Letters

From Rona Wilk, PhD, re Elizabeth Cady Stanton Blake

Dear Friends,
I am writing to you on behalf of Dr. Bettina Blake, the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton Blake, the former president of NAWA, profiled below in the linked article for NAWA’s magazine.
I myself was interviewing Bettina as part of an oral history project, and she corrected me about her family connection to Elizabeth Cady Stanton – as you will see from her notes below, it was a symbolic rather than familial gesture. And she also later included the other information below during our follow up correspondence. She asked that I kindly pass along this information to you, to avoid further confusion about her mother’s family background.

(I am taking Bettina’s word on this, and have no reason to believe she is mistaken, especially as a historian friend of mine who has had contact with other members of the Stanton family did not find the name Blake familiar.)

Please let me know if I can be of further service, and I send all good wishes,

NAWA History – National Association of Women Artists, Inc. | NAWA

Hi again, Rona –
Once again I am extremely slow about writing to you. I was happy to talk with you and think that oral histories are valuable.

Even though Alexa Miller jumped to an incorrect conclusion about any connection of my mother to the famous suffragist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (my grandmother Julia simply admired ECS and named my mother after her), there are other things to comment on in what you sent me. First, the other woman in that photo, is—I’m quite sure—someone who attended the Knox School along with my mother. My mother knew many women of NYC’s elite because of Knox and was able to use those contacts to the advantage of NAWA. Second, the two photos that appear later in Miller’s essay are of two portraits painted BY my mother. One is of an actor; the other is of a professor at Columbia.

With best wishes,
Bettina

From John Aach re: Rosemarie Beck

Dear Sarah Katz,
I recently happened to come across your appreciation of Rosemarie Beck in Under the Radar article of August 2023 and wondered if I could solicit your advice concerning part of her legacy.

I happen to have ~200 studies by Rosemarie that I have wanted to donate or otherwise go towards support of an art institution, art education venue, or charity. But after a year of searching, I have not found any group interested in taking them, and I approach you in the hope that you might be able to offer some suggestions.

I came by this collection in this way: My father, the New York painter Herbert Aach, was long a friend and colleague of Rosemarie’s – both were on the faculty of the Queens College Art Department – and after he died in 1985, she and my mother, Doris Aach, became very close friends. For over 18 years, until Rosemarie’s death in 2003, they saw each other virtually every week, and a frequent part of their routine was for my mother to go with Rosemarie to her studio where they would talk while Rosemarie painted, often using my mother as a model for studies she worked on for paintings she was planning. After many of those sessions Rosemarie would simply give the study to my mother, but over the course of years she also gave my mother other studies she had done in other contexts.

I discovered this collection in a set of 6 large archival boxes and portfolios in closets a year ago when, due to her deteriorating health, I was forced to move my mother (now 95) to an assisted living complex, and empty and vacate her NYC apartment. This discovery was both exhilarating and disheartening: The studies are beautiful, showing Rosemarie at her creative best with her vivid colors and amazing ability to capture mood, figure, and context in large brushstrokes, and yet constantly experimenting with aspect, content, and placement in the whole; yet for decades they were (and sill are) in boxes where nobody would ever see them!

I wrote immediately to Doria Hughes to see if the Rosemarie Beck Foundation would take them, but Doria replied that they were essentially ‘full up’ at the Foundation and that, as Rosemarie had given freely them to my mother as gifts, I should consider giving them freely to others. But much as I would like to do that there is no way I can distribute ~200 studies this way: I simply don’t know and cannot find 200 people who would take them!

Thus I have been looking for a way to give or donate these studies on a larger scale, in a way that might put them in the hands of people who could appreciate them, and preferably in a way that allow them to support the arts – both Rosemarie’s and my father’s life professions. I know from working with my father’s paintings that it is extraordinarily difficult to persuade galleries or museums to take works such as these, especially large numbers of them. I have even pitched to art councils the idea of using them as ‘giveaways’ at fundraising events. But so far I have had no success. The alternative, distressingly, will ultimately be to destroy them. In view of their beauty and out of my deep respect for Becky (as I knew her) – and my sense of duty as an artist’s son mindful of his legacy – I am very loathe to do that.

I attach a photo of the collection that I sent to Doria Hughes after discovering it, so you can get an idea of what they are like. The vast majority of the studies are unframed paintings on canvas, linen, or board in 5 boxes and a portfolio (there are a small number of un-boxed framed paintings and one box of charcoals and sketches). Most of the studies are signed and dated and/or numbered by Rosemarie. The woman seen in many the paintings and sketches is my mother, but some of the boxes are full of studies for other paintings that predated the sessions that my mother sat for her.

Although I am an artist’s son and learned about the ‘art world’ at his feet (so to say), I am myself not well connected with that world (which has changed considerably since his time anyway). This I appeal to you who knows the art scene as it is today, and as someone familiar and appreciative of Rosemarie’s work. Do you have any ideas?

Many thanks for your time and consideration,
— John Aach