The Postmodern Princess
Marlena Donohue
The Weisman Museum at Pepperdine hosts a show of art by Zelda Fitzgerald, who comes to us not as a producer of culture but as the bedeviled consort of F. Scott. A lesser-known fact is that Zelda painted, from her twenties through her death, not simply as a dilettante but as a serious student with an utterly eccentric take. The works on view are infrequently seen, small-scale gouache on paper works, including fairy tale illustrations, paper dolls constructions, images from a history (cardinals and kings) filtered through a hallucinatory kind of re-invention. Mary and her lamb sachet through the woods in a wholly fresh style that is a cross between an LSD trip and Asian anime before it was invented.
The works are shockingly autobiographic, but in the most indirect, charming way. They cause us to laugh and wince in their raw intensity. Somehow, in these images Zelda manages to encapsulate all of it: the lusty exuberance of the age of Gatsby and a kind of melting, distorted descent into chaos that followed it; the narcissistic childishness of that era and its effete sophistication.
Zelda was the belle of Montgomery from its oldest families, and early on showed creative potential in perhaps too many things: she danced, she wrote, she was an incisive and deeply poetic observer of nature. Her husband more than once borrowed a resonant line from letters the two exchanged during the long separation caused by Fitzgerald’s decent into alcoholism, his departure West to try his hand at screenwriting and Zelda’s stay in numerous mental institutions.
Initially exuberant and secure, Zelda and F. Scott were the talk of the US and Europe while Fitzgerald wrote his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, in which he reveals what the feminine meant to him and to his socio-strata: women hover about orchestrating yet helpless in a perfumed air; seductresses and muses, each according to their class, taunting the men they’d chosen or longing for those they had not. This view could not have helped the fragile and driven Zelda.
Early in their marriage, Zelda was happy, wrote lively articles for Metropolitan and the New York Tribune. It is no surprise in hindsight that the 27-year old Zelda gave up serious writing under the shadow of her author husband and embarked on a grueling daily eight-hour regimen of ballet study that ended when she was institutionalized in 1930. Some say it was the intense desire to find her own metier in dance that caused her breakdown. This bristling work tells us it ran a whole lot deeper and earlier than that.
Perhaps originally to amuse their daughter Scottie, perhaps later in life at the suggestion of her therapists, Zelda produced an out and out amazing body of paper dolls and drawings for paper dolls. These are funny, clever and poignant in a way that really defies description. There are knights and kings whose outfits run from high heeled preening to posed and dandy ferocity. There are woodcutters and folk icons like the big bad wolf, seen as an amorphously gendered lupine character wearing wedding silks and hunting garb interchangeably. There are dolls of a tame and tidy Fitzgerald, Zelda and Scottie, who can be dressed to taste–school attire, vacation wear–as if Zelda were trying in her inner life to tool the world she simply could not enact. These are hilarious and prescient; they anticipate all the inter-media ideas of Post Modernism, and it breaks the heart to look at them.
Also bizarre and lovely are her ballet dancers: lumbering, muscled, chunky footed, too dense to dance, too coiled to move, yet given this chin-held-high haughty grace that is delicate and lyrical. With these Zelda was able to capture in watery pigment what Rodin did–nude contours never settle, they roil and churn with some weird life force.
