While Swan was at the Museum School, she received a two-year fellowship to study in Paris. She observed that it was generally uncommon for women to be awarded this position, but due to a surplus of scholarship money after World War II, more fellowships were given than usual. Swan noted that fellowships for female students were usually just for one year, “because they didn’t trust a woman to go to Paris and not have a love affair with a Frenchman.”4 Swan further noted that she fulfilled the School’s worst expectations, and met her husband Alan Fink in a cheap French restaurant. The relationship between Swan and Fink developed while both were living in Paris—she on scholarship from Boston, he traveling with friends from Chicago. Swan was working steadily when she met Fink, painting and honing her skills in drawing, but wanted to travel. Her friend and fellow artist Ralph Coburn was living in Sanary-sur-Mer, located in coastal Provence on the Mediterranean Sea, and Swan and Fink decided to change location. Swan completed a series of self-portraits while in Sanary; three are on view in the exhibition. Swan’s self-portraits are direct and self-possessed, the eyes are never averted and she returns the viewer’s gaze. This is fitting, as Alan Fink noted that she began all of her portraits with the eyes, and worked from there—bodies and studied hands fill the page, yet the figures are ultimately defined by their gaze.5 The self-possession is not only found in her self-portraits, but in all of her figure drawings. The eyes in Portrait of the artist’s Mother (Clara Swan) (1950) are simultaneously intense and tired, lending tension to the figure which speaks directly to a companion self-portrait in which Swan’s shoulders are slumped and her face crestfallen. When placed across from each other the figures eye the other warily, and this communication is not an accident. The works were in tandem in Swan’s sketchbook, and her captions indicated that her self-portrait was a direct reaction to her mother’s disciplined personality. In contrast, a peaceful confidence alludes from other self-portraits in the sketchbook, and a highlight is the oil Self Portrait, Sanary (1951), painted around the same time. At first glance, Swan’s pose is reminiscent of the self-portraits of Elisabeth Louise Vigée LeBrun, but this is not a sentimental portrait. Swan’s bright red hat glows orange against a striking teal background, and the artist’s expressionistic side is readily apparent in this work. While aspects of the figure are carefully studied, the painting is overwhelmingly an expressionistic burst of color. In her review of Swan’s first solo exhibition in 1953, Dorothy Adlow, art critic for the Christian Science Monitor, noted that Swan was above all, a portraitist. Her work was marked with a personal characterization that made her both academic and expressionistic.6 Swan’s line drawings reveal the fluidity in which she captured her subjects at hand, and she was never short on subject matter. She had a true interest and longing for engagement with others—a sentiment at the core of her pursuit of portraiture.7 Swan’s sketchbooks include neighbors, friends, and acquaintances known only long enough to pose. Notably, many of these subjects were women. Her traveling companion Louise Vosgerchian, who later became the head of the Harvard Music Department, was the subject of a series of drawings and a painting. Swan’s oil of Vosgerchian is a contemplative study in which her seated figure appears to emerge from an empty deep red background.8 Swan’s intelligent studies of the artists Mary Frank, Esther Geller, and Lois Tarlow, as well as the poet Anne Sexton, are highlighted by her often unique choice of perspective and method of posing—a careful contemplation of arranging the subject in space that yields strong figures in intimate compositions. Her portrait of Linda Duca, in profile and smoking, is reminiscent of turn-of-the-century portraits of the New Woman—a progressive figure who broke gendered boundaries in personal and professional life—a position many mid-century women artists found themselves in as well.
Swan in Bookbinder, Boston Modern, 220-221. Conversation with Alan Fink, October 21, 2013, Brookline, MA. 6 Painting in Boston, 153. 7 E-mail from Joanna Fink, November 12, 2013. 8 Alan Fink noted this was the painting Swan was working on when he first visited her studio in Paris, conversation October 30, 2013. 4 5