Daily rituals Women at work Women at work /

Mason Currey

Book - 2019

Currey explores the daily obstacles and rituals of women who are artists--painters, composers, sculptors, scientists, filmmakers, and performers. We see how these brilliant minds get to work, the choices they have to make: rebuffing convention, stealing (or secreting away) time from the pull of husbands, wives, children, obligations, in order to create their creations; the large and small (and abiding) choices these women made--and continue to make--for their art.

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Subjects
Genres
Trivia and miscellanea
Published
New York : Alfred A. Knopf 2019.
Language
English
Main Author
Mason Currey (author)
Edition
First edition
Item Description
"This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf."
"143 artists on how they paint, write, perform, direct, choreograph, design, sculpt, compose, dance, etc."--Cover.
Physical Description
xvi, 394 pages : illustrations ; 20 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 337-378) and index.
ISBN
9781524732950
  • SOME WEIRDNESS. Octavia Butler
  • Yayoi Kusama
  • Elizabeth Bishop
  • Pina Bausch
  • Marisol
  • Nina Simone
  • Diane Arbus
  • OYSTERS AND CHAMPAGNE. Louise Nevelson
  • Isak Dinesen
  • Josephine Baker
  • Lillian Hellman
  • Coco Chanel
  • Elsa Schiaparelli
  • Martha Graham
  • Elizabeth Bowen
  • Frida Kahlo
  • - Agnes de Mille
  • THE VORTEX. Louisa May Alcott
  • Radclyffe Hall
  • Eileen Gray
  • Isadora Duncan
  • Colette
  • Lynn Fontanne
  • Edna St. Vincent Millay
  • Tallulah Bankhead
  • Birgit Nilsson
  • Zora Neale Hurston
  • Margaret Bourke-White
  • BOREDOM AND SUFFERING. Marie Bashkirseff
  • Germaine de Staël
  • Marie de Vichy-Chamrond
  • Dorothy Parker
  • Edna Ferber
  • Margaret Mitchell
  • Marian Anderson
  • Leontyne Price
  • Gertrude Lawrence
  • Edith Head
  • Marlene Dietrich
  • Ida Lupino
  • Betty Comden
  • PURE NEGLECT. Zoe Akins
  • Agnes Martin
  • Katherine Mansfield
  • Katherine Anne Porter
  • Bridget Riley
  • Julie Mehretu
  • Rachel Whiteread
  • Alice Walker
  • Caroline King
  • Andrea Zittel
  • Meredith Monk
  • Grace Paley
  • A BALLOON, A SPACESHIP, A SUBMARINE, A CLOSET. Susan Sontag
  • Joan Mitchell
  • Marguerite Duras
  • Penelope Fitzgerald
  • Barbara Hepworth
  • Stella Bowen
  • Kate Chopin
  • Harriet Jacobs
  • Marie Curie
  • RESIGNATION AND RELIEF. George Eliot
  • Edith Wharton
  • Anna Pavlova
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  • Virginia Woolf
  • Vanessa Bell
  • Maggi Hambling
  • Carolee Schneemann
  • Marilyn Minter
  • Josephine Meckseper
  • Jessye Norman
  • Maggie Nelson
  • Nikki Giovanni
  • AN ABNORMAL LIFE. Anne Bradstreet
  • Emily Dickinson
  • Harriet Hosmer
  • Fanny Trollope
  • Harriet Martineau
  • Fannie Hurst
  • Emily Post
  • Janet Scudder
  • Sarah Bernhardt
  • Mrs. Patrick Campbell
  • A SUBTLE AND DEEP-LAID PLAN. Niki de Saint Phalle
  • Ruth Asawa
  • Lila Katzen
  • Helen Frankenthaler
  • Eileen Farrell
  • Eleanor Antin
  • Julia Wolfe
  • Charlotte Bray
  • Hayden Dunham
  • Isabel Allende
  • Zadie Smith
  • Hilary Mantel
  • Catherine Opie
  • Joan Jonas
  • DEADLY DETERMINATION. Marie-Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin
  • Elizabeth Carter
  • Mary Wollstonecraft
  • Mary Shelley
  • Clara Schumann
  • Charlotte Brontë
  • Christina Rossetti
  • Julia Ward Howe
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • Rosa Bonheur
  • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • Dorothy Thompson
  • VIBRATIONS OF CHANCE. Janet Frame
  • Jane Campion
  • Agnès Varda
  • Françoise Sagan
  • Gloria Naylor
  • Alice Neel
  • Shirley Jackson
  • Alma Thomas
  • Lee Krasner
  • Grace Hartigan
  • Toni Cade Bambara
  • Margaret Walker
  • A PRIVILEGED SPACE. Tamara de Lempicka
  • Romaine Brooks
  • Eudora Welty
  • Elena Ferrante
  • Joan Didion
  • Sheila Heti
  • Miranda July
  • Patti Smith
  • Ntozake Shange
  • Cindy Sherman
  • Renee Cox
  • Petah Coyne
  • FROM RAGE TO DESPAIR AND BACK AGAIN. Djuna Barnes
  • Käthe Kollwitz
  • Lorraine Hansberry
  • Natalia Ginzburg
  • Gwendolyn Brooks
  • Jean Rhys
  • Isabel Bishop
  • Doris Lessing.
Review by Booklist Review

Readers marveled over Currey's Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (2013), but it had a serious flaw out of 161 creators, only 27 were women which Currey addresses in his mea culpa introduction to this corrective volume. Currey points to the centuries of gender bias that determined who the great creators were in Western culture and admits his failure to recognize and counter that. This realization sent him back to the archives of creativity, where he discovered dramatic new vistas of adversity and struggle in the lives of 143 exceptional women in the arts, literature, and science. Frissons of discovery, outrage, and wonder are prompted by Currey's brief yet robust biographies illuminating the discipline and imagination summoned by these artists to overcome dire obstacles. From Mary Shelley to Octavia Butler and Isabel Allende, Nina Simone and Leontyne Price, sculptors Ruth Asawa and Marisol, photographer Margaret Bourke-White, and costume designer Edith Head, along with choreographers, filmmakers, and actors, the spectrum of creativity is radiant, and each artist's rituals of concentration and balancing act between art and life are revelatory and awe-inspiring.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In Currey's previous Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, only 27 of the 161 profiles were of women; as a corrective in this fascinating sequel, Currey explains, he offers 143 vibrant depictions of the routines of creative women, living and dead, drawn from letters and diaries. Photographer Margaret Bourke-White was a morning person ("The world is all fresh and new then"); actress Tallulah Bankhead prayed on opening nights ("Dear God, don't let me make a fool of myself"); artist Alice Neel was a "lifelong shoplifter"; Margaret Mitchell depended on Johnnie Walker, Frida Kahlo on Demerol. Currey quotes women on their men, from the helpful (George Eliot's and Elizabeth Bishop's Georges) to the hindering (choreographer Agnes de Mille's unfaithful husband); on their women (Rosa Bonheur's and Romaine Brooks's Natalies); and their children (Ruth Asawa, six; Anne Bradstreet, eight; writers Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf, none). He includes writers (Harriet Jacobs), sculptors (Harriet Hosmer, Niki de Saint Phalle), filmmakers (Jane Campion, Agnes Varda), composers (Charlotte Bray, Julia Wolfe), journalists (Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Thompson), and video artists (Joan Jonas). He covers women who succeeded young (writer FranA§oise Sagan, 18) and old (artist Alma Thomas, 80). Currey's encyclopedic tour respectfully and entertainingly addresses Colette's question about George Sand: "How the devil did she manage?" Agent: Meg Thompson, Thompson Literary Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Coco Chanel (1883-1971) Chanel was born in poverty, raised in an orphanage, and received little formal education. Despite this disadvantaged start, she was a household name by age 30 and a multimillionaire by 40. Not surprisingly, work was her life, and the only truly reliable partner she ever found. Her unceasing dedication to the Chanel brand made her a formidable businesswoman--and, for her workers, a demanding and even tormenting employer. As the biographer Rhonda K. Garelick has written, Chanel's staff at her Paris headquarters was kept in a constant state of "watchful anxiety." Here, Garelick describes Chanel's work routine in Paris:   While much of the staff reported to work at about eight thirty in the morning, Coco had never been an early riser and tended to show up hours later. When she did arrive, usually around one p.m., she was attended by a degree of fanfare befitting a five-star general or royal monarch. The moment Coco left her apartment across the street at the Ritz, hotel staff members would immediately telephone the operator at rue Cambon to alert her. A buzzer would sound throughout the studio to spread the word: Mademoiselle was on her way. Someone downstairs would spray a mist of Chanel No. 5 near the entrance, so that Coco could walk through a cloud of her own signature scent. . . . "When she entered the studio, everyone stood up," recalled the photographer Willy Rizzo, "like children at school." Then, the staff would form a line, hands at their sides, "as in the army," employee Marie-Hélène Marouzé put it.   Once upstairs in her office, Chanel would set immediately to work on her designs. She refused to use patterns or wooden mannequins, and so would spend long hours draping and pinning fabrics on models, smoking one cigarette after another, rarely or never sitting down. According to Garelick, "She could remain standing for nine hours at a time, without pausing for a meal or a glass of water--without even a bathroom break, apparently." She stayed until late in the evening, compelling her employees to hang around with her even after work had ceased, pouring wine and talking nonstop, avoiding for as long as possible the return to her room at the Ritz and to the boredom and loneliness that awaited her there. She worked six days a week, and dreaded Sundays and holidays. As she told one confidant, "That word, 'vacation,' makes me sweat." Edith Wharton (1862-1937) In her autobiography, A Backward Glance , Wharton described her life as divided into two "equally real yet totally unrelated worlds," which went along "side by side, equally absorbing, but wholly isolated from each other." On the one hand, there was the real world of her marriage, her home, her friends and neighbors; on the other, the fictional world she created each morning in bed, writing longhand on sheets of paper that she dropped onto the floor for her secretary to retrieve and type up. Wharton always worked in the morning, and houseguests who stayed at the Mount--the 113-acre estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Wharton penned several novels, including The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome --were expected to entertain themselves until 11:00 a.m. or noon, when their hostess would emerge from her private quarters, ready to go for a walk or work in the garden. If guests needed to speak to the author during the morning, however, Wharton was willing to receive them in her bedroom. The historian Gaillard Lapsley was one such visitor, and he later wrote a memorable description of Wharton in bed, "flanked by night tables charged with telephone, travelling clock, reading light." She would be wearing, he continued,   a thin silk sacque with loose sleeves, open at the neck and trimmed with lace and on her head a cap of the same material also trimmed with lace which fell about her brow and ears like the edging of a lamp shade . . . Edith's mask stood out sculpturally beneath it. She would have her writing-board perilously furnished with an inkpot on her knee, the dog of the moment under her left elbow on the bed strewn with correspondence, newspapers and books.   The "dog of the moment" referred to one of the numerous canines Wharton owned over her lifetime, which included Spitzes, Papillons, a poodle, a Pekinese, and a pair of long-haired Chihuahuas named Mimi and Miza. Dogs had been a tremendous comfort to Wharton since her earliest childhood; and when, in her last years, Wharton made a list of the "ruling passions" of her life, dogs ranked second only to "Justice and Order," and were followed by books, flowers, architecture, travel, and "a good joke." Evenings at the Mount, Wharton would read to her guests from the novel she was writing, or from the work of one of her favorite authors. Although she was happy to share her writing in progress, she never had much to say about the writing process itself. A guest at The Mount recalled that "very little allusion was made to it, and none at all to the infinite pains that she put into her work or her inexhaustible patience in searching for the material necessary to perfect it." One unspoken requirement was that she follow the same schedule each day, with as little variation as possible. As Wharton wrote in a 1905 letter, "The slightest interruption in the household routine completely de-rails me." Zadie Smith (b. 1975) In interviews over the years, the London-born novelist has said that she doesn't write every day--and although she sometimes wishes she had that compulsion, Smith also recognizes the value of writing only when it feels necessary to her. "I think you need to feel an urgency about the acts," she said in 2009, "otherwise when you read it, you feel no urgency either. So, I don't write unless I really feel I need to." Even when Smith does feel that urgency, she writes "very slowly," she said in 2012, "and I rewrite continually, every day, over and over and over. . . . Every day, I read from the beginning up to where I'd got to and just edit it all, and then I move on. It's incredibly laborious, and toward the end of a long novel it's intolerable actually." Smith has also been vocal about the difficulty of writing in a world of infinite digital distractions, and in the acknowledgements section of her 2012 novel NW she thanked two pieces of Internet-blocking software, called Freedom and Self Control, for "creating the time." She does not use social media, and as of late 2016 she did not own a smartphone, and had no plans to acquire one. "I still have a laptop, it's not like I'm a nun," Smith said, "I just don't check my email every moment of the day in my pocket."   Hilary Mantel (b. 1952) The Booker­-prize winning author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies , as well as several other novels and a memoir, Mantel finds fiction-writing an all-consuming and thoroughly unpredictable activity. "Some writers claim to extrude a book at an even rate like toothpaste from a tube, or to build a story like a wall, so many feet per day," the English author wrote in 2016.   They sit at their desk and knock off their word quota, then frisk into their leisured evening, preening themselves.             This is so alien to me that it might be another trade entirely. Writing lectures or reviews--any kind of non-fiction--seems to me a job like any job: allocate your time, marshall your resources, just get on with it. But fiction makes me the servant of a process that has no clear beginning and end or method of measuring achievement. I don't write in sequence. I may have a dozen versions of a single scene. I might spend a week threading an image through a story, but moving the narrative not an inch. A book grows according to a subtle and deep-laid plan. At the end, I see what the plan was.               Mantel writes every morning as soon as she opens her eyes, seizing the remnants of her dream state before it dissipates. (Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night and writes for several hours before going back to sleep.) Her writing days tend to fall into one of two categories: "days of easy flow," which "generate thousands of words across half a dozen projects," and "stop-start days," which are "self-conscious and anxiety ridden, and later turned out to have been productive and useful." She writes by hand or on the computer, and considers herself "a long thinker and a fast writer," which means that a lot of her writing day is spent away from her desk, on the thinking part. When she does sit down at the computer, Mantel will sometimes "tense up till my body locks into a struggling knot," she wrote in 2016. "I have to go and stand in a hot shower to unfreeze. I also stand in the shower if I get stuck. I am the cleanest person I know."             To other writers who get stuck, Mantel advises getting away from the desk: "Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just sit there scowling at the problem," she has written. "But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient." Over the course of her career, Mantel has learned extraordinary patience: She first began considering a series of novels based on the life of Thomas Cromwell in her twenties but didn't begin writing the first of them, Wolf Hall , until thirty years later. (When she finally began writing it, however, she worked with tremendous speed, cranking out the 400-page book in five months, working 8 to 12 hours a day.) "Sometimes people ask, does writing make you happy?" Mantel told a visiting reporter in 2012.   But I think that's beside the point. It makes you agitated, and continually in a state where you're off balance. You seldom feel serene or settled. You're like the person in the fairy tale The Red Shoes ; you've just got to dance and dance, you're never in equilibrium. I don't think writing makes you happy . . . . I think it makes for a life that by its very nature has to be unstable, and if it ever became stable, you'd be finished. Excerpted from Daily Rituals - Women at Work by Mason Currey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.