of her friends told me she was in a very difficult plight and asked me to have her transferred to my group.” Frazer initially denied the request, but she became concerned when Wright called Bartlett out of Frazer's class, then apologized to Frazer for the disruption and cast aspersions on the student, “explaining that the Dean of Women had wanted [Bartlett] and intimating there was something amiss in regard to NYA.”31Frazer got a fuller picture when Bartlett eventually came to her home and confided in her. Frazer's account contends two attempted assaults on Bartlett by Wright. Although referred to euphemistically (as expected in that day, especially by single women narrating such events), the words paint a vivid picture of physical struggle when Bartlett went to meet with Wright on university business. The shaken student reported that Wright “was sure a strong devil, but that she was pretty strong herself. That the door was sure awful to get open, I mean it takes both hands at once and all you got.”32 Afraid to tell her family because she “feared her father would do something violent,” and reluctant to share this with anyone at the university for fear that she would not be believed, Bartlett said nothing. And given that she “was desperately in need of the money she was earning . . . she went back, and the experience was repeated.” It appears that Wright had even proposed using university funds to pay Bartlett for sexual favors, telling her to “count the theatre work on the NYA and he would take care of her over in his department.” Frazer asked Bartlett “point blank if he had the nerve to offer her money and she said that he had not come right out and stated it that way, and of course the only way she had to protect herself had been to act so dumb that she couldn't understand what he was talking about.”33 Wright subsequently punished Bartlett for resisting his sexual overtures by demoting her to “the meanest tasks” and failing to give her work for her allotted hours—feigning dumb did not actually protect her. Bartlett was then accused of lying on her timecard, and “one month her work was so manipulated that she received no check at all.”34The experiences of these women are typical in cases of sexual misconduct. Wright preyed upon students who were young or socially or economically disadvantaged, and thus especially vulnerable. It was no coincidence that Bartlett was a rural girl with limited social experience—Frazer made a point to mention that Bartlett wore coveralls her freshman year as a testament to her social naïveté and that Williams was an impressionable girl of fifteen at the time of her alleged assault. These were at-risk young women who, having grown up within the patriarchal structures of Utah Mormon culture and possessing little understanding of or power within the university institution, were easy to manipulate.Although it was Frazer who brought the claims of harassment and attempted assault of Alice Bartlett and Marjorie Williams before the university administration, she was not the only faculty confidante and advocate for these students. In a statement to the Council of the Deans of the University of Utah dated May 31, 1937, adjunct art faculty member Caroline Parry corroborated Frazer's claims. Parry verified that Bartlett had also confided in her about “her unfortunate experience with Mr. Alma Wright.” She also documented complaints from two other students, recollecting that “the first girl who came was in tears because of a proposition that she considered an insult of serious proportion. The second girl was not in tears but was very angry over a similar experience.” Although Parry uses veiled language, her statement clearly shows that she too had known about Wright's pattern of harassment of young female students in the art department. Parry concludes: “What Mr. Wright's intentions were I will not presume to judge, but I feel that any student in a University should feel absolute security in the private office of any faculty member. These girls did not feel that and so thereafter took a companion with them when it was necessary for interviews.”35Caroline Parry's statement of student grievances supports Frazer's narrative and is a critical source illuminating the Wright affair that has never been mentioned in published accounts. Together, the two women's statements show a pattern of Wright's abuse of students in the University of Utah's art department. It seems improbable that Parry would have fabricated an account of two additional students or validated Frazer's recounting of Bartlett's troubling tale if these did not have substance; in making such allegations of an eminent figure in the community and the chair of her department, Parry risked her own status within the university, especially because Parry was contingent faculty.Although not a University of Utah student, Olive Belnap Jenson (1888–1979) experienced similar intimidation when under Wright's tutelage. In 1914 Olive had been approached by the president of Ogden's Weber Academy to teach art. After hearing of her concerns about adequate preparation, he advised her to observe a few of Wright's classes at the LDS University. In the few short weeks she attended his classes, Belnap claims she was a target of his advances. In her personal history, she relates her ordeal—which deserves to be quoted at length, as it speaks to Wright's practice of singling out and grooming female art students under his supervision: I commenced the work at the L.D.S. College. Mr. Wright proceeded with his various classes while I worked at one side on a model in still-life. As I remember, not anything was said to me by way of help or criticism till after the other students had filed out of the last class. Then he proceeded to give ME and my work personal attention, which continued longer than I anticipated, and I did not know how to extricate myself from his devoted instruction as I perceived that we were quite alone in a large school building. As dusk approached and artificial lighting became necessary, I became apprehensive, even though I was in a church school building with a teacher highly recommended by our church school principal. At length the lights had to be turned off for the night, the entire building being vacant. The problem now was how to proceed in total darkness to the front entrance, which was impossible for me to do, making his assistance necessary. I was assured by him that he had the key to the building in his possession, the building now being closed for the night, but we left with my feeling really concerned. The ride on the bus gave ample time for my concern to develop and upon my arrival at my sister Marion's home where I was staying, I gave vent to my suppressed feeling in an explosive manner and used the expression that I had returned from a trip to Europe to come in the shadow of the Temple in a church school building to find concern. This brought voluminous instruction from my sister who felt that I was assuming too much to suppose that this noted instructor would have any concern with an insignificant student on her first visit. From then on I arose and left when the other students filed out of the room.36As a college professor, Wright was in a position that gave him access to young women. In at least these three cases, evidence of Wright's repeated sexual improprieties directed toward women students is clearly documented.In a follow-up letter to Frazer's initial statement dated May 24, 1937, President Thomas pressed Frazer for more details on the rumors surrounding two other individuals, Myrtle Hansen and Lucille Winters.37 Myrtle Hansen was employed by the University of Utah as an art department model, although it is possible that she modeled exclusively for Wright.38 Lucille Winters was a former student, whose relationship with Wright allegedly caused his separation from his wife.39 Frazer explained that she wanted to focus on the allegations of her students that she could substantiate, and though she was aware of the rumors, “I confined myself to the things that could be traced.”40 Frazer related some rumors she had heard from students and employees in the department but reiterated that she only had second- or third-hand knowledge of these events. Significantly, it is an incident of Wright and Hansen being caught in a compromising situation that has endured in the historical annals of the Wright case, due in part to the salaciousness of the rumors and his numerous depictions of Myrtle preserved in Utah's public art collections.41 There was much to their relationship that could provide grist for the university gossip mill, including tales of them being seen by students and neighbors in various states of undress in university studios as well as a pregnancy scandal.42Wright's nude sketches and paintings of Myrtle Hansen and other models produced during the time of the reported episodes of misconduct provide evidence of his sense of entitlement to women's bodies. While representations of the nude are, of course, not in and of themselves problematic, the ways Wright renders his subjects are suggestive of a troubling disposition toward his models. Wright's class notes, public lectures, and publications speak to a sexualization of the act of painting and a fixation on the nude—a common trope in modernist male artists and their approach to art, to be sure, but certainly not in Mormon Utah. The mid-century art scene in the state was decidedly conservative, with vocal opposition to the avant-garde artistic trends seen back East and in Europe. To him, it seems that such an artistic focus was not about capturing correct proportions or anatomy, or even to better understand the human body, but to bring out those characteristics that turned women's bodies into objects. Wright's nude imagery, as well as his writings on the subject, are indicative of a culture of toxic sexuality in Wright's professional relationships and serve as corroborating evidence of the allegations made against Wright by female students and faculty.43This specific and sexualized view of women's bodies is particularly evident in Wright's art produced in the 1920s and 30s. Even in his more academic studies, like an untitled sketch of a semi-reclining female nude (fig. 2), he positions his models in titillating and objectifying manners. Lying on her side but twisting her torso and resting on her arms so as to display her breasts, the model is placed in a strained and unnatural pose. By doing so, Wright accomplishes two things: one, he boasts of his ability to manipulate a woman's body into assuming whatever position he desires, and, two, he ensures that much of the model's body is presented to the viewer.Many of Wright's studies of Hansen are reminiscent of the seductive images of 1930s film stars such as Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, and Marlene Dietrich popularized in Hollywood culture and constructed for the heterosexual male gaze (fig. 3).44 In fact, Wright's nude renderings seem to draw more from the representational schemata of a pinup girl or pornographic imagery than an académie drawing.45 For example, in the Utah Museum of Fine Art's Untitled painting by Wright, Myrtle lies prone, her heavily made-up face of red lips, rouged cheeks, and colored eyelids, along with her upper torso pressed into the bed suggestively (fig. 4). The rendering of the rest of her body is even more provocative: the model's lower abdomen is shown twisting and opening up in the direction of the viewer, the right side of the canvas cutting off her trunk just before the pubis area.Wright's provocative painting, Myrtle: The Artist's Model, which dates to the same time that charges of sexual misconduct were levied against the artist, follows the age-old tradition of the reclining nude (fig. 5). Here, her recumbent body twists enticingly in a game of voyeuristic hide-and-seek, and her face assumes an expression of sensual reverie. While it, too, takes a cue from Hollywood's construction of desirable femininity, it also aligns with the visual rhetoric of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French boudoir scenes. In this genre, women are shown in their private chamber, typically in the act of bathing, dressing, sleeping, or preparing to entertain lovers. Wright would have been well acquainted with this mode of painting, as he had spent many years studying the art collections in Paris in 1902, 1913–1914 and 1929–1930.46 Famous boudoir paintings at the Louvre, such as François Boucher's The Brunette Odalisque (ca. 1745) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's The Grand Odalisque (1814), are exemplary of this tradition, which continued to flourish well into the twentieth century (see, for example, Henri Matisse's Odalisque: Harmony in Red, 1927–28). It is not difficult to imagine that Wright, an avowed Francophile, envisioned producing such a work in his Myrtle: An Artist's Model. The personal accouterments scattered across the canvas add narrative interest: the bedclothes are pulled to the bottom of the bed and below them are her cast-off slippers. On the adjacent table is a tea cup and clock whose face indicates that it is late afternoon—the time of day dedicated to lovers’ rendezvous in France. Wright's painting is not staged as a studio scene, but rather as a bedroom tableau.Furthermore, Wright's sketches and studies reveal a sexualization typically not seen in traditional academic studies and certainly absent from the work of his contemporaries in Utah. Many of his colleagues, including B. F. Larsen, Mahonri Young, Lee Greene Richards, and even Mabel Frazer, count representations of the female nude in their corpus of works. Young's Seated Nude Examining Foot (n.d.) represents a standard trope in academic studies that translates into a genre scene (fig. 6), and Larsen's Seated Nude (1929) is a study that manages to be fastidious in its delineation of the body while respecting the model's subjectivity (fig. 7). Frazer's undated Untitled (Nude) (fig. 8) and Greene Richards’ Reflections (1915) (fig. 9), in which the figures are shown from behind, manifest a sense of respect for the psychic and physical space of the women modeling. Unlike Wright's treatments of the nudes, the poses and expressions in his colleagues’ depictions do not follow the visual rhetoric of the movie starlet or pinup girl that had developed in the 1930s. Their bodies are not contorted and fetishized for the pleasure of the heterosexual male gaze; none of these women are endowed with a seductive “come hither” glance to the viewer found in much of Wright's nude imagery. Rather, the studies of the female form of Utah artists Larsen, Young, Richards, and Frazer uniformly indicate an interest in formal issues such as line, value, and form. The subjects of these works are positioned in natural, everyday poses and with heads turned and faces obscured, giving them the anonymity customarily accorded
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