The Life and Art of Anne Eisner

Part II.

The Early Years (1911–1944)

Coming into One’s Own

Anne Eisner (fig. 1) grew up surrounded by a strong sense of culture through social and political change for women during the early part of the twentieth century. Her older sister, Dorothy, won children’s drawing prizes and decided to be an artist for life; their dignified mother, Florine (whom everyone called Fluff), marched in the suffragette parade down Fifth Avenue in 1917, when Anne was six. The fight for voting rights marked a radical transition in women’s role in American society. Anne came of age with the stock-market crash of 1929, followed by the Great Depression and the struggle among artists and intellectuals in New York City to combat fascism and find a better world. She immersed herself in the study

Fig. 1 Aaron Siskind (?) portrait photograph of Anne Eisner, c. 1941. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

of art and found her way through periods of transition—social, political, and artistic—in turbulent times. If the context of one’s childhood tells a lot about the values one adheres to or resists, it does not determine the choices any of us make.

Anne Eisner was born on April 13, 1911, to William J. Eisner (1881–1975) and Florine “Fluff” Eisner (1884–1974). They were a second-generation Jewish family from Bohemia, long steeped in European culture. Anne’s maternal grandfather, Moritz Eisner (1852–1938), cut an elegant figure as the patriarch of the Eisner family. He had grown up in a quite well-to-do, bourgeois family, until his father, Joseph, a toll keeper, lost almost everything when the Austro-Prussian War began in 1866. His older brother Leopold went into the army, while Moritz was apprenticed to an apothecary in Vienna. Blessed with an excellent memory, as he writes in his brief, unpublished autobiography, Moritz studied physics and chemistry at the University of Vienna, but he spent as much time as possible backstage at the city’s Berg Theater; he loved everything to do with theater. At seventeen, Moritz decided to “try [his] fortune in the New World” and set out after two uncles, Meyer and Heinrich (Henry), who had settled in New York around the time of the 1848

Fig. 2a-d

a-b: Moritz Eisner, c. 1920s;

c from top left: Anna Zeitz Eisner; daughter Julia Eisner (?); Julia Haas Eisner, Anna’s mother; lower left, unknown, c. 1886;

d: Leopold and Jamie Eisner, c. 1880s. Christie McDonald archive.

The Eisner family tree. Left: Julia Haas Zeitz, married to Frederick Zeitz, with daughter Anna Zeitz, married to Moritz Eisner, with daughter (one of nine) Florine/Fluff Eisner. Right: unnamed mother of Moritz Eisner, Joseph Eisner (Moritz’s father), Meyer Eisner, and Henry Eisner; Leopold Eisner, married to Jamie, with son Will; Will and Fluff have two daughters, Dorothy and Anne. McDonald archive.

revolution in Austria. Moritz, steeped in the theatrical culture of Vienna, moved to Philadelphia, where he organized a dramatic club, many of whose members were of German descent. There he met Anna Zeitz (1852–1922), a Christian, who played the piano for one of the productions. They fell deeply in love. But Moritz, who was flamboyant and generous, with a deep sense of family, had to delay marriage because he sent all his savings to a widowed sister who wished to come to the States. Once Moritz was able to make a living as a pharmacist, he and Anna married and had nine children, one of whom was Anne’s mother, Fluff.

Once established, Moritz helped his older brother Leopold (1850–1892) emigrate from Austria. Leopold went on to settle in San Antonio, Texas. Leopold’s son, Will Eisner, who would be Anne’s father, spent his childhood there, until he was orphaned at age eleven when his mother died and Leopold committed suicide over a gambling debt. Moritz adopted his young nephew Will and brought him to live with his family. Will left school to go to work when he was thirteen. Later, after Moritz founded the Newark Paraffin and Parchment Paper Company in 1903, Will became president and, with his younger cousin Stanley Eisner, made it into a successful business; they were some of the first manufacturers of waxed paper in the United States. Lore had it that Will and his cousin Fluff had fallen in love during adolescence, although they did not marry until 1905, when he was twenty-four and she was nineteen. They became a legendary couple whose marriage lasted sixty-nine years. A redhead with a Texas-tinted New Jersey accent and a hot temper, Will was a toughie; he had to be. He learned how to take care of himself and then how to take care of everyone around him. He went on to become chairman of the Waxed Paper Industry on the War Service Board during World War I, president of the Waxed Paper Association, and director

Fig. 3

The Voyage to Africa (1946–1950)

In the spring of 1946, Anne and Pat had said their goodbyes and boarded the ship bound for Africa, when, as Anne wrote: “During the night, Pat got desperately ill and just before the boat sailed we had to get off and rush him to the hospital where penicillin and oxygen saved his life. It wasn’t till three months later that we sailed.”1 From then on, Pat’s health remained fragile; Anne just didn’t know to what extent. When they finally were able to leave New York on July 28, 1946, on a cargo ship called the Freetown, they

Fig. 25 Anne Eisner and Pat Putnam, departure, 1946 (photographer unknown). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

sailed to Las Palmas, Canary Islands; Dakar, French West Africa; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Monrovia and Firestone Plantations, Liberia; Tsakoadi, Gold Coast; Lagos, Nigeria; Daala, French Cameroon; Victoria, British Cameroon; and finally, Port Harcourt, Nigeria (see map 1). The ports along the west coast of Africa were Anne’s introduction to the continent. Pat gave Anne French lessons on board to refresh her rusty knowledge of the language in preparation for life in the Belgian Congo.

From the very first villages where their ship put in, Anne was fascinated with the shapes of the wooden carvings, masks, and stools, right down to the cooking utensils. From the 1935 exhibition at MOMA and her knowledge of modernists’ interest in “primitive” art, Anne felt deep curiosity about everything she encountered. She and Pat began to buy artifacts both from individual carvers and in the markets. Pat wrote to a colleague: “[Anne] is one of the contemporary American painters known in art circles, if not outside [them], and her taste in painting and sculpture, combined with my anthropological training, makes us, we think, get stuff distinctly worth acquiring for private collectors, art museums, and those ethnographic museums which buy primitive arts as art, and not simply at bow and arrow prices.”2 They were a team: collecting depended not only on Pat’s savvy about Africa and where to find objects but also on Anne’s aesthetic taste. They were starting to assemble what would become two important collections (now under each of their names at the American Museum of Natural History). Anne observed the carving techniques and carefully noted down everything she observed, as she would about many of her new experiences, in a sequence of letters to her parents which would continue throughout her life in Africa.

Once they left the ship in Port Harcourt, they drove overland in the car that Anne had brought with her (see fig. 26). With its “fine patina of peeling paint, rust, dust, and patches of new paint,” camping equipment piled on top of baskets, pots and pans strapped onto the front, and gasoline tins tied to the bumpers, they made their way to Kano, Nigeria, and Lake Chad; to Maroua and inland in French Cameroun; to Bangui, up the Congo and Ubangi Rivers meandering around French Equatorial Africa. Along the way, they

Map 1

Central Africa, showing the 1946 overland voyage (Caleb Shelburne).

2a / 2b. Anne Eisner, Klein’s Outer Sanctum, 16 x 30½ in., oil on canvas; Klein’s Inner Sanctum, 161/4 x 20½ in., oil on canvas, c. 1934–1938 (photographs by Michael Rosengarten). New-York Historical Society and Museum.

3. Anne Eisner, Monhegan Landscape, 15 x 22 in., watercolor on paper, c. 1939 (photograph by Michael Rosengarten). McDonald collection.

4. Anne Eisner, Carlo Tresca, 31 x 26 in., oil on canvas, c. 1941 (photograph by Michael Rosengarten). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

5. Anne Eisner, Martha’s Vineyard I, 8 x 11 in., oil on canvas, c. 1944 (photograph by Michael Rosengarten). McDonald collection.

14. Anne Eisner, Entrance to Camp Putnam, 50 x 40 in., c. 1960 (photograph by John Hill). Musée du Quai Branly.

15. Anne Eisner, Ituri Forest II/Plantation, 39 x 36 in., oil on canvas, c. 1960 (photograph by Michael Rosengarten). McDonald collection.