On Reading Gita May's Last Book

When Gita May retired from Columbia in 2006, around the same time I had left Columbia for UC Santa Barbara, she published her last book: a biography of the eighteenth-century portrait painter Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun: The Odyssey of an Artist in an Age of Revolution. Last spring I learned that Gita had died, and I couldn't help wondering if she had known about the large upcoming exhibition devoted to Marie-Antoinette's portraitist at the Met. "Vigee Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France," on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City from February 15 through May 15, 2016, was a full-scale international retrospective long overdue. After a long period of critical neglect, Vigee Le Brun was finally getting proper recognition. Publishing her biography of the artist a full eleven years before the Met show, Gita was prescient about the tide of fame. Gita died two weeks before the show opened, and I don't know if she even knew that the heroine of her last book was finally being thrown a giant party, just a few blocks and a short cab ride away from her Morningside Heights apartment. After I left for California, I didn't stay in touch with Gita, who had hired me as a young assistant professor back in 1987, and who was always a good friend, a generous mentor, and a helpful and trusted colleague to me. I had heard that she was unwell, that she had become reclusive, unwilling to accept invitations or even to talk on the phone. In the last months of her life, her deteriorating health cut her off further from the big, loud, wonderful city around her and from her Columbia life. I would like to think that she knew, somehow, about the Met show in preparation, even if she did not live to see it; I like to think that she would have felt happy and validated to see an artist that she greatly admired finally given her rightful place on the contemporary art scene. In Gita's beautiful biography of Vigee Le Brun, one passage especially caught my attention. Vigee Le Brun is beginning to establish a friendly relationship with Queen Marie-Antoinette and is about to become her favorite portrait artist. One day, however, she misses a sitting appointment because of a pregnancy-related illness: On one occasion Vigee Le Brun unexpectedly missed an appointment for a sitting; pregnant at the time, she felt too ill to make the trip to Versailles. The following day she hurried to Versailles to offer her apologies. The queen did not expect her and was finishing her toilette before taking a ride in her carriage. Upon hearing that her portraitist had come to make an appointment for another day, she readily received her and, after gently chiding her, gave orders to cancel her promenade for a sitting: "I remember that in my eagerness to respond to this kindness [Vigee Le Brun wrote in her memoir], I seized my paintbox with such a rush that it spilled; my brushes fell on the floor; I kneeled down... 'Leave everything', said the Queen, 'You are too advanced in your pregnancy to bend down.' And she then proceeded to pick up everything herself." (38) As I read this shortly after learning of Gita's death, I wondered what this remarkable, and quite likely legendary, anecdote meant to her. (The 1859 painting by Alexis-Joseph Perignon representing this scene is included in the catalog of the recent exhibition at the Met: Vigee Le Brun [Baillio, Baetjer, and Lang 239].) The story of a king picking up a painter's brush is part of a treasure trove of stock anecdotes about artists and as such is found under various forms in artist stories from the Renaissance on. In a parallel version, it is told about Charles V, who picked up Titian's brush for him; it is told about the emperor Maximilian, who made a nobleman hold the ladder for Durer as he painted. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, in their classic little book on the image of the artist, record it as one of the recurring anecdotes found in artists' lives, where it is meant to illustrate the idea of an equality of rank between prince and artist, or power and genius: "In the classical tradition. …