Drawing for an audience of one: art in Muriel Draper's archives
Date
2020
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University of Delaware
Abstract
Muriel Draper, a much-overlooked author and tastemaker in early-twentieth-century New York, was a cosmopolitan woman with eclectic interests, including mysticism, the Soviet Union, and the Harlem Renaissance. Today, Draper is best known through the voice of others and their reminiscences of her salon. Gatherings she convened and attended in Europe and America in the first half of the twentieth century set her and her work in dialog with a group of leading artists, writers, musicians, and social influencers. Not easily definable, her friends, including Mark Tobey, Carl Van Vechten, and Max Ewing, sought to come to terms with her uniqueness and capture her true nature through drawings, photographs, and sculptural portraits. But she never succumbed to their desires. Instead, in life and in death, Draper cannily crafted her own image, both participating in and rejecting the statuses assigned to her. She consciously curated her archive at Yale University by collecting and depositing correspondence, drawings, and photographs which provide evidence of a woman who enchanted nearly everyone who met her. As perhaps a final project of design, Draper created an arrival “portrait” of herself that left significant gaps, and an enduring air of mystery. The thesis asks whether we can identify a material trace of an ephemeral salon and its hostess. It interrogates how the intimate, collaborative relationships established between intellectual peers in such a salon setting can be recorded and preserved in artistic form. It also uses Draper’s example to explore larger notions about legacy, history, and remembrance. How could a woman who so carefully curated and bequeathed an archival record of her life be so quickly forgotten and erased from the annals of history? When she is remembered, is it as she desired? Was Draper a woman of her time, or one distinct from it, and is it her more common traits or her unique eccentricities that survive today?
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Caricature, Fashion, Feminism, Modernism, Salon Culture, Women authors, Soviet Union, Social influencers, Yale University, New York