{"id":110277,"date":"2017-04-25T14:11:21","date_gmt":"2017-04-25T18:11:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110277"},"modified":"2017-04-26T10:54:38","modified_gmt":"2017-04-26T14:54:38","slug":"shells-and-skulls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/04\/25\/shells-and-skulls\/","title":{"rendered":"Shells and Skulls"},"content":{"rendered":"

Delighting in the mollusks of art history.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Angela Chen.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Typical of her species, the clam deactivated all of her social-media accounts on her thirtieth birthday and headed to the sea, not wanting anyone to wish her well. She was unable to explain this urge to hide on what most considered a momentous transition\u2014thirty!\u2014a day that\u2019s usually reserved for last-hurrah debauchery. Instead, she Googled cabin rentals in Sag Harbor, where she and her husband would be unlikely to run into anyone they knew. On the drive out, a misty rain cloaked the empty highway. It rained all night, so they stayed in, drank bourbon, and watched The Shining<\/em> in bed. The next morning, when she went out for a jog along the shore, the liminal space between sea and sky looked fuzzy, indistinct. She searched for something to latch on to. In the city, she tended to look up, searching for scalloped edges and glimpses of figures in lit windows, but by the sea, she looked at the sand. Whatever she picked up she put back down, knowing from experience that these objects would never be as beautiful as they were at first glance, half submerged and luminous in the frayed light.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

She couldn\u2019t explain it then, the urge to hide on one\u2019s birthday, but recently she read a passage in Rebecca Solnit\u2019s A Field Guide to Getting Lost<\/em> about the molting behavior of hermit crabs that explained it perfectly. Hermit crabs have soft, vulnerable bodies, so they scavenge for shells left behind by mollusks. Aside from shedding their exoskeletons, this shell-search is the riskiest part of a crab\u2019s life. Between scurrying out of a too-small shell to a better-fitted one, any number of things can happen: she could\u00a0get eaten, lose her old shell to an opportunist crab, or get dragged off by a male crab for mating. At the cusp of the molt, the last thing she wants to do is call attention to herself, so she buries herself in the sand or waits underneath a rock.\u00a0<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Later, wandering through the Parrish Art Museum on that same trip, the clam came across a painting that she found so amusing she took a picture of it and sent it to her friends. Titled Portrait of Shellfish<\/a><\/em>, it featured an array of clams, mussels, oysters, and a conch, plus two crustaceans\u2014a crab and a lobster\u2014perched on a lighthouse window ledge. The arrangement recalled an awkwardly posed family photo. An opened oyster quivered, fleshy and beige, like a well-fed aristocrat. The closed-lipped shells looked like pouty, uncooperative children. The placard informed the viewer that the painter, Hubbard Latham Fordham, had worked as the head keeper of the nearby Cedar Island Lighthouse in the 1860s. When he made this portrait, he had been \u201clooking for a new direction\u201d in his art.<\/p>\n

The clam didn\u2019t know why she found this painting so funny. Perhaps it was the unsettling expressiveness of the shellfish, or perhaps it was simply that phrase, \u201clooking for a new direction\u201d\u2014it seemed a flippant way to describe an existential crisis, no less gut-wrenching in its universality. She imagined that Fordham had been extremely limited in his range of possible subjects, ensconced as he was in the solitude of his lighthouse, but now, writing this, she recalled that even artists with a wide range of possible subjects tended to gravitate towards shelled creatures in times of crisis.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Take the example of Rembrandt, who made his well-known etching of The Shell (Conus Marmoreus)<\/em> the same year he committed his second wife to the \u201cGouda House of Correction\u201d(1650). \u00a0One could only speculate about his psychological state, but tellingly, six years later, he would file for bankruptcy and liquidate all of his assets. Among his personal affects were enormous quantities of shells and coral branches, including a single conch shell for which he paid eleven guilders, more expensive than any other item he possessed except for a print by Raphael. The conch was extremely rare, imported from the Far East\u2014so his determination to acquire it against all good sense can only suggest temporary insanity. It was, perhaps, the seventeenth-century midlife equivalent of buying a sports car.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Rembrandt, The Shell (Conus Marmoreus)<\/em>, 1650.<\/p><\/div>\n

In retrospect, Rembrandt\u2019s collector\u2019s mania made sense: shells are beautiful, morbid objects, much like skulls. Both are the calcified remains of some long-dead animal. They straddle a boundary between nature and art, necessity and excess, form and function\u2014the coveted ideal for any artist. Perhaps they also represent the possibility of immortality, of living beyond the flesh. Shells and skulls, unsurprisingly, were both used as motifs in Dutch vanitas <\/em>paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, popular still-life compositions of hourglasses, flowers, skulls, and overripe fruit, all meant to remind the viewer of the transience of life. The word vanity<\/em> comes from latin vanus <\/em>or \u201cempty,\u201d which may very well apply to the bereft shell.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

This year, around her thirty-second birthday, the clam decided to drive to Abiqui\u00fa to visit the retreat of yet another artist who had briefly succumbed to shellfish: Georgia O\u2019Keeffe.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, the clam had never been especially interested in this iconic painter, a dentist\u2019s waiting-room favorite, but now that the clam had spent some time in New Mexico, she found the painter impossible to avoid. Everywhere she went, she was confronted with Georgia anecdotes and Georgia rooms, even Georgia ghosts that lurked in otherwise unremarkable buildings. The entire local economy seemed to be powered by the Georgia nostalgia machine: flower and skull images on gift-store knickknacks, horseback riding tours to stirring Georgia plein air locales with sack lunch included. At first, the clam tried to be cynical about it, but she was starting to admit that there was something singular about Georgia\u2019s vision. After awhile, certain moments began to transform themselves into animate Georgia paintings: the stark late-afternoon shadows; the cow skulls hanging over low casita doorways; the herds of clouds stampeding across New Mexico\u2019s preternaturally blue sky.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

O\u2019Keeffe began her first clam series in 1926, during a difficult transitional period in her career. Between the late 1920s and early 1930s, O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s relationship to art, marriage, and womanhood would evolve in radical ways. Her career was taking off just as the health of her husband and mentor, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, was in decline. By this time, they had grown disillusioned with one another and possibly with the whole endeavor of marriage: after more than a decade together, she was no longer the naive \u201cwoman-child\u201d (or the \u201clittle plant\u201d he had \u201cwatered and weeded and dug around\u201d) and he was no longer her sole authority. O\u2019Keeffe became increasingly indignant as muse and wife, requiring more and more time alone. That summer, at their country estate in Lake George, she stopped socializing with others, stopped eating, and lost fifteen pounds in two weeks. Then she fled to York Beach, Maine, where she began, once more, to paint.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s first clam series is solemn, quiet, and bleached of the ecstatic hues that characterize her earlier flower paintings. While the flowers represent an explosion of fertility and abundance, this clam series is cold, austere, and barren, painted in white, tan, blue-black, and gray. In Slightly Open Clam Shell <\/em>(1926), the opening of a clean white shell faces the viewer, revealing a tiny ominous black bud. The composition of Closed Clam Shell<\/em> (1926) is even more forbidding: the hunched dorsal edge of the clam cuts vertically down the center of the painting, reminiscent of a shrouded figure in prayer. O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s biographer Hunter Drohojowska-Philp comments: \u201cIf, as suggested, O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s paintings are self-portraits, these offer evidence of a woman who had shut down.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Georgia O\u2019Keeffe, Slightly Open Clam Shell<\/em>, 1926.<\/p><\/div>\n

O\u2019Keeffe knew that these paintings were a departure for her, but she couldn\u2019t quite articulate why. She only knew she was attracted to these forms\u2014shells, shingles\u2014which were calling out from her subconscious. She confessed distractedly:<\/p>\n

I do not seem to be crystallizing anything this winter \u2026 Much is happening\u2014but it doesn\u2019t take shape \u2026 I am not clear\u2014am not steady on my feet \u2026 I have come to the end of something\u2014and until I am clear there is no reason why I should talk to anyone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Despite her own reservations, the clam paintings were well received. The paintings sold\u2014one woman offered the price of a Rolls-Royce for the entire Shell and Shingle <\/em>series\u2014and garnered a new kind of cultural cach\u00e9 for O\u2019Keeffe: this was \u201chigh\u201d art now, and \u201cFrench.\u201d Critics praised her mature palette and restrained subject matter\u2014one male critic noted that it operated on an \u201cintellectual\u201d rather than \u201cemotional\u201d register, since \u201cemotion would not permit such plodding precision.\u201d Glad for once that the reviewers weren\u2019t belaboring the sexual nature of her paintings, O\u2019Keeffe responded that she was \u201cpleased to have the emotional faucet turned off.\u201d The exhibition also turned out to be a watershed moment, ushering in a new period of financial security. From this exhibition on, she would be able to support herself through painting alone.<\/p>\n

However, as O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s career took off, her marriage worsened. Dorothy Norman, a young woman forty years Stieglitz\u2019s junior, appeared at one of O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s exhibitions, asserting herself as Stieglitz\u2019s new lover and muse. O\u2019Keeffe had no control over this affair (she was instructed not to \u201cintrude\u201d on the nude photo sessions Stieglitz conducted with Norman on the bed he shared with O\u2019Keeffe) so she continued on with her shells, returning to York Beach to paint Shell No. 1 <\/em>(1928), <\/em>her first nautilus-shaped shell, and another clam, Shell No. 2 <\/em>(1928), draped with sinister-looking seaweed. For Drohojowska-Philp, this painting symbolizes what O\u2019Keeffe called her \u201cblack-hearted\u201d disposition. Strikingly, O\u2019Keeffe constantly chastised herself for not attending to Stieglitz\u2019s needs more thoroughly, describing herself as a \u201cheartless wretch.\u201d She remained a dutiful wife, caring for him even after they stopped speaking to one another. That summer at Lake George, she painted Yellow Leaves with Daisy <\/em>(1928), a painting easily symbolic of a fading May\u2013December relationship.<\/p>\n

In the spring of 1929, O\u2019Keeffe agreed to take a trip to New Mexico with the painter Rebecca Strand, a trip that would change the course of her life. The two women went out West at the invitation of Mabel Dodge Luhan, an art critic and socialite who was trying to set up an artist community in Taos. For the first time in their lives, the two women were free from their controlling husbands, and while they had always regarded one another with suspicion, without the men, their friendship blossomed. They sunbathed nude, went out dancing, drank liquor, learned to drive, and \u201ceven smoked a cigarette once in awhile.\u201d The open landscape reminded O\u2019Keeffe of the way she used to be, before she met Stieglitz, when she was still living in West Texas and supporting herself through teaching.<\/p>\n

When she returned from the New Mexico trip, O\u2019Keeffe began painting Inside Clam Shell <\/em>(1930). It had a different kind of composition from the previous clam paintings: rather than showing the half-opened seam, this painting depicted a zoomed-in view of the clam\u2019s interior, a landscape so vast it couldn\u2019t be contained\u2014it spilled off the edges of the canvas, stretched beyond the frame. It was a declaration of her own immense subjectivity. Confident that she contained an entire world, she was eager to show its contours. She might be a clam, but she was a complex one.<\/p>\n

Many more difficult events would transpire in that decade, and by the end of it, O\u2019Keeffe had added not only shells but also animal skulls to her visual vocabulary\u2014those iconic images of Southwest Americana. In 1938, she painted Red Hills with White Shell<\/em>, a monolithic, white nautilus shell securely nestled in the center of a red hill landscape. It seemed she was beginning to feel at home.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Georgia O\u2019Keeffe, Red Hill and White Shell<\/em>, 1938.<\/p><\/div>\n

*<\/p>\n

The clam paused here in the biography. This progression from clam to nautilus: the salvation was in the architecture. Why not become a mollusk with propulsion, who could ascend and descend down into the water column as it wished? One didn\u2019t have to be crab either, scavenging for shells.<\/p>\n

This is how Solnit concludes that passage about the molting hermit crabs:<\/p>\n

Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter than water and let them float in the sea.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps she was ready to become some other kind of mollusk.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Everyone had instructed the clam, with the hushed reverence reserved for saints, Oh, but you must<\/em> visit Ghost Ranch in Abiqui\u00fa, as though it were a pilgrimage site. This afternoon, as she edged the car up the hill and coasted down into the valley, she finally understood. Her friend M., sitting in the passenger seat, audibly gasped. The landscape was like nothing they had ever seen, striated in pastel pinks and yellows and grays. To their left, Abiqui\u00fa Lake shone brightly in the sun.<\/p>\n

After their hike up Chimney Rock and an obligatory stroll through the archaeology museum (\u201cOh my god, they even named a dinosaur after Georgia!\u201d M. said), the mollusk and M. were sunburned, ravenous, but happy. They headed to Abiqui\u00fa Lake to see if they could swim. They were told it would be too cold this time of year, but they just wanted to see. The sun was already low in the sky, no longer radiating much warmth. At the swimming beach, they encountered a group of women grilling burgers on a mini cooker, shaded beneath colorful umbrellas. \u201cIs this the best way to get in?\u201d the mollusk asked, and the women nodded. \u201cGood luck,\u201d they said sympathetically\u2014they had braved the frigid water earlier.<\/p>\n

By the time the mollusk looked over, M. was already standing shin-deep in the lake, shrieking about the pain. \u201cYou just have to go for it!\u201d the women called out from the rocks, laughing. There was no way they could not swim after they had come all this way, and now they had an audience, so the two of them launched pathetically into the water, dog paddling for several minutes before the merciful onset of numb skin. The barbecuing women shouted, \u201cHow is it?\u201d and M. shouted back, \u201cLike torture, but so good!\u201d They got out and got in and got out and got in and got out, dripping and goose-pimpled, scrambling for towels. \u201cI\u2019m glad we did that,\u201d M. said, out of breath. \u201cI felt like a powerful woman.\u201d Then they lay out on the rocks for awhile, their limbs outstretched to absorb as much of the waning sun as possible before it finally set.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Anelise Chen is the author of<\/em>\u00a0So Many Olympic Exertions<\/a>, out in June from Kaya Press.\u00a0She teaches creative writing at Columbia University.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shells and skulls, both the calcified remains of some long-dead animal, straddle a boundary between nature and art\u2014the coveted ideal for any artist. 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