Concha Herrero Carretero, Álvaro Molina and Jesusa Vega, La Decoración ideada por François Grognard para los apartamentos de la Duquesa de Alba en el Palacio de Buenavista

Abstract

biographical essays written by Glenn Adamson, senior scholar at the Yale Center for British Art. In ‘Waiting like a Fern’, he reviews Tawney’s student years from 1945 to 1960; ‘Back to the Source’ describes Tawney’s sculptural work from 1961 to 1970; in ‘Seeker’, he discusses her works of 1970 to 1980; and in ‘Sage’, her late works of 1980 to 2007. Many of the documents, correspondence, journals, books, sketches and photographs are, like the artist herself, rather elusive and non-chronological, and so evade conventional systems of organisation and process. For example, in a bound sketchbook dating from 1984–1989, a work in watercolour, collage and ink moves around the page as a spiral of text. Lenore Tawney reflected, ‘Water is still like a mirror ... mind being in repose becomes the mirror of the universe’. Adamson pulls the reader into Tawney’s universe by closely examining how her life and work was composed in rhythms, moving backwards and forwards in time and place, expanding and contracting as in a musical sequence or the flow of water. Non-linearity also features in Adamson’s organisation of Tawney’s biography: rather than straightforward narrative, it echoes Tawney’s non-linear textile structures, and is particularly effective in cross-referencing earlier periods and challenges that Tawney encountered in her long working life. Many anecdotes can be enjoyed from Adamson’s entries, such as Tawney reinventing herself throughout her life, moving from Chicago to New York City in 1957 when she was fifty, though she claimed to be much younger. She was born in 1907, yet she claimed it was 1925. That no one noticed is interesting, since Tawney thought that fifty was a bit late to get started on an artistic career, especially for a woman. The installations and photographs are often accompanied by extracts from Tawney’s journals, which are both poetic and analytical. ‘To be an artist’, she wrote in 1992, ‘you must be brave. You can’t let yourself be scared by a blank sheet of drawing paper or a white canvas. But what you put on that paper must come from your deepest self’ (p 280). Additional support, advice and research was provided by Kathleen Nugent Mangan, executive director of the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation in New York, whose knowledge of Tawney’s work and friendship over forty years gives many personal insights in her foreword and afterword. In April 2020, Lenore Tawney: Mirror of the Universe was recognised by the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) for excellence in art publishing.