The Artist's Unassailable Self

Mary Shaw remembered Esther's leaving town. "I helped her pack for New York City--she wanted to go where the real art was. Pittsburgh was sort of a side issue, you know . . . No, I didn't disagree with her decision." (She just didn't share Esther's strong pull toward the more stimulating professional and social whirl of the New York City art world.”)

Though there was speculation that Esther had an unhappy love affair, possibly in Pittsburgh, Mary had sardonically discounted any theory that this was a reason Esther left. She stated definitively that nothing meant more to Esther than her painting. (Van Trump also offered that he didn't believe Esther to be very interested in romantic matters.) About Esther’s having love affairs, though, Mary Shaw added, delightedly, "It's quite possible. Maybe she had two or three."

Mary recalled being surprised when she found out years later that Esther would fall upon ill health in New York. She felt Esther to be "no more crazy than half a dozen others. She was a very nice person, maybe a little eccentric. . . . She had a very sound artistic sense. It may have been a bit exaggerated or under the gun, but she was a genuine artist."

Of Esther's well-being in Pittsburgh, Mary said, "I don't think she was, ahh . . . overfed by any means." And of Esther’s life after that point, Mary added, with a hearty yet compassionate laugh, "Every artist lives destitutely, dear, that goes to New York City."

When he was asked if Esther seemed flighty in her desire to go to New York City, artist Milton Weiss resolutely had responded, "No. Every artist desires to go at one time or another. I also wanted to live in New York and did so for years." He continued, "Her parents and maybe some friends thought she was 'crazy,' wanting to just paint."

Any small disillusionment with the Pittsburgh art scene simply prompted Esther to move further toward an environment that might better bring her a personal vision of happiness. She was dissatisfied with the way of life laid out for her. But her dissatisfaction was not with fellow artists. Come the mid 1930s, despite the encouragement gained in having surrounded herself with like-minded and equally talented individuals, Esther was restless. She had finally found others who understood her and her lifestyle, a close circle of creative friends, and her paintings were beginning to get seen in a variety of venues around Pittsburgh, but she yearned for more. She was an artist, and a deep longing to be acknowledged for who she was, and what she did, was tugging at her.

Out of desire, the artist creates a self which simultaneously embodies her in the world and marks her out as distinct, unassailably herself, unlike any other being. Such presence holds the encroaching world at bay, distances it, so that she occupies within an authentic self, a kind of psychic free zone in which her work can be developed. Sometimes an artist can gain access to that necessary free space by “withdrawing” to a place that gives it to her: New York, perhaps or Paris.” *

Merle Hoyleman had moved to the Iroquois Apartments in Oakland by 1936. Though her later journals would be filled with references to Esther Phillips in New York City, only one direct notation of her friendship with her in Pittsburgh survives. Ironically, it is quite possibly the last time Merle saw her dear friend in person.

December 7, 1936-

Esther came bringing her meat and vegetables and apples. We cooked dinner together. She left around 9:30 p.m.

With that, Esther left Pittsburgh for good-- her art and her story eventually to resurface here, but she herself never to return. Merle received a postcard from Esther a few weeks later, postmarked Christmas Eve.

Hello- Merle

-am in N.Y.

-at 7 Morton St.- lovely apt.

-Try & come here & stay with me for awhile

Write me- love-

Esther Phillips

• Sara Via Pais, “Shapes of the Feminine Experience in Art,” in Women, the Arts & the 1920s in Paris and New York, ed. Kenneth W. Wheeler and Virginia Lee Lussier (New Brunswick, NJ.: Transaction Books, 1982), 52.

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