Two brilliant female artists

Author: By Liz Rosenberg

Date: SUNDAY, February 21, 1999

Page: C2

Section: Books

As a young girl, I liked nothing better than to read and reread the biographies of famous women, especially famous women writers. (I still have my dog-eared copy of ``Louisa May Alcott: Girl of Old Boston'' alongside my ``Little Women.'') Biographies have changed vastly since those days, but I still love them. ``Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange'' and ``Martha Graham: A Dancer's Life'' are two I would have admired.

Until recently, most biographies for children focused almost exclusively on the childhoods of their subjects. No longer. Indeed, both of these books are as useful for adults as they will be for young readers. Both ingeniously use photographs of (and in the case of Lange, by) their subjects, to further illuminate their text. Both take on the whole lives of their independent, thorny, brilliant female artists. Both Lange and Graham sought all their lives for a more perfect way to express their vision of the world, and each in her own way defied contemporary traditions and conventions to do so.

Elizabeth Partridge is particularly well-suited to her task. Partridge is granddaughter of the famous photographer Imogen Cunningham, and daughter of Ron Partridge, a beloved younger photographer/friend of Dorothea Lange, ``part son, part apprentice, part colleague.'' She knows her subject well, and clearly had access to the best possible source material for this work.

Dorothea Lange was struck with polio at age 7, and ever afterward walked with a limp. She once commented, ``I think it perhaps was the most important thing that happened to me. It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped and humiliated me. All those things at once. I've never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it.''

She felt early on that ``maybe I had eyesight'' and determined to be a professional photographer in an age when the most common jobs for women -- if they worked outside the home at all -- were, Partridge writes, ``in this order, servant, teacher, farm laborer, typist, clerk, and laundry worker.''

Lange reluctantly tried her hand at teaching, just as she later tried -- and failed -- to be a conventional wife and mother. ``Restless Spirit'' portrays just that: a restless woman artist most compassionate and loving in her art. Her own sons were farmed out to neighbors and friends, and, at the ages of 7 and 4, sent to boarding school during the week. Yet she often photographed children, beautifully and with great tenderness. Many are familiar with her now-famous photograph, ``Migrant Mother,'' taken in l936 among starving farmworkers in California. Elizabeth Partridge explains how Lange nearly missed that picture -- had driven past that last peapicker's camp, when 20 miles along the road, she turned back. ``I was following instinct, not reason,'' she wrote. ``I drove into that wet and soggy camp and parked my car like a homing pigeon.''

Whether photographing farm workers, desperate migrants of the Dust Bowl, the jobless during the Depression, the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II, or her own son holding out a fistful of daisies or, years later, shyly holding forward his firstborn child, Lange ``really and seriously tried,'' she wrote, ``with every person I photographed, to reveal them as closely as I could.''

Though she befriended the most famous landscape photographers of her day, Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, and others, she was all her life most interested in people -- what was happening to them. She knew how to make herself invisible, a trick she had learned while wandering the Lower East Side and Bowery during her New York childhood, and she was a good listener: ``If you substitute one [word] out of your own vocabulary, it disappears before your eyes.'' For Lange, vision was everything: She saw vocabulary as well as hearing it.

Partridge's use of Lange's photographs is especially revelatory. One can almost read the book through its images. Her prose, alas, is less wonderful, sometimes flat -- ``She found him deeply attractive, with many characteristics that the temperamental Maynard didn't have'' and sometimes positively blundering in form and content: ``African-Americans threw down their hoes and quit their hardscrabble lives by the thousands. California held out new promise. One African-American woman said, `The war made me live better, it really did. My sister always said that Hitler got us out of the white folks' kitchen.' ''

Still, ``Restless Spirit'' is well worth the price. It contains marvelous anecdotes, quotes from Lange and those who knew and loved her best, and her own indelible images, well-produced, thank heaven, in good quality duotones. Young readers with their own eye for beauty will love this book. The grown-ups who love them will surely borrow it.

If Elizabeth Partridge admits that Dorothea Lange ``always scared me a little when I was growing up,'' many of those closest to dancer Martha Graham found her positively terrifying. She was, however, also dazzling, charismatic, inspiring to her many students, colleagues and friends -- including performers as diverse as Rudolph Nureyev, Merce Cunningham, Madonna, Woody Allen, and Helen Keller. She wrote of herself that, early in her career as dancer and choreographer she ``used to hit audiences over the head with a sledgehammer.'' Later she learned ``you must draw people to you, like a magnet -- perhaps by the intensity of your own belief.''

Certainly Martha Graham was intense from the start. Raised in a wealthy family to be a proper young lady, as soon as she saw dancer Ruth St. Denis in her role as the goddess Radha, she later recalled that ``my fate was sealed. I couldn't wait to learn to dance as the goddess did.''

Getting there wasn't so easy. When she began to study dance professionally at long last, she was thought to be too old; at age 22, most dancers have had years of classes. Freedman writes that she was considered ``too short, too heavy, and too homely to be taken seriously.'' Yet for much of a century she prevailed, dominating and indeed creating what we still call contemporary dance. At the end of her dancing career, when she was crippled with arthritis, she said, ``Someone told me, `Martha, you are not a goddess. You must admit your mortality.' That's difficult when you see yourself as a goddess and behave like one.'' Indeed, author Russell Freedman notes, ``At the time of her death she was working on a new dance . . . called The Eyes of a Goddess, or a `journey through time.' ''

Graham's life was even more tumultuous, unconventional, and (at least outwardly) passionate than Dorothea Lange's. Her art and life were staged on a grand scale. She was moody, electric, impatient. The night before the premiere of her first successful work, ``Primitive Mysteries,'' she threw a tantrum, screaming at the dancers to ``Go home! Go away!'' Fortunately they didn't, and the piece received 23 curtain calls.

Though I found ``Martha Graham: A Dancer's Life'' a trifle long, Russell Freedman, a superb biographer for young readers, seldom falters in his prose. Here, too, the choice of photographs wonderfully portrays the life of its subject. But Freedman's explications are equally enlightening: ``The dance movements that Graham invented were very different from the graceful illusions of classical ballet. Ballet is an aerial art; ballerinas make a spectacle of defying gravity, as though they are lighter than air. Graham's dancers reveled in the downward pull of gravity; instead of dancing on their toes, they hugged the ground in bare feet.'' Like Dorothea Lange, Graham felt her art to be not merely vocation, but avocation: ``I did not choose to be a dancer . . . I was chosen.''

Both these women, as young girls, were taken by their fathers to see a special theatrical event -- neither one ever forgot the experience. (Perhaps in our society today, girls don't rely quite as heavily on their father's approval -- but I suspect otherwise.) There is hardly a better reason for parents to encourage their children in such whims. Presenting one of these books to the right child could be the start of something earth-shaking.