Ethel Myers

Mae Ethel Klinck (first named Lillian Cochran) was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1881. Her 20-year-old mother was already seriously ill at the time of her birth and died when Ethel was 4 years old. Ethel's father was already dead and so she became an orphan. She was later adopted by Michael and Alfiata Klinck, an affluent couple who renamed her Mae Ethel Klinck.[4] After the death of Michael Klinck, Alfiata moved between Brooklyn and Orange, N.J. which helped provide Ethel with a strong early education in both public and private schools. It was also her adoptive mother who encouraged Ethel to train on the piano in hopes of her becoming a concert pianist.

Ethel found her piano studies drudgery. "I decided I wanted to be a painter. I never had any other idea. So in my second year in the Newark high school I left and went to the National Academy in New York City, then on Twenty-Third Street. They sent me to Walter Satterlee, whose studio was in the old YMCA building across the street. After several months I took the examination at the Academy and failed. They sent word to me that if I would try again I would get in — but I said no — I have gone to the Chase School. There I became monitor of a class, and afterward became assistant director and teacher with John Douglas Connah, director. It was there that I was instrumental in getting Robert Henri in the school. It had then become the New York School of Art at Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street."[5]

Ethel studied at the Chase School (William Merritt Chase) and the New York School of Art from 1898 to 1904. A pet pupil of Chase, she also took the opportunity of studying with Henri, who would have a strong influence on her early art career. Among the others she attended classes with were Edward Hopper, Guy Pène du Bois, Gifford Beal, and Joseph Stella. She also became personally acquainted with the painters George Luks, John Sloan, William Glackens, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson and Elmer Livingston MacRae.[6]

The content of this article from The International Revue on Ethel (Klinck) Myers reveals how strongly she responded to the inspiration and goals that Robert Henri, as teacher, had set forth for his students.

A windy street scene done by Mae Ethel Klinck

"An interesting study from the artist's viewpoint is being made by Miss M. Ethel Klinck of the life in our slums. Miss Klinck, who was a student in the Chase School of Art, is particularly attracted to the study of the manner of life of the foreign population of our large cities, which cling to their old world homogeneity. She spent much of the past year in the study of the Jewish district of this city, the general region bounded by Delancey and Hester Streets, and has some interesting sketches of the sights of the Norfolk Street Synagogue at the recent Day of Atonement.

Last August she visited Boston and devoted herself to the Italian and Hebrew districts, particularly in the crowded region of Salem Street. More recently she has found the push-cart market, which the city has allowed, at and beyond the entrance to the new Williamsburg Bridge, a field of possibilities. It is not her custom to sketch upon the spot. This she finds, if it does not rouse antagonism and disinclination to be recorded by the artist's pencil, does at least result in an unnatural emphasis. The crowded life of the teeming slums must be taken off its guard, if at all, and the best method has proved to be that of carrying home sketches in the mind's eye merely.

Accordingly, Miss Klinck gathers her material by assuming the general costume of the people she wishes to observe and mixing with them as one engaged in their own pursuits. She is particularly inclined to make friends with the children and study their games. It is her intention to make what might be called a comparative study of the slums of different cities of the country. None of the large cities are without them, and her experience so far in New York and Boston has led her to look forward to extending her field. We reproduce here with a characteristic sketch."[7]

Ethel soon made a career decision to move away from doing pictures of the Lower East Side and instead turned to an innovative approach in creating small, realistic sculptures. After the birth of her daughter, Ethel chose to give up painting in order to free up much-needed studio space for her artist husband. Her shift in medium also avoided the inevitable comparisons that would be made between the work of a married couple working in the same medium and similar subjects.

A figurative sculptor and art activist in New York City, Ethel Myers is known for her caricature bronzes of city people, many of them in humorous poses. She exhibited nine of them in the 1913 Armory Show that introduced modernist art to America, and according to art historian Charlotte Rubinstein: "It is now clear that Myers was one of the most creative of the Americans who exhibited at the Armory Show." (169). However, she married painter Jerome Myers, and subjegated her career to his, which meant she did not receive her deserved recognition during her lifetime."[11]

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  The Apprentice from Madison Avenue[12]
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  Fifth Avenue Girl[12]
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  Fifth Avenue Gossips[12]
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  Miss Broadway[12]

Critical appraisal (1912-1913)

The Craftsman: “In the past Mrs. Myers has been better known to the artist world as a painter of courage and skill, for the future she must rank, whether she will or no, as a sculptor with the power of presenting through her work a knowledge of life and understanding of human psychology as rare as it is interesting.” [13]

The New York Times: "Mrs. Jerome Myers has an exhibition of sculptures at the Folsom Galleries that proves her a serious humorist, a Forain of Fifth Avenue."[14]

The Brooklyn Eagle: "Ethel Myers in her three powerfully expressed sculptured figurines impress this reviewer with the fact that she is worthy of a place alongside of Daumier, Meunier and Mahonri Young."[14]

New York Herald-Tribune: "Mrs. Myers' statuettes are many sketches of New York life, exceedingly plastic and full of expression."[14]

Evening Mail, New York: "Mrs. Myers has an extraordinary graphic talent in her sculpture, and is doing a perfectly original and delightful thing."[14]

New York Sun: "There is sculptural quality in these ingenious and clever little figures and the artist has said something worth while in her own amusing way. The little show is worthwhile seeing."[14]

Gossips - E. Myers (magazine illustration)

Vogue Magazine: "In her own field, Mrs. Myers' work is unique and charming."

Letter from Henry McBride to Ethel Myers - Jan. 24, 1913: "Must congratulate you heartily on your little figures at the Folsom's. It's a case of good goods coming in small packages. I'm sending every one I know in to see them. Most charming things of the kind I've ever seen.[15]

The Outlook Magazine quoting Theodore Roosevelt at the 1913 Armory Show: "To name the pictures one would like to possess and the bronzes and tanagras and plasters would mean to make a catalogue of indefinite length. The little group called ‘Gossip’ by Ethel Myers is one which has something of the quality of the famous Fifteenth Idyl of Theocritus."[16] Just a few months before he visited the Armory Show, Roosevelt gave his annual address as President of the American Historical Association and included this observation, which may have prompted his reaction to Ethel Myers work on display at the Armory, "The inscriptions of Hellenistic Greece in the third century before our era do not, all told, give us so lifelike a view of the ordinary life of the ordinary men and women who dwelt in the great Hellenistic cities of the time, as does the fifteenth idyll of Theocritus."[17]

Virginia at 4, dancing in her first public performance at an evening benefit event at the Plaza Hotel in 1912

Virginia at 5 - First full concert performance of her dances at the Berkeley Theatre, NY, 1913

Around 1909, when she was three years old, Ethel's daughter Virginia revealed herself to be possessed of strong artistic talent as well. One day, as Ethel was playing the piano, she looked up to see Virginia naturally dancing to the rhythm and the emotional feeling of the music. This was a time when the impact of Isadora Duncan's dancing had totally captured the imagination of the artistic community of New York, as well as much of the rest of the world, and Ethel took note of Virginia's gift for spontaneous and instinctive movements. She encouraged her daughter to perform, both privately and publicly. Virginia starred in an Edison-produced film, Dream Dances of Virginia Myers, when she was five years old, doing 20 minutes of her own improvised solo dances as the first half of a "split-reeler." The film was to spread her fame to all of America, far beyond the limits of just her acclaim in New York City. In 1913, her talent was celebrated in an article in Vogue Magazine titled "When Virginia Dances," in which she was called "a child of the century."[18]

Virginia stars in Edison Films Dream Dances (production#1000) shown all over America and overseas

Virginia Myers at 16 - Second Carnegie Hall Concert, full evening of her dances accompanied by orchestra, 1923

What started out as private performances in the Myers small studio for friends and art collectors ("millionaires sitting in tears on ironing boards"[5]), Virginia's performances soon demanded better and larger locations. In spite of having limited financial resources to draw from, Ethel took on all management and organization of Virginia's blossoming career. She organized a series of recitals throughout New York City, booking theatres, handling contracts, and coordinating costumes, set design, musicians, publicity, and the printing of tickets and programs.

As a result, Virginia became known as a "child wonder" of the dance, and people come from all over to see her, including the Parkhursts from England. Ridgely Torrence and Percy MacKaye both wrote poetry about her.[5]" Over the years, Ethel and Jerome organized seventeen recitals in theaters in New York City with many articles written about Virginia's dancing genius. When she was 16, the law at last permitted her to appear as a star dancing on the main stage at Carnegie Hall. Her first solo appearance there with orchestra was in April 1923, and the second in December of 1923.

Jerome, Ethel and their 8-year-old daughter, Virginia, were all in a state of exhaustion and near starvation due to the lack of food and the overcrowded wartime conditions they faced traveling all day and night on the deck of the ship taking them back to America. Their joy at the sight of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor must have been not unlike the emotions felt by many earlier arriving immigrants, who later would become the subjects of so many of Jerome's Lower East Side pictures. Still for Jerome and Ethel their strong hope that going to Europe would allow for a change in their fortune turned out to be as much a failure as the turn in fortunes that Jerome believed the Armory Show would be in helping to create a far greater recognition of American artists.

It was about at this point, with things so difficult, that Ethel decided she really needed to help support her family by bringing in additional sources of new income. Her eyes turned toward the garment industry. It still didn't mean she would turn away from her art entirely. And it also didn't mean she had lost her sense of humor. As the Ashcan artist that she was, she found ever more ways to express herself as she observed the passing parade of New York life..

Neither time nor evolution decreases the interest in the modern woman. She is both retrospective and introspective, and exists always. Mrs. Myers has told the story more graphically than anyone else… A little human comedy sartorially played! One could imagine the artist saying in Carlylian tones, "Madam, where would you be without your clothes?"

The characters in this comedy are taken from the passers-by and all the modern world is her stage.[21]

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  How These Scales Lie
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  On The Street
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  And after a tiresome day shopping
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  Mothers or Schoolmates (once)
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  How do they do it on eight dollars a week?
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  Balloon
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  "An open car—never! Mother, call a taxi!"
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  Ain't I got enough trouble without you telling me to hurry
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  How can men be such brutes not to give a lady a seat
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  Three Women At A Party
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  Two Women
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  Lady looking right
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  Carousel
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  Ambulance Call
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  Dog, Cat, Basket
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  "Mother, you stand like last year"
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  Woman With Blue and Red Dress
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  Saleslady to Model—"The customer says she'll take the 'Minaret' if you think it will fit her."
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  The Greeting
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  Say! Do You Do The Grapevine
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  Five Women
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  Three Women - People Should Not Come See These Slave Plays
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  All Dressed Up
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  Lady With Brush In Shower

Ethel Myers believed strongly in the importance of her husband's artistic career, and never hesitated in putting her own artwork to the side to pursue entrepreneurial activities that would help her family weather economic difficulty. These activities included design and teaching. Her life as a businesswoman would cover a period of about 25 years, from 1915 until Jerome's death in 1940.

On her family's return to New York, Ethel recalled: "We lived in many places, some uptown, some downtown. Always making sketches and having exhibitions, but no home. Finally we took two rooms on West Thirty-Seventh Street in the Garment District, the top floor. The back studio hall room was Jerome’s studio and the third floor front hall room was where we three ate and slept. At this point I decided to be a designer of clothes. I took five dollars and bought lace and designed a blouse. Went up to the Fifth Avenue shop and sold the design. From then on I was in business."[5] "The year before the Armory show. Jerome back in Carnegie. I took an apartment on East 58th Street. Went in business designing and had three girls. Worked for Fifth Avenue trade."[5] "Mrs. Myers was a designer of women’s clothes and hats, maintaining a shop in New York City from 1920 to 1940 and designing clothes for noted celebrities of society, stage, and opera and for manufacturers."[1]

Following her husband's death in 1940, Ethel devoted her time principally to furthering his artistic reputation. She lectured on Jerome's work throughout the United States, under the auspices of the American Federation of Art during 1941-43. She also maintained the Jerome Myers Memorial Gallery in New York City for a number of years.

From 1949 until her retirement in 1959 she was Art Director of the Fine Arts and Ceramics Department at Christodora House in New York City.[1]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ethel Myers.

• Stickley, Gustav (1913). "Notes of General Interest: At the Folsom Galleries". The Craftsman. 23: 724–726.
• American History Association - AHA Presidential Addresses, History as Literature by Theodore Roosevelt 1912