This Fantastic Struggle:  The Life and Art of Esther Phillips

Western Pennsylvania History, Winter 2002-2003

This Fantastic Struggle:  The Life and Art of Esther Phillips
By Lisa A. Miles, 2002. Pp. 460. Introduction, appendix, bibliography, index. $18 paper

The story of the artist in American society toiling, with little success, to gain recognition and respect – not to mention a means for monetary sustenance – is not a new one. Indeed, the “starving artist” has become a platitude often appropriated, in quaint fashion, to peddle ‘sofa size” paintings which bear little resemblance to art. But it’s a condition renewed poignancy when revealed in the biographical details of a specific individual, as in Lisa Miles’ account of the life of Esther Phillips, whose art, the author contends, has been undeservedly neglected.

Phillips was born in “an eastern village of the former Soviet Union,” and immigrated to Pittsburgh with her parents and siblings in 1905. Her early years were centered around the activities of the Irene Kaufmann Settlement, particularly its Neighborhood Art School. Her preoccupation with drawing and painting led her, through frequent visits to the Carnegie Library and the Museum of Art , to gain a relatively broad education in painting techniques as well as a knowledge of contemporary painters and movements. In this way she acquainted herself with the work of the Ash Can artists, the post-Impressionists, and with the “scandalous” new work exhibited at the Armory Show of 1913 in New York .

Despite her continuing interest in art, Esther Phillips graduated “with a concentration in business” (so as to assuage her parents who intended that she find suitable employment and get married) from Raiston Preparatory High School on Penn Avenue in 1919. While the family provided for educating her brothers at the University of Pittsburgh, Esther enrolled herself as a part-time student at Carnegie Tech where in the evenings she studied illustration and design while working during the day to pay her tuition. That her parents made no allowance for her goals, that they were – to her – emblematic of the culture generally in that they perceived artists to be impractical, self-absorbed dreamers was a source of life-long resentment. She later described herself at this time as having “health that was not very god,” and as being “always a little nervous.”

Ms. Miles has accompanied her narrative with a liberal selection of photographs of Phillips and her circle of friends, with newspaper articles and reviews of exhibitions in which Phillips’ work was displayed, and with numerous color plates of the artist’s paintings. But what most establishes the “flavor” of the era, and a steadily developing insight into the manner in which Phillips and her friends viewed the circumstances of their lives, is the extensive correspondence between them which Miles has painstakingly located and included throughout the book.

Among Esther’s friends by the early 1930s were Gladys Schmitt, who would achieve a national reputation for her novels, and Merle Hoyleman, whose poetry and prose had begun to appear in literary journals and would continue to do so over the next four decades. “Ellie,” the primary character in Schmitt’s first novel, The Gates of Aulis, was loosely modeled on Esther Phillips. But her friendship with Hoyleman, and later, with artist Eugenia “Jerry” Hughes in New York City , would be those which aided her though the most difficult times: Hoyleman, by acting as agent in selling Phillips’ paintings in Pittsburgh, and Hughes by providing at various intervals companionship, food, and shelter in New York .

Miles writes with particular dexterity of Phillips’ disillusionment with her life in Pittsburgh, of her wanting to go “where the real art was”; of her arrival in New York at age 34; of the years of low-paying jobs and unsuitable living conditions; of her acquaintances in the Village art scene; and of her nearly seven-year sojourn in mental institutions where she abandoned and then returned to her painting. The vignettes of Phillips as a street vendor selling her ceramics, or in automats purchasing cheese sandwiches and pot pies from machines, “eating ketchup on crackers” and “using tea bags over and over again” are powerfully rendered.

The final chapter of This Fantastic Struggle constitutes a kind of plea for greater understanding of the creative personality. Without knowing the author’s own biography, one surmises nonetheless that from this point, Phillips’ life serves to represent not only the plight of many unrecognized female artists, but that of the author herself. Yet Phillips ultimately accepted the consequences of her choices. While artists may seek the limelight, they survive and endure because of a passion for what they do; they paint because they are able to; because of the gratification it brings them; because they discover in the making of art the most valuable way of spending their time. Miles quotes Phillips saying, near the end of her life, to her sister Dorothy:

I consider myself very lucky. I did exactly what I wanted to do in my life and I was happy doing it…I lived the best life. When I got up in the morning, I looked forward to the day. I was happy I could paint.

It is the story of Esther Phillips – and not its corollary – that will cause readers to value this book and to seek out her paintings.

Gerald Costanzo, Professor of English and Director of Carnegie Mellon University Press. His most recent collection of poems is Great Disguise.

Author Lisa Miles will speak about Esther Phillips at the History Center on Saturday, December 7, 2002 .