Biography
......Esther
Gilman was a multi-talented woman. She grew up as an artist imbibing what
emanated from the New York art world during its golden age of the 1950's
and 1960's. Keenly aware of herself as an artist at a time and in a place
where there was much to learn, she thrived.
.....Esther Morgenstern was born August 13th,
1922 in Cleveland, Ohio to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Even as a
child, spirited and independent, she began drawing. On Sunday afternoons
she would stretch out on the living room floor and copy from the funny
papers. Later she attended art classes at the Young Communist's League.
After graduating from hign school, she spent a year at the Cleveland School
of Art, and then transferred to the University of Wisconsin and later
the University of Michigan. Enrolled in classes directed for the most
part toward the commercial arts, uninspired, she left school in 1944,
one year short of graduation.
......Disillusioned
with what had been her major interest, she went to New York to study dance.
Despite the consternation of her father, who insisted she place herself
under the care of a Freudian analyst, she installed herself in a $25 per
month apartment on Morton Street in Greenwich Village where she studied
modern dance under the pioneer Afro-American choreogropher Pearl Primus.
She also took up Flamenco and classical dance, trying out, unsuccessfully,
for the chorus of Brigadoon on Broadway. At the same time she continued
to paint, studying privately and drawing at the Art Student's League;
at this time her greatest influences were Arshille Gorky, as well as the
Mexican modernists Rivera and Tamayo. During one period she developed
a serious interest in ceramics, but "the itch to paint" followed
her all her life. Esther said later in an interview, "I didn't care
much about the accumulation of money, possessions, or following old traditions."
......She
was surrounded by young, striving, creative individuals in various fields,
becoming close friends with Wally Cox, then a jeweler, struggling actor
and roommate of Marlon Brando, whom Esther dated briefly. In 1947 she
made her first of many journies to Mexico. Around the same time she met
a village neighbor, struggling poet Richard Gilman whom she married in
1949. Living on a small allowance from her father and Richard's meager
earnings as a writer, the two traveled extensively to Mexico and decided
in 1951 to escape the oppresive atmosphere of MacCarthyism and move to
Europe. After traveling through France they settled for a time in Florence
in an apartment facing the Pitti palace, but all was not as the young
couple hoped it would be. Finding it too difficult to adapt to other cultures
and languages, they returned to New York and in 1952 briefly separated.
......At
the same time, in a crisis of religious faith, they both converted from
Judaism (actually atheism) to Catholicism, becoming part of an avant-garde
artistic community that included close friends of the famous monk and
writer Thomas Merton. Though doing so with serious intentions, they eventually
experienced a gradual " loss" of faith, or at least loss of
faith strong enough to keep them actively in the church, and they ultimately
renounced Catholicism. Richard wrote about this period in his memoir "Faith,
Sex and Mystery" in the 1980's.
The iconography of Catholicism, however, remained a constant theme in
Esther's work.
......In
1956, she had her first solo exhibition in New York, and from that time
considered herself a professional painter. She also began studying etching
and in 1963 published the first of three children's books, "A Little
Girl and Her Mother", written by Beatrice de Regniers. The other
two were "Nothing But A Dog", a feminist story about a girl
and her love of dogs, and "Little Boat Lighter Than A Cork"
written by Ruth Krauss. She also produced illustrations for such journals
as Jubilee and Commonweal, illustrated an autobiography for her father
and worked on several books that were not published.
......In 1958 her only child, Nicholas, was born and in 1964 she separated permanently from Richard Gilman. She married again, briefly, to the actor Richard Orzel.
......In the early 1960's, through Richard Gilman's work as a theatre critic, Esther became involved in theatrical set design. She worked on many productions at the Cafe La Mama, the Judson Church and other avant-garde venues, and was informally associated with the ground-breaking group the Open Theatre. Some of the outstanding productions she worked on were Megan Terry's Viet Rock, and Tom Eyen's Miss Nefertiti Regrets which introduced the public to Bette Midler. She later designed sets for productions of Sandy Wilson's The Boyfriend and The Mikado in Massachussetts.
......Also,
around 1963, she began work on a series of monumental collage/constructions
using found objects, mostly culled from her travels in Mexico; few of
these pieces, unfortunately, survive, although one was shown in an exhibition
in Germany in the 1990's.
......In
1967 Esther, her husband and Nicholas moved to a large 19th century farmhouse
in Great Barrington, Massachussetts, where she lived for four years. At
this time she was working on collages, prints and abstract expressionist
paintings. Overwhelmed with the responsibility of owning a country house
as well as her feeling of isolation living in a rural area, she returned
to New York in 1971. She moved into a large apartment on 88th Street and
Riverside Drive where she lived the rest of her life.
......Esther had been collecting pre-World War I photographs in the flea markets of Europe, the United States and Mexico, originally using the photos and "found objects" to create collages. But she found their dimensions constricting. Then came the Women's movement that in Esther's words "broke me open. I already had ninteenth and early twentieth century photos that tended to be about women's lives. I turned to watercolor to enlarge and combine the photos with personal artifacts. Suddenly my paintings were statements on the human condition". She exhibited this body of work, which would prove to be her largest, many times, including a one-person show at the Razor Gallery in Soho in 1978 and a large retrospective in Cleveland in 1988.
......In the early ‘80's, Esther began spending time in Paris, returning for five consecutive years to the same left-bank apartment. In 1984 she had a show of her illustration work in St.Amand Montrand. Having always been more comfortable working figuratively, despite long detours into abstraction in the ‘50's and ‘60's, she returned to classes at the Art Student's League of New York to study academic figure drawing and painting, and produced many fine figure studies through the ‘80's.
......In 1985, she discovered she had cancer which, after a long and valient battle which included many alternative therapies, proved fatal. She died at home on March 12th, 1989. During the last several years of her life, she had returned to her earliest interest in Mexican culture and art. The painting that marked the completion of her life's work was a portrait of an indigeonous woman from Chiapas. Her son Nicholas, an artist who now lives in Mexico, organized a retrospective exhibition in San Miguel de Allende in 1998.
*I wish to thank Dr. Lynette Seator and Soledad Santiago for their help in writing this biography. Nicholas Gilman 2003
**Please send me your reminiscences for later publication