by Elspeth Cameron
ISBN 9781897151136 | 6" x 9" | Hardcover | $36.95
Categories:Non-Fiction - Historical, Gay and Lesbian
Purchase:Local Bookstores | amazon.ca | chapters.indigo.ca
And Beauty Answers (Preview)
Song
Out of agony is music born —
With love broken and hopeless
Man turns to beauty's self for peace
And beauty answers, looking in his eyes,
There is no peace,
Save that which time or death may bring, but one word holds;
I bid you "sing."
(Florence Wyle, Poems, 1959)
Introduction
Conventional wisdom has it that Frances Loring and Florence Wyle are difficult to tell apart. Even their first names, which begin with the letter "F" and denote two European centres of art, are confusing. And both names contain the syllable "lor." Their work is not easily told apart either. Frances Gage, a younger sculptor who knew them and their work well, recalls having difficulty identifying a work before finding Wyle's signature on it. As one writer observed in 1977, a decade after their deaths, "Loring and Wyle, who were ‘among the last of the salon-and-academy romantics to retain some relevance in Canadian art, should really be viewed as a single talent, not two ... [E]ach drew upon the other's strength to create a joint body of work that transcended the individual.'"
After studying The Girls — as they were known — and their work for a few years, I disagree. Although they shared neoclassical training, they were different individuals. There was more life force in Frances, more agitation. Her work is more ruffled and powerful than Florence's. Frances more often depicted motion; Florence created serenity. Florence was more spiritual than Frances and, paradoxically, more earthy. For her, the life force was in all nature, and in nature's creatures. It was her privilege to record it. Frances was a flamboyant extrovert; Florence was a tough-minded introvert. Even their methods differed. Frances dashed off her creations in energetic spurts; whereas Florence worked regularly and hard. Frances sculpted with empathy, projecting herself into her portrait busts and statues. Florence worked with sympathy, honouring otherness. There were class differences too. Frances had been raised amid wealth and culture in a family that prized women. Florence grew up among farming people who were not well educated and who regarded girls as second-class citizens. There is something quintessential in the roles they played late in their lives. Florence patiently answered the door like a servant and said, "Come in, and meet Miss Loring," whom she fittingly nicknamed "Queenie." And Frances would receive their guests lounging like royalty on a bank of pillows.
Whenever they were asked about whether they influenced each other, they said no. Typically, Frances once said, "neither of [us] ever interferes with the work of the other and while [we] criticize each other's output, it is usually only in a very slight and friendly fashion."
There have been several proposals for a book about Frances Loring and Florence Wyle. Immediately after they died, an informal group who called themselves the Friends of Loring and Wyle tried to find an author for such a book and raised a subsidy for it. The original idea was for a book that would be composed of about two-thirds sculpture illustrations and one-third biographical and critical text. The Friends knew the two women wanted such a book. Loring and Wyle actually initiated the project five or six years before they died. They gathered several photographs of their work and approached Clare Bice — then president of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in Toronto — for advice about publishers. All three thought the Canada Council might fund it.
Frances made it clear that she did not want a thorough investigation into her private life. "Miss Loring was upset that everyone got into her life," Lawrence Hayward, a neighbour who befriended the two sculptors in their old age, reported. "She wanted closure when she died. She wanted [the comments of] her friends to die with her. She wished to have [only] her works and efforts as an artist written about."
Clare Bice approached Montreal art critic Robert Ayre to write the text in February 1968. Frances Gage, as one of The Girls' executors, went to see him armed with a sheaf of photographs, but Ayre declined. Hayward himself proposed writing such a book, but his background as a dancer and his later career as a massage therapist made him inadequate to the task. "I do not think that Mr. Hayward would be a suitable collaborator," publisher Jack McClelland, of McClelland & Stewart, informed the trustees in 1969.vii Hayward failed to get a Canada Council grant to undertake the project. That same year, biographer Lois Milani approached Frances Gage to discuss writing a book about The Girls. That, too, did not materialize.
In 1972, an affectionate, anecdotal biography of Loring and Wyle by their friend, sculptor Rebecca Sisler, appeared. Sisler complained that the $2,000 Canada Council grant she received was not enough to do justice to her subjects. But her short book, The Girls, is lively and informative throughout. In 1987, as part of a large retrospective of The Girls' work, art historian Christine Boyanoski prepared a handsome and thorough catalogue that includes several photographs of The Girls and their works, a chronology of their lives, a bibliography, and a brief biographical summary.
It is not surprising that a full biography of Loring and Wyle seemed desirable. Their work was essential to the development of Canadian sculpture. As early as 1925 one journalist predicted, "Anyone with even a little knowledge of sculpture can safely prophesy that both they and their church will, some time, be very well and widely known indeed." Both of them — but especially Wyle — were well trained at the Art Institute of Chicago in the neoclassical tradition, a style of sculpture based on Greek and Roman classics that valued the accurate representation of anatomy and espoused beauty as an elevating principle. Without the high standards they brought to their art as a result of their training, Canadian sculpture in the first half of the twentieth century could not have developed as it did. Loring, who tended to the grandiose Roman side of neoclassicism, created large monuments that defined "Canadian." Wyle favoured the simple purity of the Greek aspect of neoclassicism, which, in an age that called upon Canadian sculptors to express and establish national sentiments, positioned her further from the centre than Frances. The neoclassical tradition was eminently suited to the war memorials that made them both famous after the Great War. Its dignity and sense of occasion suited the sombre Canadian temperament and the era's nationalist purpose.
Loring and Wyle were part of the small group of English and French Canadian sculptors who formed the Sculptors' Society of Canada in 1928. Their place within that group is made clear in a lecture that sculptor Emanuel Hahn gave on 12 March 1928 at the Art Gallery of Toronto. "Up to the 1880s," he said, "there had been scarcely any effort in the plastic art in Canada. During the past 30 years, however, the progress has been considerable." He especially singled out for praise "the bronze work of Walter S. Allward of Toronto and the late Louis-Philippe Hébert of Montreal; while others whose work is becoming well-known are Alfred Howell, Frances Loring and Florence Wyle of Toronto, and Alfred Laliberté, George W. Hill and Henri Hébert of Montreal." Both Héberts, father and son, were monumentalists who celebrated French-Canadian history. So was George W. Hill, whose main contributions — like those of Louis-Philippe Hébert — stood on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Laliberté depicted the bucolic habitant life. No one yet thought of Canada's aboriginals as serious sculptors.
French-Canadian sculpture either glorified French-Canadian historical figures and an agricultural habitant past, or it continued in the liturgical tradition established by early woodcarvers. But as Frances Loring soon realized, it was possible in the late 1920s — before French-Canadian nationalism was not yet antagonistic to its federal context—to forge bonds between the only sculptors practising in Canada in Ontario and Quebec. Her initiation of the Sculptors' Society of Canada in 1928 had a ripple effect that lasted for at least the next decade.
The fact that The Girls were both from the American midwest and had been taught at Chicago was a crucial aspect of their success in Canada. In the Art Institute they had been told that the future of American sculpture would depend on midwestern independence to buck tradition, and in this way would be free from the slavish imitation of European art. It required only a slight lateral shift to adapt the enthusiastic rhetoric about the vitality of the midwestern United States to the rhetoric in Canada at the time that extolled the pioneer spirit in the arts. This attitude positioned them much closer to the Canadian nationalism that was defining a new nation than either the French-trained Howell or the German-trained Hahn.
Had Loring and Wyle stayed in the United States, as they fully intended to do, their lives would have been entirely different. Because of her upbringing in mining camps, Loring would probably have worked — for a time at least — in New York's Ashcan school, which championed society's underdogs. Florence might have continued in the profitable fountain sculpture popular at the time. It is even possible that both of them might have been inspired by New York's 1913 Armory Show (which they certainly would have seen had they stayed in Greenwich Village) and developed along modernist lines, as many of their male and female American contemporaries did. An important contact who might have prodded Loring and Wyle into more experimental work was their fellow student in Chicago: Georgia O'Keefe. Although they did not know O'Keefe well at the Institute, the three would probably have met at the Gallery 291 nearby, after O'Keefe became the partner of the Gallery owner, Alfred Stieglitz, in 1918.
If Loring and Wyle had stayed in the United States, Canadian sculpture would have lacked the high level of professionalism that resulted from their training. By coming to Canada, The Girls helped advance Canadian sculpture out of its fledgling phase of historical hagiography into the next important stage of monumentalization. They were instrumental in establishing a sound neoclassical base. And, later on, they were instrumental in nudging Canadian sculpture from its initial "celebration of the nation's heroes, institutions and middle-class values," — which were meant "to educate, elevate and delight" in that order — towards an aesthetic of fine art for all Canadians. They never abandoned the concept that art should elevate, but they thought it should delight more than it should educate. Above all, it should be beautiful. As Loring said late in life, "The evolution toward the fuller consciousness of beauty is slow, but once it has captured your soul, nothing else will do."
It is unfortunate that the social and cultural revolution of the 1960s threw Loring and Wyle into the shadows of Canadian sculptural history. As with all revolutions, the new ousted the old. The onset of modernism, with its new, more subjective concepts for three-dimensional works and the new materials they could be made of, provoked an over-reaction against the work that had gone before. Beaux-arts neoclassicism — including the later style of Rodin, the art-deco stylizations of the 1920s and 1930s, and New York's socially conscious Ashcan school approach, which Loring andWyle had begun to apply to their work — were viewed as hopelessly outdated. Works by sculptors like Loring and Wyle suddenly became almost invisible. As time passed and modernism took hold in the arts in the 1960s, they were often dismissed or ridiculed.
In their heyday from about 1920 to 1950, their contribution to Canadian sculpture was enormous. Beyond that, these two women led remarkable lives. While they were alive, Loring and Wyle spawned a widespread mythology. It was essentially romantic. Even though they met as classmates, their early contact had a mentor-student aspect. Florence did not teach Frances directly, but she was six years older than Frances and was already established as an assistant teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago. At the beginning of their friendship she played Pygmalion to Frances's Galatea. Perhaps because of this, Frances always claimed that Florence was the better sculptor. And Frances brought with her the romance of having spent seven years in Europe with her mother and brother. She had experienced many of the world's most famous sculptures and had dipped in and out of a number of art institutions abroad.
Their own accounts of meeting are in the tradition of "love-at-first-sight." They "clicked" immediately, they later said. Sharing a studio in Greenwich Village in 1910 was also romantic — and adventurous, especially for two women. It suggested elopement. When Frances's father arbitrarily closed down their studio in New York after a year, while they were away, it smacked of the heavy-handed father attempting to thwart young lovers. Certainly, concern for the morals of his daughter was paramount, though he encouraged her friendship with Wyle, whom he hoped might settle headstrong Frances down.
The continuation of Florence and Frances's Bohemian life in Toronto in 1911–12 suggested a deep commitment. Frances used the word "romantic" to describe their discovery of the old red church building that became their studio-home in 1920. Their other, outrageously squalid country property corroborated the romantic myth of an artistic retreat close to nature. The informal gatherings held at both locations were the closest Toronto came to having a Bohemian salon like those of various North American expatriates in Paris or the Bloomsbury Group in England in the 1920s. Even their poverty—on and off through the years—fit the stereotype of the struggling artist. The dusty, bare church was their "garret." The fact that they died within three weeks of each other suggested to many a spiritual bond and a reunion of their "inseparable spirits" in some other world.
Had either Florence or Frances been a man, the implication of this romantic myth would have been that they were deeply in love, a couple who lived and worked together in the sixty years between when they met and when they died.
But were they a couple? Were they lesbian?
Many have thought so. In 1911, their instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago, Lorado Taft, sabotaged the jobs they wanted as assistants to the New York sculptor Daniel Chester French with a letter of reference that claimed they were lesbian. The sobriquet "The Girls," by which they were commonly known once they set up their studio in the church building in Toronto in 1920, had overtones of homosexuality. So did the term "The Boys," already widely used for their friends, Charles Ashley and James Crippen, the well-known Toronto photographers of famous Canadians who lived a block from their studio.
As time passed and homosexuality gradually became more visible in Toronto society, the couple — also known as the "Loring-Wyles" or the "Loringwyles" — were assumed to be lovers. Writing in the Toronto Star in 1979, Donald Jones describes Loring as "an unusual and talented woman who shocked and fascinated this city for more than half a century." Alluding to the TV show The Odd Couple, which slyly made fun of homosexuality by depicting two men living together, Jones refers to Loring and Wyle as the "odd-couple sculptors" in his 1983 column "Historical Toronto." Robertson Davies based his characters "The Ladies" in his 1994 novel The Cunning Man on The Girls. Like The Girls, Davies's two women artists—one an etcher (as was The Girls' friend Dorothy Stevens), the other a sculptor — live in a church building. Davies hints at their lesbianism by naming them Miss Pansy Freake and Miss Emily Raven-Hart. Though Davies denied any reference to Loring and Wyle, the coincidental similaritiesxix are too many to ignore. Davies disingenuously claimed he was inspired by "two women artists he had known in England ... who were people of a type which has always interested me." Both Loring and Wyle also have entries in the 2004 edition of The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts. But defenders of lesbianism who later addressed The Girls did them a disservice. Since they did not investigate the situation deeply, their tributes are either superficial or inaccurate. One article misspells both their names (as Francis Loring and Florence Wylie). The use of their studio as one of the settings in a 1989 gay film called Urinal is utterly misleading.
There is no way of knowing whether Loring and Wyle had a sexual relationship. Just as we cannot know the sexual details of relationships between men and women (unless they choose to tell us), in the absence of letters or any other evidence from The Girls, there is only silence. This absence or scarcity of materials is typical of female biographical subjects. Certainly the men I have written about arrived complete with extensive archival materials. Hugh MacLennan's mother kept his first letters home from camp when he was eleven, for instance; Earle Birney's thousands of archival files include a lock of blonde hair from his first haircut and his first baby shoes. For Loring and Wyle — whose families did not anticipate their future fame — I have had to rely on uneven material: the context of the arts in Canada at the time, photographs, and accounts by the handful of people still alive who knew them. The few who knew them well mostly report that they were not lesbian. These categorical denials — bolstered by accounts of Frances's flings with men and Florence's undying worship of Charles Mulligan, her married teacher at the Art Institute, are themselves interesting. Is there a conspiracy to protect them? Is this why Loring did not want her life written about? Or are we superimposing contemporary assumptions on another era? Do we simply say, "They must have been," because we project today's much freer acceptance of same-sex relationships (including, in Canada, same-sex marriage) onto the past?
Whether or not The Girls were lovers, theirs was the closest emotional relationship either of them ever had. In Platonic terms, they were soulmates, as complementary to each other as Yin and Yang. They shared the church's small vestry, closed off with peaked doors, as a bedroom. Immediately after they moved into the church in 1920, a journalist reported that the vestry served as "bedroom, living-room, kitchen and pantry." Another journalist who interviewed The Girls in 1942 noted that "their bedrooms are in the vestry" and "their dining room, bath room and kitchen are in the crypt [the basement which was put in the second year they were there]." The main area in the nave was in "genial disarray" — "busts, torsos, heads, decorative statuettes and bas reliefs," some "swathed in cloths to keep damp" — and looked like "a movie set for European films of early 1920s." Qennefer Browne, daughter of Emanuel Hahn and Elizabeth Wyn Wood, recalls going as a child with her parents to The Girls' for a lunch some time around 1950. After lunch she needed a nap and was shown to Frances's bedroom in the vestry. "There was a big double bed in there covered with lots of blankets," she recalls. "I don't think I slept. It was an unfamiliar and fascinating place and I just looked around at things. After my mother came to get me up, I asked if I could see Florence's bedroom. There was an awkward moment. I gathered that Florence did not have a bedroom." By 1952, Frances had the vestry to herself because Wyle's new studio, bedroom, and bathroom had been added to the main building.
Regardless of the nature of their relationship, Loring and Wyle certainly challenged the gender stereotypes of their time. During their productive years, according to feminist art historian Fiona Carson, "to be a female sculptor was a contradiction in terms." An aura of "machismo" surrounded sculptors like Michelangelo, Bernini, Rodin, and David Smith. They were thought to be "flawed but heroic men engaged in a physically demanding struggle with durable materials and gargantuan tasks." Before 1900, women had difficulty studying from the nude. And the tragic lives of some women sculptors, such as Camille Claudel, Suzanne Valedon, and Gwen John, gave rise to the idea that women who sculpted were doomed to disaster. Florence in particular challenged gender stereotypes. Frances kept her hair long and enjoyed dressing in feminine costume and socializing. But Florence disdained fashion. For the last thirty years or so before her death, she appeared at social gatherings in the same grey flannel suit with a man's tie or a loose silk ascot, thick cotton stockings, and heavy men's shoes. In the early '20s she cut her hair short and kept it that way until she died. She is best described as "a not-woman, not-man," Fiona Carson's 2001 definition of a lesbian. The Girls were described variously as: co-workers, friends, a sculpture team, fellow-sculptors, partners, partner-sculptors, associates in sculpture, "this oddly matched pair," "intimate friends," "a couple of tough old cookies," and, later, "a truly outrageous couple," "intimate friends over the years," lifelong friends, and life-mates. They hated the term "sculptress," though it was used for them as late as 1979. Other feminine diminutives plagued them too: their Great War statues were called "statuettes"; their country property made them "farmerettes"; the park devoted to them is a "parkette."
The miracle is that the unconventional Loring and Wyle were able to function within the limits of an extremely confined society in Toronto. They were regarded with skepticism and raised eyebrows at first. But they were not marginalized or ridiculed. Even the fact that they were American (and Florence's nasal midwestern accent would have been a constant reminder of this) did not relegate them to the margins. On the contrary, they were welcomed into the art scene, in particular through friends Alex (A.Y.) Jackson and Fred Varley, before the Group of Seven formed. And — largely because of Frances's unusually cultured background and gregarious nature— they were welcomed by the staid, Victorian "society" of wealthy Toronto women into their arts organizations. The oddity of their partnership was attributed to the fact that they were artists. It lent interest, and did not result in their being outcasts, as might have been the case had they been anything else.
There may be clues to their relationship in their sculpture. Late in life, Frances Loring recognized that "a young artist is more emotional, a more mature artist has more repose." She was referring specifically to her own early work Hound of Heaven, which depicted an anxious woman fleeing from her conscience. This work was done in 1916 at the studio-home she shared with Florence in Toronto after they left Greenwich Village. Given the heady, sexually rebellious climate of the time in the Village, and given that Florence created her most erotic work — a nude, ecstatic woman called SunWorshipper—at about the same time, it may well be that the two women experimented with sexuality as so many others had openly done all around them. Later in life, interviewers described them in largely masculine terms. One wrote, "Frances Loring has a deep vibrant voice — maybe you've heard it over the radio? — a warm grip of the hand, and a ready laugh. Terse and straight-forward is Florence Wyle, the other half of a partnership that has endured." So thoroughly were their lives intertwined that it would not be possible to do a biography of one without the other.
This joint biography of Loring and Wyle, like all biographies, is a study in timing. Those who emerge at the top of any field are usually found to have been in the right place at the right time. This is true of Loring and Wyle, whose move from the United States to Canada in 1911 was fortuitous. Yet their early success at the end of the GreatWar was eroded by timing that did not work in their favour. They hit their peak during the Depression, in the years when funding for the arts was negligible. Ironically, they were later marginalized by 1970s feminism. In their era, the "feminine" and the "feminist" would have been viewed as opposite (and "femininity" and "the cult of true womanhood" kept "feminism" under control). Although they had lived feminist lives, their age conceptualized them merely as colourful eccentrics. A 1973 article called "Feminists Challenge Male Art Values" in the Toronto Star mentions them only because the author quotes Rebecca Sisler, who uses their example to dismiss claims that men create art and women create children. Long before Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, or Gloria Steinem, Loring and Wyle asserted the possibility of agency for women. Wyle's Mother of the Race — her best sculpture — and her obsession with female torsos suggests what feminist theoretician Linda Zerilli calls "rememoration," in which the female body — remembered from infancy — is the site of subversive desires. French feminist theorists, Zerilli explains, ground femininity on the bedrock not of Freudian penis envy, but the body of the mother.
The Girls were notoriously casual about their records. In one interview for the Ottawa Evening Citizen, Florence Wyle, speaking about her teaching at Chicago, typically said, "I taught for six or seven years; I never remember details," and later added, "I was too lazy or something." In such interviews and other records, various dates for the same sculpture or event appear. I have come across three different dates for Frances's arrival at the Art Institute of Chicago (1905, 1906, 1907) — all recorded by Frances herself. I have chosen 1906 as the most probable of these from circumstantial evidence. Frances was well-known to embellish stories; indeed, she was loved by her friends for this very trait. Factual truth has been difficult — at times impossible—to pin down. Variants have usually been recorded in footnotes. But factual truth is not the only truth in biography. I have tried to convey those other essences: two separate, yet overlapping, personalities, the timbre of Toronto, and the developments in Canadian sculpture during The Girls' half-century together.
The method I have used for this biography is mainly that described by Lytton Strachey in his Eminent Victorians. Strachey disliked the multi-volume, all-inclusive biographies that characterized Victorian England. Instead, he attempted to "row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity." In the absence of a "great ocean of material," I have dipped into The Girls' lives in the same way, letting the single incident stand for many similar ones. I have also used techniques from film, which contemporary audiences have become used to. Readers will find that close-ups of The Girls' doings are juxtaposed with panoramas of the broader contexts in which they worked. Indeed, it seems to me that sculpture once played the role films play today: to recreate "reality." Moving around a three-dimensional figure was to experience the fluid sequence of one silhouette after another, which suggests the statue is "alive." I have also occasionally taken certain liberties with my material along lines suggested by Truman Capote's theory of "creative non-fiction." At every point such liberties are based on facts my research has discovered, as my notes will explain.
The time has come to reclaim what was a necessary and important stage in the evolution of Canadian sculpture. It is not just that the works of Loring and Wyle opened the way for the next, less inhibited generation to break free, or that they were fully aware that the fund for scholarships they left would apply to work that they would be totally unable to comprehend. There is no denying their sculpture was created with enviable talent and skill, and it still projects a powerful presence and integrity. Partly because they were women, partly because their neoclassical work eventually became outdated, partly because of the fervour for urban renewal that gripped Toronto — like many other cities — in the 1970s, Loring and Wyle were unjustly relegated to the margins of our culture. Too many of their sculptures have been moved, or destroyed, or covered, or blocked, in the name of progress. Their many fine works still stand today in and around Ontario and elsewhere, but these are often lost in the chaos of today's Toronto or tucked away in obscure places, mute testimony to the highest level of the tradition in which their creators were trained. Although many of them no longer occupy the public spaces they were created for, these works can, and should, be visited and admired.
Song
Out of agony is music born —
With love broken and hopeless
Man turns to beauty's self for peace
And beauty answers, looking in his eyes,
There is no peace,
Save that which time or death may bring, but one word holds;
I bid you "sing."
(Florence Wyle, Poems, 1959)
Introduction
Conventional wisdom has it that Frances Loring and Florence Wyle are difficult to tell apart. Even their first names, which begin with the letter "F" and denote two European centres of art, are confusing. And both names contain the syllable "lor." Their work is not easily told apart either. Frances Gage, a younger sculptor who knew them and their work well, recalls having difficulty identifying a work before finding Wyle's signature on it. As one writer observed in 1977, a decade after their deaths, "Loring and Wyle, who were ‘among the last of the salon-and-academy romantics to retain some relevance in Canadian art, should really be viewed as a single talent, not two ... [E]ach drew upon the other's strength to create a joint body of work that transcended the individual.'"
After studying The Girls — as they were known — and their work for a few years, I disagree. Although they shared neoclassical training, they were different individuals. There was more life force in Frances, more agitation. Her work is more ruffled and powerful than Florence's. Frances more often depicted motion; Florence created serenity. Florence was more spiritual than Frances and, paradoxically, more earthy. For her, the life force was in all nature, and in nature's creatures. It was her privilege to record it. Frances was a flamboyant extrovert; Florence was a tough-minded introvert. Even their methods differed. Frances dashed off her creations in energetic spurts; whereas Florence worked regularly and hard. Frances sculpted with empathy, projecting herself into her portrait busts and statues. Florence worked with sympathy, honouring otherness. There were class differences too. Frances had been raised amid wealth and culture in a family that prized women. Florence grew up among farming people who were not well educated and who regarded girls as second-class citizens. There is something quintessential in the roles they played late in their lives. Florence patiently answered the door like a servant and said, "Come in, and meet Miss Loring," whom she fittingly nicknamed "Queenie." And Frances would receive their guests lounging like royalty on a bank of pillows.
Whenever they were asked about whether they influenced each other, they said no. Typically, Frances once said, "neither of [us] ever interferes with the work of the other and while [we] criticize each other's output, it is usually only in a very slight and friendly fashion."
There have been several proposals for a book about Frances Loring and Florence Wyle. Immediately after they died, an informal group who called themselves the Friends of Loring and Wyle tried to find an author for such a book and raised a subsidy for it. The original idea was for a book that would be composed of about two-thirds sculpture illustrations and one-third biographical and critical text. The Friends knew the two women wanted such a book. Loring and Wyle actually initiated the project five or six years before they died. They gathered several photographs of their work and approached Clare Bice — then president of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in Toronto — for advice about publishers. All three thought the Canada Council might fund it.
Frances made it clear that she did not want a thorough investigation into her private life. "Miss Loring was upset that everyone got into her life," Lawrence Hayward, a neighbour who befriended the two sculptors in their old age, reported. "She wanted closure when she died. She wanted [the comments of] her friends to die with her. She wished to have [only] her works and efforts as an artist written about."
Clare Bice approached Montreal art critic Robert Ayre to write the text in February 1968. Frances Gage, as one of The Girls' executors, went to see him armed with a sheaf of photographs, but Ayre declined. Hayward himself proposed writing such a book, but his background as a dancer and his later career as a massage therapist made him inadequate to the task. "I do not think that Mr. Hayward would be a suitable collaborator," publisher Jack McClelland, of McClelland & Stewart, informed the trustees in 1969.vii Hayward failed to get a Canada Council grant to undertake the project. That same year, biographer Lois Milani approached Frances Gage to discuss writing a book about The Girls. That, too, did not materialize.
In 1972, an affectionate, anecdotal biography of Loring and Wyle by their friend, sculptor Rebecca Sisler, appeared. Sisler complained that the $2,000 Canada Council grant she received was not enough to do justice to her subjects. But her short book, The Girls, is lively and informative throughout. In 1987, as part of a large retrospective of The Girls' work, art historian Christine Boyanoski prepared a handsome and thorough catalogue that includes several photographs of The Girls and their works, a chronology of their lives, a bibliography, and a brief biographical summary.
It is not surprising that a full biography of Loring and Wyle seemed desirable. Their work was essential to the development of Canadian sculpture. As early as 1925 one journalist predicted, "Anyone with even a little knowledge of sculpture can safely prophesy that both they and their church will, some time, be very well and widely known indeed." Both of them — but especially Wyle — were well trained at the Art Institute of Chicago in the neoclassical tradition, a style of sculpture based on Greek and Roman classics that valued the accurate representation of anatomy and espoused beauty as an elevating principle. Without the high standards they brought to their art as a result of their training, Canadian sculpture in the first half of the twentieth century could not have developed as it did. Loring, who tended to the grandiose Roman side of neoclassicism, created large monuments that defined "Canadian." Wyle favoured the simple purity of the Greek aspect of neoclassicism, which, in an age that called upon Canadian sculptors to express and establish national sentiments, positioned her further from the centre than Frances. The neoclassical tradition was eminently suited to the war memorials that made them both famous after the Great War. Its dignity and sense of occasion suited the sombre Canadian temperament and the era's nationalist purpose.
Loring and Wyle were part of the small group of English and French Canadian sculptors who formed the Sculptors' Society of Canada in 1928. Their place within that group is made clear in a lecture that sculptor Emanuel Hahn gave on 12 March 1928 at the Art Gallery of Toronto. "Up to the 1880s," he said, "there had been scarcely any effort in the plastic art in Canada. During the past 30 years, however, the progress has been considerable." He especially singled out for praise "the bronze work of Walter S. Allward of Toronto and the late Louis-Philippe Hébert of Montreal; while others whose work is becoming well-known are Alfred Howell, Frances Loring and Florence Wyle of Toronto, and Alfred Laliberté, George W. Hill and Henri Hébert of Montreal." Both Héberts, father and son, were monumentalists who celebrated French-Canadian history. So was George W. Hill, whose main contributions — like those of Louis-Philippe Hébert — stood on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Laliberté depicted the bucolic habitant life. No one yet thought of Canada's aboriginals as serious sculptors.
French-Canadian sculpture either glorified French-Canadian historical figures and an agricultural habitant past, or it continued in the liturgical tradition established by early woodcarvers. But as Frances Loring soon realized, it was possible in the late 1920s — before French-Canadian nationalism was not yet antagonistic to its federal context—to forge bonds between the only sculptors practising in Canada in Ontario and Quebec. Her initiation of the Sculptors' Society of Canada in 1928 had a ripple effect that lasted for at least the next decade.
The fact that The Girls were both from the American midwest and had been taught at Chicago was a crucial aspect of their success in Canada. In the Art Institute they had been told that the future of American sculpture would depend on midwestern independence to buck tradition, and in this way would be free from the slavish imitation of European art. It required only a slight lateral shift to adapt the enthusiastic rhetoric about the vitality of the midwestern United States to the rhetoric in Canada at the time that extolled the pioneer spirit in the arts. This attitude positioned them much closer to the Canadian nationalism that was defining a new nation than either the French-trained Howell or the German-trained Hahn.
Had Loring and Wyle stayed in the United States, as they fully intended to do, their lives would have been entirely different. Because of her upbringing in mining camps, Loring would probably have worked — for a time at least — in New York's Ashcan school, which championed society's underdogs. Florence might have continued in the profitable fountain sculpture popular at the time. It is even possible that both of them might have been inspired by New York's 1913 Armory Show (which they certainly would have seen had they stayed in Greenwich Village) and developed along modernist lines, as many of their male and female American contemporaries did. An important contact who might have prodded Loring and Wyle into more experimental work was their fellow student in Chicago: Georgia O'Keefe. Although they did not know O'Keefe well at the Institute, the three would probably have met at the Gallery 291 nearby, after O'Keefe became the partner of the Gallery owner, Alfred Stieglitz, in 1918.
If Loring and Wyle had stayed in the United States, Canadian sculpture would have lacked the high level of professionalism that resulted from their training. By coming to Canada, The Girls helped advance Canadian sculpture out of its fledgling phase of historical hagiography into the next important stage of monumentalization. They were instrumental in establishing a sound neoclassical base. And, later on, they were instrumental in nudging Canadian sculpture from its initial "celebration of the nation's heroes, institutions and middle-class values," — which were meant "to educate, elevate and delight" in that order — towards an aesthetic of fine art for all Canadians. They never abandoned the concept that art should elevate, but they thought it should delight more than it should educate. Above all, it should be beautiful. As Loring said late in life, "The evolution toward the fuller consciousness of beauty is slow, but once it has captured your soul, nothing else will do."
It is unfortunate that the social and cultural revolution of the 1960s threw Loring and Wyle into the shadows of Canadian sculptural history. As with all revolutions, the new ousted the old. The onset of modernism, with its new, more subjective concepts for three-dimensional works and the new materials they could be made of, provoked an over-reaction against the work that had gone before. Beaux-arts neoclassicism — including the later style of Rodin, the art-deco stylizations of the 1920s and 1930s, and New York's socially conscious Ashcan school approach, which Loring andWyle had begun to apply to their work — were viewed as hopelessly outdated. Works by sculptors like Loring and Wyle suddenly became almost invisible. As time passed and modernism took hold in the arts in the 1960s, they were often dismissed or ridiculed.
In their heyday from about 1920 to 1950, their contribution to Canadian sculpture was enormous. Beyond that, these two women led remarkable lives. While they were alive, Loring and Wyle spawned a widespread mythology. It was essentially romantic. Even though they met as classmates, their early contact had a mentor-student aspect. Florence did not teach Frances directly, but she was six years older than Frances and was already established as an assistant teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago. At the beginning of their friendship she played Pygmalion to Frances's Galatea. Perhaps because of this, Frances always claimed that Florence was the better sculptor. And Frances brought with her the romance of having spent seven years in Europe with her mother and brother. She had experienced many of the world's most famous sculptures and had dipped in and out of a number of art institutions abroad.
Their own accounts of meeting are in the tradition of "love-at-first-sight." They "clicked" immediately, they later said. Sharing a studio in Greenwich Village in 1910 was also romantic — and adventurous, especially for two women. It suggested elopement. When Frances's father arbitrarily closed down their studio in New York after a year, while they were away, it smacked of the heavy-handed father attempting to thwart young lovers. Certainly, concern for the morals of his daughter was paramount, though he encouraged her friendship with Wyle, whom he hoped might settle headstrong Frances down.
The continuation of Florence and Frances's Bohemian life in Toronto in 1911–12 suggested a deep commitment. Frances used the word "romantic" to describe their discovery of the old red church building that became their studio-home in 1920. Their other, outrageously squalid country property corroborated the romantic myth of an artistic retreat close to nature. The informal gatherings held at both locations were the closest Toronto came to having a Bohemian salon like those of various North American expatriates in Paris or the Bloomsbury Group in England in the 1920s. Even their poverty—on and off through the years—fit the stereotype of the struggling artist. The dusty, bare church was their "garret." The fact that they died within three weeks of each other suggested to many a spiritual bond and a reunion of their "inseparable spirits" in some other world.
Had either Florence or Frances been a man, the implication of this romantic myth would have been that they were deeply in love, a couple who lived and worked together in the sixty years between when they met and when they died.
But were they a couple? Were they lesbian?
Many have thought so. In 1911, their instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago, Lorado Taft, sabotaged the jobs they wanted as assistants to the New York sculptor Daniel Chester French with a letter of reference that claimed they were lesbian. The sobriquet "The Girls," by which they were commonly known once they set up their studio in the church building in Toronto in 1920, had overtones of homosexuality. So did the term "The Boys," already widely used for their friends, Charles Ashley and James Crippen, the well-known Toronto photographers of famous Canadians who lived a block from their studio.
As time passed and homosexuality gradually became more visible in Toronto society, the couple — also known as the "Loring-Wyles" or the "Loringwyles" — were assumed to be lovers. Writing in the Toronto Star in 1979, Donald Jones describes Loring as "an unusual and talented woman who shocked and fascinated this city for more than half a century." Alluding to the TV show The Odd Couple, which slyly made fun of homosexuality by depicting two men living together, Jones refers to Loring and Wyle as the "odd-couple sculptors" in his 1983 column "Historical Toronto." Robertson Davies based his characters "The Ladies" in his 1994 novel The Cunning Man on The Girls. Like The Girls, Davies's two women artists—one an etcher (as was The Girls' friend Dorothy Stevens), the other a sculptor — live in a church building. Davies hints at their lesbianism by naming them Miss Pansy Freake and Miss Emily Raven-Hart. Though Davies denied any reference to Loring and Wyle, the coincidental similaritiesxix are too many to ignore. Davies disingenuously claimed he was inspired by "two women artists he had known in England ... who were people of a type which has always interested me." Both Loring and Wyle also have entries in the 2004 edition of The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts. But defenders of lesbianism who later addressed The Girls did them a disservice. Since they did not investigate the situation deeply, their tributes are either superficial or inaccurate. One article misspells both their names (as Francis Loring and Florence Wylie). The use of their studio as one of the settings in a 1989 gay film called Urinal is utterly misleading.
There is no way of knowing whether Loring and Wyle had a sexual relationship. Just as we cannot know the sexual details of relationships between men and women (unless they choose to tell us), in the absence of letters or any other evidence from The Girls, there is only silence. This absence or scarcity of materials is typical of female biographical subjects. Certainly the men I have written about arrived complete with extensive archival materials. Hugh MacLennan's mother kept his first letters home from camp when he was eleven, for instance; Earle Birney's thousands of archival files include a lock of blonde hair from his first haircut and his first baby shoes. For Loring and Wyle — whose families did not anticipate their future fame — I have had to rely on uneven material: the context of the arts in Canada at the time, photographs, and accounts by the handful of people still alive who knew them. The few who knew them well mostly report that they were not lesbian. These categorical denials — bolstered by accounts of Frances's flings with men and Florence's undying worship of Charles Mulligan, her married teacher at the Art Institute, are themselves interesting. Is there a conspiracy to protect them? Is this why Loring did not want her life written about? Or are we superimposing contemporary assumptions on another era? Do we simply say, "They must have been," because we project today's much freer acceptance of same-sex relationships (including, in Canada, same-sex marriage) onto the past?
Whether or not The Girls were lovers, theirs was the closest emotional relationship either of them ever had. In Platonic terms, they were soulmates, as complementary to each other as Yin and Yang. They shared the church's small vestry, closed off with peaked doors, as a bedroom. Immediately after they moved into the church in 1920, a journalist reported that the vestry served as "bedroom, living-room, kitchen and pantry." Another journalist who interviewed The Girls in 1942 noted that "their bedrooms are in the vestry" and "their dining room, bath room and kitchen are in the crypt [the basement which was put in the second year they were there]." The main area in the nave was in "genial disarray" — "busts, torsos, heads, decorative statuettes and bas reliefs," some "swathed in cloths to keep damp" — and looked like "a movie set for European films of early 1920s." Qennefer Browne, daughter of Emanuel Hahn and Elizabeth Wyn Wood, recalls going as a child with her parents to The Girls' for a lunch some time around 1950. After lunch she needed a nap and was shown to Frances's bedroom in the vestry. "There was a big double bed in there covered with lots of blankets," she recalls. "I don't think I slept. It was an unfamiliar and fascinating place and I just looked around at things. After my mother came to get me up, I asked if I could see Florence's bedroom. There was an awkward moment. I gathered that Florence did not have a bedroom." By 1952, Frances had the vestry to herself because Wyle's new studio, bedroom, and bathroom had been added to the main building.
Regardless of the nature of their relationship, Loring and Wyle certainly challenged the gender stereotypes of their time. During their productive years, according to feminist art historian Fiona Carson, "to be a female sculptor was a contradiction in terms." An aura of "machismo" surrounded sculptors like Michelangelo, Bernini, Rodin, and David Smith. They were thought to be "flawed but heroic men engaged in a physically demanding struggle with durable materials and gargantuan tasks." Before 1900, women had difficulty studying from the nude. And the tragic lives of some women sculptors, such as Camille Claudel, Suzanne Valedon, and Gwen John, gave rise to the idea that women who sculpted were doomed to disaster. Florence in particular challenged gender stereotypes. Frances kept her hair long and enjoyed dressing in feminine costume and socializing. But Florence disdained fashion. For the last thirty years or so before her death, she appeared at social gatherings in the same grey flannel suit with a man's tie or a loose silk ascot, thick cotton stockings, and heavy men's shoes. In the early '20s she cut her hair short and kept it that way until she died. She is best described as "a not-woman, not-man," Fiona Carson's 2001 definition of a lesbian. The Girls were described variously as: co-workers, friends, a sculpture team, fellow-sculptors, partners, partner-sculptors, associates in sculpture, "this oddly matched pair," "intimate friends," "a couple of tough old cookies," and, later, "a truly outrageous couple," "intimate friends over the years," lifelong friends, and life-mates. They hated the term "sculptress," though it was used for them as late as 1979. Other feminine diminutives plagued them too: their Great War statues were called "statuettes"; their country property made them "farmerettes"; the park devoted to them is a "parkette."
The miracle is that the unconventional Loring and Wyle were able to function within the limits of an extremely confined society in Toronto. They were regarded with skepticism and raised eyebrows at first. But they were not marginalized or ridiculed. Even the fact that they were American (and Florence's nasal midwestern accent would have been a constant reminder of this) did not relegate them to the margins. On the contrary, they were welcomed into the art scene, in particular through friends Alex (A.Y.) Jackson and Fred Varley, before the Group of Seven formed. And — largely because of Frances's unusually cultured background and gregarious nature— they were welcomed by the staid, Victorian "society" of wealthy Toronto women into their arts organizations. The oddity of their partnership was attributed to the fact that they were artists. It lent interest, and did not result in their being outcasts, as might have been the case had they been anything else.
There may be clues to their relationship in their sculpture. Late in life, Frances Loring recognized that "a young artist is more emotional, a more mature artist has more repose." She was referring specifically to her own early work Hound of Heaven, which depicted an anxious woman fleeing from her conscience. This work was done in 1916 at the studio-home she shared with Florence in Toronto after they left Greenwich Village. Given the heady, sexually rebellious climate of the time in the Village, and given that Florence created her most erotic work — a nude, ecstatic woman called SunWorshipper—at about the same time, it may well be that the two women experimented with sexuality as so many others had openly done all around them. Later in life, interviewers described them in largely masculine terms. One wrote, "Frances Loring has a deep vibrant voice — maybe you've heard it over the radio? — a warm grip of the hand, and a ready laugh. Terse and straight-forward is Florence Wyle, the other half of a partnership that has endured." So thoroughly were their lives intertwined that it would not be possible to do a biography of one without the other.
This joint biography of Loring and Wyle, like all biographies, is a study in timing. Those who emerge at the top of any field are usually found to have been in the right place at the right time. This is true of Loring and Wyle, whose move from the United States to Canada in 1911 was fortuitous. Yet their early success at the end of the GreatWar was eroded by timing that did not work in their favour. They hit their peak during the Depression, in the years when funding for the arts was negligible. Ironically, they were later marginalized by 1970s feminism. In their era, the "feminine" and the "feminist" would have been viewed as opposite (and "femininity" and "the cult of true womanhood" kept "feminism" under control). Although they had lived feminist lives, their age conceptualized them merely as colourful eccentrics. A 1973 article called "Feminists Challenge Male Art Values" in the Toronto Star mentions them only because the author quotes Rebecca Sisler, who uses their example to dismiss claims that men create art and women create children. Long before Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, or Gloria Steinem, Loring and Wyle asserted the possibility of agency for women. Wyle's Mother of the Race — her best sculpture — and her obsession with female torsos suggests what feminist theoretician Linda Zerilli calls "rememoration," in which the female body — remembered from infancy — is the site of subversive desires. French feminist theorists, Zerilli explains, ground femininity on the bedrock not of Freudian penis envy, but the body of the mother.
The Girls were notoriously casual about their records. In one interview for the Ottawa Evening Citizen, Florence Wyle, speaking about her teaching at Chicago, typically said, "I taught for six or seven years; I never remember details," and later added, "I was too lazy or something." In such interviews and other records, various dates for the same sculpture or event appear. I have come across three different dates for Frances's arrival at the Art Institute of Chicago (1905, 1906, 1907) — all recorded by Frances herself. I have chosen 1906 as the most probable of these from circumstantial evidence. Frances was well-known to embellish stories; indeed, she was loved by her friends for this very trait. Factual truth has been difficult — at times impossible—to pin down. Variants have usually been recorded in footnotes. But factual truth is not the only truth in biography. I have tried to convey those other essences: two separate, yet overlapping, personalities, the timbre of Toronto, and the developments in Canadian sculpture during The Girls' half-century together.
The method I have used for this biography is mainly that described by Lytton Strachey in his Eminent Victorians. Strachey disliked the multi-volume, all-inclusive biographies that characterized Victorian England. Instead, he attempted to "row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity." In the absence of a "great ocean of material," I have dipped into The Girls' lives in the same way, letting the single incident stand for many similar ones. I have also used techniques from film, which contemporary audiences have become used to. Readers will find that close-ups of The Girls' doings are juxtaposed with panoramas of the broader contexts in which they worked. Indeed, it seems to me that sculpture once played the role films play today: to recreate "reality." Moving around a three-dimensional figure was to experience the fluid sequence of one silhouette after another, which suggests the statue is "alive." I have also occasionally taken certain liberties with my material along lines suggested by Truman Capote's theory of "creative non-fiction." At every point such liberties are based on facts my research has discovered, as my notes will explain.
The time has come to reclaim what was a necessary and important stage in the evolution of Canadian sculpture. It is not just that the works of Loring and Wyle opened the way for the next, less inhibited generation to break free, or that they were fully aware that the fund for scholarships they left would apply to work that they would be totally unable to comprehend. There is no denying their sculpture was created with enviable talent and skill, and it still projects a powerful presence and integrity. Partly because they were women, partly because their neoclassical work eventually became outdated, partly because of the fervour for urban renewal that gripped Toronto — like many other cities — in the 1970s, Loring and Wyle were unjustly relegated to the margins of our culture. Too many of their sculptures have been moved, or destroyed, or covered, or blocked, in the name of progress. Their many fine works still stand today in and around Ontario and elsewhere, but these are often lost in the chaos of today's Toronto or tucked away in obscure places, mute testimony to the highest level of the tradition in which their creators were trained. Although many of them no longer occupy the public spaces they were created for, these works can, and should, be visited and admired.
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