Carol Bishop-Gwyn - Art and Rivalry: The Marriage of Mary and Christopher Pratt

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

Copyright 2019 Carol Bishop-Gwyn

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2019 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada and the United States of America by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Art and rivalry : the marriage of Mary and Christopher Pratt / Carol Bishop-Gwyn.

Names: Bishop-Gwyn, Carol, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190129336 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190129344 | ISBN 9780345808424 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780345808448 (HTML)

Subjects: LCSH: Pratt, ChristopherMarriage. | LCSH: Pratt, Mary, 1935-2018Marriage. | LCSH: Pratt, Christopher. | LCSH: Pratt, Mary, 1935-2018. | LCSH: Artist couplesNewfoundland and LabradorBiography. | LCSH: PaintersNewfoundland and LabradorBiography. | LCSH: PrintmakersNewfoundland and LabradorBiography. | LCSH: Newfoundland and LabradorBiography. | LCGFT: Biographies.

Classification: LCC ND249.P7 B57 2019 | DDC 759.11dc23

Text design: Jennifer Griffiths

Cover design: Terri Nimmo

Cover images: (wedding photo) courtesy of the Pratt family; (watercolour drops) Shelly Still, (blue paint) Pinghung Chen/EyeEm, both Getty Images

Interior image credits: All photos are used courtesy the Pratt family collection, except Donna posed with Christopher, Cristopher Pratt communing, Daughter Anne Pratt, courtesy of the late John Reeves; and Opening reception., Family gathered to honour, Anne, Mary and Barby, Christopher with Donna Meaney courtesy of the author.

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To Penelope Grace and Edward Oscar, Works of art.

Contents

Preface

CHRISTOPHER PRATT WROTE the slogan Life is not a rehearsalon his studio wall. This stark warning was meant to remind him that we are given only one chance at life and so should live our lives to the fullest. Rather than be passive and indecisiveand he was guilty of both at timeswe must not fear change. Most people find change difficult, and this is especially true of Christopher Pratt. The celebrated painter leads a cautiously prescribed life. His late wife, the painter Mary Pratt, avoided change also, but did so less by prescribing the conditions in which she raised their four children and pursued her art than by ignoring certain unpleasant realities about their marriage. Despite their reticence in facing difficult issues in their personal lives, they boldly assumed places on the public stage and became two of Canadas most successful visual artists of the late twentieth century.

MARY PRATT CROSSED the wooden bridge over a little stream that ran between her house and her studio, which sat deep at the back of a rural Newfoundland property. She carried a tray of photographic slides handed to her moments before by her husband. Over more than a decade spanning the 1960s and 70s, Christopher Pratt had shot dozens of nude studies of a local girl, Donna Meaney, chronicling her change from naive teenager to sexually aware woman. Originally hired as the familys live-in domestic helper, Donna had eventually taken the role of Christophers studio model and muse.

By the mid-1970s, like so many outport Newfoundlanders, Donna and her family began to seek work outside their community. The Meaneys went to Labrador. Donna flitted back and forth, and during her sojourns back to Mount Carmeland much to Marys annoyanceshe spent a great deal of her time with Christopher in his studio. When her visits became less frequent, he hired other local girls to draw and paint. He was left with these images of Donna.

Christopher told his wife he no longer needed these slides because he now preferred to work with a model in person. Mary had recently developed her photorealist technique of projecting slides onto a canvas in order to create an image to paint, and he wondered if she had any use for this collection. If not, he would destroy them.

Mary took these Kodachrome transparencies, spread them across her light box and studied them. The slides of the attractive, full-breasted girl, unashamed of her nudity and looking directly at Christopher as he snapped pictures, confirmed what she already suspected: Donna and her husband had been lovers. In offering her these images of his naked muse, was Christopher oblivious to her awareness of the affair? Perhaps he knew very well and was trying to make a point. Regardless, Mary decided to take up Christophers challenge and use the slides.

Artist couples have famously shared models, or at least similar subjects, before. The late art critic John Berger suggests that the American abstract painters (and spouses) Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, for instance, used their treatment of closely related subjects to talk to each other. In reviewing an exhibition of the couples works, he wrote: He paints an explosion: she, using almost identical pictorial elements, constructs a kind of consolation. Mary Pratt was always self-referential in her work, and with her ensuing Donna paintings she set out to prove to the art world and her husband that she was the superior painter, more powerfully capturing the essence of Donnas sexuality than Christopher could.

Christopher had never escaped his reliance on the mathematical constructs behind his highly structured images. In his student days at the Glasgow School of Art, he had learned to draw nudes in the classical style. But when he tried now to loosen up and sketch in a more personal, expressive manner, his figures coarsened with a tinge of the lewd. As with all their work, Marys nudes were visceral and organic, Christophers intellectualized and measured.

ALTHOUGH CHRISTOPHER AND Mary Pratt lived apart for over twenty-five years, their names remain entwined in the public imagination. They are recognized as that painter duo who lived together as near recluses in rural Newfoundland. Both soared to fame in the Canadian visual art world while defiantly working in unfashionable realistic styles. Not only do their paintings hang prominently in commercial and public art galleries, but images rendered in their distinct but equally iconic styles have appeared on posters, book covers and even postage stamps.

Christophers approach is ice; Marys is fire. Christopher applied his spare, angular style mostly to depictions of architectural forms. The buildings, rooms and landscapes that are his most enduring themes are rendered in cool tones of grey and blue. Marys photorealism celebrates the vividness of the domestic and ordinaryglowing, translucent jars of red, yellow and orange jams and jellies, or filleted fish lying on plastic wrap, ready for the frying pan.

The delicate balance between the need for solitude to make art and the close quarters required to raise a family or sustain a conjugal partnership is bound to add strain to any relationship between artists. The Pratts and Pollock/Krasner are only two among many married couples in which both partners enjoyed equally successful careers in visual art. Canadian contemporaries include Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland, Bruno and Molly Lamb Bobak, Paterson Ewen and Franoise Sullivan, and William Perehudoff and Dorothy Knowles. Across the Western art world, numerous couples, including Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Pablo Picasso and Franoise Gilot, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia OKeeffe, have fascinated art enthusiasts.