Artigo Revisado por pares

“A Tyrannical Grace”: Mabel Frazer, the American West, and the Navigation of a Man's Space

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 91; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/26428652.91.4.04

ISSN

2642-8652

Autores

James R. Swensen,

Tópico(s)

American History and Culture

Resumo

In 1949 the painter Mabel Frazer (1887–1981) applied for, and finally received, promotion to the position of associate professor of art at the University of Utah. Yet, after nearly three decades of diligent service, she witnessed her male peers, often with far fewer bona fides, receive advancement.1 This was the challenge, she acknowledged, of being a “woman in a man's institution.”2 Throughout her career Frazer repeatedly overcame similar challenges and, by so doing, defied and redefined what it meant to be a female artist in Utah. This essay explores one of the significant ways in which Frazer's work stretched gendered conventions. More specifically it focuses on her work in the rugged landscapes of southern Utah and northern Arizona. Working in the West during the 1920s and early 1930s, Frazer fought against the conventions of a woman's place in the arts and the idea that landscape painting was “man's work.”3 Ultimately, by challenging how a female artist could paint and where she could work, Frazer created an important, if largely forgotten, contribution to the representation of the American West (fig. 1).Frazer understood rugged landscapes. She was raised in Beaver, Utah, in what was still seen as a frontier town, a “verdant city in the dusty red desert” located in a land of “rolling wastes of sage and juniper.”4 Both of her grandfathers were builders; her father was a stone mason, and Frazer claimed to have grown up “in the stone yard.”5 Yet, from her earliest recollections she wanted to be a painter. “There never was a time when I was not an artist at heart,” she insisted.6 From the beginning art was not a refined pastime for Frazer but a lifelong pursuit and a struggle that was often compounded because of her gender.Eventually Frazer's artistic pursuits took her to the University of Utah, where she studied under Edwin Evans in a field dominated by men. Severe but able to recognize talent, Evans pushed Frazer to the point of quitting. She insisted, however, that if she did not make it as an artist, she would go into surgery, a field that was even more difficult for a woman to enter than painting. At this early stage, Frazer's divergent career ambitions evince an individual who was willing to challenge normative occupational roles. At her nadir, she invested herself in making one last drawing that would either make or break her career. Ultimately Evans praised Frazer's efforts. This small victory gave her the motivation to continue, even as “discouragements and difficulties pile[d] up,” and in 1914 she allegedly became the first female student to graduate with a degree in art from the University of Utah.7By the time she graduated, Frazer was exhibiting her work among “all the prominent Utah artists.”8 She also furthered her studies in New York City, which she considered the “mecca of all American art students.”9 Frazer studied at the prestigious Art Students’ League under Frank V. DuMond, an influential instructor who taught early modernists like Georgia O'Keeffe and John Marin. A photograph of DuMond's studio shows Frazer (standing far right) and seven female peers surrounding their engaging instructor (fig. 2). Color was the essential element Frazer learned from her teacher, whom she adored.10 And DuMond, it was reported, believed that Frazer was “the kind of woman who has a real message for the world.”11 At the league she would have come into contact with another of the school's instructors, Mahonri Young, who must have provided a touch of home for the younger Utah artist.12 In its strident pursuit of artistic excellence and independence, it was noted that the league “held fast to the ideal, it has chosen and pursued the difficult thing, it has refused the easiest way.”13 The same may be said of Frazer, who was not afraid of pursuing difficult things and was known for not selecting easy ways.Flickers of success and enhanced studies, however, did not decrease her struggles in becoming a full-time painter when she returned to Utah in 1918. Later she readily admitted “that Utah is not a particularly good place for a woman who has brains.”14 She began teaching at the University of Utah in 1920 and would teach alongside several key Utah artists such as J. T. Harwood, A. B. Wright, Florence Ware, and LeConte Stewart. Frazer taught a wide range of courses at the university including sculpture, pottery, textile design, and anatomy. In analyzing the breadth of her thirty-three-year teaching career at the university, it seems clear that Frazer taught everything that her male peers were unwilling to teach. In the words of Robert Olpin, she “did it all.”15 In important ways, however, she was not accommodating and even defied her male colleagues when necessary. This was most clearly demonstrated when she exposed Wright's sexual misconduct and suffered from overt sexism and harassment as a result.16Frazer not only stood out from her male peers at the university, but she also had many attributes that set her apart from her female counterparts. Contemporaries saw her as possessing traits not typically associated with women artists at that time, including ambition, independence, and versatility.17 She could also be volatile; one associate noted that she was always “near the exploding point.”18 Furthermore, Frazer was seen as eccentric, which can be a positive virtue for a man playing off romantic notions of the creative artist, but not for a woman.19 Not exhibiting a matronly attitude toward her students, she was also known to be a demanding teacher, a taskmaster, or at worst, a tyrant.20 “I really have a lot of love in my heart,” she insisted, “but I also have a lot of damn-it-to-hell.”21By her own accord, Frazer was known to be fully absorbed in her work to the point of obsession. This was possible, others believed, because of her marital status; not having a husband or a family to support was seen as the reason and the result of her single-eyed focus on her work. Indeed, Frazer was a complicated individual, an “enigma . . . to all those in daily or casual association with her.”22 A reporter for the Salt Lake Telegram wrote in 1928 that “the attainment of her desires and ambitions may entail a long, hard battle, but she lets nothing stand in her way until she reaches her goal.” Frazer, the local press concluded, possessed a remarkable “strength of will” and a “certain ruggedness and ruthlessness.”23At the time, critics—most notably male critics who made up most of the profession—did not know how to write about female artists.24 This was certainly true of Frazer's critics, who often struggled to understand her but recognized that she was doing something important. Despite the challenges posed by her strong personality, she was seen as the “girl with original ideas.”25 As Olpin pointed out, it was Utah women artists like Frazer, and not their more conservative male counterparts, who were more likely to experiment artistically. “While the gents carefully ran the show,” the Utah art historian conceded, “many women in subordinated positions worked hard and had more creative ideas in a week than some of their supervisors or directors/protectors and/or chairmen actually had in a lifetime.”26 This was certainly true of Frazer, who cultivated a strong interest in modernist thought and expression, after her training in New York. “Miss Frazer has kept abreast of the modern art movements and her work is worthy of thoughtful study,” one reviewer noted.27 Not only did she keep up with current styles, but she widely lectured, wrote, and advocated for the arts in a variety of outlets, including the Improvement Era, an influential magazine produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Throughout her career, she was considered a “very outspoken participant in the give and take of the local art scene.”28One of the most important ways in which Frazer applied herself in her “long, hard battle” was her exploration of dramatic landscapes and particularly the national parks of Zion, Bryce, and the Grand Canyon, as well as Cedar Breaks before it became a national monument. Although others taught landscape painting at the University of Utah, she professed that her greatest love was landscape painting and her favorite subject was “southern Utah grandeur.”29 Indeed, during the summers from roughly 1924 to 1930, Frazer arguably made the best work of her long and varied career, exploring and depicting the “rainbow canyons” of the Southwest.30By working within these landscapes Frazer was part of a broader and evolving discourse of who could capture and possess rugged places.31 Despite not receiving the same recognition as men, women played a central role in the American West.32 “Exclude women from Western history,” Patricia Limerick Nelson famously observed, “and unreality sets in.”33 Yet, while scholarship is continuing to create room for the “frontierswoman,” the notion of a hypermasculinized West has dominated the discourse.34 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the traditional notions of manhood were being challenged as cultural and societal changes were shifting. American men, in particular, struggled to maintain what scholar R. W. Connell called a “hegemonic masculinity.”35 While this hegemony took on many forms, one of the most important was overcoming nature and challenging the unknown dangers of the frontier as a way of bolstering one's manliness.36For generations of white American men, the continued exploration of the American West, the place of ragged landscapes and “rugged individualism,” was a way of securing and projecting masculinity; it was seen as a perpetual “restorative tonic” for manhood.37 It was a place to be conquered, pacified, and possessed. This was particularly true of sublime landscapes like Yosemite and the Grand Canyon, which required intrepid men to overcome terrifying experiences in order to glimpse and capture scenes of awe. “Many of the activities celebrated as central to the western experience,” the historian Katherine Morrissey has observed, were considered “men's work.”38 In the “ideological masculine West,” this was true of explorers and cowboys as well as artists.39By undertaking her own heroic journeys, Frazer was a pioneer in challenging these myths. “My roots are in Zion,” she professed. “I love the virile youth of it all, the glory of the open spaces, the teeming fields, the majestic mountains.”40 Possessing connotations of masculinity, male energy, and sex drive, “virile” was an intriguing, if not atypical term for a female artist to use at that time. The landscape was a masculine space that could, she believed, yield to her. It was an entity that could be possessed and controlled through her art. This was not passing fancy, she readily admitted in 1928: “I would like to spend the rest of my life in southern Utah, just absorbing its intense, almost unreal beauty, and trying to capture it on canvas.”41As a native of the state and its traditions, Frazer believed that she was in a unique position to capture its localisms. “What Utah makes, makes Utah,” she proclaimed.42 Moreover, as a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she tended to challenge other, more localized stereotypes.43 The Mormon West was seen as the purview of the “God-fearing, law-abiding, and peace-loving frontiersmen.”44 Frazer stretched the notion of who could work in the frontier. She challenged the idea that women were tied to their domestic duties, proclaiming, in a sense, her own manifest destiny: “I believe God sent us to the West to create a new commonwealth better than any we might copy, and I am determined to do my share to create an art of our own.”45 Through her efforts, Frazer went beyond the stereotypical Mormons in the West who, it was believed, preferred more pragmatic approaches to the wild landscapes that surrounded them. “Mormon pioneers, cowboys, and sheepherders,” it was professed, “have looked upon the marvels of natural color to see them as ‘piles of rocks’ that couldn't sprout a kernel or feed a beast.”46 That was not the case with Frazer, who believed, as an “articulate soul,” that she could express her reaction to the land through her powers of “downright sincerity combined with endless study and experiment.”47Outside observers did not know what to make of Frazer, as she tended to defy what female artists were supposed to do. According to the Salt Lake Telegram, those following a “feminine feeling” were to work in watercolor, a medium that was traditionally connected to women.48 In addition, female artists were supposed to paint still lifes, “bowls of flowers or baskets of fruit.” “But in these, too,” the writer remarked, “women have chosen scenes typical in appeal to the feminine and have left the larger subjects and vast scenes to the men to paint.”49 Frazer did not leave these subjects to men. “I don't want to be known as a still life painter,” she protested. “My heart isn't in them.” Instead, she created landscapes that challenged the notion that only men could paint vast scenes. Unlike her peer Louise Richards Farnsworth, another important Utah artist, Frazer did not work with picturesque vistas. Rather, it was reported that she had “forsaken” pleasant northern views and was “concentrating on southern Utah landscape in particular.”50 Another local critic offered conflicted praise of her landscapes, stating that they possessed “characteristic freedom, tyrannical grace, and structural solidity.”51 What exactly is “tyrannical grace,” but an oxymoronic coupling of male and female, aggressive and passive, the terrible and beautiful. Unwittingly the writer captured the essence of a feminized sublime that characterizes Frazer's painting at this stage in her career.52Despite offering conflicted, and often backhanded, praise, critics acknowledged that Frazer was portraying landscapes in new and even pioneering ways. Frazer learned of these new ideas while studying in New York City in the 1920s, especially at the Art Students’ League, where she was exposed to European modernism. She embraced the avant-garde and brought it to Utah, which one reporter observed, tepidly noting that “Miss Frazer has kept abreast of the modern art movements and her work is worthy of thoughtful study.”53 Years before George Dibble, Dale Fletcher, and other young “vandals,” as they were called, struggled to find acceptance as modernists, Frazer was already revealing her willingness and courage to try new techniques and to create challenging new forms.54 Frazer's embrace of modernist ideas caused quizzical and mixed assessments among her peers and in the press. For Harwood, her works were “unusually interesting.”55 Commenting on her landscapes, one reporter noted that her work was “done in rather different style.”56 Another reported that although her painting was “modern in technique,” “many may find it unpleasing or clumsy.”57Although she did not always find a receptive audience in Utah and was not widely recognized for her efforts, Frazer was in the vanguard of modernist artists working in the American West. In important ways she was part of a growing number of female artists and writers working in western landscapes, which were touted as “primal and liberating.”58 Frazer embraced the stark western landscape before many of her more famous peers and was one of the first to depict it through a modernist lens. She began painting southern Utah at roughly the same time that Conrad Buff began making painting trips to Zion National Park.59 She worked in the southwest before Georgia O'Keeffe arrived in New Mexico in 1929, and she preceded Maynard Dixon to many of the desert and sandstone landscapes for which he would be recognized. Moreover, Frazer shared this space with other important modernists like John Marin, Stuart Davis, and Laura Gilpin.60Like her peers, Frazer found an inherent abstraction in the southwestern landscape. She understood and captured the power of fragmentation of red-rock cliffs, the cutting form of a distant mesa on the horizon, the orbicular quality of sagebrush, and the angularity of white clouds sharply resting on unseen atmospheric layers in an immense blue sky. Like O'Keeffe, she seems to have intuited that “half your work is done for you” when working in the landscapes of the American Southwest.61 Frazer also demonstrated an ability to combine traditional landscape with new bold form, which was seen with hesitation in her home state. According to one critic, Frazer “is a modernist with reservations; she blends with the tenets of the new some of the basic of the old, and spices it all with her own pungent beliefs.”62Not only was Frazer working with and against traditional painting standards, but she also pushed other societal norms. At the time, many female artists felt limited and confined. In 1923, O'Keeffe stated, “I can't live where I want to—I can't go where I want to—I can't even say what I want to.”63 Frazer faced similar challenges, but not tied down to a family or husband, she enjoyed freedoms that many of her female peers did not possess. This freedom was enhanced by a Ford Model A, which she purchased in the early 1920s and drove for the rest of her life. Her purchase placed her in the middle of a movement that offered thousands of people across the United States, and young women in particular, the newfound opportunity of mobility.64 The automobile became the central focus of new freedoms, and new relationships arose between these machines and their owners. Early on there was a tendency to anthropomorphize one's car and for women to give them female names and identities.65 Frazer named her Ford but characteristically did not follow larger trends. Rather, she named her brindle-colored automobile Abe Lincoln, because, as she stated, “Lincoln freed the slaves and this car freed me.”66 Frazer explained further, “It was so inconvenient to be a woman in those days without an automobile. . . . But when I got my car, I could go anyplace I wanted to go by myself. I just reveled in it.”67 Frazer was at the beginning of what Wallace Stegner called “the period of extravagant personal liberty” made possible by “wheels and cheap gas.”68 This liberty was key to her work in the Southwest. Years later she reminisced, “I used to have my car all packed and ready to take off the minute school was out, and camped out all summer painting, got back the day school opened in the fall.”69These were not trips of comfort or ease, Stegner reminds readers, but hard, “real experience.”70 Working in the desert landscape was not without its hardships, and Frazer faced the difficulties that daunted many painters. The vast and varied landscapes from the Grand Canyon northward into southern Utah were known to be challenging yet rewarding. As one Utah writer noted, there were many local artists who were “working furiously to capture elusive beauty and grandeur of the scenic canyons on canvas—a task that has discouraged many artist[s]. There is an indefinable quality about the form and coloring of the canyons which strikes despair into the hearts of most artists who attempt to capture them. But none the less,” the writer concluded, “few are the artists who fail to respond to the charm and challenge of the canyons; likewise most of them bring back some things which perhaps do not entirely satisfy them, but are lovely nevertheless.”71 Despite working in dry, inhospitable locations, it was clear to her peers, such as Alice Merrill Horne, that Frazer loved the desert, and the desert did not spurn her.72 “Life [in] a hot Arizona desert,” a reporter commented, “seems to hold no terrors for Mabel Frazer.”73 The artist writes of “trudging over the broiling desert” and notes that the lack of conveniences constantly made her work difficult. She often relied on local communities for help and assistance.74 Yet she persisted, believing that experimentation and struggle were key components of an artist's development.75Frazer insisted that her artistic output was worth all the trials she endured in the field. In a remarkable passage made in situ, she elaborated on some of her challenges and motivations: Today as I sat on a rock with my canvas before me, in the scorching sun, with blistered face and sunburnt hands, I thought just why do I endure all this when I might be at my cool home in the city painting just as beautiful a flower as this wild plant of the desert? And as I sat there the call of the great out-of-doors seemed to come to me and I knew that the love and reverence I had for this lovely flower of the desert thrilled me with all the inspiration I possess. My parched throat, the fierceness of the heat and the inconveniences I endured were nothing, compared with the depth of satisfaction and the great joy I realized. The cliffs of this country thrill me, the desert inspires me, and the hospitality of its people I adore.76Despite the difficulties and in contrast to other female painters working in the West, like Edith Hamblin, Frazer traveled and camped alone. To avoid dangers or run-ins with unwanted strangers, she slept under her car (prompting the Utah art historian Tom Alder to wonder why she slept under her Meineke instead of the stars).77 Despite the hazards, Abe Lincoln (the car) gave Frazer the freedom to travel throughout Utah and Arizona's red-rock country as well as the opportunity to venture off more well-traveled routes to discover and interpret new landscapes.The structure, freedom, and tyrannical grace of Frazer's style may be observed in her depictions of many well-known locations in southern Utah and points south along the Arizona Strip. This is true of her depictions of Cedar Breaks, a location that Frazer frequently painted. Located high in the forested hills above Cedar City, Cedar Breaks was (and is) known for its vast amphitheater of cream, orange, and burnt-sienna rock pinnacles, towers, and buttresses that stand out sharply against expanses of lofty piñon and bristlecone pines. At times Frazer painted the scene framed and directed by the trunks and branches of the bristlecone pines found along the rim, obfuscating what would have attracted other visitors. In other instances, she pulled back to capture the remarkable scene breaking away from the hillside and highlighted by stunningly bold color (see fig. 1). In her work in Cedar Breaks, the painter reveals her indebtedness to Paul Cézanne and the modernist tradition of landscape painting.Most experience Cedar Breaks from the road and trails along the eastern ridge of the monument, which provides a vertiginous view sharply down into the massive amphitheater toward the green canopies of the hills below, where observers may obtain a total view of the landscape. This experience is similar and often compared to that of nearby Bryce Canyon, the two places often being visited together. At the time, many believed that Bryce, with its “lacy fretwork” of red-rock hoodoos and softer colors, was a more fitting subject for female artists.78 In truth, Frazer worked in Bryce often, and one of her paintings of the famous sight prompted one critic to write: “It takes decided courage to attempt it and it is a subject that has tried and discouraged far older and experienced artists than Miss Frazer.”79 Yet the writer went on to recommend that Frazer try the subject in watercolor, a “more facile medium for the ephemeral and fragile beauty of the formations.” Frazer frequently had to contend with sexist criticism like this, and it is difficult to imagine a male peer receiving a similar recommendation. Yet, whether painting Bryce or Cedar Breaks, Frazer did not shy away, and she seems to have preferred the latter, which was seen as possessing “a wilder, loftier beauty on a much wider scale than Bryce.”80 For her view, she penetrated deep into the breaks, or what was called the “circle of painted cliffs,” coming up close to a clash of individual forms (fig. 3).81 From this exposed vantage point, she not only grasped the variety of color but was able to better represent its “larger proportions” and its massive features that were likened to “Gothic walls, and Sphinx-sized statues.”82Frazer often spoke of a “structural sense” and believed that structure was “most vital” and “a quality rare in woman's work.”83 As the “daughter of builders,” however, she organized her work, she said, as an “architectural plan” that seemed to surprise her male peers who did not associate draftsmanship (itself a problematic word) and solid formal composition with a female painter. Women were to be dainty. Frazer also believed that she was a “sculptor at heart,” which only added to her sense of structure.84 Her “structural solidity” can be seen in her painting of the region west of Zion National Park (fig. 4).85 In this work, sand and sagebrush maintain their form as do the various layers of southern Utah's complex and twisting geology, which fights the mirage of atmospheric perspective. As evinced by this landscape, color also played an important role in a painting's structure. “Color,” Frazer wrote, “had to be the music or melodious quality that built up a mood.”86 The total effect is a subtle yet bold and organized investigation of the forms and colors of a variegated region.A similar effect may be seen in her painting of one of Zion's towering white cliffs (fig. 5). This work, likewise, sidesteps a view most tourists would see. It literally goes above and beyond the national park's famous valley where most painters attempt to capture its grandeur. Frazer knew Zion well. It was reported that she was an “indefatigable worker” in the national park, making “in[n]umerable sketches” and nurturing a “fairy romance” for its dramatic canyons.87 Painted somewhere between Diana's Throne near Mt. Carmel Junction or Zion's imposing West Rim, Frazer did not select one of the park's famous vistas or recognizable features. Rather, she captured a scene easily missed. Its high vantage point, moreover, would have required a trek off the common path. By selecting this view, she highlighted the sublimity and presence of one of the many neglected monuments of the park. She also captured the subtle colors of distant corners of the park. “Beneath the white and red of the higher walls,” the WPA guide to Utah observed, “are the purple, pink, lilac, yellow, blue, and mauve shades in the most brilliant-colored rocks, and the colors shift constantly with the light and seasons.”88 Few paintings of Zion have captured these elements as well and by so doing revealed a scene of its “poetry, structure and essence of great geological drama.”89There is probably no better example of Frazer's work in the West than her 1928 painting Sunrise, North Rim Grand Canyon (fig. 6). Scholar Martha Sandweiss has argued that female artists of Frazer's generation tended to avoid heroic or grand landscapes, choosing instead more intimate or vernacular subjects.90 This is not the case with Frazer, who boldly chose a scene that is immense in its scale and proportions and universal in its appeal. Her painting was created on the canyon's more rugged and less built-up Northern Rim near Point Sublime, a jagged spot from which it was possible to experience what Clarence Dutton called “by far the most sublime of all earthly spectacles.”91 Women were not absent from the Grand Canyon, but few had tried to represent it. This did not daunt Frazer. For scholar Joni Kinsey, her painting represented a pioneering example of the feature by a woman.92Growing up in Beaver, it is likely that Frazer would have come into contact with James Fennemore, a prominent member of the community who, decades earlier, was John Wesley Powell's second photographer on his 1872 exploration of the Grand Canyon region.93 From Fennemore she would have learned of the canyon's grandeur as well as the difficulty and danger of its exploration.94 Few locations in the West are as associated with manliness and danger as the Grand Canyon. It was a place of “wild explorations and journeys through the wilderness.”95 Well into the twentieth century it was still seen as the embodiment of the rugged landscape, despite concerted efforts to tame and commercialize its space.As “the sublimest thing on earth,” the Grand Canyon was (is) a particularly daunting challenge for artists.96 According to Arthur Wesley Dow, “the Canyon is not like any other subject in color, lighting or scale of distances. It forces the artist to seek new ways of painting—its own ways.”97 After his first visits to the massive gorge, Thomas Moran broke up and reconfigured the canyon on canvas in an attempt to show its splendor. Indeed, the experience of depicting the massive geological system is trying for all artists. Frazer acknowledged this reality, noting that “I can't take on the whole Grand Canyon at once.”98 Despite the challenge, she succeeded in creating a sweeping view of one of the most difficult subjects in landscape painting. In earlier examples she sought the poetry of the western landscape; with this depiction of the Grand Canyon she desired to seize majesty.99Captured at sunrise, Frazer painted the dramatic scene of convulsing rock forms, concatenated mesas, and the great sweep of the Colorado River, which is not seen but its presence unmistakable. In many ways, her work is not as abstract or even as radical as contemporaries like Raymond Johnson, who turned to a fusion of modernist styles to capture a place he saw as “full of mystery and awesome.”100 Her work is not an exact depiction of the view at Point Sublime but a scene filtered through the artist's keen sense of space. Like Moran before her, she made changes for artistic effect. “I place no value upon literal transcripts from Nature,” Moran commented. “My general scope is not realistic. . . . Topography in art is valueless.”101 His friend and survey patron, John Wesley Powell, likewise noted that Moran's painting of the Grand Canyon display

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