Painters and the spouses that loved them

Frances Cohen Gillespie was told constantly that her work was inferior, her style was childlike, and that her husband was a better painter than she could ever hope to be.

Such was the story of Mrs. Gillespie, a woman known for her large-scale paintings of flowers in the same vein as the work of Georgia O'Keefe (though without the references to women's anatomy). But she was always living in the shadow of what some consider her more talented husband.

"He had technique, and she simply did not," said Tufts English professor Jan Swafford, who had met Mrs. Gillespie at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire years ago and remained friends with her until her death.

The show at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, entitled "Life As Art: Paintings by Gregory Gillespie and Frances Cohen Gillespie," is the work of a couple obsessed with their art and displays their unique styles, each artist's definition and level of attaining of realism.

Their life together could not be considered tranquil by any stretch. The two met while studying art in New York and were married soon after in 1959. They divorced over twenty years later in 1983, a result of the intensity in the relationship as well as Gillespie's unfaithfulness in 1983. Mrs. Gillespie passed away from cancer in 1998 and Gillespie took his own life in a dramatic fashion in 2000, hanging himself in his studio right after a retrospective of his work at MIT.

With her altogether different style, Mrs. Gillespie shows herself to be more open and free with not only her paintings, but life as well; Swafford, a longtime friend, remarked that when Mrs. Gillespie heard that she had lymphoma, she immediately bought a ticket to Italy to take advantage of her time left.

Her work, generally done with flowers as subjects, is expressive and in a large scale, though perhaps a bit ordinary. Mrs. Gillespie would paint flowers all the time, but they would die very quickly and she would have to keep buying new ones as she struggled to attain the level of realism she would have liked.

Swafford has memories of her crowded, dusty bedroom littered with dying flowers. Mrs. Gillespie was so attached to her work that she would literally live with it all the time, keeping a studio in her bedroom and living room. Swafford believes that her need to constantly have her work -- and the chemicals used in it -- may have contributed to her ill health and later mental imbalances.

One can sense a great amount of tension inside the paintings; of always trying to achieve a more realistic effect but never quite getting to the level of realism attained by her husband. At an event right before his death, Gillespie agreed that had his wife had the same technique as him, her paintings would have been "facile and stupid." It is the tension and the struggle inherent in all of her compositions which makes them interesting.

Mrs. Gillespie's brushwork is unnoticeable, and the result is a very smooth, clean effect. She enjoyed showing the clear nature of a vase of flowers juxtaposed to a table cloth dense with design, and the majority of her work showcases her interest in nature with the falseness of its indoor backgrounds as executed in a highly methodical approach.

In contrast to Gillespie's precise brushstrokes and his penchant for details, Mrs. Gillespie paints herself in a simpler way, with smooth brushing in sharp contrast to her husband's small, hard style. In a self portrait titled "The Touch," her body is half turned, and there is an unknown hand reaching out to touch her right shoulder. While one would not know this from simply attending the show, the piece was originally conceived as a double portrait of herself and her husband, but he suggested she saw off his half and leave herself. Her look is serious, and her eyes shine sharply at the viewer, away from the man touching her.

There is intrigue in this painting as well as emotion, something lacking in her floral pieces, and the show would clearly have greatly benefited from showing more breadth in her work.

Gillespie was well known during his life for his small works and produced a great number of intense still lives and landscapes, a highlight being "Street in Madrid." This tiny streetscape, only ten inches per side, was executed in 1963 in oil on wood -- the base medium of choice for both Gillespies, giving their paintings a matted, sometimes textured finish.

While many would walk right by the small oil painting for its size, it is important to stop and observe the smaller pieces in this show and see the amount of work and effort put into the two artists compositions. The square painting is dark in hue, showing a dead end street with low-lying buildings, people casually chatting on the sidewalk and a hazy yellow sky atop. Though there is very little variation in color, with only people's clothing colored and the rest painted in dull, tinted shades, it has clarity, detail and an ability to capture a hazy day in Europe just prior to sundown.

The amount of self portraits Gillespie painted in his lifetime is another highlight to the show. Though the show at Harvard is quite small, there are nine self portraits displayed. The show's curator, and a close friend of the Gillespies, Theodore Stebbins jr. wrote that, "no American painter revealed himself more dispassionately or more courageously." In most of these self-portraits, Gillespie looks serious, sullen or perhaps even drugged out. The paintings follow him through his life and his various psychological states at moment he painted them.

Though both Gillespies went on to remarry -- he to his Buddhist spiritual advisor, and she to a scientist -- the couple's legacy is entwined in their art. He had some bad demons and she was known as somewhat of a "crazy den mother" to friends, but their art lives on, as do their memories with friends, family, and admirers of their work.

The Fogg Art Museum is located at 32 Quincy Street, near the Harvard Square T-stop on the Red Line. Exhibit on view through March 28, 2004.