In his letter to Zweig, Freud writes, “What really happened with Breuer’s patient I was able to guess later on, long after a break in our relations, when I suddenly remembered something Breuer had once told me. . On the evening of the day all her symptoms had been disposed of, he was summoned to the patient again, found her confused and writhing with abdominal cramps. Asked what was wrong with her, she replied, ‘Now Dr. B.’s child is coming!’ ” E. Freud, ed., The Letters of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960), 67, my italics. From this memory Freud conjectures that Anna O. suffered from a hysterical pregnancy and that the sexual character of those symptoms caused Breuer to flee in fear. Ernest Jones later corroborates this version of events in his biography of Freud, as does Peter Gay in his. These interpretations of the evidence are disputed, however, and Burden appears to be well acquainted with the controversy. “They rewrote her. She would rewrite them. In courage” refers to Pappenheim’s later life as a feminist activist. In 1888, Pappenheim left the haute bourgeois life she had led as an Orthodox Jew in Vienna and traveled throughout Eastern Europe, fighting for and publishing works about the rights of Jewish women. In 1904, she co-founded the League of Jewish Women, which organized health-care facilities, vacation retreats, and youth homes, and offered career training for women. The League was dissolved on November 9, 1938. Many of its leaders were murdered in the camps. Burden may be referring to Pappenheim’s Last Will and Testament, in which she wrote: “If you remember me, bring a little stone, as the silent promise and symbol of the establishment of the idea and mission of women’s duty and women’s joy in serving unceasingly and courageously in life.” E. Loentz, Let Me Continue to Speak the Truth: Bertha Pappenheim as Author and Activist (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2007).
Rosemary Lerner (written statement)
There is a pronounced tendency in all the arts to mythologize the dead, by which I mean the creation of reductive narratives to explain artists’ lives and works. I have been an art writer for more than forty years and have witnessed this time and time again. The reasons for simplification are often ideological, but sensational biographies can also erase all nuance when they appear to fit a prefigured character and script — tragic hero or heroine, victim, genius. It is helpful to undermine these wooden scenarios. Harriet Burden was not nearly as obscure or unnoticed as she has been made out to be in the stories that are now circulating about her career. Her work was represented in no less than five group shows in the seventies and I, for one, singled her out in a review I wrote for Art in New York in 1976:
Harriet Burden’s uncanny architectural piece with its slightly askew walls and floors, its emotionally charged figures, pastel palette, and dense use of text lingers in this reviewer’s mind as the work of a brilliant and strikingly independent artist.
Albeit a minority view, I was not alone. Archie Frame, Beatrice Brownhurst, and Peter Grosswetter all commented favorably on her two one-woman shows, both at major New York galleries. Yes, both dealers let her go, but this is hardly a unique fate. It merely places Harriet Burden among the numerous distinguished visual artists, male and female, who were respected by other artists, received mixed reviews, and didn’t attract big collectors to their work.
Reviewers of every ilk like to feel they are above a work of art. If it puzzles them or if they are intimidated, they are more than likely to trash it. Many artists are not intellectuals, but Burden was, and her work reflected her wide learning. Her references spanned many fields and were often impossible to track. There was also a literary, narrative quality to her art that many resisted. I am convinced that her knowledge alone acted as an irritant to some reviewers. I once had a conversation with a man who had excoriated her first one-woman show. When I brought up his review and offered a defense of her work, he was hostile. He was not a stupid man and had written well on some artists I admired. He had attacked Burden’s work as confused and naïve, the very opposite, in fact, of what it was. I realized that he had been incapable of a fair-minded appraisal because, although he prided himself on his sophistication, the multiple meanings of her carefully orchestrated texts had eluded him, and he had projected his own disorientation onto the work. His last words to me were “I hated it, okay? I just hated it. I don’t give a damn about what she was referring to.” That conversation has stayed with me, not as a story about Harriet Burden so much as a lesson for myself: Beware of the violent response and the sophisms you may use to explain it.
Then there is the question of sex. It has often taken women longer to gain a hold in the art world than men. The remarkable Alice Neel worked without much attention until she was in her seventies. Louise Bourgeois made a breakthrough with her show at MoMA in 1982. She was seventy. Like Burden, these women were not ignored but gained prominent recognition only late in their careers. During her lifetime the painter Joan Mitchell was known and admired, but it wasn’t until after her death that her place among second-generation abstract expressionists began to grow enormously. Grace Hartigan was the only woman in MoMA’s legendary New American Painting exhibition in 1958–1959. Eva Hesse, who was at Cooper Union only a few years before Burden, died in 1970 at age thirty-four of a brain tumor. She didn’t live to see her star continue to rise or the power of her influence on younger artists. But when she was alive she complained that her work did not receive the serious attention given to the work of her male colleagues, and she was right. There were many reviewers who reviewed her life, not her art. Lee Krasner’s work was subsumed by her husband’s in the eyes of the art world. Jackson Pollock was and is deified as a Romantic hero. A year before Krasner died, a retrospective of her work was mounted, but by then, she said, it was “too late.” Mostly, the art business has been about men. And when it has been about women, it has often been about correcting past oversights. It is interesting that not all, but many women were celebrated only when their days as desirable sexual objects had passed.
Although the number of women artists has exploded, it is no secret that New York galleries show women far less often than men. The figures hover around twenty percent of all one-person shows in the city, despite the fact that almost half of those same galleries are run by women. The museums that exhibit contemporary art are no better, nor are the magazines that write about it. Every woman artist faces the insidious propagation of a male status quo. With almost no exceptions, art by men is far more expensive than art by women. Dollars tell the story. After giving up on a public life as an artist, Burden decided to experiment with the perception of her work through the use of masculine personas. The results were striking. When presented as the work of a man, her art suddenly found an enthusiastic audience. Caution is in order, however. Art world trends are constantly changing. The raw is in one day, the cooked the next. And there is an ever-present hunger for youth, the latest ingénue or mangenue on the menu. Might a young woman have served Burden equally well? Probably not, but the story cannot simply be told as a feminist parable, even though it seems obvious that sexual bias played a determining role in the perception of Burden’s work. And yet, each of her masks seemed to uncover a different aspect of her imagination, and it is not unfair to say that the trajectory of her artistic experimentation became a movement toward an increasing and almost sinister ambiguity.