Two Lupes
In which I wish my mother a happy birthday and covet Robert Motherwell's sporty shirt.
Before I launch into the heart of this post, I’d like to acknowledge two important matters:
1. I want that shirt that Robert Motherwell is wearing in the above photo (taken at Black Mountain College in 1945)
2. My mother would be 107 today (she gave birth to me when she was 75. . . unbelievable? Would you believe 42?).
April 3rd, 2023
Dear Mom,
In your short story about Black Mountain College, “The Dance at the End of the War,” you didn’t change much about the people you met there. Sometimes I wonder why you bothered to change names at all. The artist Robert Motherwell, for instance, you renamed Mitchell. The physical descriptions of him and his wife, Maria, seem pretty accurate descriptions of the characters’ real-life counterparts:
As she sat on the pier, she knew that the couple coming toward her must be Mitchell and his wife, apparently just arrived. He was round-faced with gentle features, and amber-colored hair that gave him a kind of farm-boy look. His wife was small, dark, and striking with extraordinary light, tilted eyes. Artists, she decided, always choose the most beautiful wives. Perhaps they had to do homage to beauty in every way.
When searching the Internet for “Robert Motherwell marriages,” I had to do a little digging to find Motherwell’s wife, Maria Emilia Ferreira y Moyeros, a Mexican actress, whom he met on a voyage to Mexico in 1941. I remember you telling me how beautiful she was, and how in love they seemed.
In your story, you christen her, “Lupe.” The substitution intrigues me. You and just about everyone else from your time would have known of the famous “Mexican Spitfire,” Lupe Velez, the only Mexican Hollywood star that I’ve ever heard of from that era. She was quite famous in the 40s, though largely forgotten today, and was generally cast in the racist fashion of the time in films that needed a Mexican “sexpot.” Velez killed herself in 1944 by downing 75 Seconol pills and a glass of brandy to avoid the shame of giving birth to an “illegitimate child” from her romance with Harald Ramond, an Austrian refugee who worked in film as a dubber for Warner Brothers. By calling Maria Lupe, were you giving a nod to Lupe Velez in this way?
I know that in your world of the 1940s, “Artists” were of course assumed to be male, and Mexican actresses and trophy wives were meant to be seen by the public as “sexpots” (what a strange word) or in more refined circles, an “homage to beauty.” I know that you would remind me that this is a short story and not your opinion (yes, I know you were a proud feminist and brought me to National Organization of Women meetings when I was a boy), but I’m sure that you also internalized some of the pervasive and mostly unquestioned sexism of the time. After all, it was Motherwell who told you that you should stick to writing because there had never been any “great women artists “(as I mentioned in my first post). But I’ve been surprised to learn through your letters that you and the Motherwells became pretty good friends and you even visited them in East Hampton. Still, you must have been disturbed enough by his comments to remember them many decades later and relay them to me, and apparently at the time to your mentor, art historian, Meyer Schapiro. Somewhere, I have a letter from him to you telling you not to pay Motherwell too much attention because he “teaches his uncertainties,” a phrase that has stuck with me since the day I read it 25 years ago. Perhaps Motherwell didn’t mean what he told you about women artists and merely said it in passing because he didn’t think you were any good. In your short story, the character based on him, Mitchell criticizes your alter ego, for being too representational. As an abstract expressionist, your representational work likely would have seemed uninspired to him.
I’m not trying to be an apologist for Motherwell, but I have no idea of the complexities of the man and I don’t think you would have befriended him if he was a total creep . . . well, that’s not true. I know of at least two creeps, one of them quite famous, whom you befriended, both of whom betrayed you deeply and forever. Motherwell, whatever his faults, had a major influence on your life by way of suggesting you give up visual art and that you travel to Mexico.
As for his “homage to beauty,” he paid homage quite frequently as these things go, didn’t he? Motherwell was a serial monogamist, married four times, most famously to the well-known abstract expressionist, Helen Frankenthaler, thirteen years his junior. They divorced in 1971 and he married one more time after that.
I’d like to think of your renaming of Maria as Lupe not as an homage to beauty or to sexpotism, but as an homage to women in difficult circumstances caused by sexism. Your choice of “Lupe” as a name might well have been coincidental, but I can’t help seeing it as at least unconsciously chosen for the parallels to your life. Or the life of Maria Motherwell. I’m intrigued and saddened that Lupe Velez ended her life because of her pregnancy, as I know you would have been. You at least made different choices. As you said in a later letter to Leonard Rapport, while you could berate herself for doing something so “stupid” as getting pregnant “out of wedlock” by a completely self-absorbed man, you preferred to see your life in a more combative if not wholly positive light, as “anarchic.”
Happy birthday from your sometimes equally anarchic (and hopefully not stupid) son.