Clara Tice, Nude with
Butterfly, n.d. Courtesy of Francis Naumann Fine Art.
When the artist Clara Tice
first showed her nudes—paintings and drawings depicting the sinuousness and
lyricism of the human form—she wasn’t expecting to make enemies.
It was March 1915, and
members of Tice’s bohemian Greenwich Village community had organized an
exhibition of her work at one of their preferred watering holes: Polly’s
Restaurant. While the show began as an early outing of a young, unknown artist,
it became an overnight sensation when it caught the eye of Anthony Comstock,
the head of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, a morality squad backed by
the YMCA and other moneyed donors interested in moral reform.
(The group sought to
eradicate “every obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper,
writing, print or other publication of an indecent character” in New York
City.)
In a surprise raid,
Comstock—nicknamed “Simon Pure” by those he targeted—attempted to seize Tice’s
nudes. Luckily, the artist’s friends had gotten wind of the impending crusade
and removed the artworks just an hour before Comstock could snatch them away
and add them to his “unrivaled collection,” as Tice sarcastically referred to
his trove of confiscated works. The next day, Tice and her risqué work were the
talk of downtown Manhattan.
“Clara liked to say that
Comstock was her best publicist,” Dada scholar and dealer Francis Naumann tells
me, as we flip through Tice’s unpublished autobiography. Naumann and his wife,
fellow scholar Marie T. Keller, have written extensively on Tice, and are two
of several champions of the late artist, who was all but written out of history
books until recently (along with other female Dadaists, like Beatrice Wood and
Mina Loy, who worked alongside Marcel Duchamp in the early 1900s).
“Most women who were part
of the New York Dada group were pushed off into the periphery of scholarship,”
continues Naumann. “It’s hard to believe, given what a sensation Tice’s work
was in her time.”
Tice was born in 1888 in
Elmira, New York, on the border of Pennsylvania, but not long after, she moved
to New York City with her family. She grew up above the lodging house for
homeless children where her father worked, and was raised primarily by her
good-humored, liberally-minded mother, who encouraged Tice’s creative instincts
from a young age.
Thanks to her parents’
laissez-faire, progressive approach to child-rearing, as Keller points out in
her essay on Tice in Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender and Identity (1998),
the budding artist “encountered none of the familial obstacles usually imposed
upon a young woman of that time eager to pursue an artistic career.” By her
late teens, Tice had enrolled in Hunter College, but she left after celebrated
painter Robert Henri accepted her as one of the rare female students he took
under his wing.
In Henri’s Greenwich
Village school, Tice began to develop the fluid style she became known for,
depicting female and male nudes and other lively, rhythmic creatures like
birds, afghans, and butterflies that filled her bohemian life. When Henri and
several other established artists of the day organized the first exhibition of
Independent Artists in 1910, Tice showed a whopping 21 works. But it wasn’t
until the 1915 exhibition at Polly’s, and the controversy it stirred, that Tice
skyrocketed to New York fame.
While Tice admitted that
she worried “a bit over Mr. Comstock’s pronouncement of my work as ‘obscene,’”
she was generally unfazed by criticism—and responded with typical gusto, wit,
and her wry sense of humor. “I have never heeded academics and critics with
their set rules and formulas attempting to limit the freedom of the artist,
forcing him to follow the ‘old masters,’” she wrote in her autobiography.
In response to Comstock’s
crackdown, she and gallerist Guido Bruno also organized a performative mock
trial in which Tice would be “tried and therefore acquitted of the charges of
having committed unspeakable, black atrocities on white paper, abusing slender
bodies of girls, cats, peacocks, and butterflies,” as the delightfully
sarcastic announcement for the event, written by Tice, stated.
News of the performance was
also published, along with reproductions of Tice’s nudes, in the then-budding
magazine Vanity Fair, whose editor, Frank Crowninshield, had become a
passionate fan of Tice’s work and later anointed her “the queen of Greenwich
Village.”…….
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-erotic-artist-queen-bohemian-new-york
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