Ruth Harwood: Utah's Spiritualist Prodigy
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 91; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/26428652.91.4.05
ISSN2642-8652
Autores Tópico(s)American History and Culture
ResumoWriting from a small home in the hills above Berkeley, California, in February 1923, Ruth Harwood described to her father how she had commemorated her mother's birthday. James Taylor Harwood—Utah's most prominent artist—had lost his wife, Harriet Richards Harwood, the previous April. Bereft by the death of his wife, James had returned to Salt Lake City with his two younger children after having relocated the Harwood household to California three years earlier.1 Despite the loss, Ruth's letters contain a celebratory tone, one that reflects her belief that the presence of their mother remained in the family. “You will want to know all the celebration we did for the little mother's birthday,” Ruth wrote. “Mostly I felt in a mood of rejoicing that she had had a birthday and such a beautiful life and that she had given the gift to me. . . . Somehow I felt the benediction and the joy that the little mother would have in having me there.”2Ruth Harwood's expression of thankfulness rather than sorrow belies the deep heartache she felt, one that influenced her work as an artist and poet and prompted her lifelong pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. Her search was guided by a metaphysical belief system known as spiritualism, which appealed to believers who rejected conventional religious institutions but sought to understand the mysteries of the cosmos. Spiritualism was especially appealing to those who had lost a loved one. Harwood accepted the belief that the soul progresses eternally, constantly evolving to slough off the darkness and reach toward the light, a basic tenet of the movement. Harwood's artistic evolution from commercial illustrator to symbolist artist, coupled with her mystical verse and prose, reflect her growing commitment to use her gifts so fellow seekers could attain the inner knowledge that would lead them to universal love.3 Harwood's family roots in Utah, her experience with bereavement, and her fateful meetings with artistic luminaries shaped the spiritualist philosophy she sought to share.This article aims to recover the history of an artist and poet and to augment the burgeoning historiography of female artists in twentieth-century Utah. Recent scholarship has explored how Latter-day Saint women artists served as unofficial but committed missionaries to incorporate art in the home and overseas; has shown how artists, curators, and dealers served as both tastemakers and paid participants in the labor market; and has provided new perspectives on the grande dame of twentieth-century Utah art, Alice Merrill Horne.4Ruth was a native Utahn and the daughter of two remarkable artists, but her story is very different from that of her contemporaries—largely because of her parents’ religious indifference and her own spiritualist beliefs. Harwood upends many of the assumptions people hold regarding women in the first half of the twentieth century: she was gay but accepted by her parents, she was sustained by long-term loving relationships, and she was self-supporting. She lived most of her adult life in California but until the 1940s spent enough time in Utah that she became an important part of the state's artistic scene. Harwood's spiritualist beliefs and her commitment to disseminating her message through art and poetry were central to her life. Her work thus provides a look at the cultural landscape of Utah through a different lens and opens a new avenue by which to understand how an unorthodox belief system entered the Utah art scene.5Ruth was very much the product of two artistically accomplished parents. Sometimes referred to as “the father of Utah art,” James Harwood was notable as the first Utahn to study art in Paris, the first Utahn to have a painting exhibited at the Paris Salon, and an influential art instructor at the Salt Lake High School and the University of Utah. Born in 1860 in Lehi, James spent his youth working in his father's saddle and harness shop, hunting, fishing, and trapping in the beautiful environs of Utah County, and drawing, sketching, and painting at every opportunity. In 1887, he met eighteen-year-old Harriet “Hattie” Richards when she enrolled in his Salt Lake Art Academy. Harriet showed promise as a student, and gradually they fell in love, marrying in Paris in 1891. During their courtship Hattie honed her skills as a painter and expressed to James her desire to study art in New York. James discouraged her, fearing that such a venture would sever their relationship.6 Hattie continued to pursue serious artistic study, however, before her marriage. In 1888, while living in Paris with her parents, Hattie joined her fiancé to study at the private Académie Julian and was the first Utah woman to do so. In 1893, Hattie's Étude represented the only oil painting by a woman artist exhibited in the Utah Pavilion at the World's Columbian Exposition.7 Although Hattie set art aside once she married, she developed serious avocational interests in philosophy, astronomy, and geology, thus reinforcing the intellectual tone of her household.8After they married, James and Hattie returned to Salt Lake City and began their family. James painted, taught at Salt Lake High School, and farmed in Holladay on land he acquired in 1905. “My farming was carried on under difficulties,” he wrote in his autobiography, Basket of Chips, but “my love for the farm came from both generations ahead,” referring to his Lehi roots.9 Despite the financial stress, he wrote, “We were a happy family, my dear wife and children. Every day was a holiday to us; a new thrill came each day.”10 James and Hattie established a loving home, one that was creative, cerebral, and tolerant of their children's exploits. They were immersed in Utah's artistic milieu and enjoyed the pleasures of country life.The congenial Harwood household provided a secure base for Ruth to cultivate her artistic and literary skills as well as a foundation of open-mindedness that allowed for the investigation of novel belief systems. Considered “a most unusual child,” Ruth was a free-spirited, carefree, nature-loving girl, “perhaps in some ways a little wild, but always gentle, untamed, hair flying the wind, ever eager and impulsive.”11 She was exceptionally close to her father, and her mother gave her eccentricities a wide berth, making for a happy childhood.12 Her teenage years, however, were not as pleasant. Described as an adolescent who exhibited an air of boredom while feeling awkward, diffident, and shy, Ruth retreated into an imaginary world sustained by her poetry. She resisted sharing her poems with others, believing that writing poetry was an endeavor best kept “sacred and undisturbed.”13 A stanza from an early poem she wrote, “Wind Rapture,” expresses her need to escape social conformity: Let me break loose from thisPrison of conventionality thatSmothers me and moveUnfettered through the earth's And air's immensity.14During her years as an English major at the University of Utah, Harwood blossomed as a poet and artist. In response to the encouragement of an English professor, B. Roland Lewis, Harwood submitted a poem, “The Shoe Factory (Song of the Knot-Tyer),” for publication after visiting a factory as part of a psychology class studying mental reaction.15 In it, she captured the repetitive motion of manufacturing work, presented by the narrator not as drudgery but as a “joyous song.” Within a couple of years, the poem and two others were published in the prestigious Poetry Magazine and included in an anthology of the best American and British poems of the year.16 Ruth won other poetry prizes at the University of Utah and later stated that “the annual poetry prize of the University of Utah had been given to me—just for the happy songs I had woven together for myself. That was the first time my songs had ever reached out and brought me happiness.”17Although Harwood's confidence as a poet took time to develop, her deep desire to paint and draw manifested itself from an early age.18 The family was described as splitting into two camps during family outings in the mountains: Ruth's brothers and younger sister accompanying their mother in “field study,” and Ruth and her father “picking out a scene to be put on canvas.”19 She contributed her artistic skills to the student art guild at the University of Utah by providing illustrations for Pen, “the little art magazine of the school,” the Utonian, the school's yearbook, and posters for the university's dramatic club productions. In 1918, the Salt Lake Herald reported that she donated her services to the Red Cross in Salt Lake by making posters to advertise the organization's downtown store; the Herald described her as “one of the recognized artists in the west ever since the days of her high school life.”20 After feeling like a social outsider during her teens, Harwood had not only achieved public recognition for her creative talents but managed to carve a space for herself among her classmates who shared her artistic sensibilities.In 1920, the Harwoods moved to Berkeley, seeking a change and wider artistic circles. Ruth had recently graduated from the University of Utah and enrolled in the University of California to study commercial art and obtain a teaching certificate. She continued to write poetry and in 1921 won the Emily Cook Chamberlain prize for a volume of verse entitled Songs from the Lyric Road.21 Some of the poems have a somber tone, while others are fanciful and playful. Lyric Road includes one of her most charming poems, “Vagabond Song”: But O! I have a heart that gaily sings And feet that swiftly dance, and wealth untold For I have eyes to catch and soul to holdThe gold of sunsets and the jewels of spring.And I find gems in all the stars that shine;And dazzling diamonds strung on spider's lace;And glistening water on the water's face;And full red rubies sparkling on the vine.22As she told a California reporter, the poem “typifies her own self.”23 The publication of Lyric Road and Ruth's honor in winning the Chamberlain prize occurred a few months prior to Hattie's death in April 1922, close to the end of the happy but brief interlude the Harwoods experienced in California. When read with the knowledge of the sadness that was about to beset the family, “Vagabond Song” seems to portend the close of Ruth's carefree days. Upon the loss of his wife, James returned to Salt Lake City with his two younger children; Ruth remained in Berkeley to make her way in the world. She was twenty-six years old.Following Hattie's death, Ruth wrote to her father almost every day, adopting a cheerful tone intended to ease his despondency.24 But despite the upbeat tone of her letters to James, Ruth deeply grieved her mother's death. Several of her poems reveal the depth of the loss she experienced and are poignant and prophetic of the spiritual journey she ultimately embarked upon. For example, on the last birthday Hattie shared with her daughter, she wrote to Ruth: Birthday NoteMy darling little girl This is your day and from the neverending stream of life you have come to helpbrighten the sorrow and give joy to humanity. From pain of motherhood I give thee tothe world, love it, help it to your highesthope. Your mother25A stanza from Ruth's poem “Mother Song” sounds like a response to her mother's message: So I shall go into the world,Beloved—My Mother—And far and far shall take the fervent songsThat I have fashioned from my Love for youAnd sing them dearly till The careless throngsShall turn and hearken to This love I know.26No work of Harwood's expresses the feelings of grief prior to her spiritual awakening as directly as her poem “Wisdom,” with her accompanying pen and ink illustration. Several sources suggest that she produced both the poem and the drawing shortly after Hattie's death.27 Her verse does not describe the spiritualist journey she eventually undertook but instead depicts the sorrow common to all who have lost a loved one. In “Wisdom” Harwood writes metaphorically of three forces: love “was a transient stay,” fame “fled elusively,” and death “hovered gloomily near where a loved one lay,” so that “nevermore my [musical] notes can take their early carefree ways.”28 “Wisdom” indicates her struggle to come to terms with her grief in the interim of Hattie's passing and her spiritualist investigations. Although life would not be the same without her mother, during the 1920s Ruth encountered people and experiences that provided an absorbing, if circuitous, path that allowed her to resolve her questions regarding loss and her purpose in life.It took a few years before Ruth's metaphysical beliefs came into focus. In the meantime, the years from 1923 to 1930 were a productive time of illustrating, writing, and teaching, during which she encountered several literary and artistic celebrities, traveled abroad, and lived in New York City. By 1923, Harwood had fallen in love with a woman named Lois Atkins, and together they explored the hills and valleys above Berkeley, created a garden at the small house Harwood had purchased, and participated in various theatrical ventures.29 Ruth's letters to her father indicate that she and Lois were very much in love, that he accepted Ruth's sexual orientation, and that he was fond of Lois.30Until 1926, Harwood worked as a commercial artist and lived with Lois. Little remains in her archived papers of illustrations she prepared for corporate purposes, but examples of the hand-painted greeting cards she designed as part of a business she started with Lois are abundant. Her use of poster paint on colored card stock resulted in bright, saturated images outlined in gold ink and demonstrate the bold, graphic style she employed in the 1920s.31 The charming and whimsical cards portray natural scenes or cozy dwellings and convey glad tidings for various holidays.32 The greeting cards were a source of income for Harwood for many years.Artwork illustrating the poems Ruth wrote provides additional examples of her drawing ability. The cover for Songs for the Lyric Road (1921) uses pen-and-ink techniques to portray a road leading to the horizon, illuminated by an oversized sun.33 A work entitled “In Sunlit Spaces” is very colorful, featuring a willowy nude woman delineated in pen and ink, dancing on grass in front of a large tree with yellow leaves. The details of these images, including the cavorting figure and the finely detailed foliage executed in various pen-and-ink techniques, were typical of 1920s graphic art. Although Ruth is mentioned in several sources as having come to art naturally with two artistic parents, little evidence remains that she pursued drawing or painting as a fine art, unlike James and Hattie. Her papers include a few lovely watercolors of landscapes, but she used art primarily for illustration and later to express her spiritualist beliefs.She was also an art educator. By March 1926, Harwood was working as the art supervisor of the State Teachers’ College in Silver City, New Mexico, and the next year as a design instructor at the University of Utah. Her teaching approach is documented in the articles she authored for School Arts Magazine, which demonstrate both her skill and her creativity. The magazine's editor, Pedro J. de Lemos, published submissions from teachers throughout the country who presented a range of projects using a variety of techniques, materials, and media. The projects Harwood described reflected the balance of creativity and technical expertise that School Arts Magazine supported. She instructed readers how to teach a unit on stained glass, construct an Easter lily basket, decorate a cover for a clock, design a graphic border of trees, and examine the underlying geometry of flowers to improve still-life drawing. For an issue devoted to color, Harwood augmented a short article explaining the components of color with a play written in verse, “Color Fantasy,” in which she anthropomorphizes colors. “Mother Gray” instructs the characters (primary and secondary colors) as to their proper place on the color wheel and admonishes them when they rebel. When Blue and Orange try to sidle up to each other, Mother Gray intercedes and explains that “Across the wheel for gray must always be / Between each pair. I love you all so much / Because all colors lend to making gray / And all of you are beautiful with me.”34 The original approach Harwood used to instruct children regarding a concept as straightforward as the color wheel demonstrates her whimsical nature and ability to envision the artistic potential of everyday scenes. During her two years as an educator, Harwood was occasionally featured in School Arts Magazine and favorably impressed de Lemos. He featured Harwood in the monthly “Our Contributors” column, showcased her students’ designs, and published a number of her poems.35By 1929, Harwood had left her University of Utah teaching position. A Salt Lake Tribune article published in June of that year describes several recent successes: in 1927 she won the Browning prize for the best sonnet, she was writing a book to be called Floral Form and Design based on the geometric floral lesson she described in School Arts Magazine, and in the summer of 1928 she had accompanied her father to Paris to study art.36 In a photograph from this time, Harwood sports a chic bob and a happy expression, embodying the confident and independent young women of the 1920s. Earlier in 1928 she had visited New York City as a member of the Poetry Society of America, a membership attained through her connection with Ina Coolbrith of Berkeley, the poet laureate of California.37 She reported on the poetry luminaries she met, most notably Kahlil Gibran, Edwin Markham, and Mary Carolyn Davies, and literary patrons who feted her because she won the Browning prize. Between her association with Berkeley “bohemians” and immersion in the Greenwich Village literary milieu Harwood was very much a part of the artistic world of her day. Harwood told the reporter that she would return to Berkeley and work there through the winter.38 Her life was cosmopolitan and busy, one in which she was not only treated as a celebrity in her hometown but also attracted attention on a national stage.But Harwood did not spend the winter of 1929–1930 in Berkeley; instead, she moved to New York City, where she participated in weekly poetry readings and enjoyed the company of the poets whom she had studied at the University of Utah. Although she expressed pleasure at being in the midst of New York's literary world, her focus had begun to shift from sociability and professional achievement to one of introspection and spiritual exploration.39 Looking back a decade later, Harwood attributed the change to an epiphany she experienced when studying art in Paris prior to her move to New York, stating that she had made “a great transition from pure art to art for humanity.”40 From about 1930 on, Harwood devoted herself to searching for truth, enlightenment, and spiritual aspiration or what she termed the “universal pilgrimage.”A brief review of spiritualism reveals how perfectly it accommodated Harwood's background, sensibilities, and longing to find truth and meaning in her life. Spiritualism is a broad term used to describe overlapping metaphysical belief systems that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. Spirit mediums were the initial purveyors of the movement, claiming to have the power to act as intermediaries between the dead and their loved ones using planchettes (similar to Ouija boards) at seances and through hypnosis.41 Spiritualism spread rapidly in the United States and abroad, with American variants finding a home first among social reformers and ultimately amid those who rejected the authoritarianism and orthodoxy of traditional religion. Spiritualists did not form congregations but instead turned inward to seek their own spiritual truth. The emphasis on individual exploration resulted in a multitude of variations, many concerned with healing, almost all with communicating with departed loved ones, and all with cultivating self-understanding. These variations could coexist with traditional religions or meld together and later break apart. Spiritualism also propounded the belief that the soul progressed through a series of spheres, with the soul becoming ever more perfect to advance to the subsequent sphere. Rather than use the binary of heaven and hell as the promise or threat of one's fate in the afterlife, spiritualists saw spherical progression as motivation to lead a moral life on earth to advance faster after death.A significant offshoot of spiritualism was Theosophy, initiated by an impoverished Ukrainian émigré named Helena Blavatsky who arrived in New York City in 1873.42 Intrigued by Blavatsky's claims of mystical experiences, a New York attorney, Henry Steel Olcott, championed her views, and in 1875 they formed the Theosophical Society. Blavatsky espoused the concept of occultism, the idea that secret mysteries could be uncovered by experts, known as adepts, who possessed the heightened sensibilities and spiritual powers to reveal ancient truths. This knowledge formed the core of Theosophy. Once revealed, it had the power to remedy what adherents believed was the corrupting influence of orthodox Christianity. Theosophy thus differs from spiritualism in that it was characterized by secrecy and in which truth could only be interpreted by a few, whereas spiritualist investigations were democratic, straightforward, and open to all.43 Theosophy is also distinguished from Spiritualism by its incorporation of Eastern philosophies. Blavatsky was an avid traveler who explored Europe, Turkey, Egypt, India, Sri Lanka, and Tibet. Her exposure to the belief systems of Asian societies, coupled with accusations of chicanery, inspired her to change course from espousing supernatural occultic practices to that of encouraging the fusion of Eastern and Western religious philosophies.44Spiritualism, with its emphasis on establishing contact with departed loved ones, the rejection of materialism (the conviction that only what is physically manifested can be believed), and the assurance that the soul progresses eternally appealed to Harwood for several reasons. Having grown up in a nonreligious and tolerant household, Harwood was open to new philosophies that might provide answers to questions of existence. Spiritualism offered her a path to understand and accept her mother's death. Finally, it gave her a deep foundation on which to build her art and poetry. Several of her early assertions and poems document her rejection of traditional religion and indicate her pursuit of a route to understand the impulses that drove her need to create years before she immersed herself in spiritualism. At some point Harwood wrote, “In adolescence I looked upon religion as some form of hallucination, and six years of college confirmed me the more in such skepticism. Yet during all this time a rich flow of artistic power bore unrecognized evidence of greater forces.”45 A stanza of one of her earliest published poems, “Interlude,” included in Songs of the Lyric Road (1922), indicates her belief in a universal divine presence and is coupled with her rejection of conventional religious practices: God is speaking through this vast silenceBut man remains within his walls,Doing little tasks,Searching for happiness,Laughing and weeping,Man ventures out on SundaysAnd hears of God,Second hand.There would be less grievingIf man would learn to hear him every day.46In 1928, Harwood accompanied her father to Paris, where she revisited many of the places she had experienced as a child. Eventually she recorded her impressions in a self-published book of poems, prose passages, and drawings, entitled Paris Cycle. Although Ruth says little in a biographical sketch about the significance of this trip, in 1940 she told a newspaper reporter after a lecture that her “great transition from pure art to art for humanity came while she was a student in Paris.”47 Her words from Paris Cycle reveal a spiritual awakening: For days now there has been the sense of dawning secret. I seemed to stand breathless upon the threshold of a mystery. I seemed to be waiting and preparing for something beautiful. And now has come the hour of the secret's revealing. It is the truth that I have heard so often but not until now understood. The oneness with all nature. Only the first chapels of the amazing mystery are open to me yet. There are myriad hidden inner shrines that some day with hushed finger tips I shall reveal.48This text, describing the impression of one of the many Parisian scenes she included in her small book, reflects Theosophical occultism or the belief that a secret power or presence exists to unfold the mysteries of the universe. It also underscores the conviction that the seeker will find understanding gradually through a long process of inward searching. Beginning in the 1930s, Harwood pivoted her focus from commercial illustration to using her creative gifts for finding and sharing spiritual fulfillment.It was Harwood's relationship with the choreographer Ruth St. Denis, however, that definitively refined her sensibilities and changed the direction of her artistic output. They probably met about 1930 through Harwood's circle of poetry friends in Greenwich Village.49 Born in 1878 in Newark, New Jersey, St. Denis was a seminal figure in creating modern dance and establishing it as an art form. Like Harwood, St. Denis had a lively imagination and a free-spirited nature. She was exposed to unorthodox beliefs from an early age from intellectual guests who boarded at her parents’ establishment, Pin Oaks Farm in Somerville, New Jersey, and argued over the merits of Christian Science versus Theosophy. St. Denis began her dance career in the peripatetic and raucous world of vaudeville, where even in this milieu she investigated a multitude of philosophical discourses, ultimately with the goal of using her art to achieve a loftier spiritual truth. In 1904, St. Denis experienced an epiphany during a fortuitous stop in Buffalo. Upon noticing an advertisement for “Egyptian Deities” cigars featuring Isis, the goddess of healing, she was affected so profoundly that the exotic image calmed what she said had been “an awful restlessness in me.”50 St. Denis staged concerts throughout the world and often used touring as an opportunity to explore and meet luminaries of various religions, particularly when traveling in Asia. Whether she gleaned her understanding from a Coney Island festival or took lessons from a former geisha in Los Angeles, a smorgasbord of cultures informed St. Denis's work.51The two Ruths met amidst a difficult time for St. Denis. She had experienced the zenith of her cultural significance in the mid-1920s because of a national tour with her husband, Ted Shawn, but by the early 1930s St. Denis was broke and she and Shawn had gone their separate ways.52 St. Denis was living in a makeshift apartment in a small warehouse, which she christened “Vita Nuova,” or “new life,” referring to Dante's text of courtly love. Harwood and St. Denis had a significant impact on one another and remained in each other's lives until Harwood's death in 1959.53 In her 1939 autobiography, An Unfinished Life, St. Denis credits Harwood for suggesting that St. Denis resume the temple services, referring to discussion groups she had formed under the aegis of the Society of Spiritual Arts. That group was a kind of subsidiary to Denishawn, the dance school she had established with Shawn several years earlier. The discussions at Vita Nuova centered on Christian Science principles and included a group of scholars and artists known as the Rhythmic Choir. From the discussions held in the makeshift, metaphorical temple in Vita Nuova, St. Denis found the inspiration to stage at least two choreographic works. A “sympathetic word” from Harwood and especially her suggestion that “we need the temple” had provided the impetus for those works.54Just as St. Denis experienced the Egyptian Deities advertisement as a life-changing event, Harwood credited her encounter with St. Denis as clarifying “those high ideals credit toward which she had been striving for many years now began to take form and shine out more clearly. A new type of design expression began to come to her in a full abundance of inspiration.”55 Because Harwood lived with St. Denis for several months in the early 1930s, perhaps her exposure to the discussions of the Rhythmic Choir played a significant role in the change she experienced in her artistic output and honed her spiritualist beliefs. Although Harwood had been on an upward trajectory in terms of establishing herself as a poet in elite literary circles when she met St. Denis, the choreographer inspired Harwood to leave behind the world of ambition and use her creative gifts to share the deep personal feelings of her soul with the world.56Harwood's spiritualist impulses were already manifest in the 1920s, but the epiphany she experienced in Paris in 1928, coupled with the influence of St. Denis and her circle of fellow believers, began to show in Harwood's work in the early 1930s. Harwood's revised design style emerged in the twelve full-page illustrations she contributed to Lotus Light, St. Denis's first book of autobiographical poems. Published in 1932, Lotus Light consisted of almost one hundred poems about love, shrouded in the mysticism of beauty and truth. Nationally, St. Denis's poetry did not garner good reviews, but Salt Lake writers reported favorably on the collection, perhaps out of hometown pride of Harwood's association with St. Denis's celebrity.57 The poems were written in free verse, and as a Salt Lake Tribune writer gushed, they “have much of the magical grace and spiritual beauty that attends her [St. Denis's] movements in these terpsichorean interpretations
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