The Art of Sarah Goodwin Austin | Priscilla Cunningham
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How can one describe a friend whose talent, loyalty, generosity and personal qualities were so various and outstanding? Such a friend was the late Sarah Goodwin Austin, whose extraordinary, though brief, career as a shadowbox artist is yet to become well-known. Over a period of 25 years, Sally or Sal, as she was called, created at least 350 shadowboxes using art period themes such as surrealism and cubism, and baroque, renaissance and modern 20th-century art. The boxes were not exhibited, however, until the last three years of her life, tragically cut short by breast cancer.
When my father, Charles Cunningham, assumed the directorship of the Wadsworth Atheneum of Art in Hartford, CT, in 1946, he followed in the footsteps of an illustrious colleague, A. Everett Austin Jr. (Sally’s father), known to most people as “Chick.” (His story has been lovingly detailed in Magician of the Modern, by Eugene Gaddis, the archivist of the Wadsworth Atheneum, so I will not write about his fascinating life here, except as it touched Sally’s.) Needless to say, Sally and I met almost immediately and became close, lifelong friends. We both grew up in Hartford and attended the Oxford School, and even when we were at different schools or in different cities, we remained in touch, as did our fathers.
At Oxford, while I was involved in choirs and musicals, Sal was a star athlete. We were, however, in several math classes together, where we colluded in causing despair in our teachers. We just didn’t “get” algebra. Eventually we were put in separate classes. Our teachers and fellow students didn’t appreciate our questions and the mirth that ensued at our incomprehension. The irony of this is that Sally was really adept at numbers, proof of which is her precise measurements for the boxes.
Sally left Oxford for boarding school a year before I did (Concord for Sally and Westover for me), but since our fathers were good friends we’d get together on holiday vacations. I remember some long evenings together, with Chick, my dad and Sally’s godfather, the famous architectural historian Henry Russell Hitchcock, in deep discussions in the Austins’ baroque living room, our moms checking their watches to see if these three men could get to midnight without a pause for escape. Through her parents’ contacts, Sally met many famous people—Le Corbusier, Alexander Calder, Salvador Dalí, Virgil Thomson, Max Ernst, as well as other artists and theater people—and we both met museum colleagues of our fathers, outstanding directors and curators. But, preoccupied as we were with existential concerns, we never discussed our teenage years until much later.
Sally had an inquisitive, perceptive and playful mind. As an aunt and friend to many young people, she could banter and play jokes like a pro. She once led me and an equally gullible friend to an abandoned house, pretending it was where we would stay as guests. After what seemed like ages, she reappeared and took us to her mother’s very elegant Castine, Maine, home—which she later renovated and modernized, showing her great taste and eye for design.
After college and nine months in Italy, I came to New York in 1959; Sally arrived two years later. Since our time together as schoolgirls and her graduation from Concord Academy in 1954, and an unhappy year spent in Italy (1954-55), Sally had taken serious steps in her evolution as an artist. Her mother had encouraged both her children to draw from an early age, and Sally pursued formal training at the Hartford Art School (1956-57) and worked at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (1958-61). In New York, she was employed at the Archives of American Art and the Pace Gallery. She also helped various charitable organizations, putting together art shows. Much later, she volunteered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Her infectious sense of humor continued unabated from when we were schoolgirls. At concerts in Alice Tully Hall, where I subscribed to a chamber music series and was frequently thrilled to be able to invite her, we had a strict rule: If an ultra-modern piece was to be performed, we were to avoid eye contact at all costs! One night, a piano and violin duet began with the violinist performing a series of atonal scales, the pianist responding with a cacophonous chord, then leaping up and plucking the strings or hitting the hammers of the open piano. These excruciating maneuvers continued for some time, alternating between the pianist hopping up on and jumping down from his bench and the violinist extracting blood-curdling screeches from his instrument; finally, unable to restrain the impulse, we sneaked a peek at each other and immediately lost our cool, dissolving into uncontrollable mirth. In tears from laughing so hard, we were forced to put our heads down for the duration of the piece to keep from looking at each other and bursting into laughter again. Virgil Thomson this was not!
On another occasion when Sally visited me in Southampton, after a tour of the historic village and antique car museum, we headed east to look at a new “artsy” and incongruous metal house, which I had nicknamed “Jaws.” Situated in the middle of a huge field, it resembled a futuristic fortress, with a real moat around it. Sally was a keen student of architecture; her brother was an architect and she had grown up in an architectural icon. She immediately wondered how this experiment would turn out in the changeable Long Island weather and how expensive its upkeep would be. We had a great laugh at this strange example of modern architecture.
Another variety of expression inappropriate to its environment that similarly induced a mixture of merriment and distress occurred during a lecture by a famous feminist at the Cosmopolitan Club—which I did not witness but which was described to me and several others by Sally in her characteristically comedic way—when, while questioning the distinguished guest, a member happened to utter a very raunchy word, only to be met with a stony silence by the startled audience. Her retelling of the event had all us “Cos-Clubbers” in stitches. Nonetheless, underneath the hilarity, Sally, a real lady, was appalled. Her concern for strict observance of Club rules was evident on the several occasions I saw her reminding members that business papers were not to be displayed in public spaces at the Club. Her devotion to the Cosmopolitan Club also included its staff, all of whom she knew by name, and who loved her as well.
My earliest memory of Sally as an artist was when I visited her new apartment in 1961. She proudly showed me her digs, and then a blank, white canvas with a shiny black slip glued to it. I was clueless about pop art, but amazed at this apparition. (Incidentally, Sally later named her black poodle Pop Art, or Popsie, and she had many wonderful times with him.)
Although I had been to Sally’s apartment in New York many times and seen a few creations, including a box with a portrait of her father doing a magic trick, it was not until the late ’70s, when I visited Castine and saw her house and studio, that I encountered her boxes. Her studio was amazing, well equipped not only for art but house repairs, at which she was very adept.
I can picture her there now, humming along to Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Corelli and other Baroque musicians as she deftly and laboriously assembled her magnificent creations. Sally was as musical as she was artistic. Her mother was on the board of the Hartford Symphony, and she and her brother David were surrounded by music from an early age. While David took up the violin, she enjoyed the musical life rather more vicariously, via concerts and the radio.
It was David, her brother, knowing her fascination with toys and gadgets, who triggered Sally’s art career when he showed her a mechanical sculpture by Jean Tinguely in Philip Johnson’s office, where he worked. She then began collecting mechanical toys, motorized objects, and started creating moving sculptures—some freestanding and some in boxes. The surreal boxes came next; mysterious, some lighted, some with odd pieces of glass.
At some point, Sally had began to collect art magazines, postcards, old art textbooks and catalogues, and gradually made the move into collage, creating out of them the most amazing, brilliant, witty and unusual shadowboxes. These were miniaturized works of art, portraits, paintings, sculptures and other cultural and art historical subjects. There is no doubt that the work of Joseph Cornell had a great influence on her. Sally owned one of his constructions, and one of her earliest boxes of 1978 features Cornell’s head rolling against a mirrored background over a line of text with a partial quote. She apparently flirted, briefly, with Cornellian concepts, copying his style, but decided this was not where her vision would lead her.
Instead, Sally focused on large themes and prominent figures of 20th-century art: Surrealism, Cubism and Dada. She created 4' x 4' boxes devoted to Picasso and Braque, and others devoted to 16 Sculptors and 16 Painters. These were all composed of images cut out and glued to wood, featuring the artists’ portraits along with seminal works they had created. Literary and cultural portrait boxes followed: Duchamp, Max Ernst, Calder, Cornell, Jean Cocteau, Vita Sackville-West, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Bessie Smith, and George Gershwin, among others. Many of the portraits were made by cutting the faces into small cubes and rearranging them in a mosaic-like pattern. All these images reflect her insights not only into the people portrayed, but into the art they created. The viewer is guided to regard their work in multiple ways, inviting new perceptions of their aesthetic to emerge.
The closet workshop in Sally’s New York apartment, where much of her work was done, was about five feet square. Although cramped, it was neatly organized, and easily accommodated the nails, paint, saws, glue and all the other materials she used to create her miracles. With these tools, Sally made her clippings, at once sources of inspiration and raw materials, reappear, reinvented and renewed, in different configurations. Take, for example, Watteau’s Gilles, a three-dimensional figure whose torso is constructed of circular pieces glued to a pole. She also made a similar Calder portrait, which is in the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum. Another box is in what I call her “mosaic” style, with hundreds of tiny pieces cut from who can tell how many reproductions of a Vermeer interior, which shimmers with light just the way real Vermeers do. Her “cut-outs” feature figures, faces and scenes cut out and reshaped like a jigsaw puzzle that has somehow gone askew, as in her portrait of Max Ernst. In another style, she used transparent Xerox papers and mirrors to create images wittily portraying her subjects, vain or simply pleased with themselves, mis en scène in wonderful theatrical productions. Thus, Jackson Pollock is caught in the act of tossing paint at a canvas, lit from below with a small light built into the box. In her rendition of Titian’s Venus and Cupid with an Organist, the organist’s head is mirrored from behind. It is remarkable that she was able to accomplish all this complexity in boxes that are 27/8 inches deep.
Sally loved a challenge, and she enjoyed working with her hands, just as her father, who was deeply involved in the theater, loved designing and making his stage sets. It is easy to see the genetic links between them, as she discovered the fun, discipline, challenges and great joy in creating her boxes. The skill and meticulous attention to detail required to create these exceptional works of art, combined with the imagination she invested in the reinvention of the work of other artists, mark her as a great artist in her own right. She made satirical films, some about art, for family and friends. One was called What Makes Van Gogh Gogh. She loved her movie camera and was very proficient with it. She also made postcards, holiday greeting cards, a miniature magazine about corsets, and other wonderful things such as toys. Sally inserted her own portrait into many of these images, drawn from old Victorian prints—playing golf, dueling, cycling—which made them even funnier. The more I have seen of Sally’s work in shows since she died, the more convinced have I become of her genius.
It is hard to imagine how, between her various commitments, Sally was able to devote any attention to her art. She served the Cosmopolitan Club as vice president and head of the art committee, as well as in other capacities, played tennis weekly, and took care of her aging mother, driving to Hartford twice a month until her mother’s death in 1986. She then moved into high gear with her boxes, and still found time for a busy social and cultural life.
A clue to her industriousness may lie in a life-changing trauma she experienced as a nine-year-old. Sally was a survivor of the horrific Barnum and Bailey circus tent fire of July 6, 1944. Suspected of having been set by an arsonist, it resulted in at least 168 deaths and over 700 injuries. Sally and the neighbors with whom she had gone to the circus were forced to crawl over bodies to reach safety. It was a harrowing experience, and one that continued to haunt her for years.
Surviving such a life-or-death situation can change one’s thinking forever. Sally was a person who did not waste a single second of the day. She knew how precious life was, and enjoyed every day to the utmost.
As the shadow boxes increased in number, they remained hidden from all but her closest friends. For my 50th birthday, in 1986, Sally presented me with a lovely box representing The Three Graces from Botticelli’s Primavera, and I immediately urged her to find a dealer. She did not do so, however, whether because she regarded her boxes as children, to be kept close to their doting mother for as long as possible, or because they served to remind her of her father, whose life had been so cruelly cut off at an early age. One can only surmise. She had some very important friends in the art world, including Fred Mueller and Arne Glimcher, with whom she had worked at the inception of the Pace Gallery; a word to one of them could have launched her career. She finally did send slides to a dealer friend, and was put off for three years. I nagged her until she got them back.
The rest of the story is a triumphal yet tragic saga. Luckily I had a dear friend, the prominent art dealer Elaine Benson, whose eponymous gallery in Bridgehampton was not only famous for showing established artists in the East End of Long Island but also for discovering new talent. I showed her my Botticelli box and Sally’s slides. She loved them and booked Sally into her “Free Spirits” show. (One of the artists originally scheduled to be represented in the show had cancelled.) Elaine and I visited Sally’s apartment in the spring of 1991 and we were overwhelmed by the scope of what we saw. After three hours of viewing and reviewing, Elaine selected 10 boxes. For good measure, Sally brought 15 to the two-week show in July 1991. On opening night, she sold 12 of them. Some were taken that night, so I drove back to New York the next day to select more boxes.
Her many friends had been hoping, and waiting, for all those years that she had kept them to herself, to acquire her creations. Sally gave several boxes to the Wadsworth Atheneum and to a dear friend, Eleanor Howland Bunce. And I continued to collect the boxes, eventually amassing 10. My collection included Titian, Botticelli, Vermeer, Ingres, David, Watteau, Duchamps, Max Ernst and Bessie Smith. She also did five large self-portraits in her “mosaic” style. Both the Atheneum and the Trinity College Art Gallery mounted posthumous exhibitions.
Elaine had three more shows for Sally, one posthumous, at her gallery, and both the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Trinity College Museum in Hartford also hosted posthumous exhibits. Eventually, her work was shown at the Rosenberg and Steigel Gallery by Kimberly Venardos, later director of the Sarah G. Austin Foundation, and by her current dealer, Pavel Zoubok, who has had her work in several shows. The author of this article was able to arrange an exhibition for her in 2003 at the F. Donald Kenney Museum of St. Bonaventure University in Olean, New York. In this show, Sally’s boxes were hung alongside reproductions of the original works by various artists, or portraits of the artists, which had inspired them. This enabled direct comparison between Sally’s art and its inspirations, revealing in each instance her knowledge and skill in getting to the essence of a given work of art or of the artist portrayed. In the large boxes (5' x 5') devoted to modern art movements, she not only included portraits of the artists, but paired them, side by side, with works they created.
16 Painters and 16 Sculptors accommodate each artist in a separate box (15" x 15"), with extras in each series, allowing for substitutions to be made in each ensemble. Douglas Hyland, the director of the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, saw the wonderful boxes belonging to Linda Cheverton Wick and the author and was inspired to mount a well-attended and highly lauded exhibition for Sally at the Museum between August 9 and November 2, 2008. Her boxes have also been shown at the Cosmopolitan Club, much to the delight of her friends and members, as well as at the Century Club.
Before she died, Sally helped her dear friend Eugene Gaddis, who was writing Chick Austin’s biography, and he taped many hours with her at the Atheneum. She also learned that the Austin House—which she, along with her mother, Helen, and brother, David, had given to the Wadsworth Atheneum—would become a National Historic Landmark. This gave her great joy. Through the generosity of her cousin Genevieve Harlow Goodwin, the house was endowed, and friends she never met have helped sustain it, especially Melinda Martin Sullivan and her husband, Paul. Her spirit lives on in the house, where she spent so many happy hours and where several of her miraculous and magical shadowboxes are on exhibit.
