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“In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, one of the most famous cartoonists in the world was a lesbian artist who lived on a remote island off the coast of Finland.”1

That lesbian artist was Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins. At its peak, her Moomin comics was reaching an astounding 20 million readers in a single day.

Today, the Moomins is the most popular Finnish series of all time, and Tove is a national icon. The series has been adapted for screen, for stage, and even as an opera. During Tove’s career she received more than 50 honorary awards and nominations, including the Hans Christian Andersen medal in 1966. Tove has a park named after her in Helsinki, stamps made in her honor, and there are Moomin amusement parks in Finland and Japan. (If you are American and don’t know the Moomins well, it might be because Tove turned down Walt Disney’s offer to buy exclusive rights to the characters, opting instead to retain ownership in full in a family company. That business, which is now run by Tove’s niece, Sophia, holds the artistic control over her legacy. It brings in over $850 million each year.2)

Despite the fame and fortune the Moomins brought her, Tove never lost her grounding. In addition to writing the series, she pursued painting primarily as an artist her entire life and wrote eight novels and four picture books.

To sustain such an ambitious creative focus, she balanced building a rich community of friends and family with taking deliberate remove from a world that had so many demands of her.

Most notably, she spent close to 30 of the final summers of her life alone with her partner, Tooti, and their cat on Klovharun, a rocky and inhospitable island in the outermost archipelago of the Gulf of Finland, close to islands she had visited regularly as a little girl.

The couple slept in a tent on Klovharun, caught their own fish, made art, and danced. (Tove loved dancing; Tooti loved filming her.) Occasionally, fisherman or family moored for a visit, but most days they were alone with the sea, the landscape, their art, and each other.

Tove Jansson was born in Helsinki, Finland, in 1914, to a sculptor father and an illustrator mother. Finland was part of the Russian empire then, and in her lifetime Tove would bear witness to the country’s separation from the Russians, two world wars, and a Finnish civil war.

Tove’s life philosophy and the work she created for the world are the rare artistic artifacts of a happy childhood. Despite the strife and suffering occurring in the world around them, Tove’s childhood home offered a loving creative cocoon. As both of Tove’s parents were well-respected artists, they encouraged their children creatively. “Home and studio were one,” wrote Boel Westin in her biography, “with no clear distinction between work and family life.” The siblings came to see that working as a professional artist was “the obvious way to spend each day, and the meaning of existence.”3

All of the Jansson children would become artists, with Tove publishing her first story at just 14 years old. Having the childhood home full of art and artists who were “facing the compromises of daily life” had a significant impact on Tove’s philosophy as an artist. She would put her painting and freedom first—before fame, fortune, or stability—until her final days.

During World War II, Tove started producing cartoons for magazines and newspapers to earn money and support her career as a painter. She created the Moomins in this moment of war and poverty, a time when children’s stories were rare. She later wrote to a friend that the Moomin characters had taken shape “when I was feeling depressed and scared of the bombing and wanted to get away from my gloomy thoughts to something else entirely. . . . I crept into an unbelievable world where everything was natural and benign—and possible.”4

Tove’s parents, siblings, friends and lovers directly inspired the Moomin characters. As Sheila Heti writes for The New Yorker:

Jansson built her narratives around an idealized notion of home: her creatures ventured out on their own, but some sense of safety followed them everywhere, an assurance of a familial love that left them to enjoy their solitude, rather than fear it.

The Moomins “trusted and supported each other in every way” and acted as a creative team. Much like in Tove’s young life, “community and the power of art” are what see Moomin through challenges time and time again.5

At first, Tove kept her drawings secret—she saw them as an unserious personal project. But in the final months of World War II, at a friend’s urging, Tove published The Moomins and the Great Flood. Readers met a young Moomintroll, the Moominmamma, and Sniff as they searched through forest and flood for a lost Moominpappa.

The Moomins were an immediate hit. Within a decade, the comic strip was being published weekly in over a hundred newspapers around the globe, including England’s Evening Standard, the most widely distributed paper in the world. There was eventually a Moomin television show in Sweden, an anime series in Japan, and “a deluge of merchandise: ‘trinkets and marzipan and candles,’ cups and dishes, even menstrual pads.” Having previously lived on meager income, the regular compensation offered a “huge relief” to Tove.

Another major change arrived for Tove as the war was coming to a close. Throughout her 20s, she’d had love affairs with men—three of whom proposed marriage to her, all of which she declined. In 1946, she fell in love with a woman for the first time. Same-sex relationships were illegal in Finland until 1971, but Tove would privately share with close friends the she had gone over “to the ghost side” (ghost was both a slang word for lesbian and an allusion to the discretion required of them). She wrote the following about how it felt to fall in love with a woman for the first time:

It came as such a huge surprise. Like finding a new and wondrous room in an old house one thought one knew from top to bottom. Just stepping straight in, and not being able to fathom how one had never known it existed. . . . I’m finally experiencing myself as a woman where love is concerned, it’s bringing me peace and ecstasy for the first time.

At a Christmas party in 1955, as the Moomins were reaching tremendous global fame, Tove met the artist Tuulikki (“Tooti”) Pietilä. They connected taking turns choosing records to play, and Tove asked Tooti to dance. Tooti refused, unwilling to break with social convention, but immediately after the party mailed a Christmas card depicting a striped cat to Tove’s studio. Soon Tooti would move into the studio next door. “At last I’ve found my way to the one I want to be with,” Tove Jansson wrote in one of her first letters to Tooti in June 1956.6 Tove was 42, and she stayed with Tooti until the end of her life.

By 1959, running the Moomin empire was taking its toll on Tove. Fame—parties, appearances, interviews—and the weekly comic strip consumed too much of her time, time she’d rather spend painting. Tove decided to transfer production of the weekly comics to her brother Lars and terminate her own contract prematurely.

With newfound time, Tove and Tooti began to travel for pleasure, an activity they continued to do actively for the remainder of their lives, often without too much planning. (“They didn’t usually book hotels in advance.”)

Their first trip took them to Greece in 1959, and by the early 1960s a black cat had appeared in their lives named Psipsina (Greek for “pussycat”). It’s rumored that Tove’s mother was the one who raised the cat and then passed her to Tove. Tooti would capture Psipsina in a number of her drawings.

The couple also sought out solitude “to avoid the bombardments of the world—to find someplace where the performance could end.” In 1964, the year Tove turned 50, she and Tooti bought their own small island: Klovharun.

On Klovharun, the couple slept in a tent with Psipsina, listening to crashing waves as strong gusts blasted their tent walls. A fisherman helped them construct a simple one-room fisherman’s cabin. (Even when the cabin was ready, Tove and Tooti still chose to sleep in the tent, offering the cabin to guests.) The women chopped wood, caught their own fish, and rowed their mahogany boat to land for more supplies when needed. Otherwise, they were free to explore nature and make art. “They weren’t very young when they moved out there, they were almost 50. Many people raised their eyebrows to the idea of building a house on this deserted island in the outer archipelago,” Sophia Jansson, Tove’s niece, recalled. “There was no electricity or running water on the island and it was difficult to get there. Since they were women, people thought they would never make it. But they proved them all wrong.”

Sheila Heti captured what this reclaimed lifestyle meant for Tove and Tooti beautifully in The New Yorker:

On her islands, Jansson’s many contrary aspects—the self that valued solitude and the self that valued friendship; the self that loved adventure and the self that loved routine—were easily made one. In a letter, Jansson describes waking up early with Pietilä, “always simultaneously though we sleep in separate beds.” They lie together in the mornings and listen to the radio; Jansson lets out the cat, makes coffee, reads novels. Later, she walks along the beach and brings in the wood:

We rarely clean the house and only have the occasional wash, with much brouhaha and pans of hot water on the ground outside. Then we do our own private thing until dinner, which we eat sometime in the middle of the day, our noses in our books. We get on with our work. . . . We don’t talk much. And so the days pass in blessed tranquility.

Even in the city, the couple preserved a distance within their intimacy; they kept separate apartments, joined by an attic corridor through which they visited each other every day.

…

Much of Jansson’s later fiction expands this idea of contentment. Love, for her, is premised on a delicate balance between the reliable presence of another person and the freedom to inhabit one’s private universe…In “Fair Play,” a novel that is loosely based on Jansson and Pietilä’s relationship, Mari, a writer, and Jonna, an artist, live and work in side-by-side studios. Jonna receives an award that will take her to Paris, to a studio “meant for her use alone.” Worried about leaving Mari behind, she is unsure whether to accept. She nervously justifies herself, explaining “the importance of illustration, the painstaking labor, the concentration” needed to do one’s best work. But Mari finds herself unafraid of the prospect:

A daring thought was taking shape in her mind. She began to anticipate a solitude of her own, peaceful and full of possibility. She felt something close to exhilaration, of a kind that people can permit themselves when they are blessed with love.

In the 1970s, Tooti bought a Super 8 camera and began recording both their travels and their life on Klovharun. You can see more old videos of Tove and Tooti on Klovharun here and here.

Tove on Klovharun in 1982

Tove packing up their boat to leave Klovharun in 1983

Tove after her 75th birthday party in 1989, the year she published Fair Play, a novel about two older women and the life they've built together.

The pair returned annually to Klovharun until they were well into their 70s and it was no longer safe. Tove wrote in a beautiful book that her and Tooti created together about their island:

“And last summer, something unforgivable happened: I started to fear the sea. The giant waves no longer signified adventure, but fear, fear and worry for the boat and all the other boats that were sailing in bad weather. [...] We knew that it was time to give the cottage away.” — Anteckningar från en ö (Notes From an Island), 1996

On September 30, 1991, their final night in Klovharun, Tove signed a deed gifting the cabin to the Pellinge District Resident’s Association, which rents the cottage as an artists’ residence and also organizes open days and guided tours.7 The couple never returned to Klovharun, not even for a visit.8

At the end of her life, Tove became seriously ill from breast and lung cancer. During this time she lived in Tooti’s studio, which was in the same building as her own studio but had a separate entrance and a private passage, so the two could move secretly between them.

When the Finnish government awarded her an honorary professorship at the age of 80, Tove remarked:

I've had an exciting, varied life that I am glad of, though it has been trying as well. If I could live it all over again, I'd do it completely differently. But I won't say how.

Tove Jansson died on June 27, 2001. She is buried with her parents and brother Lars in Sandudd Cemetery in Helsinki. The major obituaries made no mention of her and Tooti’s life together.

Tooti died eight years later. She was buried in a different cemetery, but is perhaps not so separate from Tove after all. In the end, it seems she honored Tove’s request for a dance.

Rest in peace, Tove and Tooti.

Bonus 1: Fan Mail

When Tove and Tooti would row to the closest town from Klovharn, they would collect their mail and Tove would often spend the entire day responding to correspondence and letters from admirers.

She received an average of 2,000 letters a year and answered each one of the personally, always by hand, and often with special drawings included.

Bonus 2: A cat dressed as Tove

Art Dogs is a monthly-ish dispatch introducing the pets—dogs, yes, but also cats, lizards, marmosets, and more—that were kept by our favorite artists. Subscribe to receive these ~monthly posts to your email inbox.

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Art Dogs is a monthly-ish dispatch introducing the pets—dogs, yes!, but also cats, lizards, marmosets, and more—that were kept by our favorite artists. Subscribe to receive these ~monthly posts to your email inbox.

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Last year, I published a short Art Dogs edition for Thanksgiving:

The best image in that post you can see in the preview above—a photo of Snoopy ice skating around the southern bend of Central Park West.

After hitting publish, a reader, , made me aware of a fantastic photo by Elliott Erwitt. I woke up wanting to share that photo with you today:

Elliott captured this scene of two of his daughters, Sasha and Amy, sitting by the living room window during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1988. He and his family bought the three-bedroom apartment at the corner of West 69th Street, overlooking Central Park, for $75,000 in the late 1960s.1

According to another of his six children, Jennifer Erwitt, “It was a big stretch to make that purchase,” she told The New York Times. “He was successful, but I don’t think he was really wealthy.” Jennifer can remember watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parades with family and friends from the living room as one of her favorite memories of the Manhattan apartment. In this short video, Elliott recalls a time when Superman’s foot smacked against their apartment window.

Elliott Erwitt lived until the age of 95, spending nearly 60 of those years on the Upper West Side. He passed away in 2023 on November 29th—one year ago tomorrow.

Beyond Snoopy, dogs were one of his favorite subjects, especially Sammy, his cairn terrier.

Make sure to look closely at Elliott’s tie in this self-portrait.

“I bark at dogs and get odd reactions sometimes, in this case, every time I barked the dog jumped.” - Elliott Erwitt

“I always thought of [Elliott’s] pictures as New Yorker cartoons — he was amused by humanity in general.” — Rick Smolan.

In an extract from one of his eight books of dog photographs, Elliott explained why dogs went from “an incidental part of his photographic practice” to the subject of some of his most famous works:

“I am a professional photographer by trade and an amateur photographer by vocation. Most of the time when I am out of the house I carry a small unobtrusive camera and I snap away obsessively at things that interest me and whatever I think would make a good picture. Until recently, I have never especially set out to take dog pictures but somehow dogs appeared in large numbers on my contact sheets. A few years back while looking through my inventory of pictures to assemble a retrospective book and exhibition of random photographs taken on my travels, I was surprised by the preponderance of dogs. Obviously, my sympathy for the creatures was deeper than I had imagined.

Many of the dogs pictured must have looked appealing to me in their exotic settings, other dogs were appealing in reasonably well-composed photographs and some others seemed to transcend their easy obvious charm and to have allegorical connotations to us humans and our human condition. As I think about this now, my comments don’t sound particularly surprising. I don’t know of any other animals closer to us in qualities of heart, sentiment and loyalty. Some people say elephants come close. Personally, I find elephants too bulky, unwieldy and inaccessible for everyday photography and not at all cuddly or attractive with those big long noses. Besides, they do not roam the streets in every town and country like dogs do. And dogs make easy, uncomplaining targets without the self-conscious hang-ups and possible objections of humans caught on film.”

You can enjoy more of Elliott’s photographs on the Magnum website and his personal website.

Happy Thanksgiving, Art Dogs.

Bailey

“I decided to photograph from a dog’s point of view because dogs see more shoes than anybody.” — Elliott Erwitt

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I first encountered Ruth Asawa’s artwork in 2009. I was a recent college graduate with an art history degree, working as an unpaid intern at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery in Fort Mason. Each morning, I would bike from my small sublet in the Inner Sunset, winding through the hilly Presidio in the fog and rain to reach the gallery on the water. It was there that I learned from Maria Medua and Andrea Voinot about the Bay Area’s art elders. Two names and their stories became etched in my memory: Robert Ogata and Ruth Asawa, both Japanese-American artists, both lived through internment, both possessed stop-you-in-your-tracks talent.

At the time, Ruth was virtually unknown outside of Bay Area arts circles. She was also in her 80s and bedridden with lupus. Her children had been forced to sell artworks Ruth had been gifted by friends, such as Josef Albers, to pay for the round-the-clock care that their aging mother required.

Ironically, this need to sell her artworks to cover medical expenses is one of the reasons many of us know about Ruth Asawa today. Jonathan Laib, a specialist at Christie’s, became curious about the source of these special pieces by Josef Albers. Such ambitious Albers works weren’t typically found in personal collections, but were coming to his attention from this family alongside sweet-hearted notes from Albers to a woman named “Ruthie.”1 At that time, Ruth Asawa’s last show with a gallery in New York was in 1958 and she had all but disappeared from the New York art world. Laib started looking into her work, setting in motion a rediscovery of Ruth’s art and story by the art establishment.

And Ruth Asawa has a truly incredible courageous story—one as epic as the art she was able to create. One that I think we all can take inspiration from in this exact moment, at least in America.

I’ve hesitated to write this Ruth Asawa post for months now. As a Bay Area native, her work and life mean so much to me. Could I write an essay that truly honors her…? I wasn’t confident the answer was yes. Then I re-encountered photos of her with her dog, Henry, in art books tucked away at the Whitney store just before the election results started rolling in. I decided it was finally time for Ruth Asawa’s beautiful life to have her Art Dogs moment. I hope you take as much inspiration from her as I have.

From her very first days until her very last, Ruth Aiko Asawa lived an astonishingly communal life. It began on her family farm in the 1920s, which she worked as a young girl with her parents and six siblings. Thessaly La Force excavated her early family life for The New York Times:

Her father, Umakichi, had worked as a tofu vendor, leaving Japan in 1902 to avoid conscription in the Russo-Japanese War. Her mother, Haru, was a Japanese picture bride — one of the thousands of Japanese women who, at the beginning of the last century, agreed, through the exchange of black-and-white portraits, to marry a Japanese man living in the United States in the hopes of a better life. By the time Ruth was born, the family was leasing an 80-acre farm in what would later become greater Los Angeles, unable to own property as immigrants because of the California Alien Land Law of 1913. Eventually, the Asawa family would grow to include seven children. Ruth was the fourth oldest.

Life on the farm was tough and unsparing, with long days and little time for idleness. The family lived in a board-and-batten house, covered by a paper ceiling and a tin roof, that Umakichi built himself. Asawa’s mother…woke at around 3 a.m. each day to begin cooking the family’s rice; her father rose an hour later to check the gopher traps. Onions, broccoli and cauliflower were harvested every winter, strawberries every spring, and tomatoes and melons in the summer. They recycled the wooden crates down to the nails, which Umakichi would re-flatten with a hammer. “In my home we had virtually no materials,” Asawa said in a 1981 interview, “just a set of encyclopedia and a player piano. All the children wanted to play music but we didn’t have any money for lessons.”

When Ruth was 15 years old, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. A few months later, Ruth’s father was arrested, and later she and her entire family were forced out of their home. “It was a Sunday, I guess, in February,” she recounted in an interview from the mid-1970s, “that we were working in the field and two FBI men came. They went and found my father in the field and marched him back into the house. He had lunch and then they took him away.” Ruth wouldn’t see her father again for six years. Soon after her father’s arrest, Ruth and her mother and siblings were taken to a detention center in Santa Anita. (Ruth later recalled having to say goodbye to the family's beloved horse Pim and watching the family dog chase behind the car as they left for Santa Anita Relocation Center.)

But a communal thread wove itself even through internment. It was there that Ruth had a life-changing experience with the generosity of fellow artists. Three Walt Disney artists who had worked on “Snow White” and “Pinocchio,” Tom Okamoto, Chris Ishii and Ben Tanaka, were also detained at Santa Anita. They taught art classes to fellow detainees, guiding Ruth on how to draw on paper, charcoal and ink. She had more free time in the camp than on the family farm, and Ruth immersed herself in making art.

Looking at the way Ruth gave shape to the rest of her life, you can see how these communal seeds only continued to flourish as she aged.

• After leaving the detention center, she went on to do what the Walt Disney artists had done for her: teach art. She enrolled at the Milwaukee State Teachers College, where her tuition was paid for by a Quaker scholarship.

• Because Ruth was Japanese-American, she was denied a teaching certificate, which prevented her from earning a living as a teacher, so she followed two of her friends to a summer course at a school called Black Mountain College, where she studied and created alongside a group of artists who would become the most consequential in American history. (Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Cy Twombly, and more.) Josef Albers, who had fled Hitler’s Germany with his wife Anni Albers, ran the art program and Ruth “blossomed under Albers’s tutelage…For the first time in her life, Asawa finally saw herself as an artist.”2

• At Black Mountain College, Ruth met a young architect named Albert Lanier. Ruth married Albert, who was white, in 1949, when interracial marriage was still illegal in all but two states—California and Washington. They settled in San Francisco hoping it would be less hostile to their relationship. One year later, they had their first child, Xavier. Ruth and Albert would go on to have six children together. She refused to compartmentalize her life; Ruth’s family and artistic practices were interwoven, as you can see from the photographs of her studio and home.

• As her children entered school, Ruth became increasingly involved in local arts education. As writer Nancy Princenthal remarked, “During the years when the New York art world heard little of her, Asawa was very busy.” Instead of pushing the accelerator on her own career opportunities, she invested in others locally. She launched a volunteer-run art program in 1968, which had expanded to 40 schools by 1975. Later, she focused her energy on building a public high school for the arts in San Francisco. In 2010, the school was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts.

• In 1966, Ruth started making mask artworks of her family and friends. She would make these pieces to document visitors to her home throughout the rest of her life, typically making two clay masks of each—one to give to the sitter and the other to hang on the shingled exterior wall of her Noe Valley house. By the time of her death in 2013, hundreds of masks hung clustered together on that wall. Ruth’s youngest daughter, Addie, said the mask-making was usually done at home with visitors on an impromptu basis. “It was very Japanese; she always gave people things she made, like plum jam, loquat chutney, pickles,” she says. “And then she would give you a mask, too.”3

Last year, I went to see these masks on display at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center.

Alongside the masks, the curators placed three pots made by Paul Lanier, Ruth’s son, that are on loan from the family.

Before Ruth died in 2013, one of her final requests was for her son, Paul, an accomplished ceramicist, to reunite her with her husband and son through his art. Paul mixed his mother’s, father’s, and brother Adam’s collective ashes with clay and threw a set of pots, one for each remaining sibling to keep. He fired the pots in an anagama, a traditional Japanese wood-fired kiln, over a seven-day period. As a result, the pots are exceptionally strong and “some of them had amazing colors,” he says, “like I’ve never seen before.”4 According to Ruth’s wishes, the pots were to “remain among the living—to be admired and even used to hold flowers from the family garden.”

As an artist, Ruth Asawa devoted her hands to the act of transforming delicate, discrete strands of wire into transcendent unified works of art: sturdy in form, rigorously composed yet beautifully in balance.

Her communal life mirrored these interlocking sculptures. Author Marilyn Chase wrote that Ruth “fought arduously for the life she led,” deliberately constructing a “complex and vast” community around herself and her family. None of this emerged accidentally. Life taught Ruth that delicate threads, when connected in artful clusters, are what allow both people and forms to weather storms and the passage of time. She forged these bonds for herself as a young artist, and as she aged she devoted herself to weaving such webs for others.

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt wote that a public realm, where individuals come together to discuss, act, and share experiences, was essential for political life and human flourishing. Community for Arendt was not just a collection of individuals but a space where people engage with each other as equals, each contributing to the creation of a shared world. She viewed action and speech in the public sphere as the most meaningful forms of human activity, as they allow individuals to express their uniqueness while also creating a sense of shared identity.

Hannah Arendt was born 20 years before Ruth Asawa. There’s no evidence that they knew each other, but I wish Hannah Arendt could have witnessed Ruth’s life. I wish she had dined in her home, met her children, had her mask made and hung on the facade of Ruth’s Noe Valley home. If she had, Hannah Arendt would have borne witness to one of the most meaningful human lives as she described it—a truly communal life. From Ruth’s childhood on a farm to her generous teachers at the internment camps and Black Mountain College, to her robust friend group of peer artists, to her lifelong contribution to arts education, to her integration of her family life with her artistic practice, to her final resting place—every major chapter was communal. She forged so many of these spaces for herself and for others. What a wise woman. What an admirable life. May we all take inspiration from her in these tumultuous years to come.

Rest in peace, Ruth Asawa.

Bonus: Henry the dog

Many of the most beautiful photos you’ll see of Ruth in this post, both working and spending time with her family, were made by famed photographer Imogen Cunningham, one of Ruth’s best friends. Ruth met Imogen in 1950, around the time she had her first child, Xavier. Despite their 43-year age difference, they quickly developed a strong friendship “over their shared values, refusal to separate their artistic practices and family life, and love of plum jam.” And Imogen was responsible for a number of the photos we have of Henry the dog.

I wrote into Ruth’s family to learn more about Henry the dog. To my surprise, I received thoughtful responses from one of Ruth’s son’s, named… Henry! I hope you enjoy his answers.

Q: Were pets, animals in any way a part of Ruth's childhood?

Ruth grew up on a farm in Norwalk, CA, so she was surrounded by animals from an early age-- dogs, cats, chickens, horses, a donkey and pigs for slaughter (although only for a short time because the family found they did not like the pig slaughtering process or eating the meat). When she and her family were interned after the issuance of Executive Order 9066 in April 1942, Ruth recalled having to say goodbye to the family's beloved horse Pim and watching the family dog chase behind the car as they left for Santa Anita Relocation Center.

Q: I only know of one dog ("Henry”! Is your name related?) from family photographs later in life, but did the Asawa family have other pets?

I joke with my mother that I am named after Henry the dog (although that's yet to be officially confirmed or denied). In addition to Henry, whose full name is Henry Clyde Lanier (approximately 1964-1976), Ruth had a few cats as pets including Beasley (approximately 1970-1979) and later Fea and Ratty Bell (approximately late 1980s-1990s), neither of which were named by Ruth. In addition, my uncle Xavier had a monkey for a very short time that was a gift from a friend at school in approximately 1968. 

Q: Can you tell me a bit more about Henry the dog?

Henry the dog was technically my late uncle Adam's (1956-2003) and was around from roughly 1964 to 1976. He often accompanied the family to the beach and other outings, including to the family home in Guerneville, CA where he was originally from. My grandmother constantly drew the world around her including Henry who often slept/sat by her side. We are unsure of the origin of Henry's name, but my mother thinks it's likely that the family just thought it was a funny name for a dog. 

Q: What did Henry the dog mean to Ruth? Can you describe their relationship, and how they spent time together?

They spent a lot of time together and we have countless drawings and sketches of Henry in sketchbooks and on finished sheets, mostly of him sleeping. During Henry's final years he would cry when she left his side, so she'd have to pick him up and bring him with her when she moved around the house. Ruth often worked and drew at night while her family slept, so Henry would've been an ideal model late at night while all others were in bed. 

Q: I know Ruth, Henry, and Imogen Cunningham would hang out a lot, it seems in nature. What was Imogen and Henry's relationship like - are there any notable anecdotes or stories?

We are unaware of any particulars about Imogen Cunningham and Henry's relationship. However, in our archives we have a Cunningham photo of Ruth sketching Henry at Fort Cronkhite in the Marin Headlands and the Asawa sketchbook featuring drawings of both Imogen and Henry drawn on the same day. Pretty cool!

There are countless drawings and sketches of Henry over the years along with a handful of drawings and watercolors of both Beasley and Ratty Bell, and a few sketches of Fea. Perhaps most interesting of the lot, however, is a drawing of a rocking chair with Xavier's sleeping monkey.

Thank you to for inspiring this post! You should read her writing on Ruth Asawa here:

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Art Dogs is a monthly dispatch introducing the pets—dogs, yes!, but also cats, turtles, marmosets, and more—that were kept by our favorite artists. Subscribe to receive these posts in your email inbox.

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Patsy Cline is one of my favorite singers of all time. (The other is Billie Holiday, who was also a dog lover.)

Patsy’s career bloomed for just three years, but in that time she accomplished so much. She was one of the first women to headline concerts in the male-dominated country music industry, she achieved a life-long dream of joining the Grand Ole Opry, and was one of the first country artists to successfully cross over to the pop charts. “Crazy” may be the #1 jukebox hit of all time, and her greatest hits album remains one of the best-selling country albums. In 1973, she was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the first female solo artist to receive this honor.

Patsy’s appeal comes from her voice’s capacity to simultaneously communicate grief and strength. As Dan Barry wrote, “If that famous Bekettian thought— ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’—were set to music, Patsy Cline would be the one to sing it.” Stephen M. Deusner expanded on that theme:

[Patsy] is always the lonely one, the heartbroken, the one who suffers so that another woman can thrive. Love is a zero-sum game…few artists have managed to find so many facets of despair or to express them so carefully, so precisely… “If you’ve got leavin’ on your mind,” she sings on 1963’s “Leavin’ on Your Mind,” “hurt me now. Get it over.”

Let’s hear her sing before going any further.

Patsy Cline was born Virginia Patterson Hensley in Winchester, Virginia, on September 8, 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression. Her mother, Hilda Virginia, was only 16 years old at the time of Patsy’s birth. (Patsy’s father, Samuel, was 30 years older.)

Her childhood was full of challenges, and perhaps the source of the sadness she would capture in songs as an adult. The family moved nineteen times before Patsy entered high school so that her father, a blacksmith, could find work. As a young child, she had to work jobs to contribute money to the family, including plucking and killing chickens at a poultry factory. Later in life, Patsy would confide to Loretta Lynn that her father had sexually abused her as a child.

At 13 years old, Patsy went into the hospital with an infection and rheumatic fever. “I developed a terrible throat infection and my heart even stopped beating. The doctor put me in an oxygen tent,” she later recounted. “You might say it was my return to the living after several days that launched me as a singer. The fever affected my throat and when I recovered I had this booming voice.”1

With this newfound voice, young Patsy started performing. She and her mother sang duets at church social events and in a local Baptist choir. Then Patsy auditioned for the local radio station at 14 years old. The disc jockey remembers her showing up in the station's waiting room one day and being impressed by her voice, telling her “Well, if you've got nerve enough to stand before that mic and sing over the air live, I've got nerve enough to let you.”

At the outset of her career, Patsy struggled to find a groove. She conceived of herself as a hillbilly and took to yodeling onstage at juke joints and cabarets wearing cowgirl outfits hand sewn by her mother. For two years, her records didn’t chart.

Then she performed “Walkin After Midnight,” on a televised talent competition and won. The song climbed to #2 on the country and #12 on the pop charts. Patsy updated her image, trading “fringed dresses and cowboy boots for high heels.”2 She started earning a solid living as a singer, but gave all her money to her mother so she could pay down the mortgage on her house.

Just as her single “I Fall to Pieces” started to climb the charts in the summer of 1961, disaster struck.

Patsy and her brother Sam were driving to the store to buy material for her mother to make some clothing when a car struck them head on. Two of the three passengers in the other vehicle would die from the accident. Plastic from the steering wheel lodged into Sam’s chest, and Patsy was thrown through the windshield, suffering a dislocated hip, broken ribs, and a cut that ran the length of her face, barely missing her eyes.

Patsy’s injuries were so life-threatening that hospital employees didn’t expect her to survive. She stayed in Madison Hospital for over a month. Upon leaving, she almost immediately returned to work. Patsy performed at the Grand Ole Opry in a wheelchair and toured the midwest singing on crutches. She would never have plastic surgery, and it would reportedly take her nearly four hours to apply makeup to hide her scar. She suffered from headaches for the rest of her life, often wearing a headband to suppress the pain. (See videos below.)

After the car accident, the first hit she recorded was “Crazy,” written by Willie Nelson. Patsy was still recovering when she first tried recording the song, and hitting its high notes caused rib pain. Her producer sent her home to rest while musicians laid down the track without her. A week later she returned and recorded her vocal in just a single take. It would become her biggest hit.

She followed up with “She's Got You,” “So Wrong,” and “Imagine That.” The poor country girl finally had earned enough money to buy her family a “dream home,” outside of Nashville, where they had a large backyard.

It was around this time that a dog came into Patsy’s life: a small white puppy named Pepe, for Pepe LePew. If you take the time to visit the Patsy Cline Museum in Patsy’s hometown in Virginia, you may catch a glimpse of Pepe in some of the young family’s home videos, in between Patsy painting her nails and Charlie sipping a beer.

I wrote into the Patsy Cline Museum to ask about Pepe, and they told me that the puppy was with the family when Patsy died at the age of 30 in a plane accident on her way home from a concert in Kansas.

Patsy’s daughter Julie specifically remembers that on the day Patsy didn't come home, a neighbor took her on a drive to board the puppy at the vet, since the family would have to leave town for the funeral services. Julie can’t remember how long they kept Pepe after that day. Patsy’s children went to live with their grandmother, surrounded by kids and families who had no idea that they were the children of the great country star who had died too young.

Patsy Cline seems to have had a gift for premonitions.

In the year before her death, she famously told Dottie West, June Carter Cash, and Loretta Lynn separately that she didn’t expect to live much longer.3 (In 1961, Patsy even sketched out her will on a Delta Airlines flight, going as far as to specify her burial outfit.)

And after she finished her final performance, fog prohibited Patsy’s plane from taking off in its first attempt. Her friend Dottie West suggested Patsy join her instead on a 16-hour drive home. “Don’t worry about me, Hoss,” Patsy responded. “When it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go.” The next day, Patsy Cline boarded a plane that she’d never disembark.

Stephen M. Deusner wrote a beautiful review of Patsy’s last album. In it he laments that because of this plane crash, we never got to see Patsy Cline’s suffering abate: “We never got to see her expand her repertoire to songs that elaborated on that sadness or countered it with contentment. Patsy Cline never even got a chance for a happy ending.”

But after reading about the full course of Patsy’s life, I can’t help but wonder if Patsy Cline did indeed get her happy ending in those final years—with her young family, her blooming singing career, her dream home with its big backyard, and, of course, her dog, Pepe.

In 1954, at the outset of her career, Patsy committed a happy premonition to record with her song “I’m Walking the Dog.” Perhaps this premonition came true, too.

Such an easy life, I never knew
Well, I can't believe that it's really true
Well, I'm a carefree gal that's seen the light
And I'm a-walkin' that dog all the day and all night

Well, I'm full of pep, I just can't grow old
I got a one-track mind, so I've been told
But I'm fancy free, I don't worry no how
'Cause I'm walkin' that dog, all the law will allow

Such an easy life, I never knew
Until the day that I left you
Well, I'm a carefree gal that's seen the light
And I'm walkin' that dog all the day and all night

Bonus: Playlist

If you need a good Patsy Cline playlist, here’s one I made for myself of my favorite songs:

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Yayoi Kusama is a great artist.

She’s a “creative polymath” who can span the artistic gamut: painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, performance, film, printmaking, installation, and environmental art as well as literature and fashion. (In addition to visual art, she has published eight novels and several books of poetry.1)

Yayoi boasts the highest auction prices of any living female artist. (The highest price for any woman artist, living or dead, belongs to her mentor, Georgia O'Keeffe.) She even has her own museum in Tokyo.

And like Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and more, she transcended the art world to become an instantly-recognizable visual style.

Some of this comes from Yayoi Kusama’s ceaseless appetite for promotion. She pursued collaborations with many of the world’s biggest brands—handbags with Louis Vuitton, bottles with Veuve Clicquot and Perrier, cotton shirts with Issey Miyake, and more.

And when Instagram came out, it carried Yayoi’s aesthetic to countless screens around the world.

Millions of people have spent hours of their lives in line waiting for the chance to experience—and photograph—her Infinity Mirror Rooms. (Adele even performed in one.) These rooms have been called “the ultimate Instagram exhibition.”

Yayoi’s omnipresence has fed the ire of some art critics. Adrian Searle from The Guardian disparaged the Infinity Mirror Rooms as being more about the photograph than the concept, describing them as “an Instagram experience posing as art,” and resembling “cheapo garden fairy lights​.” Will Heinrich wrote in The New York Times that her work is “as familiar, and as reliably perfect, as Coca-Cola.”

But don’t let the popularity she’s earned confuse you, as it has these critics. Even cynical people can’t help but love Yayoi Kusama’s work when they stand amidst it.

Because Yayoi Kusama is a great artist.

Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto City, Nagano, Japan, in March 1929. (Yayoi means “March” in Japanese.) Her family was wealthy and owned a business cultivating plant seeds. Yayoi spent her childhood amongst their flower fields while the Great Depression and World War II brought her country to its knees.

Yayoi’s parents didn’t support the creativity that burst forth from their daughter. She made thousands of small paintings and drawings during her early years, some of which she later developed into sculptures. Her mother would reportedly rip these early artworks straight from Yayoi’s hands before she could finish them, forbidding her from creating art, throwing away her inks and canvasses, and telling her daughter that one day she would have to “marry someone from a rich family and become a housewife.”

This environment drove Yayoi to practice art as an act of opposition in all forms including her clothes, which she began to rebelliously decorate with dots as a child.

Yayoi has said that she first started experiencing hallucinations at a young age, and they have informed her art ever since. She can recall exploring the fields outside of her childhood home and seeing patterns in the “overwhelming amount” of flowers. Her hallucinations left her “dazzled and dumbfounded,” with repeating patterns flooding her field of vision, an experience she came to refer to as “obliteration.” Yayoi’s artworks aim to help us “obliterate the self” and the process of making them has helped her to transcend her troubles. She later said that she “kept trying to make my own world” as a way to cope with trauma and anxiety.

In her late 20s, Yayoi left Japan and her family behind for a new world—America. She said that Japanese society was “too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women” for her to remain, but this move was no trivial act. In the immediate postwar period, “it was rare enough for a young Japanese woman to travel to the U.S., much less with the intention of becoming an art star.”2

She arrived in Seattle “with no one waiting for her on the other side” and spent six months on the West Coast making art before heading to New York in 1958.3 Of Yayoi’s early conviction, Tate curator Frances Morris said:

“She was on a train to stardom. She knew exactly what she wanted to do. She had a suitcase full of drawings, and she set about selling herself.”4

In New York, Yayoi quickly established a reputation. Within the year, her net paintings were being praised as groundbreaking. Arts magazine exclaimed that she was “one of the most promising new talents to appear on the New York scene in years.”

Yayoi didn’t settle. She explored new fabrication processes and materials, including soft sculpture, repeat imagery, mirrors, and lights. As a young artist, she embodied a central tenet of contemporary art that “art must enact rather than simply depict its own transformational capacities.” And she manipulated each material to embody her signature aesthetics.

Art critics have since credited Yayoi Kusama as one of the central nodes pushing the boundaries of the 1960s New York art scene. But at the time Yayoi struggled to earn a living or gain mainstream recognition. It’s widely believed that male artists like Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol copied her signature concepts.5 Yayoi was left to watch in despair as “these ideas—her ideas—manifest in wealth and success [for Warhol and Oldenburg] that she could not herself achieve.” Meanwhile, Yayoi lived in harsh poverty. In her autobiography, she recalled using a door found on the street for a bed, painting during the night to keep warm, and eating “from the fishmonger’s rubbish.”6 (The relevant chapter of her autobiography is titled “A Living Hell in New York.”) She increasingly isolated herself, covering the windows of her Greenwich Village studio to prevent other artists from seeing her ideas.

To avoid other artist’s mimicry, Yayoi began to focus on performance art.

In response to not being invited to the 1966 Venice Biennale, Yayoi smuggled 1,500 plastic-metallic balls onto the lawn of the Japanese pavilion— her first successful experimentation with performance . (Japan didn’t formally invite her to represent the nation until 30 years later. She was the first solo female artist to represent Japan, in 1993.) The artwork directly references the story of Narcissus. Her reflective spheres resemble a fortune-teller’s crystal ball. When gazing into them, viewers see only their reflections staring back. Yayoi acted as a street peddler at the event, selling the mirror balls to passers-by for two dollars each. She was stopped by Biennale authorities who kicked her out, objecting to her selling her work “like hot dogs or ice cream cones.”

Back in the U.S., she started staging “polka dot happenings,” or “body festivals.” She took these happenings to iconic locations, including the Brooklyn Bridge, MoMA, Washington Square and Times Square. Yayoi asked participants to strip naked, and painted their bodies, often with polka-dots, with the intention of promoting peace or protesting the art establishment. Yayoi used polka dots to “make everything the same, to become one with the universe, and fight back against American individualism.”

In 1967, Yayoi Kusama released a 23-minute film called Self-Obliteration that documents her notorious happenings. The film can best be described as trippy. At 2:00 minutes, Yayoi presses polka dots onto the skin of a horse, which she then mounts to ride to a polka dot coated lake while wearing a red polka dot gown. Things only get weirder from there.

Your first-blush impression of these performances might be to call them stunts and Yayoi a “media-manipulating show-off.” Will Gompertz writes:

That was certainly the opinion the press reached in both America and Japan by the early 1970s. And they were right, up to a point. She was and is a savvy operator when it comes to attention-grabbing public relations. But with good reason. First, she had to stand out and stand up for herself to have any chance of making it as an unknown Japanese woman in the man’s world that was America’s post-war art scene. And second, she is her art, inside and out. She turns her panic-inducing alarm into positive, life-enhancing experiences.

In response to new forms of struggles and oppression in New York, Kusama had yet again made her own radical world.

But all of this hustling would take a toll on Yayoi. She returned to Japan in 1973 “in a desperate state, having had physical health issues and, on top of that, suffering a nervous breakdown and a subsequent depression that she struggled through on a daily basis.”7 Four years later, she voluntarily checked into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, and the world forgot about her.

But Yayoi never stopped making her art.

Most every day for the last fifty years, Yayoi Kusama has woken up in the same hospital in Tokyo, walked to her studio a couple of blocks away, sat down and worked through the daylight.

While she repeated that cycle over and over, the world changed around her.

It started with curator Alexandra Munroe, who organized a retrospective of Yayoi’s work at the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York in 1989.

Then Japan asked her to represent the country in 1993 at the Venice Biennale, where Yayoi installed an Infinity Mirror Room and reprised her Narcissus Garden.

This time, Yayoi wasn’t kicked out of the Biennale. Nor were her concepts stolen by a male artist. No, this time Yayoi was treated in a way she’d rarely experienced in her lifetime: she was embraced.

Since that shift in the early 1990s, Yayoi Kusama has become the most recognizable artist on the planet. Her art has been shown at the most prestigious galleries and museums. Paintings she once sold for $200 now fetch upwards of $10 million at auction. Her home country, where she was once shunned, has awarded her its most prestigious prizes. And her style is hers and hers alone—no one would dare copy her.

My favorite essay on Yayoi Kusama comes from Will Gompertz in LitHub.

Yayoi Kusama is far from unique in using art as therapy to overcome extreme anxiety; fear is one of the most common sources of creative inspiration. But her psychological experiences are unique, as are yours and mine. They could have crushed her, but instead they were the making of her. She used them to see and be seen, and to become one of the most original, ground-breaking artists of our time. She says she was born into a family and a culture that suppressed emotions, but despite resistance from her parents and periods of ridicule during her career, she has prevailed by showing the world the healing power of confronting the thoughts that frightened her.

It’s this courage that we must remember when we see Yayoi Kusama’s work today. Against all the odds, Yayoi Kusama has survived to 95 years old. She spent nearly nine decades trying to carve out her own world with little-to-no support systems, and she has finally succeeded. We are lucky to be bearing witness to the late stages of this great artist’s career. This daughter of seed cultivators is in full bloom, and her “Kusama worlds” are on display around the world for us to step into. How lucky are we?

Yayoi Kusama’s Dogs

I found this fantastic photo of Yayoi with an unknown dog and cat in her studio in 1958 in an art book. Despite my best efforts, I can’t find any info about the photographer or the animals online. (If anyone has intel, please share!)

Perhaps this studio dog inspired a series of sculptures that Yayoi created in the 2000s. She’s made fiberglass and balloon dogs, and even a limited-edition dog cell phone.

(These sculptures cost ~$250k. If anyone would like to buy one for me, I’ll happily accept.)

Bonus: The music video Yayoi Kusama made with Peter Gabriel

Released the same year at Yayoi’s return to the Venice Biennale.

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Jack Gilbert is my favorite poet. Perhaps he’s yours, too.

Alice Quinn, former poetry editor of The New Yorker, wrote that his were “poems that stood tall, making one step back and slow down.” I’m inclined to agree.

Here are two of my favorites.

In over 50 years of writing, Jack Gilbert published just four collections. He reflected on this by saying: “It’s not a business with me . . . . I’m not a professional of poetry, I’m a farmer of poetry.”1

Jack Gilbert treated his discipline with supreme reverence, calling poetry “a witnessing to magnitude”:

“[Poetry] is the art of making urgent values manifest, and of imposing them on the reader. It is the housing of these values in poems so they will exist with maximum pressure, and for the longest time. It is the craft of doing so in structures that are a delight in themselves. And it is the mystery of fashioning poems in such a way that the form and the content are one.”

If you’ve read Jack Gilbert’s poems, you know that he wasn’t exaggerating by describing himself as a “serious romantic.” He returned regularly to love and its implications in his writing. Fellow poet Dan Albergotti said that Jack Gilbert’s poems about love, loss, and grief “defy all expectations of sentimentality.”

And if you’ve read Jack Gilbert’s poems, you’ll recognize the name Michiko. Michiko Nogami was a sculptor and Jack’s former student. They met in San Francisco, and Jack followed her to Japan. They lived and traveled together until she died from cancer at age 36. I could only find one photo of her.

Jack Gilbert didn't publish for most of their 11-year relationship. When he was asked why, he said that he had spent that time “falling in love.”

As Michiko was dying, he published again.

In the years to follow, Jack left us with many poems memorializing her and reflecting on loss.

Three of the poems above were first published in Kochan, a chapbook collection of elegiac poems written for and with Michiko. (Four of Michiko’s own poems are included in the chapbook.2 )

Kochan was published two years after her death in a limited run of 300, which are hand sewn in Mulberry rice paper. After Kochan, Jack Gilbert wouldn’t publish again for a decade. His next collection, The Great Fires, is a meditation on the ten years after Michiko’s death.

On the final page of Kochan, Jack chose to etch a poem from the Man’yōshū, the oldest anthology of Classical Japanese poetry.3

If I had known the size of this longing
I would have watched you every day
like looking in a clear mirror

If anyone had the wisdom to see a loved one clearly in the present moment, as this poem prescribes, it was Jack Gilbert. His poems demonstrate that capacity, and they are his and Michiko’s lasting gift to us.

This newsletter is called Art Dogs, and, as always, I promise to deliver for you.

While I could find no evidence that Jack Gilbert and Michiko Nogami had pets, after reading his poems, I suspect a dog or two may have graced their lives.

One poem in particular makes me confident in this. It’s an apt poem to bring this edition to a close.

Bonus

Here’s another poem that Jack wrote for the Kochan collection: “Nights and Four Thousand Mornings.” I discovered it on an obscure Tumblr, where I found the rest of the Kochan poems.

“Nights and Four Thousand Mornings” is the longest poem Jack Gilbert ever wrote, and I had never seen it before researching this post. I hope you enjoy it.

If you are keen to read more about Jack Gilbert, the best resource out there is ’s interview with him in The Paris Review: Jack Gilbert, The Art of Poetry No. 91.

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“Although not a favorite artist of music critics” (ouch), Barry Manilow had 51 top 40 singles, including 13 that hit number one across his career.

Barry’s career began to take off when Bette Midler saw his act in 1971. She chose him as her pianist, accompanying her at performances in a gay bathhouse in New York City.1

Despite being immersed in LGBTQ+ culture, performing at the bathhouse and touring didn’t lead Barry to discovering his sexuality. “At that point I wasn’t sure about that,” the singer later said. “There were a lot of us in the world that had yet to figure it out.”

Instead of chasing love in his youth, Barry buried himself into his music. By the early 1970s, Frank Sinatra predicted of Barry: "He's next." He skyrocketed to fame with “Mandy” in 1974, followed by “Looks Like We Made It,” “Copacabana (At the Copa)” and “Can’t Smile Without You.”

HAPPY PRIDE!! Enjoy this remixed version of Copacabana!

Later, Barry recalled of this time: “I was pretty lonely.”

To ease the emptiness, he brought a beagle named “Bagel,” into his life. There are a fantastic number of photos of Barry with Bagel out there, and I even found a Barry Manilow fan club named after the dog.

In 1978, at the age of 35, Barry met Garry Kief, who would turn out to be the love of his life.

Throughout his career, he says he “was always worried. Every interview: ‘They’re going to ask me whether I’m gay or not.’ Nobody ever did, by the way. They never asked me the $64 question.” 

The two married in 2014, after same-sex marriage became legal in California. Three years later, Barry came out as gay after spending nearly 40 years in the closet, worried that he’d disappoint his fans. The couple has been together for 45 years, spending time between Bel Air and Palm Springs, where they once owned the Kaufmann residence by Richard Neutra, a midcentury modern masterpiece immortalized in the Slim Aarons photograph “Poolside Gossip.”

Today, he’s 80 years old and still performing in Vegas. And yes, he still has dogs.

Barry onstage in Vegas at 80 years old!

Barry Manilow facts

• He was born Barry Alan Pincus and was raised by his single mother, Edna, in “the slums of Williamsburg,” Brooklyn.

• His grandfather changed the family name to obscure their Jewish heritage just before Barry’s bar mitzvah.

• After graduating from high school in 1961, Barry went on to study musical theater at Juilliard Performing Arts School.

• He got his start writing scores for Off-Broadway plays, and composing and singing commercial jingles, including State Farm Insurance ("Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there"), Band-Aid ("I am stuck on Band-Aid, 'cause Band-Aid's stuck on me!"), Pepsi ("all across the nation, it's the Pepsi Generation"), and McDonald's ("you deserve a break today"). When receiving an award for his commercial work, he stated that he learned the most about making pop music by working for three or four years as a writer in the jingle industry.

• While in high school, he met Susan Deixler, and they later married for a short time. Barry stated in 2017 that though he later came out as gay, he had been in love with Susan and the failure of the marriage was not related to issues of sexual orientation. And… he credits a response he received from Playboy in 1965 for the courage to leave his marriage and everything behind to focus on his career in music: “I asked a lot of people what I should do, and they all said different things. Finally, I was so desperate, I wrote to the Playboy Advisor.”

Art Dogs is a monthly dispatch introducing the pets—dogs, yes!, but also cats, turtles, marmosets, and more—that were kept by our favorite artists. Subscribe to receive these posts in your email inbox.

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Jean-Jacques Sempé is France’s most celebrated cartoonist. He has even been called a national institution. In his lifetime, he published 40 books, which were translated into 40 languages and sold 15 million copies. Sempé, as he is affectionately called, also drew 114 covers for The New Yorker.1

Sempé never attended art school but spent more than 70 years drawing. In his obituary, the New York Times described him as having “bypassed life’s meanspirited realities for a mythical world of mischievous schoolboys, daydreamers, nosy neighbors, holidaymakers and swooning lovers.”

Sempé portrayed characters struggling with “petty tragedies or undeserved victories” and delighted in “the tenacity of the most banal of human instincts.”2

He also mastered the panoramic cartoon, often drawing people from a high or distant viewpoint. “I've always been astonished that we humans assume somehow that we are big,” he once said. “If you look at a person beside a tree or a building or a town, we are just tiny, little scraps of things. I never consciously set out to draw that way.”3

Those aesthetic tendencies, combined with French eyes, made him a magnificent documenter of life in New York City. Despite only visiting New York City “five or six” times in his life, Sempé captured its spirit perfectly in his cartoons. In the late 1970s, Sempé fulfilled a life-long dream to draw a cover for the New Yorker. His final cover for the magazine went to publication three weeks after his death in August of 2022.

Sempé’s scenes of New York and Paris are what draw me back to him most. I just spent 24 hours in Paris to celebrate my 37th birthday. After seeing the two tremendous cities in juxtaposition, it’s clear somehow that a Frenchman in New York would be the person to notice these moments—scenes that I would stride right past unthinkingly.

Philosopher Henri Bergson once wrote:

[A]rt always aims at what is individual. What the artist fixes on his canvas is something he has seen at a certain spot, on a certain day, at a certain hour, with a colouring that will never be seen again. What the poet sings of is a certain mood which was his, and his alone, and which will never return. What the dramatist unfolds before us is the life-history of a soul, a living tissue of feelings and events — something, in short, which has once happened and can never be repeated. We may, indeed, give general names to these feelings, but they cannot be the same thing in another soul. They are individualized.

Truly great art embodies this paradox: that very specific, very individual expressions can offer near-universal appeal. For me, Sempé was a master of this capacity.

In addition to documenting the charms and oddities of life in Paris and New York, Sempé's repeat subjects included bikes, children, trees, cats, dogs and musicians.

His own cat, Nefertiti, and his wife’s Jack Russell terrier, appear regularly in his work.

A critic once wrote that Sempé:

Took pleasure in giving an answer to the famous mystery that surrounds the lives of our animals in our absence. The cartoonist lends them almost human behavior, humorous reflections of our ways of being. Thus, the cat, tired of the frantic pace of a city he only knows through the window, seems happy to find ‘his’ bed.

The dogs and cats in Sempé’s work serve to emphasize the qualities of a well-lived human life—enchantment, relaxation, adventure, play and comedy. The animals are the wise ones who have much to show us, should we allow them to do so.

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For the last week, I’ve been wandering around London with .

At some point in every trip to London, I have to visit the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate Modern. (Perhaps this is true for you, too.) I was cruising past a wall text about Joan Mitchell at the Tate when Jess called me over for a closer look.

“Music, poems, landscape and dogs make me want to paint…and painting was what allowed me to survive.” — Joan Mitchell

A quick search led to a treasure trove of archival images of Joan with her many dogs. (She owned 13!)

This Art Dogs was inspired by that chance encounter with Joan and Jess at the Tate. I hope you enjoy learning about her as much as I did.

xo Bailey

Joan Mitchell was born on February 12, 1925, in Chicago, to a doctor and a poet.

Almost every recollection of her early life includes two details: that she was the daughter of an important poet and editor (her mother, Marion Strobel) and that she was an athlete.

As a young girl, “she came to know T.S Eliot, Ezra Pound, Edna St. Vincent Millay,” and more “as visitors to the family home.”1 She published one of her own poems in Poetry magazine, where her mother was an editor, at just ten years old. Later, she would enroll at Smith College as an English major, marry a famous publisher, and develop friendships with Frank O’Hara (who wrote Lunch Poems in her studio) and James Schuyler.

A childhood spent among poets gave Joan “an abiding lyricism.” She once said that she wanted to express in painting the qualities that “differentiate a line of poetry from a line of prose.”2

Young Joan was also a jock. Well into her teens, she pursued diving, horseback riding, tennis, and figure skating. She was a champion figure skater, at one time placing fourth nationally and only retiring due to injury. Susan Delson wrote of Joan that “As an artist, she had the virtues of an athlete: ambition, discipline, technique and an intoxicating sense of bodily freedom.” Her brushstrokes are still likened to skating tracks—“rather like a perfectionist’s practice session on the ice.”

Poetry, as with diving, riding horses, and figure skating, strike me as crafts that benefit from bold precision. Expression that demands intention and restraint. Joan Mitchell mastered this capacity as a painter.

Despite the carefree appearance of her brushstrokes, she produced her paintings “slowly, with the help of preliminary drawings in charcoal on the canvas.”3 Joan frequently emphasized her deliberate approach in interviews. “I want to know what my brush is doing,” Joan explained in 1957. Twenty years later, she told Marcia Tucker that her love for structure in her painting was akin to “a kind of plumb line dancers have. They have to be perfectly balanced, the more frenetic the activity is.” John Russell made sure to note this intentionality in the artist’s New York Times obituary:

Throughout her life, she insisted that the tumultuous and airborne expression of feeling in her paintings was not a matter of instinct left free to run wild. As she said to the historian Irving Sandler: “The freedom in my work is quite controlled. I don't close my eyes and hope for the best.” The historian Leo Steinberg once wrote of her ability “to score triumphantly for the willed act as against chance effect.”

Joan is remembered by art history as one of the lone girls in a boys club. Often the only woman in the band of Abstract-Expressionists in New York City, she established herself during America’s artistic emergence in a decade rife with sexism and homophobia.

Joan was well aware that if she’d been a male painter, life would’ve come easier to her. But she forged ahead despite. “When I was discouraged I wondered if really women couldn’t paint, the way all the men said they [the women] couldn’t paint,” Joan remembered. “But then at other times I said, ‘Fuck them.’”

Though Joan was surrounded by male peers and had a number of significant lovers (including Samuel Beckett and Alan Greenspan. Yes, that Alan Greenspan!), her most lasting companions proved to be her dogs. She never had children, but she cared for many, many dogs across her lifetime. The Joan Mitchell Foundation has “1,663 (and counting) photos of puppies and dogs” in their archives, and notes that “Joan titled numerous paintings after dogs dear to her, and she often wrote to friends with news about the dogs in her life.”4

Joan’s first dog was a poodle named Georges du Soleil. Georges came into Joan’s life just after her work was included in the now-historic 1951 “Ninth Street Show” and her first solo show in 1952, which was described by an Art News reviewer as “a savage debut,” with “heroic-sized cataclysms of aggressive color-lines.”5

In 1955, Joan began splitting time between New York and Paris. Four years later, she’d move to the country full time—first to Paris, and then to Vétheuil. She lived in the town until the end of her life, close to a house which had been that of Claude Monet before he moved to nearby Giverny. (Her address was “avenue Claude Monet.”)

Joan once said that she bought the house in Vétheuil so she wouldn’t have to dog walk, which came in useful because she had so many—three Skye terriers (gifts from Patricia Matisse), three German Shepherds (Iva, Marion, named after her mother, and Madeleine, named after a mistress of one of her exes!), two Brittany spaniels, and a number of stray dogs, totaling 13 dogs across her lifetime.

In Vétheuil, Joan “lived and breathed the landscape around her” and receded from the outside world. She had a large studio that allowed her to create on a grander scale than ever before, where Joan would pour the turpentine for her oil paint into leftover dog food cans and leave them scattered across the floor. She liked to paint late into the night and listen to loud music, from Maria Callas to Billie Holiday, with her dogs nearby. The morning after, in the daylight, she reviewed the colors.6

Art Director Suzanne Pagé believes that Joan Mitchell “became herself in Vétheuil.” She was finally free of the gender emphasis that shadowed her entire career in New York and Paris. Eileen Myles noted the following about this period in Joan’s life:

“When I think about Joan in France…she was in a big studio in nature all day long and she had no gender. These paintings have no gender. They are just pure acts of being… I think females were never allowed that freedom except quietly to ourselves.”

Removing oneself from city life eases the social comparisons we endure—in Joan’s case, the ongoing call-out of being a female artist in a male club. She claimed that freedom for herself by moving to rural France alone with her dogs. The resulting paintings are expansive, awe-inspiring. For me, her work in this period rose to new heights—beyond Joan’s mid century Ab-Ex peers and onto the level of Van Gogh and Monet.

If you’ve seen these paintings in person, you’ll know that they are massive—sometimes measuring 9 feet tall by 20 feet wide. John Vincler remarked in The Paris Review that although Joan Mitchell was 5’6 tall and not “unusually proportioned,” she nonetheless “brought an enormity to her painting.”

That’s all the more remarkable given Joan painted these huge artworks while fighting for her life. The late 1970s to the early 1990s was a period of intense grief: She broke off a 25-year, turbulent relationship with her last major lover after his infidelity7, faced unshakeable depression and alcoholism, lost her sister and several close friends in rapid succession, and received a cancer diagnosis that would eventually take her life.

The “Untitled” series (above) were Joan’s last paintings. Reduced to walking with a cane, she would die the same year from cancer. John Vincler looked closely at one of the “Untitled” paintings for his essay The Paris Review:

“Much of its surface remains as white ground, seemingly to emphasize her now-limited reach, documenting the struggles of the body against frailty. But her gestures remain large and bold, lyrical and confident, creating a stark yet riotously colorful composition that suggests calligraphic graffiti… The painting conveys such an immensity of spirit and scale—the persistence of her wingspan—suspended.”

Joan never lost her ambition or discipline. When an art critic asked Joan how she managed to keep painting given her illness late in life, she answered “I just got up on that fucking ladder and told myself, ‘This stroke has to work.’” In her old age, she recognized more than ever “the consequence of every stroke” and “maximized every ounce of energy in service of great painting.” The jock and the poet inside of Joan drove her forward until the very end.

Rest in peace, Joan Mitchell.

Bonus: Poems

Joan Mitchell paired numerous pastel drawings on paper with typed poems by friends, including Jacques Dupin, J. J. Mitchell, James Schuyler, Pierre Schneider, and Chris Larson. However, she objected to describing these works as collaborations. “I just took the poems,” she said.8 Here are a few I enjoyed most.

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Art Dogs is a monthly dispatch introducing the pets—dogs, yes!, but also cats, turtles, marmosets, and more—that were kept by our favorite artists. Subscribe to receive these posts in your email inbox.

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Garry Winogrand has been called “the central photographer of his generation” and his work revered as more consequential than even famed contemporaries like Diane Arbus or Lee Friedlander. He passed away in 1984, at the young age of 56, and some critics believe his style presaged the prolific way digital photographers shoot today.

During his lifetime, Garry won several Guggenheim Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work has been the subject of many museum and gallery exhibitions, including solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (in 1969, 1977, and 1988!), as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Garry Winogrand was born in 1928 in the Bronx. After spending two years in the Army, he enrolled as a painting student at Columbia University in 1948. While there, a friend encouraged Garry to join him in the darkroom, which was located in the basement of the architecture building and open 24 hours a day. Those sessions were the seeds of a lifelong passion.

Sean O’Hagan wrote that Garry Winogrand became “essentially a New York photographer: frenetic, in-your-face, arty despite himself.” Yet his style elided definition. “His style was no style at all,” Vince Aletti wrote. “His pictures look perfectly artless, the opposite of the decisive moment and the epitome of the snapshot aesthetic.”

Let’s take a look.

In his 30 years of taking photos, Garry Winogrand produced a prodigious amounts of work. Frank Van Riper described him as having “the intensity of a pig hunting truffles” while photographing. Colleagues, students and friends described him as “an almost obsessive picture-taking machine,” and his ex wife Adrienne Lubeau once said that “being married to Garry was like being married to a lens.”

He took over 20,000 rolls of film throughout the course of his lifetime. When he died, he left thousands of undeveloped rolls behind, totaling nearly 300,000 unedited images.1 “Everyone thinks there’s something about an ‘eye’ but Garry was an athlete,” one of his friends once remarked.

Garry also photographed with a surreptitious style that made it hard for people on the street to know if he’d taken a photo or not. Richard Brody explained how Garry’s approach affected his subjects:

Only one or two in a crowd who were aware of the camera’s presence and looked into the lens, not so much interacting with him as reacting to him, already too late. He was, in effect, stinging his subjects with the camera, and their gaze back was as an expression of their surprise.

In the film below, you can hear his Bronx accent and watch him sneak photographs on the street.

In this week’s Art Dogs, we’re taking a look at the great photographer’s first book, “The Animals.” It was published in 1969, two decades after Garry Winogrand started hanging out in the darkroom of his university.

The book contains 43 black-and-white photographs taken at the Central Park Zoo, the Bronx Zoo, and the Coney Island Aquarium over a period of seven years. He took many of these photos as a newly divorced father, bringing his young children to the zoo for entertainment. Soon after, he was awarded his second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969, and the series was shown at MoMA—his first one-man exhibition.

I think some of these photos are jaw-droppingly good. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Until next time Art Dogs,

Bailey

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Good morning Art Dogs!

I hope your March went swimmingly. At the beginning of the month, I mentioned that I was going to move to a monthly cadence for posts so I can have some time to really invest into each one. This is the first of those monthly posts.

In between, I’ve been sharing shorter Art Dogsian stories and anecdotes on Notes, which I’ve found quite fun. Here are a few if you’re interested.

• Note: On Flannery O’Conner’s peacocks: “My quest, whatever it was actually for, ended with peacocks. Instinct, not knowledge, led me to them.”

• Note: On Marvin Gaye’s blissful years in Topanga Canyon with his dogs: “For weeks I’d just sit and stare into space. With enough time, I was sure this was the place where I could create my masterpiece.”

• Note: On Richard Serra’s youth in the Outer Sunset (43rd and Taraval), two doors down from Mark di Suvero: Looking back, di Suvero, who turns 86 this month, recalled long, riotous afternoons when he and a young Mr. Serra played in the dunes, skidding down them on flat cardboard, having to empty their shoes of sand before their mothers let them back into the house. Their relationship, however, was not completely harmonious. “Our dogs would fight,” di Suvero recalled with amusement. “I had a dog, they got a dog, and his father would say, ‘Let them fight!’”

Ok, onwards to Pat Highsmith! I hope you enjoy today’s story.

xo

Bailey

Patricia Highsmith has been called one of the greatest psychological thriller writers of all time and a master of “stealth, disquiet, menace.” Author Graham Greene described her as “the poet of apprehension” and her writing as “relentlessly objective, examining flawed people as she might curious insects.”

Patricia published 22 books and numerous short stories in over five decades. More than two dozen of her stories have been adapted to film. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, was turned into a movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Her book The Price of Salt, published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan in 1952, was republished 38 years later as Carol under her own name and turned into a 2015 film. (It was the first lesbian novel with a "happy ending.") Her 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley has been adapted on more than one occasion.

And by all accounts, Patricia Highsmith was a monster.

Patricia Highsmith was born Mary Patricia Plangman in Fort Worth, Texas in 1921. As is true for so many great writers, her childhood wasn’t a happy one.

Her parents, Jay and Mary, were both commercial artists. They divorced ten days before Patricia’s birth, and her mother once said that she had tried to abort the pregnancy by drinking turpentine.1 Patricia would not meet her biological father until her early teens.2 Soon after, she claimed that her father got out his pornography collection and “promptly tried to seduce her.”

As a six year old, Patricia followed her mom and new stepfather to New York. The couple’s finances were tight, and they fought often. Patricia was sent back to Texas to live with her grandmother for a year. She felt abandoned by her mother and said it was the "saddest year" of her life. Fortunately, her grandmother had taught her to read at just two years old, and Patricia spent her time in Texas exploring her grandmother's extensive library.3 She later said that she has been “writing the same sort of thing since I was 15 years old —about people who are a little cracked. I saw a lot around me.”4

By the age of 12, Patricia had decided she was a man born in a woman’s body. Her analyst eventually suggested that she join a therapy group of “married women who are latent homosexuals,” which she agreed to for six months in an attempt to “normalize” herself. Instead of taking the therapy seriously, however, Patricia opted to romance other members of the group, which she documented in her diary in her diary. (“Perhaps I shall amuse myself by seducing a couple of them.”)

She enrolled at Barnard College in the late 1930s, where she studied English composition, playwriting, and short story prose. For one year, she also studied zoology and “felt a strong tenderness for animals, particularly cats and snails, both of which she kept as pets.”5 We’ll get to that later.

While in college, she started what would become a lifelong alcohol habit6 and visited lesbian bars throughout the city, developing a reputation as a womanizer and “a sapphic Dennis the Menace.”7 “I repeat the pattern, of course, of my mother’s semi-rejection of me,” she once wrote. “I never got over it. Thus I seek out women who will hurt me in a similar manner.”

At just 19 years old, her short story “The Heroine” was published in Harper's Bazaar. It was selected as one of the twenty best stories that appeared in American magazines in 1945 and won the O Henry award for short stories in 1946. Still, when she applied for work at major publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping, Time, Fortune, and The New Yorker, she couldn’t get a position. Fortunately, Truman Capote and an editor at Harper's Bazaar, where she had published “The Heroine,” put in a word for Patricia to get into a foundation for the arts called Yaddo8 in New York. Alongside Flannery O’Conner (whom she detested), Chester Himes, and other artists, she wrote her first book. It was met with six rejections, but a rewritten version of the book about two men who exchange murders was accepted on the first try.9 Alfred Hitchcock later turned this book into “Strangers on a Train.”

At 28, Patricia's career was underway.

By all accounts, Patricia Highsmith was an unlikeable adult, her private life a “fiasco—squalid, chaotic, often extraordinarily painful.” The 8,000+ diary pages she left us with reflect this transformation—the notes “scribbled by a dissipated tomboy who aged into a cantankerous dragon, are ribald, chaotic, and – as her prejudices calcify – often nasty.”10

She has been universally described as a raging alcoholic, a misanthrope, and even “next to impossible to be around.” She made horrific racist, anti-semitic, and misogynistic comments throughout her life. Her former publisher once said she was “mean, hard, cruel, unlovable” and the “most odious woman he's ever met.” Even her oldest friends called her “hormonally strange” and “a woman at the mercy of her emotional tides, drawn to the darkest corners of her psyche.”11 Some believe she may have fit the classic definition of a sociopath.12

Of all that I’ve read about her demeanor, I found this passage by Terry Castle the most enlightening:

[Patricia Highsmith] had excruciating difficulties engaging with other people. Virtually everyone who met her remembers her lifelong diffidence: her pathological fear of shaking hands, the way she would reflexively take several steps backward when introduced to someone, the hostile and ruinous drinking. Some readers will disparage [her biographer’s] revelations as sordid and unwelcome, like photographs of a car wreck, but to do so is also to miss the point. Quite as much as T.E. Lawrence, Highsmith was a Prince of our Disorder (though she was far more mannish than he). Anyone who has grown up troubled or shy or gay will instantly identify with certain parts of her story--the towering rage above all. However cruelly and ignobly she vented it, her animus toward the world was a psychic necessity, a survival mechanism. In contemplating Highsmith's life and work, Terence's attitude is the right one: Humani nil a me alienum puto. [“I am human: I consider nothing human is alien to me”]

But the fiasco of the life is also the key to the work. Highsmith's personality disorder is everywhere on display in her novels--most strikingly in her plots, which like those of her masters Dostoevsky and Camus (or of J.M. Coetzee) turn upon the unbridgeable alienation of one person from another. Susannah Clapp once described Highsmith as "a balladeer of stalking." "The fixation of one person on another," Clapp observed, "oscillating between attraction and antagonism, figures in almost every Highsmith tale." This seems sadly apt. The stalker wants to get as close as possible to someone: close enough to see, hear, touch, taste, breathe (or murder) the other person, but without any real intimacy being established. Stalking is a parody of intimacy: a way of being in proximity without the pain--or the ecstasy--of actual attachment.

Over and over in Patricia Highsmith’s stories, one character develops a deadly obsession with another. “Obsessions are the only things that matter,” she once said. “Perversion interests me most and is my guiding darkness”

Fortunately for Grade A-sociopaths like Patricia Highsmith, we’ve got pets on this earth—animals that both horrible and wonderful humans can obsess over with little to no damaging consequences.

I mean, this cat looks in pure sun-soaked bliss.

Patricia Highsmith never had a long term partner. Her many love affairs never lasted in part, as Gerald Lively writes, because of the author’s unpleasant personality. So she spent most of her time alone with her cats and…hundreds of pet snails. Her self-described “strange pastime” was observing and writing about the mating rituals of snails, which are nearly all hermaphroditic.

Patricia was first drawn to snails in 1946, before her career took off. While walking past a New York City fish market, she spotted “two snails locked in a loving embrace. Intrigued, she took them home, placed them in a fishbowl and watched their wriggling copulation, spellbound.”13 Eventually, Patricia would accrue up to 300 snails in the back garden of her home in Suffolk, England. Freaky pets for a freaky person! Rennie McDougall wrote:

As was typical of Highsmith, she was riveted by what others found repulsive or nauseating. “They give me a sort of tranquility,” she said of the gastropods. “It is quite impossible to tell which is the male and which is the female, because their behavior and appearance are exactly the same,” she wrote elsewhere.

Patricia took the snails with her when she left the house. “She traveled with snails in her luggage,” recalled , usually taking five or six of “her favorites” with her when she went on holiday. Jeanette Winterson also saw her bring snails along to social events. “If she was bored at dinner parties, she might get a few snails out of her purse and let them loose on the tablecloth.”14 When Patricia moved to France, she had to illegally smuggle her snails from England into the country in batches. Former editor Larry Ashmead remembered her “sneaking them in under her breasts. She said that she would take six to ten of the creatures under each breast every time she went. And she wasn’t joking — she was very serious.”

Snails even “slithered into her fiction.” In a short story called “The Snail-Watcher,” a snail enthusiast is smothered and consumed by the snails he keeps with him at home. “He swallowed a snail,” Patricia wrote. “Choking, he widened his mouth for air and felt a snail crawl over his lips onto his tongue. He was in hell!” Patricia’s agent deemed the story “too repellent to show editors,” but the story embodied the author in her “gruesome element” and made its way to publish.15

Hesperios notes that in her diary, Patricia “wondered at the aplomb with which her snails slithered along the edges of razor blades,” and expressed curiosity about Søren Kierkegaard’s account of “the tightrope-treading anxiety with which we advance through life.”

Those of us (all of us?) with anxious and obsessive minds teeter on a razor blade. But while snails can bear the tension, we humans chase reprieve. We seek out our own philosophical or spiritual answers to the question: How do we assuage the turmoil of our psychic lives?

Kierkegaard described his approach to soothing anxieties as taking “a leap of faith” into the unknown. According to the Danish philosopher, faith does not possess logic, reason, or rationality. When a person accesses faith, Kierkegaard believes that person is demonstrating trust in something without using logic or reason. He’s saying there’s something transcendent, something higher, we tap into to drive ourselves forward.

I think Patricia Highsmith lost her ability to access Kierkegaard’s faith as a young girl. Thus she sought another tack—a radical one. “She challenged God by asking: ‘Have you the courage to show me hell?’”16 At just 26 years old, Patricia Highsmith wrote “My New Year's Toast” in her diary. It reads:

To all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle—may they never give me peace.

The young author, void of Kierkegaard’s faith, veered instead into darkness. The resulting life was one of isolation, perversion, manipulation and… great art. The depth of Patricia Highsmith’s psychic strangeness fuels the stories, novels, and movies she created that continue to entertain us.

I suppose we need both the Kierkegaards and the Highsmiths making culture—thinkers and artists approaching life from the philosophical extremes so that we, their audience, may sample both sides of the razor blade and decide on our own approach.

Now it’s up to us. Will we dive into Kierkegaard’s faith or Highsmith’s perversion?

If you’re taking Highsmith’s path, please, do us all a favor. Get yourself some pets and a garden. It’ll take the edge off.

Bonus: Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda

If you need evidence that love (lust?) can bring us to our to knees, look no further than “Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda,” the children’s book avowed misanthrope and high-minded literary snob Patricia Highsmith created with a romantic partner.

In 1955, the same year she published The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith began an affair with Doris Sanders, an advertising copywriter. Together they worked on the book, which Doris wrote and Patricia illustrated. It’s full of of simple nonsense rhymes (“Golf sox on a musk ox,” “A habit on a rabbit,” “A funny on a bunny,” “A chandelier on a little deer.”) It’s sweet-hearted and simple, and completely unlike anything else Patricia produced.

The year after publishing the book, Patricia cheated on Doris, ending their relationship

Enjoy!

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Art Dogs update: We’re moving to monthly!

Hi Art Dogs,

Happy March. I hope all is well in your part of the world.

I wanted to send a quick note that I’m going to switch the Art Dogs publishing cadence to monthly (with unpredictable bonus editions sprinkled in). The hope with this is to give myself more space to research and write one really treasured edition a month for y’all. Quality over quantity! Hopefully that’s ok?

Ok, onwards to David Shrigley!

Bailey

David Shrigley is an artist whose work spans writing, drawing, sculpture, music, and film. The bizarre humor he imbues into his pieces has attracted a cult following. He’s described his own art as “slightly satirical but also serious at the same time,” while critics have called him “the joker with a deadly punchline.”

In 2013, David Shrigley was nominated for the Turner Prize. His sculpture Really Good—a giant thumbs up—was installed on Trafalgar Square's Fourth plinth three years later and he was recently appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). David’s artwork has been shown at MoMA in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and other top galleries around the world. Hundreds—maybe thousands—of people have tattooed his pieces on their bodies.

David Shrigley was born in the U.K. in 1968. He spent his childhood in Leicestershire, where his dad was an electrical engineer and his mom a computer programmer. David knew early on that he wanted to be an artist, and recalled later that his more pragmatic parents, “were probably quite unhappy when I went to art school.”1 When working in his studio today, he’s said he is still “thinking about expressing myself the same way I did when I was five years old. I try to make the paintings in the same way, they’re very primitive.”2

David’s parents were devout Christians, but the young artist would renounce religion as a teenager. He maintains, however, that his art is influenced by his parent’s religiosity. “I think it's a positive thing. I think life would be really tedious if we were all like Richard Dawkins,” he once said. “I like my parents and I like that they have a moral framework. It makes as much sense as anything in this stupid life.”

David’s career started in Scotland, where he studied at the Glasgow School of Art. He handed out “morbidly funny little books filled with morbidly funny little characters” to friends at gallery openings and slowly built a following.3 By the 1990s, David Shrigley’s work could be found everywhere: “on tea towels, T-shirts, greetings cards, and in books, magazines, galleries, and chainstores. Bands [wanted] to use them on their album covers. Directors [wanted] them to accompany the opening credits of their films. Fans [wanted] them to be turned into tattoos.” By the 2010s, he was winning major awards.

Fortunately for dog lovers, the year before being nominated for the Turner Prize, David and his wife, Kim, got a mini Schnauzer puppy they named Inka. (You can watch a video of David walking Inka from 9 years ago here—starting at 1:00 minute in.)

The couple’s fateful decision to add Inka to their family has led to a slew of dog-inspired Shrigleys.

Let’s take a look at a few pieces for which Inka served as muse.

A few years ago, David, Kim, and Inka moved to Brighton, where they now live in a house 10 minutes from the beach. Though the couple doesn’t have children, the artist’s work remains childlike in spirit. In fact, as he’s aged David believes his work is becoming even more cheerful. “Maybe that says something about the time in my life, enjoying the simple pleasures of walking the dog on the beach,” he noted in an interview. “When I was 25, I wanted to watch noisy rock bands, go to New York City. Now I’m happy here with my dog.”

David has two studios in Brighton, one in a disused church and another in the basement of his Victorian townhouse. Inka has dog beds in the studio, where he has served as a companion to David’s prolific art making for 12 years now.

David starts each day in the studio by creating a list of things he plans to draw. He then draws the images on his list, and sometimes adds other elements, like text. In his words, “it just all comes out of my head like water pouring out of a jug.” The pieces he doesn’t like, he throws into the bin. (In the video above, you can see him tear up a picture of Inka.) The ones he does like, he keeps. It’s as simple as that, day after day. “The work is made in the editing,” he’s said. “I make literally hundreds of drawings, and then a much smaller percentage of those become the finished work.”

Here’s how he describes his creative process:

“I have a motto: ‘If you put the hours in, then the work makes itself.’ My work is created through the very process of making it. That’s just how I function. I adapt. I never have a plan.”4

“I know if I make enough stuff some of it will be all right. That's my whole strategy for making art anyway. I just fill the page, fill the space, fill the time I'm given.”5

David Shrigley has created a tremendous, joyful oeuvre by repeating this routine for the last 30 years. Below I’ve gathered some of the drawings and paintings of dogs that made it past his personal quality check. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do, and please let me know in the comments which is your favorite.

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Bonus: “David Shrigley wants your balls”

David Shrigley’s latest gallery installation is inspired by Inka’s relationship with tennis balls.

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